Terabytes of Rat-Fucker Data Trail

We often talk details about the Mueller investigation that should make Donald Trump worry.

And I think the government’s motion to declare Roger Stone’s prosecution a complex case ought to do that.

According to the filing, Mueller’s team has got “terabytes of electronic records and data” from Stone, including a bunch of stuff that doesn’t look directly pertinent to an obstruction case, but might look more interesting given the hints of campaign finance violations in this investigation. Or worse.

I’m particularly interested in this paragraph:

It is composed of multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information consisting of, among other things, FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives). The communications contained in the iCloud accounts, email accounts, and physical devices span several years. [//] The government also intends to produce to the defense the contents of physical devices recently seized from his home, apartment, and office. Those devices are currently undergoing a filter review by the FBI for potentially privileged communications.

The implication is everything before the bracket — the multiple cell phones, computers, and hard drives, his iCloud and email accounts, and the aforementioned financial records — have already been in Mueller’s possession. It’s just the things after the bracket — more physical devices — that may or may not be new to the FBI. When, in Stone’s indictment, Mueller referred to all the “emails and text messages … STONE was still in possession of” when he lied to the House Intelligence Committee about having any such documents, that’s how prosecutors knew.

For most of the year during which prosecutors have been obtaining testimony from Stone’s associates, one by one, they’ve been been sitting on a mountain of evidence, and evidence not relating exclusively to the obstruction charges against Stone.

This designation as a complex case will give Stone some time to think about that.

As I disclosed last July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

image_print
136 replies
    • mister bunny says:

      I, for one, love toast.

      But I agree that it’s merely an appetizer. The thing that encourages me is that Mueller isn’t the kind of person to just do a bunch of Mickey-Mouse run around with these things if it isn’t going somewhere subsantial. No chance this is going to just wrap up after a couple more false statements charges and he says, “That’s all folks.”

          • punaise says:

            In the ethical framework of leaving no waste, let’s go tail to snout. The whole enterprise on a platter, with an apple in its …. orifice.

        • Bruce Olsen says:

          You’re forgetting about all the canapés Mueller must surely have encountered on his shopping trips.

          What about our favorite non-Cypriot so-called banker? Or the arrogant dick still known as Prince? The entire money side of the fraudulent enterprise (delivering it from Russia to the NRA to how many influential GOPers)? Or whatever’s going on in the mid-East that makes Israel want to pal up with SA? And there are probably 5 other divisions of the crime organization, with a great variety of appetizers yet to be skewered, roasted, and served.

          Grazing is supposed to be better for you anyway. Pretend you’re at a tapas bar.

  1. Roger Davis says:

    What’s most interesting to me is that prior to Stone’s arrest, the SCO had obtained warrants for bank accounts and financial records, indicating that a judge agreed that a crime was in process or that a crime had already occurred, the evidence of which was likely to found in those places. Had no crime been found, there would be no obligation to share the results in discovery. So what does that tell you?

    We are either highly likely to see superseding indictments should Stone refuse to cooperate, or a referral to relevant state authorities to dissuade a pardon.

    • Reader 21 says:

      chris Christie has been effusive in his McGahn praise while on his book tour.  Crushes nearly everyone else (with one phat, orange exception), but man does he love him some Don McGahn.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      The federal statute of limitations is generally five years from the last criminal act.  I’m guessing McGahn is busy doing the math.

  2. pseudonymous in nc says:

    “Dear Ratfucker: you have been owned.”

    It got me thinking what the typical capacity of a spinning portable hard drive is these days — the kind that makes most bang-for-buck sense to provide for discovery — and it’s 3-4TB.

    (The actual lawyers will have a better sense of what prosecutors actually provide.)

    The “physical devices” aspect is kind of interesting if you assume that Mueller had access directly from providers. Obviously, computers and hard drives can contain local storage, and cell phones can contain archived versions of communications that don’t persist on networked services or corroborate ones that do exist: the Manafort tampering charges verified iCloud records with the senders.

    It’s almost evidence overkill: we have it from the provider, we have it from the recipient, we’re looking for it on your own physical devices. Now try to argue that you didn’t send it.

    • BobCon says:

      I wouldn’t assume the evidence overkill part. It’s pretty common for hard drives to have all kinds of hidden goodies that never made it into emails or the cloud.

  3. BobCon says:

    I think I’ve said this before, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this seizure has the added benefit of providing evidence for potential tax and/or financial fraud charges at the state level. Stone seems like the kind of guy who would engage in all kinds of Manafort-style activities. I have to wonder if that’s part of a calculation on his part of whether a Trump pardon woukd help him.

    • bmaz says:

      Maybe, and this maybe the import of this filing, but I would not expect it soon. Frankly, too, I think Stone would be up for a short stint in prison, it would up his street cred. Problem is, you never know that it will be short.

      • Matt Brett says:

        The tax liens on his homes indicate that money is an issue.  Fighting these charges will bankrupt him.

          • AndTheSlithyToves says:

            An excerpt from today’s plea for funds from the beleaguered indictee:

            Dear Friend,

            …………

            Mounting a proper and effective legal defense against the United States government will cost me millions of dollars. Contrary to popular belief, and fake news websites claiming that I am a mega-millionaire, I have spent the last of my savings fighting this persecution. My wife and I have had to end our health insurance plans in order to make ends meet and pay my attorneys.

            At 66 years old, I never thought that I would find myself in the fight of my life. I refuse to let Robert Mueller run roughshod over our legal system and trample on our basic fundamental right as Americans… the right to be innocent until proven guilty.

            We may never be able to meet face-to-face or talk on the phone, but I want you to know how much this means to my family.

            You are my last hope. Some people might see that as a low point, though I do not. I trust in patriotic Americans like you to do what is right… now more than ever.

            In liberty,

            Roger J. Stone, Jr.

            P.S. Friend, I’m facing a minimum $2 MILLION price tag to clear my name of the Deep State’s baseless charges! I hope I can count on your principled support of my legal defense today! Thanks and God Bless, Roger

      • posaune says:

        bmaz,   how long did Gordon Liddy spend in the clinker?  he always seemed pretty tough.  Think Stone is up to that?

        • NorskieFlamethrower says:

          Liddy was “tougher” but also dumber. I think bmaz is right in speculating that Stone is willing to take a slap on the wrist stay at Club Fed but I wonder if he won’t fold like the Vikings in the Super Bowl if he is threatened with real time especially if it’s hard time.

    • maestro says:

      Mirandizing him is irrelevant if the government doesn’t plan to use any post-arrest statements against him.

      • Alan says:

        Mirandizing him is also irrelevant if he didn’t make any statements that could be used against him–or wait, is he saying he confessed and now wants to recant because he wasn’t Mirandized?

      • bmaz says:

        Stone is just whining. There was no need to Mirandize him. That is Fox News fodder, and nothing legally.

  4. bmaz says:

    Okay, said this much earlier, but the thought that a complex criminal conspiracy is complex is not close to news.

    That said, the fact that SCO sought to extend the Speedy Trial Act, or 18 USC §3161, this early this early is …. interesting. I think there is a message being sent. This is why no sane individual acts as Roger Stone does.

    • pseudonymous in nc says:

      Any ballpark sense of what kind of hard drives are typically supplied to the defense for discovery these days, bmaz? Just out of curiosity…

      • bmaz says:

        Hard question. Short answer, is no, don’t know. How and when did they get them? Do they intend to introduce them? Is any of it Brady or Jencks material?

        But this case just officially started. My guess is there is a lot of evidentiary motioning to play out.

    • Peterr says:

      The two sentences that precede what Marcy quoted above also suggest a message is being sent:

      Upon the entry of a protective order, the government intends to begin providing defense counsel with discovery. This discovery in [sic] both voluminous and complex.

      The language “intends to begin providing” is quite different from the more direct “will provide.” I hear Mueller saying “we’ve got so, so, so much on you that it’s gonna take a while to even start to get it to your lawyers. But we’ll get right on it once the judge signs off . . .”

      • Tech Support says:

        Is it reasonable to speculate that the SCO might slow-drip evidence to the defense, starting with the least sensitive items and then gradually ratcheting up… the goal being to get him to cry uncle with the least amount of overall disclosure?

  5. North Jersey John says:

    Not a lawyer, so dumb question: how does Dodger’s seized materials have FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results?

    • Someguy says:

      I read it quickly that way at first too and was wondering the same, but it is referring to the body of the discovery SCO intends to produce.  SCO intends to produce multiple hard drives /several terabytes of info, including various FBI case reports, search warrant applications and the results thereof.  That body of discovery comes from other sources (e.g. perhaps Manafort, Gates, Cohen, NSA intercepts) and goes all the way down to @emptywheel’s [//].  And then on top of all of that they are reviewing the materials seized from Stone in this latest round of search warrants and intend to produce that stuff as well.

  6. Alan says:

    @ North Jersey John

    The material that the Special Counsel intended to produce has been loaded onto hard drives, and those hard drives contain FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results, a lots of other stuff. This material was not seized from Stone–people are just misreading what is said in the Special Counsel’s motion. To quote the motion:

    “Upon the entry of a protective order, the government intends to begin providing defense counsel with discovery. This discovery in both voluminous and complex. It is composed of multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information consisting of, among other things, FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives). The communications contained in the iCloud accounts, email accounts, and physical devices span several years.”

  7. chicago_bunny says:

    @North Jersey John

    The motion is describing the discovery the government intends to share with Stone, which includes not just the information seized from him but also other information like the search warrant applications, FBI case reports, etc.

  8. P J Evans says:

    I have five terabytes of storage on three external drives, myself. One of them is for genealogy. (Using “Ancestry” for research gets you a lot of image files of things like census pages. They’re about a megabyte each. Get 30K images, and it adds up to needing a lot of disk space because of different versions – the software that they used to require for access from home computers would mislink things every so often, and not tell you what records it had just f*cked up. So you’d download the database again and use that until the next time it did it. I have at least 15 versions….)

    • Rayne says:

      For comparison’s sake: I was a project manager for a Fortune 100 company’s remote servers in 2001. One site at a research facility in the Midwest had a smallish cluster of servers, only a dozen at the time for less than a couple hundred people to use for research content (not email). All told the entire cluster was about a terabyte of storage. I had to double it because of photos taken from the field of insects. But still, only two terabytes.

      • ivaluemyprivacy says:

        File size is not a good measure of meaningful content. encyclopedia Britannica can take up same space as handful of image based PDFs.

        • Rayne says:

          Yeah thanks a bunch for the lecture now that I’ve retired from working in IT. ~smh~

          p.s. First, you’ve had more than one username here. Please stick to one. Second, you aren’t qualified to lecture me.

  9. Avattoir says:

    Lots of ‘farewell tours’ these days …
    Bent Roger the Rat Fucker
    Bounded into the shot
    He’d claimed, I got tons of dirt on Hils
    And I know where to get way more
    One bad-ass menacing twisted poltroon
    He says, Now’s my turn in the barrel, boys
    But I ain’t goin’ down alo-one

    You won’t want to miss this crazy train
    Not one clown car of this train
    You won’t want to miss this crazy train
    Not one clown car of this train
    Don’t miss one car of this crazy train
    Don’t miss one car of this crazy train

    He says, The trap was set
    Then it was sprung on me
    Well, I don’t claim to be worried about that
    Mueller’ll never get me to fli-ip
    Armed feds could knock on your door
    And say, Yer under arrest
    Then the video’s all over CNN
    But it’ll more about Gestapo tactics
    24/7 on FoxNews

    You won’t want to miss this crazy train
    Not one clown car of this train
    Don’t miss one car of this crazy train

    Bent Roger the Rat Fucker
    Files motion to suppress
    He says, Hope this eats up the coming year
    Meanwhile, there’s that tattoo to address …

    • Rusharuse says:

      Good! Good!

      Farewell tours – KISS (the band) about to embark on their latest FW tour, nineteen years after their first attempt. Connection? A fav KISS song/album ‘Psycho Circus’!

      back to work now . .

  10. Savage Librarian says:

    And don’t forget about the pee tape. I’m sure Stoned has a copy of that for leverage over the Toxic Trump Site. ha, ha!

  11. P J Evans says:

    @Rayne January 31, 2019 at 2:47 pm
    We had a one-terabyte shared “network” drive at work (we knew it as the Y: drive) – it was intended for sharing files between users, but a lot of people used it for more general storage, which meant it filled up faster than expected. (Note that I only used it for stuff I wanted others to be able to access.) It really wasn’t large enough. And that was more than five years ago.

    • Rayne says:

      Ours were filled with a lot of research papers — mostly text, some data. The cluster was pulled into my orbit because folks started snapping pics of bugs and storing them to the cluster instead of to their own local drives. Wish I could tell you the name of the company because the amount of content would be immediately understood.

      Comes down to the type of content and compression. Lots of plain text? or lots of dense photos? I shudder to think what graphic content there might be relevant to the investigation.

      • DMM says:

        Gotten a good chuckle out of the fact of you having to double the capacity to store so many photos of insects. I’m not consciously aware of what my mind expected the end of that statement would be, but it surely wasn’t photos of insects! :D

        • Rayne says:

          Oh I was pretty surprised, too, though in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have been based on what I knew about the site’s research work.

          Enterprise environments can be pretty predictable. Mondays suck if your email servers are approaching their limit along with network storage devices — everybody decompresses after the weekend by tackling emails first thing. And of course the complaints are the worst about email system/storage/network at the same time. My team of junior engineers would freak out about this one site every Monday because we didn’t have approved budget to implement upgrades or add equipment but the entire facility would lock up. I’d ‘borrow’ a drive to add to buy us time and the damned thing would be full next Monday. My team would spend the day cleaning out duplicate content, compressing and defragmenting whatever they could.

          And then when I sent a team down for an upgrade they sat around bullshitting with folks on site. One guy showed them what he had difficulty uploading and it was bugs. Lots and lots of photos of bugs, snapped during visits to customer locations. No freaking wonder the system was bogged down in June but not December, because they were pics of bugs munching on crops in summer.

          *sigh*

          • Eureka says:

            Lol, you had me at ~’Fortune X Co’ and ‘field pix of insects.’  ~’Lots of research papers’ and ‘crops’ fit into my mind-story like confirmation bias.

      • Troutwaxer says:

        Like you, I understand how big a terabyte is. What in the world covers multiple terabytes for a single person’s crimes? Even considering audio and video that’s a gigantic amount of data! I’m imagining video of swinger’s parties with Putin and Buttina, a database of every fraudulent real-estate transaction in the U.S. going back 30 years, 20 different angles on the Pee Tape,  surveillance video of Cohen in Prague, two years of transcripts for the phone conversations of every player in this game, ten-thousand documents, high-rez PDFs of every Peanuts cartoon every published plus the source code for Windows, Linux, Mac, and BSD and I know I’m nowhere close to multiple terabytes!

        WTF!

        Speculating: Is this enormous data-dump a way for Mueller to convey to the rest of the conspirators exactly what he knows and when he knew it, and how gigantic the knowledge truly is?

        • Rayne says:

          Of course we don’t know how much of this will survive screening by the filter crew for privileged material but jeepers…still a lot of material.

          One thing that popped up today overlapping with Stone is that New York state investigation into the false FCC comments. Stone had been promoting an activist entity to conservatives to generate comments, IIRC. There had to have been a huge database of real names and manufactured contact info created in order to flood the FCC. Did a certain ratfucker furnish a contact list from another much larger database for this purpose?

          And then there’s the weirdness of Graham going all screechy about Stone’s arrest though he didn’t do the same for Stone’s former partner and recent Trump campaign manager Manafort. Is Graham trying to gin up a way to get access to the list of materials the SCO snagged during the Stone raid?

          Entire situation leaves more questions than answers though we now know this investigation isn’t ending soon.

            • Rayne says:

              YES. Who was the secret keeper for the GOP? Who was the enforcer? Would the king of ratfuckers handle this?

              Notice the dead silence across the GOP save for Graham and Trump, too. Like they are whistling past the graveyard.

            • Eureka says:

              Great points, PJ & Rayne.  What are in Stone’s ledgers?  He might have the data in his hoards or records of payoffs so WL didn’t release the stolen GOP stuff, etc. (Besides the years of regular ratfucker business.)  Many, many outcomes to imagine here.

              Do the GOPers owe more to RU, WL, or Stone?

              How many years back of the _general_ GOP/RU conspiracy are in those TB?

              Now I’m hungry.  I was already excited over the possibility of old PACs-related info but this could go every which way but loose!

        • Tech Support says:

          Right. I mean if it were TBs of Roger Stone’s personal devices I’d be asking, “and how much of that is Skyrim?”

          I’m inclined to believe that the “elephant in the room” in terms of data footprint would be recorded digital video of depositions.

          Still a LOT of stuff tho.

          • Rayne says:

            I’d be more worried the entire heap of data is salted with photos and videos featuring Stone engaged in his kink. Imagine straightlaced folks having to wade through that while filtering for relevant evidence. We don’t pay some of our law enforcement folks enough.

  12. Savage Librarian says:

    OT – This is just a general apology to EW, Et al. I’m beginning to see some of the challenges of blogging.

    Sorry if I misstepped from time to time. Will try to pay more attention and step up my game.

    This is, by far, the most engaging site I know. Definitely has given me a new lease on life, so to speak. Long live, EW!

  13. P J Evans says:

    @Rayne
    We were doing GIS. I had some layer files that I was making available to others – one was all the power plants and cogens that I could locate, in our service territory and some of the adjacent areas (some of which we served). The others were internal data, of the same general nature. (I remember one of those was all the named locations we had, non-obvious places like Atwood and Monolith Junction.)

  14. Greg F says:

    Thanks for this great update, Marcy. I second the SavageLibrarian – Long live EW!

    BTW, I recently read about “petabytes” of storage for astronomical data and images. That’s a million Gigabytes. Yikes. And they have many years-full of them too!

    Happy Groundhog Day this Saturday, everyone. We’ll see if he can dig out of his snowbank.

  15. David Byron says:

    Another pointless arrest on only process crimes, making the hypothesis that Mueller is running a witch hunt that more likely. After two years investigating Stone, Mueller indicts him entirely on the basis of minor factual inconsistencies in his congressional testimony that Mueller only received the transcript of a month ago? That makes it obvious he found nothing in the other 20 months. But kept looking regardless.

    Of course there is no charge of collusion or anything like it, and of course none of the data taken will lead to any serious charge. Let’s assume hypothetically Stone was guilty of something — he’s had a year warning of this arrest to burn the data.

    Mueller has nothing to connect any of his dots and his time is about run out. His fans hope and pray that Mueller has a Deus Ex Machina. What’s going to happen when the entire Russiagate conspiracy theory goes up in flames? A lot of people with a lot of egg on their face.

    • Rayne says:

      AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH *cough* HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!

      Oh dude, we haven’t had a good trolling in the last day or two. Thanks, I really needed the laugh.

    • G Holland says:

      @David Byron – How embarrassing for you! I bet you thought this was one of those websites frequented by gullible people who don’t do their own research. Surprise! You thought wrong. Your contribution to this discussion is unhelpful, unwanted, and – most importantly – untrue.

    • Rusharuse says:

      Hello . . Chris Christie

      Ps. someone said you look like a snake, a snake trying to digest a warthog!

      Chrs

    • Tech Support says:

      I have to admit, I’m pretty sick of all this fapping over “process crimes.” Your slavish devotion to manipulative linguistic spin, handed down MLM-style through your CEO’s network is duly noted.

      I’m guessing that you will explain in your next comment how our chocolate ration has been “increased” to 20 grams. Thank you.

    • Rayne says:

      Yeah. That.

      And then this bit about the FCC fake comments.

      Senator Graham is tetchy and Trump is stewing, getting right-wing media riled up. SCO asks for a protective order, not a gag order. I think there’s going on here than Stone’s ratfucking for Trump.

      Would LOVE to know what’s in those terabytes.

  16. chuck says:

    Motion for a speedy trial fits a theme of using a long pole to handle Roger and then hustle him out on the same to the big house. At this stage my only theory for why Mueller would begin to slow roll things is so that Trump is at the end of his term and easy to arrest.

    • bmaz says:

      This is complete bullshit. Speedy trial rights are constitutional under the Sixth Amendment and codified in 18 USC §3161. Mueller is not “slow rolling” jack. He is giving comity to a defense counsel that was going to request it anyway (and who would have likely been granted it).

      • chuck says:

        Yes, I’m just speaking to my fantasy of Trump exiting office in cuffs and the tax savings of his post-office Secret Service detail being twofer prison guards.

  17. David Caldwell says:

    In the dead of night in his very quietest moments Roger Stone must surely be seriously contemplating what a fine mess he has got himself into by ignoring any remnant he may have ever had of a moral compass. In fact quite a number of Trump associates must be thinking those very same thoughts. Hence for example what I think was Sarah Huckabee Sanders weird and highly unprofessional off topic invocation for Gods assistance the other day. I’ve got news for you baby and its all bad. God ain’t going to help Donald Trump or you get out of this fine mess.

    • Rayne says:

      Wasn’t SHS appearing in front of some fundamentalist Christians at the time? I do think the panic is beginning to set in but in SHS’ case I think there was context.

    • Troutwaxer says:

      The word that comes to mind is “hubris.” We’re looking at an end-game that will make the average Greek tragedy look like a Disney movie.

  18. Alan says:

    > Would LOVE to know what’s in those terabytes.

    Coming soon to an internet near you–liberally edited and seeded with irrelevant files…

  19. harpie says:

    Chris Geidner found a change in the amended opposition brief:

    2:11 PM – 31 Jan 2019 Two related changes that I found reviewing the special counsel’s amended opposition brief in the Concord case. (This is the filing that got attention yesterday for discussing the alleged release/manipulation of materials turned over in discovery.) Doc: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5715576-USA-v-Concord-Amended-Opposition-to-Discovery.html / [KEY: Yellow is original filing. Green is amended filing.]

    Original:

    [p9-10] On October 22, 2018, the newly created Twitter account @HackingRedstone published the following tweet: “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!”1 […] On October 23, 2018, defense counsel contacted the government to advise that defense counsel had received media inquiries from journalists claiming they had been offered “hacked discovery materials from our case.”

    Amended:

    On October 22, the newly created Twitter account @HackingRedstone began sending direct messages to Twitter accounts for members of the media claiming that the sender had access to “the Special Counsel Mueller database.”1 On October 30, 2018, the @HackingRedstone account issued a public tweet stating: “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!” […] On October 23, 2018, the day after the tweet quoted above, defense counsel contacted the government to advise that defense counsel had received media inquiries from journalists claiming they had been offered “hacked discovery materials from our case.” [emphasis added]

    [Moved this comment from other thread. /~Rayne]

  20. pseudonymous in nc says:

    OT: is it just me, or does the reporting this evening on Uday’s phone calls feel like prebuttal from his side?

    • Rusharuse says:

      Phone info released from D jnr + today’s 4 sealed indictments. I’m getting excited – Friday on my mind!!

    • Eureka says:

      I took it like they were slipping some straw into the Look at Bad Bad Jared nest that Christie’s been building during his auditions for future Trump work.

      If they’re trying to get ahead of a specific anticipated event, they must think there’s enough time left for the RWNJ to spend some time spinning it dry.  Though he was on Ingraham last week as well…

      Are you thinking preemptive in terms of maybe concordant (or serially interwoven) timestamps emerging from ~ a burner in the Stone haul?

  21. Wotadog says:

    Dear David Byron
    The Mueller investigation is being cheered on around the world because it’s fundamentally about democracy. Hence ConFraudUs discussed at Emptywheel. Sometimes the first step to forgiveness is understanding that the other person (you) is a complete idiot. From Australia.

  22. Alan says:

    > Phone info released from D jnr + today’s 4 sealed indictments. I’m getting excited – Friday on my mind!!

    Reportedly 19-cr-24, 19-cr-25, 19-cr-28, and 19-cr-29. Felony Friday, here we come…

  23. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Donald Trump might be right: CNN’s reporters should go back to school.  CNN reported today that someone told Senate investigators that Don Jr did not call his dad after that June 9, 2016, meeting.  Its conclusion follows from the fact that, according to unnamed Senate investigators, neither of the two phones associated with the two blocked numbers Don Jr called were registered to Donald Trump.

    The June 9th meeting was held at Trump Tower NYC.  That large building housed the head offices of Trump’s campaign and the Trump Organization, as well as Trump’s principal NYC home.  That leaves at least four ways CNN’s conclusion could be wrong.  Let me borrow your phone so I can call and tell them that.

    One, who a phone is registered to and who is talking on it from time to time are not always the same person.  Trump, in particular, regularly plays games with the mobile phones he uses to take or receive calls.  Two, Don Jr could have gone up the down staircase and talked directly to his dad.  Three, he could have used a dedicated intercom or video phone system, which the Don might also have used to follow the meeting in real time.  And four, Don Jr could have used a house phone to call his dad.

    Whether Mueller has evidence of any of those possible ways is a different matter than that Senate investigators discovered that the two blocked numbers Don Jr called were not formally registered to Donald J. Trump Sr.

    • Eureka says:

      Yes, all of these points.  And the propensity to use others’ phones, one suspects, is going to or has already tied up many of his associates in this mess.

      Plus Jr is not going to wait two hours to tell Dad what happened in that meeting.  While the call two hours later could be to Trump (or anyone), common sense suggests that any of those other, easy routes of communication would have taken place post haste.

      • BobCon says:

        What’s weird to me is that they’ve never waited to push back when given the opportunity. These guys have not been planning strategic witholding of information to unveil at the most advantageous time — they’re the opposite of Mueller’s team. So why now?

        One possibility is that they didn’t know until now what numbers Don Jr. called, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless he wasn’t using that phone at the time, and someone else was. If that’s the case, then who?

        Or maybe Don Jr. made different calls on different phones, and was afraid of making the denial until now, when he has finally managed to sort out what phone records went to investigators, and which ones they weren’t able to get their hands on. If that’s the case, how did he find out now that investigators don’t have the records he was afraid they had?

        I’m sure it’s possible there’s something else behind the long delay in revealing the information, but I’m struggling to see any way this fits into the normal pattern of these guys chasing any way of pushing back the instant it presents itself.

        • Eureka says:

          I think the ‘now’ part relates to SCO having terabytes of ratfucker data and the opportunity to try to stick the news of Jr’s calls amidst Bad Jared talk, as I had commented separately in reply to pseudonymous in nc.

          I’m assuming that they have had this or a similar disclosure plan ready for awhile, but weren’t going to bother mentioning it if the investigation, say, got shut down before Stone (or others closer to the inner circle) was indicted.  Else why ever talk about it again, type of thing.

          And to be clear I mean this even if the sources’ claims are true and even if the communications in question didn’t involve Stone or Dad or whoever– just simply that SCO is getting close enough to the nuts and bolts of the conspiracy such that it makes sense for them to release _differently_ inculpatory evidence and try to news-cycle launder it, get free tv-lawyer debate advice, etc.

          We’ll see how that works out for them, perhaps just like their ‘adoptions’ meeting agenda did.

          ADD: included in my wonderings: did they also just get verification from Stone that some e.g. burner phone of his was NOT caught in the search, so e.g. Jr is free to free-form re some of those communications.

          • Eureka says:

            i.e. this goes well with your/our/the prevailing notion of them being reactive types.  Not the best planners, no.  Reactionary (with a public appearance of razor-thin preemptiveness), yes.

          • Eureka says:

            I forgot to add the other proximate triggers:  seating of HIC and Schiff on the news re Jr’s testimony, especially after the Stone indictment.   I’m still not clear on why the Rs delayed their appointments or to what ends.

            • Rayne says:

              The GOP’s delay in seating committee members was simple obstruction by foot dragging. They can’t have hearings of the full committee when there isn’t a full committee.

              The last slot was finally filled this week with appointment of John Ratcliffe. There was some lame excuse given about two term-limited GOP committee members needing a waiver to stay on, but this is bullshit since the GOP has known for months now these two slots would need to be addressed.

              Just plain foot dragging to delay hearings.

  24. Eureka says:

    Any day you bring up the older PACs is a good day, as far as I’m concerned.

    It reminds me – when Wohl had one of his scams going (I think it was the Mueller one, but really not sure), the photo of the woman Wohl used struck me so hard as resembling P. Jensen in the close-set eyes/upper face that I looked up the picture in your post.  But additional views/pix of the gal Wohl used made it seem like no relation or link worth pursing.

    Point being I don’t know if anyone in the OC den has gotten a Stone or Trump tattoo yet, but I hope “ratfucker” will have been rendered unto history well-before forty years from now.  I really can’t take watching them grow into it and doing this again.

    (Also, apropos of nothing but news reminders:  Scott Walker is an asshole.)

  25. P J Evans says:

    @BobCon January 31, 2019 at 2:17 pm
    Experts can recover files that have been deleted but not heavily overwritten. I’d bet that Mueller has such experts available.

  26. Rusharuse says:

    NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! There WILL be indictments tomorrow and plenty of them, thick, fat, juicy ones. *Every mind-fucking, gaslighting, crooked son of bitch is going down. All of em!!

    *This mindset guarantees a great nite’s sleep. Reality(?) can wait till morning . . after coffee and toast. Talk to me then!

  27. e.a.f. says:

    For a short article, it certainly packs a punch. Great read, thank you.
    Read the referred to previous articles. omg, this could be very entertaining. Thank you for providing all this information and thank you to the other commenters. Its an education.

  28. Peacerme says:

    I woke in the middle of the night. Read Rusharuse’s post. My pulse and heart rate escalated. I got excited hoping for a factual foundation to follow. Knew deep down, that we truly are in a fight against foreign interests for our democracy. We need to worry less about the psychotic believers and continue to build a coalition of truth. I mean the truth is marching on. The success of democracy depends on this. What happens here.

    This is why I need to avoid reading in the middle of the night. Sweet dreams. Not dreaming of trump. Not even an fbi raid of the White House culminating in an arrest of potus would earn trump a place in my dreams. Unless it was a nightmare….

    But this cast of characters on this blog are welcome in my dreams any time! (No trump)
    Marcy, Rayne, Bmas, Ed, and all the gang in emptywheeler land, the commenters here. What I focus on grows. Heart is calming now. Will head back to sleep. Thank goodness for all of you. And prayers for the psychotic believers like David Byron. Believers in trump’s innocence have to ignore an awful lot of truth. It’s pathological. There is no point in trying to convince them. Democracy lives or dies based on the majority. What we focus on grows.

    Can’t keep my eyes open….good night emptywheeler land!!!

  29. orionATL says:

    trip 1/31 1:41p

    “Dude really isn’t wrapped too tight. He thinks this is his time in the sun.”

    “isn’t wrapped too tight”

    that’s a new one for me. funny as hell. tx. :)

  30. Hops says:

    Sounds like some people could use a Fantasy Indictment League. Maybe an open thread to post our predictions?

  31. Savage Librarian says:

    Question:
    As I am mostly clueless about the field of law, I am wondering about the total quantity of indictments that might be produced in such
    intertwining cases.

    Would the guesstimate be dozens? More?

  32. Leila512 says:

    O/T: From today’s WaPo: “U.S. should counter Russia and China hacking with its own influence operations, think tank says”
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2019/02/01/the-cybersecurity-202-u-s-should-counter-russia-and-china-hacking-with-its-own-influence-operations-think-tank-says/5c5341331b326b29c3778d3d/

    While this is from a right-wing, Adelson-funded think tank, I post it here because it reminds me of an issue I’ve been struggling with and have yet to hear a POV that I can embrace: What should be our posture, strategies and tactics to respond to, and deter, cyberwarfare efforts?

    [FYI — link edited to remove tracking ID. When posting WaPo links please remove everything after ‘.html’ including the question mark, ex. ‘?utm_term=.0123456789’ /~Rayne]

  33. HCCarey says:

    This is great, but how did Muller come by all this info? It suggests Stone was under investigation well before appointment of the special counsel, doesn’t it?

    I guess Mueller is rolling other investigations, like maybe by the IRS, into his case against Stone? Or he’s just telling Stone how totally fucked he is, to get him to flip? That he can’t smokescreen and dodge and lie his way out of this?

  34. Trip says:

    Shimon Prokupecz‏Verified account @ShimonPro

    Judge told Roger Stone that any inconsistencies he has had when speaking publicly could be introduced as evidence at his trial. Prosecutors said a possible October trial date. Judge thinks the case could go to trial in July or August. ..As expected Judge in Roger Stone case considering a gag order. The judge cautioned Stone against treating the build up to the trial “like a book tour” and reminded him he should not argue his case “on the talk show circuit.” Both sides will be given a chance to next Friday…Again…important (I think) to point out that DC U.S. atty office prosecutor Michael Marando spoke on behalf of the gov’t in the Roger Stone case. Clear indication to me that the special counsel’s office work is winding down with DC prosecutor taking lead on this case.

    https://twitter.com/ShimonPro

  35. A. Non says:

    It’s very difficult for an individual to get to terabytes of data from documents alone. Most likely those terabytes are full of movies, like Stone’s porn stash. I’d be surprised if the actual evidence in the case is more than gigabytes.

    • Rayne says:

      Maybe. Maybe not. The estimated size of the U.S. voter database leaked online in 2014-2015 which included 191 million voters was about 191 gigabytes (based on 1 Kb per record).

      Imagine how big the same database would be if it included personal information like the direct mailing content the GOP has used for years.

      If Stone had anything like that in his grubby paws it wouldn’t take much to make up the first terabyte — and then sprinkle icky photos and videos on top.

      I can’t wait to learn — if we ever do learn in full — what evidence Stone has had in his possession.

    • P J Evans says:

      I save web pages that I think I might want or need later – it’s faster and easier than trying to find them with a search engine. I have docs, I have pics, I have spreadsheets and databases, and I have a couple of terabytes at least, spread across four drives and 10 years (at least) of use. (I have no idea how many pics I have in my 6 folders of “space pix” – but that’s likely to be a lot of gigabytes, even when some pics are in there multiple times.)
      (A lot of versions of my genealogy databases come in at a quarter gig each – with all the links. The corresponding image folders are another 30 or so gigs.)

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      Roger Stone has been a rat-fucker since Nixon was in office.  He must have collections on collections.  The right files, as J. Edgar Hoover showed, are one sure means of avoiding having another rat-fucker turn on you.

      It’s also his portfolio, his calling card, for future clients: Pictures, audio, video, early document scans in the form of pictures, documents, models, diagrams, you name it might be there for the unraveling.

Comments are closed.