#mueller probe

[mariacallous]

Three days after Kamala Harris was sworn into the Senate in early January 2017, the U.S. intelligence community released a stunning declassified report that concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an influence campaign meant to sway the previous year’s presidential election in favor of Donald Trump and undermine faith in U.S. democracy.

The revelations spurred three high-profile investigations into Russian election interference by lawmakers and special counsel Robert Mueller and would come to dominate headlines for much of the Trump presidency.

As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which conducted a wide-ranging three-year investigation of Moscow’s interference efforts, Harris had a front-row seat to reams of highly classified material about Russian intelligence operations targeting the United States. The experience left a long-standing impression on the vice president, according to current and former aides who characterize it as a highly formative experience that left her with few illusions about Moscow’s intentions.

“I see those first few weeks as pivotal, because those were both her and Donald Trump’s first few weeks in Washington,” said Halie Soifer, who served as national security advisor to Harris in the Senate.

A Republican source familiar with Harris’s time on the committee said that during the Russia investigation, members were exposed to “borderline raw intelligence” on Moscow’s interference efforts, which they described as an eye-opening experience, even for long-standing members of the committee. “I think it was sobering for everyone,” said the source, who requested anonymity to share their insights.

The Senate’s final report, which spanned over 1,000 pages across five volumes, is generally regarded to be the most detailed look at aggressive Russian intelligence efforts to make inroads with the Trump campaign and to sway the election in favor of the former president.

The report did not reach a conclusion as to whether the Trump team had actively sought to collude with Moscow for its own advantage.

As part of its investigation, the committee reviewed over 1 million pages of documents and interviewed more than 200 witnesses.

While much of the day-to-day work of the probe was carried out by committee staffers, senators from both sides of the aisle have described Harris as a quick study whose advice on questioning witnesses was sought by seasoned committee staff, according to a 2019 BuzzFeed article.

In public hearings on both the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, on which she also sat, Harris developed a reputation for her prosecutorial style as she interrogated senior members of the Trump administration.

“Members get out of it what they put into it, and she put a lot of time and energy and effort into it,” said the Republican source.

Former aides to the vice president have spoken of how her background as a lawyer also informs her view on foreign policy, placing particular emphasis on the importance of international laws and norms. In a 2019 interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Harris described the U.S. role in building a “community of international institutions, laws, and democratic nations” as America’s biggest foreign-policy achievement since World War II.

While the House Intelligence Committee Russia investigation was beset by political infighting, the Senate investigation remained bipartisan and largely free of public drama—something Harris has spoken fondly of.

“Every week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee would walk into that wood-paneled room—no cameras, no public, no devices,” said Harris during a memorial service last year for the late California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had been a long-standing member of the committee.

“Senators of both parties who would take off their jackets and literally roll up their sleeves, putting aside partisanship to discuss what was in the best interests of our national security,” she said.

Harris served on the Intelligence Committee, which, alongside the House panel, provides oversight of the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, throughout her four years in the Senate.

In 2018, Harris backed an amendment that would compel law enforcement to obtain a warrant before accessing the communications of American citizens inadvertently gathered under a controversial program that enabled intelligence agencies to conduct wide-ranging foreign electronic surveillance.

She also used the perch to stress the need for greater investments in election security in light of Russia’s attempt to sway the vote, co-sponsoring bipartisan legislation on election cybersecurity.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Prominent right-wing influencers Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson and Tim Pool have huge followings on YouTube and a fondness for the Trumpist talking point that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election on the former president’s behalf are a “hoax.” That’s not all they have in common: They also reportedly enjoyed lucrative deals with a content creation company that was a front for Russian propagandists. The Justice Department indicted two employees of the Russian propaganda outlet RT on Wednesday, charging them with laundering almost $10 million through foreign shell companies and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The DOJ alleges this was done “to covertly fund and direct” a media company that produced videos whose content and subject matter were “often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests.” The company’s description matches that of Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based firm co-founded by Lauren Chen, a creator for Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV (which fired Chen on Thursday) and a contributor to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Tenet Media publishes content by Rubin, Johnson, Pool and other less-prominent influencers. According to the indictment, the production companies of three unnamed commentators were paid $8.7 million through the scheme. The indictment states two of the commentators were deceived about the source of the funding; the trio all described themselves as unwitting “victims” of the operation in separate statements on social media. But the Tenet Media saga demonstrates once again that Russian election interference is not, as these commentators and their allies have insisted, a “hoax.” It is a fact, a deliberate and ongoing operation by the Kremlin to sway U.S. politics. And the Trumpist right’s yearslong quest to rebut that reality have ended up ensuring that their entire information ecosystem is honeycombed with Russian propaganda. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 final report conclusively documented the Russian government’s systematic effort to influence the 2016 presidential election in order to help Trump and the many ways Trump’s associates participated in that endeavor. This was an inconvenient finding for Trump and his political and media allies, who had spent years fabricating a complex alternate reality in which claims of Russian election interference or corrupt ties between Russia and Trump and his associates were “deep state” lies. They responded by falsely claiming Mueller’s report had found “no collusion” between Trump and Russia, and used that lie to brand the entirety of the probe as a “hoax.” [...] No one on the right has done more to push pro-Russia talking points than former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a longtime defender of Russian president Vladimir Putin and opponent of U.S. support for Ukraine. Russian propaganda channels sought to gin up Western support for its 2022 invasion by highlighting Carlson’s nightly screeds against U.S. aid to Ukraine, and in turn served as a source for Carlson’s program. A Russian state TV host even suggested on-air that Carlson take a job at his network after Fox dropped him the following year. [...] But Russia-friendly narratives about the country’s invasion of Ukraine ultimately spread far beyond Carlson. It became widely accepted orthodoxy on the MAGA right that sending military aid to Ukraine is a waste of money, that the United States is responsible for Russia’s invasion, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the real villain of the conflict. [...] Russian interests and Kremlin-connected sources also fueled the right’s obsession with Hunter Biden’s business interests and the absurd related allegation that Joe Biden accepted a bribe from a Ukrainian oligarch — both of which right-wing media and politicians treated as major stories, with House Republicans making it the heart of their impeachment case against the president..

MMFA's Matt Gertz for MSNBC.com on MAGA media pundits being on the Kremlin payroll via TENET Media (09.06.2024).

Matt Gertz wrote in MSNBC’s opinion section that MAGA influencers such as Tim Pool and Benny Johnson have only themselves to blame for the TENET Media debacle in which they pumped out pro-Russia propaganda.

See Also:

MMFA: How MAGA pundits who mocked the Russia “hoax” ended up the Kremlin’s payroll

Public Notice: Russia's useful idiots

[dertaglichedan]

MASSIVE REVELATION! James O’Keefe Releases Undercover Video of CIA Contractor Admitting CIA Director Withheld Info from Trump and Spied on His Presidency

ames O’Keefe last Friday warned he was about to release the most important story of his entire career.

“I have evidence that exposes the CIA, and it’s on camera. I am working on releasing a story that I believe is the most important of my entire career,” O’Keefe said on Friday.

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that right at this moment I am subject to an endless series of attacks?” he said. “This is obviously a sophisticated information operation designed to stop me from releasing this story. I’m sure you recognize they are masters of using half-truths and innuendos to raise doubt against people who don’t deserve it. It’s meant to consume my time and energy and make me back down.”

“But I’m not going to let it work. Rest assured, nothing will stop me from releasing this story,” O’Keefe said.

O’Keefe Media Group on Wednesday released part one: Exposing the CIA: A project manager working in cyber operations told OMG’s undercover journalist that the Director of the CIA would keep information from Trump.

He also said the CIA spied on Trump’s presidency and is still monitoring him to this day.

“So the agencies kind of, like, all got together and said, we’re not gonna tell Trump…Director of the CIA would keep [information from Trump]…” Amjad Fseisi, a project manager working in Cyber Operations for the CIA with top-secret security clearance told an undercover journalist.

Amjad Fseisi said Trump is a “Russian asset” – “He’s owned by the f*cking Russians,” he told the undercover journalist.

Per James O’Keefe:

Amjad reveals to OMG’s Undercover American Swiper that intel agencies not only kept intelligence information from a sitting United States President and Commander-In-Chief, they also used FISA to spy on President Trump and his team and are still monitoring President Trump according to Amjad who says, “We monitor everything.” Amjad adds “we also have people that monitor his ex-wife. He likes to use burner phones” – information only an insider with access to highly sensitive information would state. “We steal it [information]” and “We hack other countries just like that,” Amjad, who states he currently works on the CIA’s China Mission Center, explains how intel agencies obtain information. He also describes a broken intelligence system where “We don’t share information across agencies” because the CIA is “very reluctant” to share information with the “careless” NSA. O’Keefe Media Group’s bombshell undercover footage supports earlier reports by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag that revealed how the American intelligence community illegally ran a spy operation against then-candidate Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and illegally acquired intelligence that was later used to justify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (@FBI) official probe, “Crossfire Hurricane,” which in turn led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that ultimately did not find evidence of Russia collusion by the 2016 Trump campaign. Contractors like Fseisi hold the duty to withhold sharing confidential or national security information. In denying his statements, Fseisi may have realized he could be held liable for violating internal agency provisions and federal laws like the Executive Agency ethics provisions, which restrict what he may share with others outside of his contracted-to agency. Additionally, any government worker or agency head who withheld information from a superior (i.e. President Trump) may violate: (a) obstruction of justice by deception (18 USC 1512); (b) conspiracy to obstruct (18 USC 371); and false statements (18 USC 1001). Agency regulations may also provide offenses related to insubordination, reflecting poorly on the agency in public, or misrepresentation or dishonesty. When James O’Keefe caught up with Amjad Fseisi on the streets of Washington, D.C., Fseisi could not tell O’Keefe whether he had top secret clearance, denied making statements clearly caught on camera, and would not even confirm it was him on the video saying only “It looks like me.” When asked directly if he works at the CIA, Fseisi said, “I can’t tell you that.”

[meandmybigmouth]

Trump neuters the watchdogs

Trump neuters the watchdogs

Trump neuters the watchdogs

After spending much of his first term and all of his post-presidency under investigation, President-elect Trump is moving to ensure that doesn't happen again.

Now more familiar with the levers of power — and his own points of vulnerability — Trump is attempting to insulate himself.

Breaking it down: Trump and his allies have telegraphed unprecedented steps to put loyalists in roles that have historically been apolitical.

FBI Director: Trump has signaled he will fire Christopher Wray, whose 10-year term would run into 2027.

Trump sparked a firestorm in his first term by firing James Comey and replacing him with Wray.

Firing Wray would be norm-smashing yet unsurprising, given Trump's antipathy for Wray and the bureau more generally, particularly after its raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents.

Attorney general: The nomination of Pam Bondi, who represented Trump at his first impeachment trial, would put a close ally in a position that by tradition (though not always in practice) has a level of independence from the president.

"For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans — Not anymore," Trump said in announcing the pick.

Trump castigated and eventually fired his first AG, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, and later fell out dramatically with his successor, Bill Barr, for not endorsing his claims of widespread election fraud.

Special counsels: Jack Smith moved to dismiss his cases against Trump after the election and is likely to resign before Inauguration Day.

In Trump 2.0, we're unlikely to see a repeat of the Mueller probe, with an autonomous team investigating the sitting president — though Trump last year floated the idea of a special counsel to investigate the Biden family.

Inspectors general: Watchdogs for government agencies could also be on the chopping block, with Trump's allies calling for their removal, Politico reports.

Project 2025 — which Trump disavowed on the campaign trail before naming some of its architects to his administration — calls for a much wider culling of career civil servants in favor of loyalists.

Between the lines: Conservatives now control all three branches of government, neutralizing many potential challenges to Trump at least until 2026.

[ridenwithbiden]

President-elect Donald Trump announced that his former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe is his choice to lead the CIA – citing his credentials battling the 'fake Russian collusion' narrative.

Trump announced the latest loyalist pick to his rapidly growing cabinet, which had been floated, with a statement on a day when he announced he would tap former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Once again, Trump used language suggesting it was a done deal, although the newly Republican Senate will have to confirm the selection.

'I am pleased to announce that former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe will serve as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),' Trump said.

'From exposing fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation, to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American Public. When 51 intelligence officials were lying about Hunter Biden’s laptop, there was one, John Ratcliffe, telling the truth to the American People.'

Trump's statement makes clear that the reason the MAGA-aligned Ratcliffe was selected in part due to his loyalty. Trump has railed ever since he entered the White House about the Russia probe, which began during the 2016 campaign as a probe of contacts between Trump advisors who had Russia ties.

He has long said the probe hobbled his administration from the outset. He said in 2020 he was 'probably entitled to another four' year term because of 'the way we were treated.'

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller found that Russia did interfere in the campaign, but he 'did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.'

[reading-writing-revolution]

$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2024/08/02/trump-campaign-egypt-investigation/

Trump can do the crime, so let's let him do the time.

August 2, 2024 (Friday)

Today, Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post reported that there is reason to believe that when Trump’s 2016 campaign was running low on funds, Trump accepted a $10 million injection of cash from Egypt’s authoritarian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. It is against the law to accept direct or indirect financial support from foreign nationals or foreign governments for a political campaign in the United States.

In early 2017, CIA officials told Justice Department officials that a confidential informant had told them of such a cash exchange, and those officials handed the matter off to Robert Mueller, the special counsel who was already looking at the links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives. FBI agents noted that on September 16, Trump had met with Sisi when the Egyptian leader was at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City.

After the meeting, Trump broke with U.S. policy to praise Sisi, calling him a “fantastic guy.”

Trump’s campaign had been dogged with a lack of funds, and his advisers had begged him to put some of his own money into it. He refused until October 28, when he loaned the campaign $10 million.

An FBI investigation took years to get records, but Davis and Leonnig reported that in 2019 the FBI learned of a key withdrawal from an Egypt bank. In January 2017, five days before Trump took office, an organization linked to Egypt’s intelligence service asked a manager at a branch of the state-run National Bank of Egypt to “kindly withdraw” $9,998,000 in U.S. currency. The bundles of $100 bills filled two bags and weighed more than 200 pounds.

Once in office, Trump embraced Sisi and, in a reversal of U.S. policy, invited him to be one of his first guests at the White House. “I just want to let everybody know, in case there was any doubt, that we are very much behind President al-Sissi,” Trump said.

Mueller had gotten that far in pursuit of the connection between Trump and Sisi when he was winding down his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. He handed the Egypt investigation off to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D C., where it appears then–attorney general William Barr killed it.

Today, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that Elon Musk and other tech executives are putting their money behind a social media ad campaign for Trump and Vance, and are creating targeted ads in swing states by collecting information about voters under false pretenses. According to Schwartz, their America PAC, or political action committee, says it helps viewers register to vote. And, indeed, the ads direct would-be voters in nonswing states to voter registration sites.

But people responding to the ad in swing states are not sent to registration sites. Instead, they are presented with “a highly detailed personal information form [and] prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age,” handing over “priceless personal data to a political operation” that can then create ads aimed at that person’s demographic and target them personally in door-to-door campaigns. After getting the information, the site simply says, “Thank you,” without directing the viewer toward a registration site.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at more than $235 billion.

In June the Trump Organization announced a $500 million deal with Saudi real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump International hotel in Oman.

In January 2011, when he was director of the FBI, Robert Mueller gave a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York. He explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. Rather than being regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated and had multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.

These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”

In order to corner international markets, Mueller explained, these criminal enterprises "may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat."

In a new book called Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, journalist Anne Applebaum carries that story forward into the present, examining how today’s autocrats work together to undermine democracy. She says that “the language of the democratic world, meaning rights, laws, rule of law, justice, accountability, [and] transparency…[is] harmful to them,” especially as those are the words that their internal opposition uses. “And so they need to undermine the people who use it and, if they can, discredit it.”

Those people, Applebaum says, “believe they are owed power, they deserve power.” When they lose elections, they “come back in a second term and say, right, this time, I'm not going to make that mistake again, and…then change their electoral system, or…change the constitution, change the judicial system, in order to make sure that they never lose.”

Almost exactly a year ago, on August 1, 2023, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted former president Donald J. Trump for conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges stemmed from Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A grand jury is made up of 23 ordinary citizens who weigh evidence of criminal activity and produce an indictment if 12 or more of them vote in favor.

The grand jury indicted Trump for “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the government”; “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified”; and “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

“Each of these conspiracies,” the indictment reads, “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.” “This federal government function…is foundational to the United States’ democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years.”

The case of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump was randomly assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Obama in 2014 and confirmed 95–0 in the Senate. Trump pleaded not guilty on August 3, after which his lawyers repeatedly delayed their pretrial motions until, on December 7, Trump asked the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether he was immune from prosecution. Chutkan had to put off her initial trial date of March 4, 2024, and said she would not reschedule until the court decided the question of Trump’s immunity.

In February the appeals court decided he was not immune. Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 1, 2024, to decide that Trump enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts. Today the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Chutkan, almost exactly a year after it was first brought.

[garudabluffs]

Trump effect: Justice system ‘bends over backwards’ to shelter 'defendant Trump,' legal expert says

Mar 1, 2024 #MSNBC#Trump#justicesystem

Donald Trump’s team is trying to delay his classified documents trial, as the former president continues to face prosecution on several fronts. Trump evading court despite his dozens of indictments and what that means about our criminal justice system are discussed by Joy Reid and her expert guests on The ReidOut.

 ANDREW

6:31WEISSMANN, FORMER SENIOR MEMBER

6:32OF THE MUELLER PROBE AND MSNBC

6:34LEGAL ANALYST.

6:36KATIE PHANG, TRIAL ATTORNEY AND

6:37HOST OF THE KATIE PHANG SHOW

6:38RIGHT HERE ON MSNBC, AND TIM

6:40O'BRIEN, SENIOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR

6:42OF BLOOMBERG OPINION AND MSNBC

6:44POLITICAL ANALYST.

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[criticalthinkingisalostskill]

Biden Justice Department Asks Court to Keep the Names of Jack Smith’s Top Staff Secret

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.” Patrick Henry wrote. That is the concern we face today with unlawful government secrecy.

The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal court to allow the agency to keep secret the names of top staffers working in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office that is targeting former President Donald Trump and other Americans.

We filed a FOIA lawsuit in May 2023 after the Justice Department rejected a December 9, 2022, FOIA request for ”staff rosters, phone lists, or similar records depicting all employees hired by or detailed to office of Special Counsel Jack Smith” (Judicial Watch Inc. v U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:23-cv-01485)).

After months of delay, the Biden Justice Department finally acknowledged on April 12, 2023, that it possessed two staff rosters responsive to our request, but, citing a supposed “dearth of FOIA public interest,” was withholding the rosters under privacy and law enforcement exemptions. We explained in our motion that we were only seeking the names of top-level staffers – those at the GS-14 level and above – and did not seek email addresses or phone numbers.

In our motion, Judicial Watch quotes President Joe Biden’s remarks at a November 9, 2022, White House press conference and provide the background and justification for the FOIA request:

“Well, we just have to demonstrate that [Donald Trump] will not take power – if we – if he does run. I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next President again.” - President Joe Biden

On November 18, 2022, [three days after Trump announced he would run for president again in 2024], Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate potential criminal wrongdoing by former President Donald J. Trump. The appointment came nine days after President Biden announced his effort to “mak[e] sure” Trump did not become president again. The unprecedented investigation – and now prosecutions – by an incumbent president of his immediate predecessor, opponent in the last election, and leading opponent in the upcoming election raises numerous questions about who Special Counsel Smith chose to assist him in this highly charged endeavor. Are these persons opponents or supporters of the former president, aligned with one of the two major political parties, or otherwise biased or conflicted, or are they unbiased, nonpartisan professionals?

Further, we cite the Fani Willis and the other anti-Trump investigation scandals in explaining the public interest in knowing who is involved in this unprecedented prosecution:

Two recent examples highlight the importance of knowing the identities of the SCO’s staffers. Notorious FBI employees Peter Stzrok and Lisa Page were both members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of then-President Trump…. Stzrok was the lead FBI investigator assigned to the probe, and Page was a “general attorney” on Special Counsel Mueller’s staff…. During the investigation, it was discovered that Strzok and Page had exchanged voluminous texts disparaging then-candidate Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, commenting that “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president, and citing having an “insurance policy” in case he did…. A subsequent report by the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General was highly critical of the exchanges, noting with respect to the “we’ll stop it” text in particular:

[W]hen one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it” in response to her question “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”, it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, who also has brought criminal charges against the former president, is now reportedly under investigation herself for allegedly choosing her paramour, Nathan Wade, to lead the prosecution…. Although Wade’s identity was already known, it led to the discovery of new, previously unknown information that bears on the public perception of the prosecution. It helps the public to know “what their government is up to.” This case is no different.

In our motion, we further explain:

Defendant’s argument that disclosing the more-than-one-year-old rosters could reasonably be expected to interfere with the SCO’s work because it could lead to the SCO’s staff being threatened and harassed is entirely conclusory, little more than speculation, and lacks meaningful evidentiary support. It also ignores the fact that the names of at least 23 SCO staffers are readily available from public sources, yet the public availability of these names and in some instances email addresses and a cell phone number does not seem to have had any discernable impact on the functioning of the SCO…. Its prosecution of the former president and the two other individuals certainly appears to be proceeding apace, and Defendant has neither claimed nor demonstrated otherwise.

We conclude that the government’s exemption claims fail and that the Justice Department’s request to close the case is “plainly insufficient to satisfy its burden of proving that its withholdings are lawful.”

Our motion includes a declaration that lists 23 individuals working for Special Counsel Smith who were identified using publicly available court filings; an additional four names were located in media reports.

Special Counsel Jack Smith isn’t above the law, and the American people have the right to know who is working on his unprecedented and politicized anti-Trump investigation. Given the scandalous revelations about the Fani Willis prosecution team targeting Trump, it is especially urgent that Americans know just who the top people on Jack Smith’s staff are.

We’re involved in other matters regarding President Trump.

Through the New York Freedom of Information Law, in July 2023, we received the engagement letter showing New York County District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg paid $900 per hour for partners and $500 per hour for associates to the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher law firm for the purpose of suing Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in an effort to shut down the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight investigation into Bragg’s unprecedented indictment of former President Donald Trump.

Through FOIA, we uncovered information about Special Counsel’s Mueller’s budget and staff. We also sued for and obtained records for the budget of Special Counsel John Durham. A Judicial Watch lawsuit also uncovered calendar entries of Mueller special counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann showing he led the hiring effort for the investigation that targeted President Trump.

In January 2024, we filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia for records regarding the hiring of Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor by District Attorney Fani Willis. Wade was hired to pursue unprecedented criminal investigations and prosecutions against former President Trump and others over the 2020 election disputes.

Before his appointment to investigate and prosecute Trump, Jack Smith previously was at the center of several other controversial issues, the IRS scandal among them.

In 2014, a Judicial Watch investigation revealed that top IRS officials had been in communication with Jack Smith’s then-Public Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal investigations into conservative tax-exempt groups. Government officials were looking to step up a probe into requests for tax-exemption from organizations with conservative sounding names like “Tea Party” and other “political sounding names,” according to a later report by the Treasury Department’s inspector general. Jack Smith appears to have been a key player in this attempt to silence conservative voices.

According to the documents we obtained, Jack Smith directed the head of the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch, Richard Pilger, to meet with the director of the IRS’s Tax-Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner. In one email we obtained, Lerner discusses an idea that the Justice Department could build “false-statement cases” against tax-exempt conservative groups.

We later obtained additional documents detailing a planning meeting between Justice Department, FBI and IRS officials about possible criminal prosecutions. Thanks to our disclosures, House investigators discovered that the IRS improperly turned over confidential tax records of nonprofit organizations to the FBI—sparking a public uproar and forcing the return of the records to the IRS. Read more about the case here.

https://myjw.pr.judicialwatch.org/link.php?AGENCY=jw&M=55814187&N=67116&L=28702&F=H&drurl=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuanVkaWNpYWx3YXRjaC5vcmcvYWJjcy1pcnMtbWVzcy1qdXN0aWNlLWRlcHQtdGFpbnRlZC8/dXRtX3NvdXJjZT1kZXBsb3llciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV9jb250ZW50PUFOVFU0TVRReE9EYyUzRCZ1dG1fY2FtcGFpZ249d2Vla2x5K3VwZGF0ZSZ1dG1fdGVybT1tZW1iZXJz&hash=7eaa4d7e25f74bbc8b9cb71344675bda2d18751e23a812663ba77960fa44c7b0.

[azspot]

The first Eastern European wife of the future president gave way to the southern actress who became the Dancing With the Stars contestant, as the second Eastern European and third-to-date wife then became the First Lady. The cast of Russians from the Mueller probe gave way to the cast of Ukrainians from the first impeachment. The press secretary competed on Dancing With the Stars, as did the guy in charge of the Department of Energy, who was also a guy from the last Republican primary before the one that nominated the host of The Apprentice. The great villain of the first season of The Apprentice who worked for Al Gore landed in the White House again working for the former Apprentice host and played to type, making secret recordings before getting the ax and releasing a tell-all book. A Celebrity Apprentice contestant became friendly with North Korea’s dictator, which helped pave the way for a summit where the president blew up precedent with Elton John references designed either to prove his madman theory of diplomacy or to provoke a homicidal lunatic into nuclear war. The Playboy model was followed by the porn star, and the porn star was promised a role on The Celebrity Apprentice. The war erupted between the other homicidal dictator and the other TV-star president of another country, who was in fact a central figure in the first impeachment.

The Stormy Daniels Story

[mariacallous]

With Donald Trump threatening to retake the U.S. presidency next week in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine, it’s time to take stock of a deeply unsettling fact. After years of investigations by U.S. government bodies from the Justice Department to the FBI to Congress, the American public has no idea if Russian President Vladimir Putin has “something” on Trump—in other words, some compromising information about the would-be 47th president’s past, or what the Russians call kompromat.

Eight years after the FBI first began probing Trump’s Russia connections in mid-2016, national security officials are still puzzled by the former U.S. president’s unrelenting deference to Putin, as well as the enduring mystery of Trump’s decades-old relationship with Russian and former Soviet investors and financiers, some of whom helped save his failing businesses years ago.

So we’re asking the same questions we were asking eight years ago. Is Trump some sort of Manchurian candidate—or in this case, perhaps a Muscovian candidate—controlled by or beholden to Moscow in ways that we don’t know and likely will never know? Or is Trump’s persistently fawning treatment of Putin mainly just a manifestation of his often-expressed admiration of autocrats around the world, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and ​​Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban?

Trump himself has long denied that there is any collusion between him and the Kremlin. But among key U.S. officials who were involved in these earlier investigations, there is no small amount of frustration over this disturbing question.

What has emerged from interviews in recent weeks is an idea of just how ugly and unresolved the disputes remain among the investigators, some of whom are kicking themselves for not going deeper in their probes back then. In many cases, former senior officials at the FBI and Justice Department are still blaming each other for falling short—especially when it comes to the investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller of Russian election interference and ties between Trump officials and the Kremlin during the Trump administration.

“Here we are in 2024, and over the years since the special counsel started their work in 2017, all we have gotten is more questions, more evidence, more situations that point toward very serious questions about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia and specifically with Vladimir Putin,” said Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI who first pushed for the Mueller probe, in a phone interview with Foreign Policy. “And none of those questions have ever been answered,” he added. “Likely because there’s never been a thorough and legitimate investigation of them.”

And that’s unlikely to change if Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Russian interference in the November U.S. election—all apparently in support of Trump—is already more widespread and intense than in 2016, U.S. officials say. Deploying new methods such as deep fakes and paid-for news sources, Russia’s activities “are more sophisticated than in prior election cycles,” a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in September.

According to the Washington Post, the official cited the use of artificial intelligence as well as “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” Russian government propaganda and spread socially divisive narratives through major social media and fake websites posing as legitimate U.S. media organizations. Moscow is targeting U.S. swing states “to shape the outcome in favor of former president Donald Trump,” the newspaper said.

Perhaps the most crucial swing state that could decide the election is Pennsylvania, and on Oct. 25, U.S. officials announced that “Russian actors” were behind a widely circulated video falsely depicting mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed in a critical county of that state—in an apparent effort to justify Trump’s regular rants about election fraud.

In late September, the U.S. Justice Department accused two employees of RT, the Kremlin’s media arm, of funneling nearly $10 million to a company that media outlets later identified as Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based company that has hosted right-wing pro-Trump commentators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms. The Biden administration also announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used in Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns called “Doppelganger.”

According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, “Putin’s inner circle, including [First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office] Sergei Kiriyenko, directed Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of a campaign to … secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”

“In some respects, this payment of media sources to put out stories is even more brazen than some of the activities we investigated,” said Andrew Goldstein, a former senior Justice Department lawyer and the co-author of a new book titled Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation.

“Americans should be concerned about the fact that Russia interfered in a very substantial way in 2016 on Trump’s behalf, and they’re doing it again by every measure we’ve been able to see publicly,” Goldstein added. “People should be continuing to try to get the bottom of that.”

The most urgent issue, these former officials say, is what might happen if Trump gets elected and follows through on his promise to resolve the Ukraine war quickly. Trump has hinted that he will give Putin at least some of what the Russian president wants—in particular, the parts of Ukraine that he has conquered as well as a pledge to keep Ukraine out of NATO.

“On a foreign-policy level, that is clearly the biggest concern,” McCabe said. “His promise to end it [the war in Ukraine] in one day can only possibly end it one way, and that will be an absolute travesty that could spell the end of NATO, and on and on. There’s a million other things, though. He’s the only president to ever have repeated one-on-one unmonitored, unwitnessed interactions with Vladimir Putin who then gets up in front of the world and tells them he believes Putin over his own intelligence agency.”

Those conversations with Putin continued after Trump left the presidency, according to a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, titled War. Woodward reported that Trump spoke to Putin as many as seven times after he left the presidency and that at one point, in 2024, Trump told a senior aide to leave the room at his mansion in Mar-a-Lago so “he could have what he said was a private phone call” with the Russian leader.

According to Goldstein, “given the difference in the candidates’ views of the war in Ukraine, there is an even greater incentive now for Russia to intervene, wanting Trump to win and not wanting [Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala] Harris to win.”

Trump himself, asked to confirm the Woodward account of his alleged conversations with Putin since he left the White House during an interview with Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait in mid-October, responded: “I don’t comment on that. … But I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing and not a bad thing in terms of a country.”

So what do we actually know about Trump’s ties to Russia? A great deal. But while there is a great deal of smoke, it’s still difficult to find any fire—that is, any kind of hard evidence of a tit-for-tat relationship that would cause Trump to side with Putin. The investigations simply didn’t go far enough to know if there is one.

What’s clear is that some three decades ago, when Trump’s businesses were buckling under failure after failure and repeatedly declaring bankruptcy—causing him to be toxic to U.S. banks—foreign money played a significant role in reviving his fortunes.

In particular, Trump benefited from investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics, some of them oligarchs linked to Putin. The overseas money came initially in the form of new real-estate partnerships and the purchase of numerous Trump condos—but Trump also benefited from help from the Bayrock Group, run by Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on unknown sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a massive stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia. Some of the overseas banks and investment groups that Trump used also had alleged ties to the Kremlin and Russian money launderers linked to Putin, according to U.S. officials.

Trump’s own family has acknowledged his dependence on Russian money, without ever saying where in Russia it came from. In September 2008, at the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in New York, his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. … We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump’s former longtime architect, the late Alan Lapidus, confirmed this in a 2018 interview with me, saying that in the aftermath of Trump’s earlier financial troubles, “he could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

In the view of U.S. investigators, these historical connections to Russia looked suspicious and helped to explain why during the 2016 presidential campaign, some of the people in Trump’s orbit—including Trump’s son, daughter, and son-in-law—were contacted by at least 14 Russians at a time when it was clear that the Kremlin was interfering in the U.S. election in Trump’s favor. Parts of this relationship were hyped as open collusion by the so-called Steele dossier produced by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, which was later mostly debunked.

All those suspicions in turn led to the FBI probe and then the Mueller investigation, along with a massive bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that identified a close associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort—Konstantin Kilimnik—as a Russian intelligence officer.

“Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of [Russian oligarch] Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” read the 2020 Senate report. The report also delved into Trump’s relationships with women in Moscow during his trips there starting in the mid-1990s.

But the Senate investigation was limited by partisan infighting and insufficient subpoena power, and the FBI and Justice Department never followed through fully as the narrowly focused Mueller probe got under way.

One key reason why we don’t know more about Trump’s ties to Russia appears to be that Trump and his lawyers aggressively interfered with the Justice Department investigation—and in particular, reports suggest that they pressured former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who was overseeing the Mueller probe.

Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation were extensively detailed in the Mueller report itself, which came out in April 2019. According to McCabe and others, Trump and his team were intent on ensuring that the president’s past financial ties to Russia did not become part of the probe, and they made that clear to Rosenstein, who was described in several accounts as rattled by the pressure and unsure what to do.

“I think Rod desperately didn’t want to get fired. I think Rod navigated a lot of those pressure situations with his first and strongest eye on self-preservation,” McCabe told me.

Some of these tactics were reported in a 2020 book by New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President. Schmidt wrote that Rosenstein quietly curtailed the investigation by making it strictly about whether Trump or his campaign officials committed criminal offenses through colluding with Russia or by covering up such collusion. Apparently bowing to pressure from Rosenstein, Mueller dropped the original counterintelligence probe into Trump’s long-term business ties to Russia—in other words, ignoring any questions about what might have motivated Trump to favor or collude with Moscow.

McCabe said he was unaware that Rosenstein was doing this. “Had I known at the time that there would be no investigation of the counterintelligence concerns, I would have continued that work at the FBI,” he said.

Andrew Weissmann, another member of the Mueller team and a former FBI general counsel, also wrote in a 2020 book that fears of dismissal—and unrelenting pressure from the White House—had a lot to do with the limits on the investigation. Trump had already fired then-FBI Director James Comey, partly for pursuing the Russia probe, and behind the scenes, the president was threatening to get rid of Mueller as well, according to several news accounts as well as the final Mueller report.

In his book Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, Weissmann wrote that the Mueller team “was put on notice” that “a broad-based financial investigation might lead to our firing.” He wrote that at one point, Mueller told his investigators, “if the president were in the tank with Putin, ‘It would be about money’—that is, that Trump was motivated by money and his fawning behavior toward Putin could be explained by his seeking to make a buck in Russia. We all knew we had to dig deeper.”

They never did dig deeper, and even now, they are still arguing about why that never happened. Weissman blames Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s chief deputy and a co-author, with Goldstein, of Interference. Weissmann accused Zebley of fretting about retribution from Trump and the White House if the Mueller team dared, for example, to subpoena the president or his son Donald Trump Jr. as part of the inquiry. (They never did.) In the end, Weissmann wrote, the Mueller probe was doomed by its reluctance to fully examine Trump’s financial history and ties to Russia.

“The inability to chase down all financial leads, or to examine all crimes, gnawed at me, and still does,” Weissmann wrote. “Our investigation and report do not resolve those issues once and for all. But we, as a country, are entitled not to have to wonder what the facts would have revealed.”

In interviews with me in the past month, Zebley and Goldstein denied that they were ever directly pressured to narrow the investigation.

“There were definitely no red lines,” Zebley told me. “There was never any sort of decision not to examine something financial, or anything else, when there was cause to do so.” Nonetheless, those who worked with Mueller acknowledge that the special counsel was directed only to conduct a purely criminal investigation, dispensing with the counterintelligence component that McCabe wanted to pursue.

Rosenstein, who is now in private law practice, responded to a request for comment by indicating, in an email, that he did not wish to comment about the scope of the investigation. But he said that he “did what I thought was right and consistent with my oath to faithfully execute the duties of the office, which often angered Trump and some of his key allies.” Defenders of Rosenstein say he did his best to keep the investigation going—even as he was under constant threat of being fired by Trump.

“He was incredibly concerned about what Trump might be up to from both the counterintelligence and the criminal side,” said McCabe, who confirmed an earlier report that at several points during the probe, Rosenstein even offered to wear a wire to the White House to help the investigation into Trump. “That really says it all. Rod is a sphinx. He is a survivor, a guy who is capable one day of writing the memo that justifies the firing of Jim Comey and two days later asking me for Comey’s cell phone number because he desperately wanted to talk to him to get his advice on what to do.”

Early on, Rosenstein did defy Trump by appointing Mueller as special counsel, leading to angry reactions by the president and his GOP defenders, who called the probe a “witch hunt.” But in the end, Rosenstein also appeared to bow to the Trump administration’s wishes by endorsing Attorney General Robert Barr’s controversial statement on March 24, 2019—after the Mueller report was completed but before it was released the following month—saying that the Mueller team had found no evidence of crimes by the president.

As the journalist Jeffrey Toobin described it in his book True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, Barr’s statement “was an obvious and unjustified act of sabotage against Mueller and an extraordinary bequest to the president.”

It is true that the 22-month investigation led by Mueller did not find sufficient evidence to justify criminal charges that the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow to tip the election, nor that Trump tried to cover up his own role. But the Mueller investigators were also explicit in saying that enough evidence existed to make it impossible for them to exonerate Trump.

That part of their conclusion was ignored by Barr and Rosenstein. Contradicting Trump’s claims that Russian interference on his behalf was a “hoax,” the Mueller report concluded that Russian interference was “sweeping and systematic” and “violated U.S. criminal law,” resulting in the indictment of at least 26 Russian citizens and three Russian organizations.

The Trump White House sought to quash other inquiries into his past as well. In 2019, when the House Financial Services Committee tried to subpoena Deutsche Bank’s records on Trump, the president sued and ultimately won a decision from the Trump-aligned Supreme Court saying the subpoena was not justified. Deutsche Bank, one of the few major banks that would still lend to Trump after his financial debacles, has been heavily fined by U.S. and U.K. regulators for sham trades that could have been used to launder billions of dollars out of Russia.

Most of these former officials believe that a second Trump term would certainly involve fresh threats of dismissal against any Justice Department or FBI officials who don’t fall into line, whether on Russia or Trump’s threats to use the Justice Department to go after his domestic political enemies.

“One thing we learned about Donald Trump in our investigation: What you see is what you get,” Zebley said. “There aren’t two Donald Trumps. If he says he’s going to behave in a particular way, that’s what he’s going to do.”

McCabe agreed. “He’s said it repeatedly many different ways,” he said. “He’s committed to this revenge tour. He’s committed to using the lever of power for his own purposes, whatever those might be, whether lawful or unlawful, now cloaked with immunity from the Supreme Court.” (In a historic but controversial July 1 decision, the Supreme Court granted Trump and future presidents broad immunity from prosecution.)

And that means the FBI and Justice Department will likely go along with whatever a newly elected President Trump wants, McCabe added. “The question is whether people will break within my old organization or the [Justice] Department. Of course they will. At some point they will.”

During all this time, Trump has consistently defended Putin—or at least refused to criticize him. This goes back to that infamous moment at their first formal summit in Helsinki in July 2018, when Trump took Putin’s point of view after he was asked whether he believed the Russian president or his own intelligence agencies about the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election (which have since been amply documented).

“President Putin says it’s not Russia” that is meddling, Trump replied. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Later, in November of that year, when his own U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, condemned Putin’s violent intervention in Ukraine after Russian ships fired upon, wounded, and seized Ukrainian sailors—Haley called it “yet another reckless Russian escalation”—the then-U.S. president also declined to criticize Putin personally.

Instead, Trump appeared to blame both sides. “Either way, we don’t like what’s happening, and hopefully, it will get straightened out,” Trump said.

Even on the day of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years later, Trump actually praised the Russian leader for his aggression. “I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine … as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump told a right-wing radio program on Feb. 22, 2022.

And this September, asked at his only debate with Harris whether he wanted Ukraine to win, Trump answered simply: “I want the war to stop.”

Even Trump’s former director of national intelligence, Dan Coats—also a former conservative congressman—admitted that he was worried by the former president’s consistently positive views of the Russian dictator. “His reaching out and never saying anything bad about Putin. For me … it’s scary,” Coats told Woodward.

It is entirely possible, of course, that Trump’s fawning attitude toward Putin is simply another manifestation of his career-long habit of praising people who flatter him and buy his products, no matter what else they might have done, as well as his open admiration for “strong” autocrats.

By his own admission, Trump tends to favor anyone who invests in his businesses, including foreigners. As he said about the Saudis at a campaign rally in 2015: “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them?”

It was hardly a surprise that even after the CIA blamed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump appeared to absolve the crown prince as readily as he often does Putin. In a statement, Trump quoted Saudi officials as describing Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” and said only, “The world is a very dangerous place!”

“The problem with every one of these things is that there is, in the background, a reasonable or nonnefarious explanation,” said McCabe. “Like the massive inflow of Russian money buying up these high-priced condos, that’s also happening all over in places with safe currency, so it’s hard to disaggregate. Is it throwing him [Trump] a financial lifeline, or is it just him benefiting from this trend in high-end real estate?”

In other words, is Trump just a narcissistic former businessman who caters to his investors—some of whom may now represent the United States’ rivals and adversaries? Or is the explanation far more nefarious than that?

We may never know. And if Trump is elected, many new questions are likely to emerge.

“How on earth can we share human source-derived intelligence about Russia with a president who we think might have an inappropriate relationship with Russia?” said McCabe. “How do you do that without putting those people’s lives in jeopardy? But as president, he has the right to access any of that information. So how do we manage the potential risk there?”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos:

Donald Trump nominated former acting attorney general and Trump loyalist Matthew Whitaker to be the United States ambassador to NATO on Wednesday. The ambassador serves as a crucial liaison with our foreign allies, who have criticized Trump’s pro-Russia statements and sentiments during the Russia-Ukraine War. “Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot, who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” Trump said in a statement.  Whitaker is a relic from Trump’s first term, where he began as chief of staff to Attorney General Jeff Sessions before a brief and stormy stint replacing Sessions as acting attorney general. He was in turn replaced by William Barr, then managed to hang on as an adviser in the Justice Department. But it wouldn’t be a Trump pick without a history of dubiousness. Whitaker’s 2013 bid for a Senate seat in his home state of Iowa was a failure. But during that campaign he argued that states could “nullify” federal laws—if they had the "courage" to do so. As University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told CNN in 2018, “Nullification as a serious, mainstream legal argument didn’t survive the Civil War (or the constitutional amendments that followed).”

He subsequently served as a “prominent member” on the advisory board for the Miami-based World Patent Marketing, an “invention promotion” company that was accused of defrauding customers. Whitaker was reportedly “slow to respond to government investigators probing it.” A Florida court ultimately ordered World Patent Marketing to pay out a $25 million settlement and agree to close up shop. After he was publicly critical of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump's campaign activities and Russian interference in the 2016 election, Whitaker’s ascension to acting attorney general set off red flags.

[...] Whitaker then made a combative appearance in front of the House Judiciary Committee, where he refused to answer questions about his conversations with then-President Trump or the potential for obstructing the special counsel’s investigation. It was later reported that Whitaker left the committee hearing and flew off to Mar-a-Lago for a private chitchat with Trump. The Daily Beast published a report detailing how Whitaker spent his days in Washington after the Trump administration ended and he retired from the Department of Justice. While not registered as a lobbyist, Whitaker seems to have been paid by a “dark money” group to lobby for presidential pardons.

Donald Trump taps Matthew Whitaker to serve as the US’s NATO Ambassador.

[dertaglichedan]

House votes to censure Rep. Adam Schiff over Trump-Russia probe

The House voted along party lines Wednesday to censure Rep. Adam Schiff for amplifying claims that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia.

The censure resolution against Schiff (D-Calif.), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was approved by a vote of 213-209 with six lawmakers opting to vote “present.”

Reps. Michael Guest (R-Miss.), David Joyce (R-Ohio), Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), John Rutherford (R-Fla.) and Michelle Fischbach (R-Minn.) – all members of the House Ethics Committee – voted present, as did Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.).

Sparks flew in the well of the chamber after the vote when several House Democrats crowded near the dais and chanted “shame” as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) attempted to read the resolution.

“I have all night,” McCarthy said as he tried to ask for Schiff to present himself so he could be censured.

The interruption lasted for roughly five minutes.

An initial resolution to censure Schiff failed 225-196 last week, with 20 Republicans voting to kill the effort.

That resolution featured a provision to fine Schiff $16 million, half of the money taxpayers doled out for special counsel Robert Mueller’s collusion probe, according to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who sponsored both bills.

The resolution voted on Wednesday scrapped the fine and made other modifications to win over members of the House like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), who opposed the initial version.

FULL STORY...

***BURN you POS!

[foreverlogical]

Special counsel John Durham, who then-Attorney General William Barr appointed to probe the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation after the release of the Mueller report in 2019, arrives for his trial at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on May 17, 2022 in Washington, DC. | Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty

A new report reveals how politicized and conspiratorial the Durham investigation was.

In 2019, a few weeks after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Trump administration flipped the script and began investigating the investigators.

Attorney General Bill Barr appointed US Attorney John Durham to investigate those government officials who had presumed to look into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

The FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, Barr argued publicly, was born of chasing thin conspiracy theories and relied on phony evidence, and its investigators were either blinded by political bias or acting with blatant political motives.

And then Durham and Barr proceeded to do all those same things.

A new, detailed exposé by the New York Times’s Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner digs into what exactly happened with the nearly four-year Durham investigation, which is purportedly about to conclude, and it isn’t pretty. Anecdote after anecdote portrays Durham and Barr as believing in conspiracy theories without evidence but with clear political motives to bolster one of Trump’s favorite arguments: that he was the victim of a nefarious plot.

Basically, Durham and Barr wanted to prove that the Trump-Russia investigation was manufactured in bad faith by either “deep state” officials or the Clinton campaign (or both), with the goal of hurting Trump politically. Again and again, Durham pursued various versions of this theory, and again and again, he fell short of proving his case.

If Barr and Durham started off with suspicions but found upon investigation that they were baseless, that’s not necessarily so terrible. Yet both men kept on saying or implying publicly that the “‘deep state’/Clinton campaign hit job” theory was true — Barr in public statements where he said this outright and Durham in court filings and trial questioning that seemed designed to advance a narrative he couldn’t actually prove.

Bizarrely enough, when checking out one of these theories — that Italian officials were somehow involved in launching the Trump-Russia investigation — Durham and Barr were instead presented with evidence linking Trump himself to potential financial crimes. “Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore,” the Times reporters write. Barr kept this new investigation of Trump in Durham’s hands, and it’s unclear what became of it.

The Trump-Russia investigation certainly shouldn’t be exempt from criticism, and a fair-minded review of whether investigators made misjudgments would be reasonable. But the Durham probe was not that. Instead, it repeatedly assumed dastardly plots against Trump, even when the evidence kept failing to establish those plots, while Barr seeded a narrative to conservative media and President Trump himself that Durham was closing in on Trump’s “deep state” enemies. The politicized, blinkered investigation they were looking for was inside them all along.

The many conspiracy theories of Bill Barr and John Durham

The grand theory of the Russia investigation from Trump’s supporters has always been that it was a “deep state” Democratic witch hunt. This is what Barr and Durham evidently set out to try to prove — and they explored many possibilities.

Perhaps something was off about the FBI’s decision to open the investigation in July 2016. Or maybe it was the post-election period when the FBI acted oddly. Maybe the CIA cooked its analysis of Russian interference with the election. Or perhaps a Western intelligence service seeded misinformation. But Durham’s probe did not lead to any charges against officials in any of these matters.

Instead, Durham’s only charge against a government official, in 2020, stemmed from a referral made by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who found that an FBI attorney had altered an email when trying to get sign-off on a fourth round of FISA surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months of probation, but the judge in his case concluded he didn’t have political motives and was instead engaged in bureaucratic corner-cutting.

By 2021, Durham had seemed to give up on the “deep state.” His team’s new theory seemed to be that Trump/Russia investigators were bamboozled by malicious outside actors — with ties to Hillary Clinton — knowingly making false or misleading claims to drum up a phony investigation into Trump.

So he focused on one episode where Michael Sussmann, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, told the FBI about research by a group of computer scientists into secret online communications between a Trump server and a Russian bank. The charge against Sussmann was narrow, with Durham alleging he lied to his FBI contact about whether he arranged their meeting on behalf of his client.

The indictment, however, seemed written to imply something bigger — that the Clinton campaign knowingly concocted a bogus Trump-Russia link, and fed it to the FBI and the media. The problem with that theory is that other evidence suggests the researchers involved really believed their theory. (Sussmann was acquitted of the charge at trial.)

Durham also dug into Igor Danchenko, the lead researcher for Christopher Steele’s infamous (and infamously flawed) “dossier” claiming Trump-Russia connections. Durham seemed to have been trying to imply that Democrats deliberately seeded false claims in the dossier — like the claim about the “pee tape.”

But what he could prove was much less impressive — a Democratic PR executive, who had been previously involved in some Clinton campaigns but never at high levels, had claimed to know about some Trump campaign personnel gossip that he had actually read in the newspaper. (Danchenko was charged with lying to the FBI but acquitted at trial.)

Now, the new Times report reveals another episode where Durham used questionable means to try to prove Democratic malfeasance. The background is that the CIA had obtained some purported Russian intelligence memos asserting there was a deliberate plot by Clinton to drum up a phony investigation against Trump, but the memos were believed by internal analysts to be dubious.

Durham, however, tried to prove their veracity, in part by trying to secretly obtain emails from an executive at George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (since the memos had made some accusations about this executive). A judge, however, rejected Durham’s request to get this private citizen’s emails without informing him.

The Times reporters pointed out that this is quite similar to what the FBI did with the allegations in the dubious Steele dossier — except now, apparently, it’s okay because Barr’s people are the ones doing it.

It remains possible that Durham has found some unflattering things that he’ll disclose in an eventual report. But so far, his investigation has seemed to be a politicized mess, bumbling from one conspiracy theory and weak case to the next.

Everything Barr thought was true about the Trump-Russia investigation has turned out to be true about the investigation that he ordered.

[ridenwithbiden]

Summary

Ex-spy Steele says Trump suing investigation firm for "revenge"

Says declassification did "serious damage" to US operations in Russia

Ivanka friendship "deepened his animus", Steele says

LONDON, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Donald Trump's decision to declassify evidence given by ex-British spy Christopher Steele over the former U.S. president's alleged links with Russia led to the disappearance of two sources, Steele said in court documents made public on Tuesday.

Steele said in a witness statement that Trump's decision to declassify his 2017 testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was "one of the most egregious breaches of intelligence rules and protocol by the US government in recent times".

The former intelligence officer also said: "Two of the named Russian sources have not been seen or heard of since."

His witness statement was made public on Tuesday, the day after Trump asked London's High Court to allow his data protection lawsuit against a British private investigations firm co-founded by Steele to continue.

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is suing Orbis Business Intelligence over the "Steele dossier" in order, he said in his own witness statement, to prove its claims were false.

The dossier, published by the BuzzFeed website in 2017, alleged ties between Trump's campaign and Russia, and said Trump engaged in sexual behaviour that gave Russian authorities material with which to blackmail him.

Many of the allegations were never substantiated and lawyers for Trump, 77, said in court filings the report was "egregiously inaccurate", while the former president said it contained "numerous false, phoney or made-up allegations".

Orbis, however, says Trump is bringing the claim simply to address his grievances against the company and Steele.

'UNTRUE AND DISGRACEFUL'

Steele had given evidence in an interview with two FBI agents as part of Mueller's probe into an alleged conspiracy between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia.

Mueller concluded in 2019 that there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia.

On the last day of his presidency, Trump declassified Steele's evidence and provided a copy of his testimony to a journalist, Steele said in his statement.

"The publication of this document did serious damage to the U.S. government's Russian operations and their ability to recruit new Russian sources," Steele said.

Steele also said in his witness statement that he believed Trump was "motivated by a personal vendetta against me and Orbis and a desire for revenge".

He suggested Trump's discovery of Steele's friendship with his daughter Ivanka had damaged their relationship and also "deepened his animus towards me and is one of the reasons for his vindictive and vexatious conduct towards me and Orbis".

In his witness statement, Trump said Ivanka was "completely irrelevant to this claim and any mention of her only serves to distract this court from (Orbis') and Mr Steele's reckless behavior".

"Any inference or allegation that Mr Steele makes about my relationship with my daughter is untrue and disgraceful," Trump added.

Reporting by Sam Tobin; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise