Docket Tea Leaves: Manafort, Bannon, and Flynn

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I’d like to point to some curious docket doings in cases pertaining to Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, and Mike Flynn

Manafort

First, two things pertaining to Paul Manafort, who is serving his prison sentence from home. In his book, Andrew Weissmann raises the “other investigation” in which Manafort, on the day he succeeded in getting a plea deal, implicated someone — almost certainly Jared Kushner — and wondered why the material still hadn’t been released.

Most notably, at one point we asked him about an email he’d received in August 2016 from Roger Stone. Manafort gave a long explanation, the gist of which was to implicate two senior Trump campaign officials; it was related to an investigation in New York. (As the precise material is still under seal I cannot discuss the details, although it is unclear to me what the continued basis is for keeping all this material under seal.) We were trying to assess his credibility, fixating on signs of dishonesty—any indication that Manafort was still angling for a pardon, or attempting to play us. Volunteering this information, which implicated senior officials, suggested he may have written that possibility off, even though we all had continuing doubts.

It’s a damn good question given that Manafort’s defense and prosecutors filed a sealed joint motion about what else could be unsealed from Manafort’s breach determination. At the time, the government was proposing to unseal at least some of the information — and had even given proposals to Manafort’s lawyers to unseal them.

On May 29, 2020, the government provided counsel for Mr. Manafort with the last of the government’s proposals for lesser-redacted materials. Counsel for Mr. Manafort is now considering the government’s proposals, and the parties respectfully request additional time for counsel for Mr. Manafort to do so, and for the parties to confer and prepare the joint report for the Court.

But Judge Amy Berman Jackson hasn’t ruled yet. She’s busy as hell, but some of this information would be fairly important for voters to consider before they vote.

Meanwhile, in Manafort’s case in chief, on Tuesday, one of the two DC AUSAs who were on the docket swapped out for a different one.

The United States of America, by and through its attorney, the Acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, and Assistant United States Attorney Arvind Lal, hereby informs the Court that he is entering his appearance in this matter on behalf of the United States. Assistant United States Attorney Zia M. Faruqui no longer represents the United States in this matter.

Manafort’s serving his prison sentence from home. And the AUSA on the unsealing docket, Molly Gaston, remains on this one (so it shouldn’t pertain to the unsealing debate). There doesn’t seem to be a need to add new AUSAs when all he’s going to do is continue to sit in his condo until Trump pardons him.

Bannon

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, a sealed document was placed in Steve Bannon’s docket.

This could be a lot of things, and Bannon has three co-defendants, so it’s not even clear that it pertains to him. But it’s the first sealed document (as a simple fraud case, this shouldn’t involve any classified evidence). And it was filed the same day as the Hunter Biden faux-scandal broke.

NBC reported that the FBI is investigating whether this faux-scandal has ties to foreign intelligence.

Federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The FBI seized the laptop and a hard drive through a grand jury subpoena. The subpoena was later published by the New York Post. The bureau has declined to comment.

Though there are other sketchy aspects to the story, such as the claim that the shop owner, having been subpoenaed for the laptop, also made a copy and gave it to Rudy’s lawyer, Robert Costello.

“Before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello,” the Post said. “Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.”

Bannon’s Chinese benefactor, Guo Wengui, was hyping the dirt before it was released.

Weeks before the New York Post began publishing what it claimed were the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard drive, a Sept. 25 segment on a YouTube channel run by a Chinese dissident streamer, who is linked to billionaire and Steve Bannon-backer Guo Wengui, broadcast a bizarre conspiracy theory. According to the streamer, Chinese politburo officials had “sent three hard disks of evidence” to the Justice Department and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi containing damaging information about Joe Biden as well as the origins of the coronavirus in a bid to undermine the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Three days later, a Twitter account linked to Guo and Bannon’s Himalaya movement subsequently amplified an edited clip of the segment alongside the pledge of a “Bombshell… 3 hard disk drives of videos and dossiers of Hunter Biden’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have been sent to Nancy Pelosi and DOJ. Big money and sex scandal!”

And Bannon was boasting of having the laptop on September 28.

If the FBI was already investigating this — including why the shop owner was handing out copies of the purported laptop — then the FBI may have been aware of Bannon’s activities before Wednesday.

The point is, some of this — particularly if it delves into fraud — would be a bail violation. There’s a status conference on October 26, so it’s possible we’ll get hints then.

Ultimately, I think Bannon is virtually guaranteed to be pardoned, because he still hasn’t told the full truth about 2016. So even if he were jailed, it’d likely be for a matter of days until Trump got him out again.

Flynn

Finally, there’s Flynn’s case. The one unopposed amicus — filed by the NACDL — got docketed today. It’s a strong case — far stronger than a similar argument that Sidney Powell tried to make — that Flynn should not be held in contempt for the lies he has told in Judge Emmet Sullivan’s case. It’s an argument that Sullivan would, I imagine, normally find persuasive, and the fact that he has docketed it today makes me wonder if he’s relying on it in his order on Flynn’s case.

The only problem with the brief is it misunderstands the full scope of Flynn’s lies to the court. The brief assumes all his lies pertain to his guilty pleas, and argue that defendants can’t be held accountable for perjury on coerced guilty pleas.

But — as I’ve noted repeatedly — the sworn declaration Flynn submitted as part of his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea, which DOJ’s recent excuses for blowing up his prosecution increasingly rely on, also conflicts with what Flynn said to the grand jury as well as evidence submitted in this docket, which shows notes from Covington recording Flynn telling lies about his engagement with Turkey (see the bold for a conflicting statement).

  • June 26, 2018: Mike Flynn testified to an EDVA grand jury, among other things, that:
    • “From the beginning,” his 2016 consulting project “was always on behalf of elements within the Turkish government,”
    • He and Bijan Kian would “always talk about Gulen as sort of a sharp point” in relations between Turkey and the US as part of the project (though there was some discussion about business climate)
    • “For the most part” “all of that work product [was] about Gulen”
    • When asked if he knew of any work product that didn’t relate to Gulen, Flynn answered, “I don’t think there was anything that we had done that had anything to do with, you know, anything else like business climates or stuff like that”
    • He was not aware of “any work done on researching the state of the business climate in Turkey”
    • He was not aware of “any meetings held with U.S. businesses or business associations”
    • He was not aware of “any work done regarding business opportunities and investment in Turkey”
    • He and his partner “didn’t have any conversations about” a November 8, 2016 op-ed published under his name until “Bijan [] sent me a draft of it a couple of days prior, maybe about a week prior”
  • January 29, 2020: Mike Flynn submitted a sworn declaration. Among the assertions he made were:
    • “On December 1, 2017 (reiterated on December 18, 2018), I pled guilty to lying to agents of the FBI. I am innocent of this crime.”
    • “I gave [Covington] the information they requested and answered their questions truthfully.”
    • “I still don’t remember if I discussed sanctions on a phone call with Ambassador Kislyak nor do I remember if we discussed the details of a UN vote on Israel.”
    • “My relationship with Covington disintegrated soon thereafter.” [After second proffer session.]
    • “I did not believe I had lied in my White House interview with the FBI agents.”
    • “In the preceding months leading up to this moment [when he agreed to the plea deal], I had read articles and heard rumors that the agents did not believe that I had lied.”
    • “It was well after I pled guilty on December 1, 2017, that I heard or read that the agents had stated that they did not believe that I had lied during the January 24, 2017, White House interview.”
    • “I agreed to plead guilty that next day, December 1, 2017, because of the intense pressure from the Special Counsel’s Office, which included a threat to indict my son, Michael, and the lack of crucial information from my counsel.”
    • “My former lawyers from Covington also assured me on November 30, 2017, that if I accepted the plea, my son Michael would be left in peace.”
    • “Regretfully I followed my lawyers’ strong advice to confirm my plea even though it was all I could do to not cry out ‘no’ when this Court asked me if I was guilty.”
    • “In truth, I never lied.”

Not to mention, Flynn’s sworn declaration is internally inconsistent. [Update: a few more of the amicus briefs have been approved, including one from former prosecutors.]

It’s also worth noting that the Bill Barnett 302, which included about a page worth of paragraphs that were “pending unsealing by the court” that have yet to be unsealed. Some of those must pertain to things Flynn claimed in his declaration. (Flynn’s defense, but not Judge Sullivan, has an unredacted copy.)

Finally, yesterday, DOJ either posted or updated a job description that could be Brandon Van Grack’s job leading DOJ’s more focused FARA practice, which Van Grack got moved to after the Mueller investigation (though it could also be a more junior position reporting to Van Grack).

The attorney for this position will focus on administering and enforcing FARA, with at least 50% of the attorney’s time devoted to FARA matters. The attorney’s FARA responsibilities will include preparing for and leading civil litigation, managing criminal investigations, conducting inspections, and drafting advisory opinions.

When DOJ tried to blow up Flynn’s prosecution, Van Grack withdrew from the case but did not quit, though the frothy right claimed he had been ousted. Just in the last while, Bruce Ohr was finally ousted from the office for a trumped up complaint that he shared intelligence on Russian threats, as he had done for years. Van Grack hasn’t filed anything in PACER since DOJ moved to withdraw the prosecution. That said, DOJ has repeatedly said DOJ did not violate Brady.

I don’t really know what to make of all this. But I thought I’d note what I’m seeing in the bottom of my tea cup.

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Tuscaloosa Gets The Birmingham Blues

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Part of the lack of consistent Trash has been aversion to NCAA “opening”, knowing what would happen. The NFL pros had/have a shot, but even that has not been easy. Colleges? Anybody that has spent time on a college campus knew that would be a tough pull. So…..

Nick Saban is a Trumpian hero that magically slays the Covid and can coach the most important thing in the world, a belligerent SEC game. What a jerk. That said, UGA at Bama is close to a national championship game as you will get prior to any supposed BCS Championship.

Bill Bel had an interesting start to his coaching career. He was always that guy, and it is interesting reading.

As to the Pros, they are holding on. Barely. The Tennessee Titans has a huge COVID scare that seems to be slightly smaller than first advertised. The Titans are actually a pretty well run organization, so that is not surprising. But what a warning shot, along with Cam Newton and Gilmore in Boston. Playing football, with giant team roster numbers, and even bigger administrative staffs, was always going to be harder than the NBA, NHL or even MLB.

The AFC alone lost steals the day Sunday. I’ll take the Pats over the Donkos in Gillette, but that is not overly easy, Baker and the Brownies in Pittsburgh is the game to really watch. Green Bay at Tampa Bay is the other one to watch. Whether you are a fan or not, that is two of the best QBs ever tilting at each other.

Okay, a story about the Trash music attached hereto. Long ago, I went to a Charlie Daniels Band concert in Phoenix. It was really good. So, one of my first summers in Santa Monica, I was just kind of driving around. Drove by the Civic Center and saw that the CDB was playing. So found a place to park and bought a ticket. It was absolutely great, as the CDB was back then. Later, I had an opportunity to talk to Daniels via email. He was stunningly smart, even if we disagreed about most everything. His politics were not mine, but he was great. This was before even Twitter. RIP Mr. Daniels. The Birmingham Blues are close enough to Tuscaloosa. So is Caballo Diablo.

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“That’s Rudy.” Trump Proves, Yet Again, That He Would Just Ignore a Defensive Briefing

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For years, the frothy right has wailed that candidate Donald Trump should have been given a defensive briefing back in July 2016, rather than have the FBI open an investigation to figure out which member(s) of his campaign had gotten advance notice that the Russians were planning on dropping emails to help Trump win. Never mind that his top advisor in the briefing where that would have occurred was secretly working for the Turkish government at the time.

The complaint has always rung hollow given that, after President Obama warned Trump against hiring Mike Flynn (the aforementioned secret agent for Turkey), Trump went ahead and hired him anyway.

Today, however, we have further proof that Trump would have done nothing if he had gotten a defensive briefing rather than have the FBI investigate whether — as turned out to be true, in every single case — Flynn and Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos and Carter Page were trying to cash in on their ties to Trump with foreign governments.

Yesterday, the WaPo reported that Trump’s national security advisor warned Trump that Russia was feeding Trump bullshit though Rudy.

U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.

The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The intelligence raised concerns that Giuliani was being used to feed Russian misinformation to the president, the former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and conversations.

The warnings to the White House, which have not previously been reported, led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump in a private conversation that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia, one of the former officials said.

The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” this person said. Officials wanted “to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,” particularly since he was facing impeachment over his own efforts to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into investigating the Bidens.

But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president. Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.”

The WaPo goes on to reveal that Bill Barr and Pat Cipollone — who helped Trump survive impeachment for asking for this help — along with Chris Wray all understood that Rudy was being targeted by Russia.

Several senior administration officials “all had a common understanding” that Giuliani was being targeted by the Russians, said the former official who recounted O’Brien’s intervention. That group included Attorney General William P. Barr, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and White Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Today, the NYT matched the WaPo story, albeit with one of their fewer than WaPo’s sources pushing back somewhat.

The agencies imparted the warning months before disclosing publicly in August that Moscow was trying to interfere in the election by taking aim at Mr. Biden’s campaign, the officials said. Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani have promoted unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Biden that have aligned with Russian disinformation efforts, and Mr. Giuliani has met with a Ukrainian lawmaker whom American officials believe is a Russian agent.

Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, presented the warning about Mr. Giuliani to Mr. Trump in December. Two former officials gave conflicting accounts about its nature. One said the report was presented to Mr. Trump as unverified and vague, but another said the intelligence agencies had developed solid and credible information that Mr. Giuliani was being “worked over” by Russian operatives.

Mr. Trump shrugged it off, officials said, but the first former official cautioned that his reaction could have been colored in part by other information given to him not long before that appeared to back some of Mr. Giuliani’s claims about Ukraine.

Both stories, however, agree that Trump blew off this warning.

So in 2016, the FBI investigated and Trump wailed and cried and said he wished he had gotten a defensive briefing.

Last December, he got a defensive briefing, and he just let his attorney continue to mainline him Russian disinformation.

And along the way, Billy Barr seems to have sidelined a tip (and possibly tried to squelch others) — in the form of the whistleblower complaint that launched impeachment — that might get Rudy investigated for serving as such a willing agent of Russian intelligence.

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2020 Presidential Debates: Missing ‘The Capital of Latin America’ [UPDATE-1]

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[NB: Updates will appear at the bottom of this post. /~Rayne]

I pre-wrote posts for the presidential debates, scheduling them to post a half hour before the event began. Here’s the post I wrote about the now-canceled second debate, on which Trump and his team flip-flopped about his participation.

Here’s a post so emptywheel community members can discuss the second of three presidential debates.

Tonight’s second presidential debate scheduled for 9:00–10:30 p.m. ET . Tonight’s moderator will be Steve Scully of C-SPAN.

The debate — changed to a remote format after Trump’s hospitalization for COVID-19 — was to be held at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, Florida. Moving to a remote or virtual debate model removes a key topic of discussion though it’s best for the safety of the candidates.

Miami has two nicknames: the Gateway to the the Americas, and the Capital of Latin America. I wonder how closely Central and South America will be watching the debate because the original location lent itself to discussion of foreign policy in the Americas.

Good luck to Steve Scully on keeping the tangerine hellbeast from running amok as he did during the first debate.

Of course we now know that roughly 26-28 hours after Trump’s participation in the first presidential debate, Trump tweeted that he and his current spouse tested positive for COVID-19.

This is Day 14 after that announcement, and still an unknown number of days since Trump’s positive test was administered. We don’t know how long the gap was between the time the test was administered and when he announced he was positive, let alone if more than one test was taken or the kinds of tests used.

It’s also an unknown number of days since his last negative test because Trump and his minions have steadfastly refused to answer this question. We’ve seen reports indicating Trump was not tested regularly.

We still don’t have any indication who infected him or when. We know Hope Hicks, whose positive test was announced on October 1, traveled with Trump on Friday September 25. RNC’s chair Ronna Romney McDaniel was also with Trump inside the 24 hours before the “Rose Garden Massacre” super spreader event.

An unknown number of people including senators and GOP political figures were infected at that event; as of this past Monday we could account for 34 but there have surely been more who either didn’t tell anyone for various reasons including Trump’s goddamned NDAs, or fear, or asymptomatic status.

We’re no closer to knowing how the super spreader event began.

Trump ultimately canceled this second presidential debate because of his COVID-positive status seven days before this debate, unwilling as he was to participate on a virtual basis.

But just because he canceled doesn’t mean we the people don’t have questions for the candidates.

~ ~ ~

Make sure to add the date of the third and final presidential debate to your calendar — format and location subject to change, of course, if not outright cancellation:

Thursday, October 22, 2020 8:00–9:30 p.m. ET
Location: Curb Event Center at Belmont University, Nashville, Tennessee
Moderator: Kristen Welker, NBC

~ ~ ~

UPDATE-1 — 8:30 P.M. 15-OCT-2020 —

I left this post unchanged while the situation gelled into this evening’s dueling town halls, with Biden on ABC and Trump on NBC.

Since Trump’s appearance on NBC was announced, there’s been a shit storm of outrage across social media platforms. Trump refused to debate on a remote basis, but he’s willing to appear on a network this evening at the same time as Biden?

Fuck that.

Many young people are tuning into ABC on multiple devices and streams to watch Biden’s town hall in order to boost his viewership ratings, knowing of course that Trump is hung up on audience numbers.

After the way in which K-pop fans skewed the reservation numbers for Trump’s Tulsa OK rally back in June, it’ll be interesting to see what youngsters can do this time against a forewarned Team Trump.

Not putting up Trump’s crap here tonight, especially after his rally appearance today in which he implied he authorized the extrajudicial execution of an anti-fascist protester.

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Roger Stone Was Parroting That Russian Intelligence Report a Month before FBI Got It

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Yesterday, I noted several key problems with the way the frothy right is trying to politicize some reports that John Ratcliffe just declassified: Russian intelligence analysis picked up before July 28 ascribes to Hillary foreknowledge of what Roger Stone would start doing on August 5, first denying that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian mouthpiece and then engaging in public and non-public Twitter conversations with the persona.

Ratcliffe left out an unbelievably important part of the report: the role of Guccifer 2.0 in the Russian report. Intelligence collected in late July 2016 claimed that Hillary was going to work her alleged smear around neither the GRU (which had already been identified as the perpetrator of the DNC hack) nor WikiLeaks (which had released the DNC files, to overt celebration by the Trump campaign), but Guccifer 2.0, who looked to be a minor cut-out in late July 2016 (when this intelligence was collected), but who looked a lot more important once Roger Stone’s overt and covert communications with Guccifer 2.0 became public weeks later.

The report suggests Hillary magically predicted that days after this plot, President Trump’s rat-fucker would start a year’s long campaign running interference for Guccifer 2.0. Not only did Hillary successfully go back and trick George Papadopoulos into drunkenly bragging about Russian dangles in May 2016, then, Hillary also instantaneously tricked Stone into writing propaganda for Guccifer 2.0 days later.

No wonder they consider Hillary so devious.

Mind you, rather than producing evidence that Hillary seeded this story with the FBI (when her public attacks on Trump went right after the Russian intelligence services involved), they appear to be claiming that Hillary used the Steele dossier — which included no reporting on Guccifer 2.0, which was a very early sign of its problems — to plant a story that centered on Guccifer 2.0.

Next up, they’re going to accuse Hillary of going back in time and planting the extensive forensics that prove that the Guccifer 2.0 persona was a GRU operation.

While Hillary was already assailing Trump’s debt to Russia because of the hack, she was in no way focusing on Guccifer 2.0; nor did the Steele dossier that the frothy right seems to believe she used to seed this line of thinking at the FBI address Guccifer 2.0, at all.

There’s something still crazier about the insinuation, one I didn’t realize before I wrote this post.

Roger Stone’s public dalliances with Guccifer 2.0 — an Olympic difficulty flip-flop from attributing the Hillary hack to Russia to, instead, arguing that it was obvious Guccifer 2.0 was not Russian over a nine day span — came when he wrote a post at Brietbart claiming that Guccifer 2.0 was a lone hacker.

I have some news for Hillary and Democrats—I think I’ve got the real culprit. It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0. The original Guccifer famously hacked Hillary’s home email server, you might remember.

Here’s Guccifer 2.0’s website. Have a look and you’ll see he explains who he is and why he did the hack of the DNC.

Now, ask yourself: Why is Roger Stone the guy showing you this? This website isn’t hidden but of course our pathetic press patsies haven’t reported it; they just keep repeating Hillary’s spin.

Before I tell why Hillary’s dishonest blame-casting is so dangerous, let me explain a little more about why it seems like Guccifer 2.0 is the real deal. He seems to have set up a Twitter account back in June and then a WordPress blog to let the world know that he’d hacked the DNC.

That post had the headline, Dear Hillary: DNC Hack Solved, So Now Stop Blaming Russia.

But two days later Stone reposted it at his own site, magnifying the sub-hed, “Hillary Clinton has tried to save herself from her latest email scandal with rhetoric that poses a dangerous threat to our democracy and even world peace.”

This line — in a post launching Stone’s public lobbying for Guccifer 2.0 — that Hillary was blaming Russia to cover up from her own email scandals, comes right out of that Russian intelligence report. It’s as if Stone was reading right off it.

And yet he was parroting a Russian script — which the CIA only discovered in late July and which would not get formally shared with the FBI until September 7 — on August 7, 31 days before the FBI even got that report.

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Government Caught Between a Recusal Motion and Desperation

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Last week, Sidney Powell made her first formal request that Judge Emmet Sullivan recuse.

In response, Judge Sullivan said (while noting the proper time for such a request was last year), file a motion.

Sidney did.

It was a shitshow.

Nevertheless, Judge Sullivan politely invited the government to weigh in.

They’ve now done so. While not disagreeing with Flynn, they argue that the way to proceed is on the motion to dismiss — and press for urgent response.

The United States of America, by and through its undersigned counsel, respectfully files this response to General Michael T. Flynn’s Motion to Disqualify Judge Emmet Sullivan, United States v. Flynn, 17-cr-232 (Doc. 161), filed on October 7, 2020. As this Court is aware, during the mandamus proceedings before the en banc Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, General Flynn asked that “any further proceedings be conducted by a different judge.” In re Flynn, No. 20-2153, Doc. 1846621 at 24. While the government did not address that request in its written pleadings, when asked during oral argument, the government offered that it had “reluctantly come to the view that there is now at least a question about appearances of impartiality” because this Court’s filing of a petition for en banc review suggested a “level of investment in the proceedings that is problematic.” In re Flynn, No. 20-2153, Doc. 1859900 (Transcript of the August 11, 2020, Hearing) at 54. The D.C. Circuit rejected that view. In re Flynn, No. 20-5143, 2020 WL 5104220, at *16 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 31, 2020).

Based in part on subsequent events, including the hearing held before the Court on September 29, 2020, General Flynn again raises the serious charge that this Court is biased and has engaged in misconduct. The government does not believe that adjudicating General Flynn’s motion is the most appropriate way for this Court to proceed. Consistent with the en banc D.C. Circuit’s statement that “[a]s the underlying criminal case resumes in the District Court, we trust and expect the District Court to proceed with appropriate dispatch,” In re Flynn, 2020 WL 5104220, at *7, the government respectfully submits that instead the Court should immediately grant the unopposed motion to dismiss the criminal information with prejudice. Doing so would avoid any further delay to General Flynn and to the government, and would eliminate any need for the Court to address the disqualification motion, which would be moot.

This is a nifty way to use the purportedly agreeing sides against each other.

The government wants this done by November 3. That makes Sulliavan’s response to Powell on recusal easier.

 

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The Desperation of the Jeffrey Jensen Investigation Already Made Clear that John Durham Won’t Indict

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Yesterday, a sick man called into Maria Bartiromo’s show and wailed that his opponents had not been indicted.

Bartiromo: Mr. President. We now know from these documents that John Ratcliffe unveiled that it was Hilary Clinton’s idea to tie you to Russia in some way. It was successful. The whole country was talking about it for two and a half years. But what comes next, Mr. President? We can have all of these documents, we can see exactly what happened but unless John [Durham] comes out with a report or indictments unless Bill Barr comes out with a — a — some kind of a ruling here, do you think this is resonating on the American people?

Trump: Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes, the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win and we’ll just have to go, because I won’t forget it. But these people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country and that includes Obama and it includes Biden. These are people that spied on my campaign and we have everything. Now they say they have much more, OK? And I say, Bill, we’ve got plenty, you don’t need any more. We’ve got so much, Maria, even — just take a look at the Comey report, 78 pages of kill, done by Horowitz, and I have a lot of respect for Horowitz, and he said prosecute. He recommended prosecute and they didn’t prosecute. I was — I couldn’t believe it, but they didn’t do it, because they said we have much bigger fish to fry. Well, that’s OK, they indicted Flynn for lying and he didn’t lie. They destroyed many lives, Roger Stone, over nothing. They destroyed lives. Look at Manafort, they sent in a black book, it was a phony black book, phony, they made up a black book of cash that he got from Ukraine or someplace and he didn’t get any cash.

In the comment, he described speaking directly to Billy Barr about the urgency of prosecuting his political opponents.

In response to this attack, Billy Barr has started telling Republican members of Congress that John Durham isn’t going to indict before the election.

Attorney General Bill Barr has begun telling top Republicans that the Justice Department’s sweeping review into the origins of the Russia investigation will not be released before the election, a senior White House official and a congressional aide briefed on the conversations tell Axios.

Why it matters: Republicans had long hoped the report, led by U.S. Attorney John Durham, would be a bombshell containing revelations about what they allege were serious abuses by the Obama administration and intelligence community probing for connections between President Trump and Russia.

  • “This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn’t happen before the election,” a GOP congressional aide told Axios.
  • Barr has made clear that they should not expect any further indictments or a comprehensive report before Nov. 3, our sources say.

Barr is excusing the delay by saying that Durham is only going to prosecute stuff he can win.

What we’re hearing: Barr is communicating that Durham is taking his investigation extremely seriously and is focused on winning prosecutions.

  • According to one of the sources briefed on the conversations Barr said Durham is working in a deliberate and calculated fashion, and they need to be patient.
  • The general sense of the talks, the source says, is that Durham is not preoccupied with completing his probe by a certain deadline for political purposes.

This back and forth represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what must be going on.

The Durham investigation should not, at this point, be considered separately from the Jeffrey Jensen investigation attempting to invent a reason to blow up the Flynn prosecution. That’s been true since Barr appointed Jensen because Durham hadn’t yet discovered anything to dig Sidney Powell out of the hole she had dug Flynn. But it’s especially true now that documents that would be central to the Durham inquiry are being leaked left and right — whether it’s the report that the FBI knew that Igor Danchenko had been investigated (like Carter Page and Mike Flynn) as a possible Russian agent, or specific details about when the FBI obtained NSLs on Mike Flynn.

The investigative integrity of the Durham investigation has been shot beyond recovery.

Plus, the sheer desperation of the Jensen investigation raises real questions about whether a credible investigation could ever find anything that could sustain a prosecution, in any case. That’s because:

  • Jensen has repeatedly provided evidence that proves the opposite of what DOJ claims. For example, the Bill Priestap notes that DOJ claimed were a smoking gun actually show contemporaneous proof for the explanation that every single witness has offered for Mike Flynn’s interview — that they needed to see whether Flynn would tell the truth about his calls with Sergey Kisklyak. Plus, now there’s a Priestap 302, one DOJ is hiding, that further corroborates that point. That evidence blows all the claims about the centrality of the Logan Act to interviewing Flynn out of the water, and it’s already public.
  • Jensen’s investigators submitted altered exhibits to sustain easily disprovable claims. DOJ has claimed that this tampering with evidence was inadvertent — they simply forgot to take sticky notes off their files. That doesn’t explain all the added dates, however, undermining their excuse. Moreover, if they didn’t intentionally tamper with evidence, they’re left claiming either that they haven’t read the exhibits they’ve relied on thus far in this litigation, or that they’re so fucking stupid that they don’t realize they’ve already disproven their own assumptions about dates. Add in the way their “errors” got mainlined to the President via a lawyer meeting with Trump’s campaign lawyer, and the whole explanation gets so wobbly no prosecutor would want to proceed toward prosecution with problems that could so easily be discoverable (or already public).
  • Jensen’s investigators got star witness William Barnett to expose himself as a partisan willing to forget details to help Trump. Along with an analyst that was skeptical of the Flynn case (but who was moved off before the most damning evidence came in), Barnett would need to be the star witness in any case alleging impropriety in the investigation. But rather than hiding Barnett’s testimony and protecting his credibility, Jensen made a desperate bid to get his claims on the record and make it public. And what the 302 actually shows — even without a subpoena of Barnett’s personal ties and texts sent on FBI phones — is that in his interview, Barnett claimed not to understand the case (even though documents he filed show that he did, contemporaneously), and either did not remember or deliberately suppressed key evidence (not least that Flynn told Kislyak that Trump had been informed of his calls).  The 302 further showed Barnett presenting as “truth” of bias claims that instead show his willingness to make accusations about people he didn’t work with, even going so far as to repackage his own dickish behavior as an attempt to discredit Jeannie Rhee. Finally, by hiding how many good things Barnett had to say about Brandon Van Grack, DOJ has made it clear that the only thing Barnett can be used for is to admit that he, too, believes Flynn lied, didn’t have a problem with one of the key investigators in the case, and that his views held sway on the final Mueller Report. Had Durham managed this witness, Barnett might have been dynamite. Now, he would be, at best, an easily discredited partisan.

Jensen is working from the same evidence that Durham is. And what the Jensen investigation has shown is that it takes either willful ignorance or deliberate manipulation to spin this stuff as damning. And in the process, Jensen has destroyed the viability of a witness and possibly other pieces of evidence that any credible prosecution would use.

DOJ might make one last bid in giving Trump what he wants, allegations against his adversaries, by using the initial response in the McCabe and Strzok lawsuits as a platform to make unsubstantiated attacks on them (DOJ got an extension in both cases, but one that is still before the election). But those attacks will crumble just like the Jeffrey Jensen case has, and do so in a way that may make it easier for McCabe and Strzok to get expansive discovery at the underlying actions of people like Barnett.

Billy Barr has largely shot his wad in drumming up accusations against Trump’s critics. And along the way, he has proven how flimsy any such claims were in the first place.

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Sidney Powell Falsely Claims All Jeffrey Jensen’s Errors Have Been Corrected

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Sidney Powell doesn’t want anyone writing Judge Sullivan correcting the erroneous record that she and DOJ have entered in the Mike Flynn case. She wrote a letter asking him to strike the letters from lawyers for Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe informing him that exhibits Powell received via Jeffrey Jensen’s review and uploaded to the docket and integrated into her accusations against others were false.

I guess she realizes there are additional errors that need to be fixed.

More remarkably, after taking a swipe at Strzok and McCabe in her letter (sounding like President Trump wailing for indictments), she claims that the Jensen “errors” have been corrected.

When Mr. Strzok and Mr. McCabe become parties to criminal proceedings, they are welcome to file objections in their own cases. Until then, they are free to write directly to the Department of Justice with their concerns, but they may not engage in ex parte or extrajudicial communications with the judge in this case, nor insert themselves into proceedings in which they have no standing. The Department of Justice has already taken appropriate action to correct the unintentional error. The defense only filed what it had been provided by the government.

This is, of course, false. The original claim not to know when the January 5, 2017 meeting was remains, as does Powell’s own attack on Joe Biden based off that false claim.

This ought to draw more, not less, attention to how Judge Sullivan’s docket has become a seeding ground for false campaign attacks.

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2020 Vice Presidential Debate: In the Land of the Shoshone

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This post is dedicated to discussion of the Vice Presidential debate between current VP Mike Pence and Democratic VP candidate Senator Kamala Harris.

The debate is scheduled to begin at 9:00 PM ET and will take place in the Nancy Peery Marriott Auditorium at the University of Utah’s Kingsbury Hall in Salt Lake City, Utah.

University of Utah’s efforts to prevent the dispersion of the candidates’ aerosolized exhalations — particularly those of Pence who has been in contact with infected persons within the last week — are absolutely laughable, evident in this photo of the stage (via NBC):

Harris had asked for a plexiglass partition between the candidates which the Commission on Presidential Debates approved though not without complaint by Team Pence. What the Commission furnished is a joke, clearing the candidates’ heads by no more than 18″.

Check-out clerks at major grocery store chains and banks have more protection than this.

I’m crossing my fingers that Harris’s people have reached out to SC Senate candidate Jaime Harrison to see if they could borrow the folding plexiglass screen he used when debating Lindsey Graham.

Or found a mask with a built-in mic (why hasn’t this become a thing?) so that she has more protection but is still audible.

~ ~ ~

Like the three Presidential debates, this event is booked in a red state venue. None of the events organized by the allegedly nonpartisan, nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates is scheduled for a blue state.

Partisan bias could well explain the casual attitude toward infection control.

Utah’s state nickname is the Gateway to the West, but Native Americans know this is land taken from Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone tribes. Though some of the state falls under sketchy treaties, Salt Lake City itself is unceded land of the Northwestern Shoshone. Let’s hope this is recognized at some point during the evening.

USA Today’s Susan Page is the scheduled moderator, who has a conflict of interest:

… A potential conflict of interest has arisen in the vice-presidential debate. In late 2018, moderator Susan Page hosted a party in honor of Mike Pence’s protégé Seema Verma, who runs the Medicare and Medicaid programs for the Trump administration. As New York’s Ed Kilgore notes, the controversy centers on “whether a working journalist at Page’s level who has been hobnobbing with Mike Pence’s best-known associate in the Trump administration ought to be moderating his debate with Kamala Harris.” …

And in spite of the hubbub which arose when this conflict of interest was identified, Page and USA Today have refused to do anything about it — apparently there are no other journalists at USA Today covering the presidential race who are free of conflicts…? Or COVID-negative?

Sure hope it comes up in the debate that Mike Pence has had to return to DC when Air Force 2 was turned around mid-flight on its way to or from New Hampshire not once but twice in the last 18 months.

Has any journalist confirmed it was Air Force 2 hitting a bird which caused Pence to turn around on September 22 and not something else? Or did they leave it to Pence’s communications people to explain this?

~ ~ ~ 

Add these two dates to your calendar for the remaining two presidential debates — if Trump is healthy enough to participate:

Thursday 15-OCT-2020
9:00–10:30 p.m. ET
Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts
Miami, Florida
Moderator: Steve Scully, C-SPAN

Thursday 22-OCT-2020
8:00–9:30 p.m. ET
Curb Event Center at Belmont University
Nashville, Tennessee
Moderator: Kristen Welker, NBC

I’m not holding my breath for these.

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Sidney Powell Has Become No More than a Channel for the Fevered Rantings of Her Twitter Followers

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Sidney Powell has outdone herself in this motion for recusal, submitted 16 months after the appropriate time for such a motion. This thread unpacks it.

I want to look at the crazy-ass echo chamber that Powell is engaged in.

In her filing, she argues that because “a random sample of tweets of citizens in response to the hearing” suggest Judge Emmet Sullivan is biased, it supports a claim that he appears biased.

Because “unbiased, impartial adjudicators are the cornerstone of any system of justice worthy of the label, [a]nd because ‘[d]eference to the judgments and rulings of courts depends upon public confidence in the integrity and independence of judges,’ jurists must avoid even the appearance of partiality.” Al Nashiri, 921 F.3d at 233- 234. The court jettisoned any appearance of neutrality before and throughout the hearing. Judge Sullivan’s words and conduct prior to and during the hearing have had a profound negative affect on “public confidence in the integrity of the judicial process” and require him to recuse himself under §455(a) and §455(b)(1). Liljeberg v. Health Servs. Acquisition Corp., 486 U.S. 847, 860 (1988). See Ex. A (a random sample of tweets of citizens in response to the hearing).

[snip]

The court’s hostile tenor made its abject bias resounding to thousands who listened or who read the transcript. Countless tweets from Americans who were watching what became a circus reflect their view of the federal judiciary. Ex. A. It was apparent that the court was desperate to find something wrong.

Here’s the list of tweets she draws on.

The first is “Undercover Huber,” one of the two most ardent recyclers of her garbage propaganda. For some reason Powell redacts his avatar but here it is:

Powell has likely violated PACER rules with this filing, as she submitted the personal information of a bunch of random people without redacting it. Suffice it to say that these people are responding to:

  • High Gaslighter Catherine Herridge
  • Powell herself
  • Mike Flynn himself
  • QAnon account @SSG_Pain
  • Jack Posobiec
  • Epoch Times
  • John W Huber
  • Lara Logan
  • President Trump
  • Tom Fitton
  • The Last Refuge

 

 

Some are fairly obviously bots.

But the craziest bit is that Sidney Powell includes these two tweets in her totally random collection of tweets which she has obviously searched for by searching on “Eric” and “Judge Sullivan” (which means they’re not random at all):

It turns out, however, that one of just a few that had that reaction to this hearing. The rest of tweets that come up on such a search invoke a more generalized conspiracy about a black judge being friends with a black former Attorney General.

That doesn’t matter to Sidney Powell. She’s got a point to manufacture.

Back in her motion to recuse, she suggests (having lauded Sullivan in the past in this case because of his actions in the Ted Stevens case) that the reason Sullivan did dismiss Stevens’ case but not Flynn’s is because Holder made the motion in the former.

There are only two material differences between the government misconduct here and that in the Stevens case. The first is that the government misconduct against General Flynn is far worse—and it goes all the way to the Obama oval office. ECF No. 248; Exs. D, E. The second is the name of the Attorney General. As the court noted on the record last week, “Eric” moved to dismiss the wrongful Stevens case—with prejudice—and the court granted it immediately on a two-page motion. Hr’g Tr. 09-29-20 at 90.

I think the suggestion is that if a black Attorney General had made the request here, Sullivan would have granted it.

And from there, she goes exactly where her Twitter nutjobs want her to, and demands — with no basis whatsoever — all communications between Emmet Sullivan and Eric Holder.

All communications and visits with Eric Holder about this case or General Flynn, identification of the number of visits Eric Holder has made to Chambers about this case or General Flynn, or other personal meetings regarding General Flynn with Eric Holder to whom Emmet Sullivan referred as “Eric” on the record in the hearing. Hr’g Tr. 09-29-20 at 89.

Powell’s fevered motions have literally become just the expression of the Id of her own crazed Twitter thread.

 

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