March 28, 2024 / by 

 

Jack Smith Attempts to Prevent Trump from Delaying DC Trial with Interlocutory Appeals

In a hearing in the stolen documents case on November 2, Jay Bratt implored Judge Aileen Cannon not to base the timing of the Florida trial based on assumptions about the DC case, because that trial date

The Court really cannot let or should not let the D.C. trial drive the schedule here. In the D.C. case, they are making many of the same arguments, though they have not yet filed a motion for adjournment. They have already said that they likely will. They have talked about —

[snip]

A lot of this, though, is in the realm of the — I don’t want to say hypothetical, but it is in the realm of we don’t know what is going to happen. We don’t know what is going to happen in this case. We don’t know what is going to happen in the D.C. case. Among the things that the Defense has raised in the D.C. case is that if there are adverse rulings on any of the pending motions to dismiss, that they would seek an appeal and seek to stay the proceedings. That could happen. We don’t know. Obviously, there are arguments both ways, arguments both before the Trial Court before the D.C. Circuit, but that could happen. That trial date could disappear.

[snip]

Things could happen, things could happen with the D.C. case that would make going forward on May 20th, 2024, in this case not feasible. That may happen and we can address that, at that time, but we should be moving forward in this case.

The one thing he mentioned that could happen was a defense request to stay proceedings pending appeal.

Judge Tanya Chutkan certainly doesn’t want anything to delay the DC case. She said that explicitly in an October 16 hearing on Trump’s bid to stay her gag order.

THE COURT: This trial will not yield to the election cycle and we’re not revisiting the trial date, Mr. Lauro.

Perhaps to make that even clearer, after Trump filed to motion a stay pending appeal of any decision on his Absolute Immunity argument on November 1, she issued a requested order pertaining to jury selection by setting the beginning of that process to start on February 9.

But Jack Smith’s team appears to be concerned that Trump may use interlocutory appeals to delay the trial. In a response to Trump’s November 1 motion, Molly Gaston not only opposed that stay (which she described as an attempt to apply appellate and civil procedure to this criminal trial), but she requested that Judge Chutkan prioritize those decisions that are subject to interlocutory appeal: the Absolute Immunity bid, and one part of Trump’s Constitutional challenge to the indictment pertaining to double jeopardy.

[T]he defendant’s stay motion exposes his intention to use his meritless immunity claim to disrupt the Court’s schedule. Accordingly, to prevent undue delay and maintain the trial date, the Court should consider and decide first among the motions pending on the docket the defendant’s two claims that could be subject to interlocutory appeal: presidential immunity and double jeopardy.

In her motion, Gaston lays out Trump’s various dilatory tactics.

The defendant has planned to file this motion for months but waited until now in hopes of grinding pretrial matters to a halt closer to the trial date. As early as August 28, 2023, for instance, defense counsel informed the Court that the defendant would raise “executive immunity . . . with the Court likely this week or early next week, which is a very complex and sophisticated motion regarding whether or not this court would even have jurisdiction over this case. . . .” ECF No. 38 at 33-34. But the defendant did not file an immunity motion that week or the following. Instead, he waited more than a month before filing the promised pleading on October 5. See ECF No. 74. The defendant then waited another month to file the stay motion, late at night on November 1. Tellingly, earlier that same day, when defense counsel appeared at a hearing in the defendant’s criminal case in the Southern District of Florida, he used this Court’s March 4 trial date and pretrial schedule as an excuse to try to delay that trial—without disclosing that, within hours, he would file his stay motion here seeking to disrupt and delay the very deadlines in this case that he was using as a pretense. See United States v. Trump, No. 23-80101, Hr’g. Tr. at 24 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 1, 2023). In short, the defendant’s actions make clear that his ultimate objective with the stay motion, as has consistently been the case in this and other matters, is to delay trial at all costs and for as long as possible.

To thwart Trump’s efforts to stall any longer, Gaston requests that Chutkan prioritize the issues that can be appealed.

To limit such disruption, the Court should promptly resolve the defendant’s immunity motion, as well as his double jeopardy claim that is also potentially subject to interlocutory appeal, so that the Government can seek expedited consideration of any nonfrivolous appeal and preserve the Court’s carefully selected trial date.

She promises DOJ will use all mechanisms available to accelerate Trump’s own appeal.

To prevent the defendant from using the timing of any such appeal to disrupt the Court’s trial date, the Court should promptly consider and decide his immunity and double jeopardy motions. If the Court rules in the Government’s favor and the defendant appeals, the Government will take all possible measures to expedite the appeal, see Apostol v. Gallion, 870 F.2d 1335, 1339-40 (7th Cir. 1989) (identifying mechanisms such as requesting summary affirmance or asking to expedite the appeal), just as the defendant sought to expedite his appeal of the Court’s Rule 57.7 Order—relief that the court of appeals provided. See United States v. Trump, No. 23-3190, Order (D.C. Cir. Nov. 3, 2023) (expediting merits briefing and oral argument). In any event, although a non-frivolous appeal would temporarily divest this Court of jurisdiction, it would do so over only “those aspects of the case involved in the appeal.” Griggs v. Provident Consumer Discount Co., 459 U.S. 56, 58 (1982) (per curiam). In sum, the Court’s prompt resolution of the defendant’s immunity and double jeopardy claims would best position this case to stay on track with its current pretrial schedule and trial date.

The thing is: The double jeopardy claim is frivolous; James Pearce noted that the four charges in the current indictment are for a totally different crime than the incitement of insurrection charged in impeachment.

But no matter how shitty the Absolute Immunity bid is, because of the historic nature of the case, all judges are going to take it seriously, including Chutkan.

The Absolute Immunity bid was fully briefed on October 26. Trump’s reply in the double jeopardy bid is due next week.

I don’t know appellate procedures well enough, nor can I imagine how John Roberts’ court will respond to a request to expedite something like the Absolute Immunity request.

But I do know that Jack Smith’s team seems to recognize that this bid for delay might work. Political pundits on both sides of the aisle are accounting for a trial that will start on March 4. But there has not yet been enough scrutiny on whether Trump’s bid for delay will succeed.


DOJ’s Responses on Trump’s Motions to Dismiss

DOJ submitted their responses to Trump’s motions to dismiss today. As a reminder, here’s my summary of Trump’s arguments.

I’ll write them up tomorrow, but here are links:

Here’s my Xitter thread on the omnibus response to MTD on Statutory and Constitutional Grounds.


Scott Brady’s “D-I-S-C-R-E-E-T” Vetting : A Marginally More Credible Witness than Gal Luft

About 70% of the way through the House Judiciary Committee interview of former Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady on October 23, he explained how reaching out to FBI’s legal attaché in Ukraine to ask that Legat to reach out to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General fit within the scope of a project Bill Barr had assigned him.

Brady had described the project, hours earlier, as vetting incoming information on Ukrainian corruption received from the public, including but not limited to, Rudy Giuliani, using public information.

[W]e were to take information provided by the public, including Mayor Giuliani, relating to Ukrainian corruption. We were to vet that, and that was how we described it internally, a vetting process.

We did not have a grand jury. We did not have the tools available to us that a grand jury would have, so we couldn’t compel testimony. We couldn’t subpoena bank records.

But we were to assess the credibility of information, and anything that we felt was credible or had indicia of credibility, we were then to provide to the offices that had predicated grand jury investigations that were ongoing.

Brady distinguished between reaching out directly to Ukrainian investigators, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine or the Prosecutor General’s Office, and reaching out via the FBI.

The latter, Brady said, was,

a discreet, nonpublic way of securing information about these cases, including from publicly available documents or dockets, in a way that then wouldn’t, you know raise a flag and make the Ukrainian media, the national media aware? Because we were very concerned– [my emphasis]

“So ‘discreet’ here,” a Democratic staffer clarified, “means quietly, basically. You could do that quietly. Is that fair to say?”

“Yes,” Brady agreed, “quietly, as an investigation is…”

The Democratic staffer interjected, “Okay.”

“Usually conducted,” Brady finished, perhaps recognizing what he had just conceded.

Scott Brady’s misreading of discrete words

Two hours earlier, the same Democratic staffer had walked Brady through the email — one he himself had raised — via which a top Bill Barr aide, Seth DuCharme, had first given Brady his assignment on January 3, 2020.

DuCharme had given Brady that assignment between the time on, December 18, 2019, that the House had impeached Donald Trump for (among other things) asking President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to help Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr look into the Bidens and Burisma, and the time, on February 5, 2020, that the Senate acquitted Trump.

The staffer asked Brady, close to the beginning of the Democrats’ first round of questioning in the deposition, what he took DuCharme to mean by the word, “discreet.”

In spite of the fact that both the staffer and Brady had that email in front of them, an email which spelled discreet, “d-i-s-c-r-e-e-t,” Brady tried to claim that by that, DuCharme meant to give Brady a discrete, “d-i-s-c-r-e-t-e” assignment.

Q And Mr. DuCharme refers to your assignment as a, quote, “discreet assignment,” correct?

A Yes. And I think what he meant by “discreet” was limited in scope and duration.

Q Oh, “discreet” means limited in this case?

A My understanding was that it was “discrete” meaning limited in scope and duration.

Q Okay. Did you think in any way that he was implying that it ought to be kept out of the public, this assignment?

Brady denied that this reference, “d-i-s-c-r-e-e-t,” meant Barr and DuCharme were trying to keep this project quiet, because after all, Bill Barr spoke of it publicly.

A No. I no, because, on the one hand, the Attorney General was speaking publicly of the assignment. However, it should be kept secret, to use your words, just as any investigation would be, any process would be that whether vetting or an investigation between the U.S. attorney’s Office and the FBI or any Federal agency.

Q You mean the information itself that you were discussing or coming upon in the investigation, that should be kept discreet or out of the public eye?

A The investigation, the process, all of that none of that is public

Q Got it.

A when we do that.

The staffer asked whether Brady really meant that Barr was discussing the assignment publicly on January 3, 2020, a month before Lindsey Graham first revealed — days after the Senate had acquitted Trump — that Barr had, “created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified.”

Q And you indicated that you believe that the Attorney General at that time was discussing your assignment publicly? Is that in your recollection, was he doing that publicly on January 3, 2020?

A No. I mean subsequent comments.

Q Okay. So, after it became known that this investigation or assignment had been given to you, Attorney General Barr did make public comments. Is that right?

A Yes.

That gives you some sense of the level of candor that Pittsburgh’s former top federal law enforcement officer, Scott Brady, offered in this testimony. About the most basic topic — how he came to be given this assignment in the first place — he offered two bullshit claims in quick succession, bullshit claims that attempted to downplay the sketchiness of how he came to be assigned a task intimately related to impeachment right in the middle of impeachment.

The word games about “d-i-s-c-r-e-e-t” are all the more cynical given that American Oversight, whose FOIA Brady repeatedly described having read (probably as a way to prepare for the deposition), titled their page on the it “A Possible Discreet Assignment.”

The high risk of deposing Scott Brady

Inviting Scott Brady to testify to the House Judiciary Committee was a high risk, high reward proposition for Jim Jordan.

Brady, if he could hold up under a non-public deposition, might give the Republicans’ own impeachment effort some credibility — at least more credibility than the debunked, disgruntled IRS agents and indicted fugitives that the project had relied on up to this point.

Sure enough, in the wake of his testimony, the usual propagandists have frothed wildly at Brady’s descriptions of how he faced unrelenting pushback as he pursued a project ordered by the Attorney General and “fully support[ed]” by the top management of the FBI. Poor Scott Brady, the right wing wailed, struggled to accomplish his task, even with Bill Barr, Jeffrey Rosen, Chris Wray, and David Bowdich pulling for him.

The right wing propagandists didn’t need the least bit of logic. They needed only a warm body who was willing to repeat vague accusations, including (as Brady, a highly experienced lawyer who should know better did more than once), parroting public claims, usually Gary Shapley’s, about which he had no firsthand knowledge as if he knew them to be fact.

But testifying before House Judiciary also meant being interviewed by staffers of the guy, Jerry Nadler, who first raised concerns about the project after Lindsey blabbed about it. In real time, Nadler established that Bill Barr’s DOJ had set up Brady to ingest material from Rudy Giuliani, then put the US Attorney in EDNY (at the time, Richard Donoghue, but Donoghue would swap places with DuCharme in July 2020) in charge of gate-keeping several investigations into Ukraine. Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney in SDNY whom Barr fired in June 2020 in an attempt to shut things down, would later reveal that this gate-keeping effort had the effect of limiting SDNY’s investigation into Rudy’s suspected undisclosed role as an agent of Ukraine.

That part has become public: Freeze the investigation into whether Rudy is a foreign agent in SDNY, move any investigation into identified Russian asset Andrii Derkach to EDNY and so away from the Rudy investigation, and set up Scott Brady in WDPA to ingest the material Rudy collected after chumming around with Derkach and others.

What had remained obscure, though, was the role that Brady had with respect to that other “matter[ that] that potentially relate[s] to Ukraine:” the Hunter Biden investigation in Delaware. Indeed, DOJ’s letter to Nadler about it falsely suggested all covered matters were public. It turns out Stephen Boyd, who wrote the letter, was being “discreet” about there being another investigation, the one targeting Joe Biden’s son.

Inviting Scott Brady to a deposition before the House Judiciary Committee as part of an effort to fabricate an impeachment against Joe Biden provided the the same congressional office that first disclosed this corrupt scheme an opportunity to unpack that aspect of it.

It turns out Jerry Nadler’s staffers were undeterred by shoddy word games about the meaning of, “d-i-s-c-r-e-e-t.”

The virgin birth of a “Hunter Biden” “Burisma” search

The central focus of the HJC interview, unsurprisingly, was how an informant came to be reinterviewed in June 2020 about interactions he had with Burisma’s Mykola Zlochevsky months and years earlier, the genesis of the FD-1023 on which Republicans are pinning much of their impeachment hopes, and how and on what terms that FD-1023 got forwarded to David Weiss, who was already investigating Hunter Biden.

Yet it took three rounds of questioning — Republicans then Democrats then Republicans again — before Brady first explained how his team, made up of two AUSAs working full time, himself, two other top staffers, and an FBI team, came to discover a single line in a 3-year old informant report. With Republicans, Brady described that it came from a search on “Hunter Biden” and “Burisma.”

Q And the original FD1023 that you’re referring as information was mentioned about Hunter Bidden and the board of Burisma, how did that information come to your office?

A At a high level, we had asked the FBI to look through their files for any information again, limited scope, right? And by “limited,” I mean, no grand jury tools. So one of the things we could do was ask the FBI to identify certain things that was information brought to us. One was just asking to search their files for Burisma, instances of Burisma or Hunter Biden. That 1023 was identified because of that discreet statement that just identified Hunter Biden serving on the Burisma board. That was in a file in the Washington Field Office. And so, once we identified that, we asked to see that 1023. That’s when we made the determination and the request to reinterview the CHS and led to this 1023. [my emphasis]

That answer — which described Brady’s team randomly deciding to search non-public information for precisely the thing Trump had demanded from Volodymyr Zelenskyy less than a year earlier — satisfied Republican staffers. Again, they weren’t looking for logical answers, much less rooting out Republican corruption; they needed a warm body who might be more credible than Gal Luft.

It took yet another round of questions before the Democrats asked Brady why, if his job was to search public sources, he came to be searching 3-year old informant reports for mentions of Hunter Biden. At that point, the search terms used to discover this informant report came to shift in Brady’s memory, this time to focus on Zlochevsky, not Hunter Biden personally.

Q Okay. And so, in the actually, in the first and second hours, you said pretty extensively that your role was to vet information provided from the public, correct?

A Correct.

Q And so the 1023, the original 1023, was not information provided from the public, correct?

A That’s correct

Q Okay.

A yes.

Q But it came up because you’d received information from Mr. Giuliani and, in your vetting of that information, you ran a search?

A Correct.

Q Okay.

A And just to clarify, I don’t remember if we asked the FBI to search for “Burisma”

Q Right.

A or “Zlochevsky.”

Q Understood.

Searching on “Zlochevsky” and “Burisma” wouldn’t have gotten you to the specific line in a 2017 FD-1023 about Hunter Biden — at least not without a lot of work. Chuck Grassley revealed the underlying informant report came from a 3-year long Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation into Zlochevsky that had been closed in December 2019.

December 2019.

Remember that date.

Finding that one line about Hunter Biden in a 3-year investigative file would have been the quintessential needle in a haystack.

Spying on the twin investigations

Perhaps this is a good time to explain a totally new — and alarming — detail disclosed in this deposition.

Scott Brady didn’t just accept information from the public, meaning Rudy, and then claim to vet it before handing it on to other investigations. Brady didn’t just attempt to contact Ukraine’s Prosecutor General — through the Legat and therefore discreetly — to try to get the same cooperation that Trump had demanded on his call with Zelenskyy.

He also quizzed the investigators.

In the guise of figuring out whether open grand jury investigations already had the information he was examining, he asked them what they were doing.

In Geoffrey Berman’s case, this involved an exchange in which Scott Brady — the guy claiming to be working off public files and leads from Rudy — told Berman — the guy with a grand jury investigating Rudy — that Berman was wrong.

Q Okay. Let me be more specific. At some point, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mr. Berman, wrote you a letter or email that provided information he thought that you should have because of the material that he knew you were reviewing, that he thought might be inconsistent with what you were finding; is that correct?

A That’s correct. And then we wrote him an letter back saying that some of the contents in his letter was incorrect.

Q Okay. So you had some kind of dispute with Mr. Berman about the information that they had versus the information that you had, the subject had seemed inconsistent. Is that fair to say?

A I think there was a clarification process that was important that we shared information and made sure that they especially had an understanding because they had a predicated grand jury investigation, what was in our estimation and our limited purview correct and incorrect. So we wanted to make sure they had the correct information. [my emphasis]

As we’ll see, this is important — nay, batshit crazy — based on what the full sweep of Brady’s deposition revealed about his interactions with Rudy. Because, as Brady conceded by the end of the interview, Rudy probably wasn’t entirely forthcoming in an interview Brady did with Rudy.

But, as described, it doesn’t seem all that intrusive.

In David Weiss’ case, however, Brady described that, after Hunter Biden’s prosecutors refused to tell him what they were up to and he intervened with Weiss himself, using “colorful language,” the Hunter Biden team instructed Brady to put his questions in writing.

Q Okay. And so the I think you said you passed along or, not you personally, but your office passed along interrogatories or questions for them.

A That’s right.

Q That was along the lines of asking them what steps they had taken. Is that fair to say?

A Some limited steps. Correct.

Q Okay. So you were asking them about their investigation to help inform your investigation.

A Yes, to help focus our process so that we weren’t doing anything that, as I mentioned, would be duplicative or would complicate their investigation in any way.

[snip]

Q Okay. And you wanted to know that because you didn’t want to start doing the same investigative steps that they were doing?

A Correct.

Q But you indicated before that you didn’t have the power to get bank records, for example; is that right?

A Correct.

Q So was there a reason that you would need to know whether the other district had subpoenaed something if you weren’t able to subpoena bank records yourself?

A Yes. For example, if we were given a bank account number and wanted to see if they had already looked at that, we would want to know if they had visibility and say, you know: Here’s a bank account that we had received; have you, you know, have you subpoenaed these records, have you can you examine whether this bank account has sent funds into other Burisma-related accounts or Biden-related accounts?

Q So you were looking to sort of use their grand jury or subpoena authority to learn information because you didn’t have that tool in your own investigation?

A We weren’t really looking to learn information about their investigation. We just wanted to know if we needed to do anything with that, to try to corroborate it through perhaps other sources or through the FBI, or if we should even hand it over, again, if it was credible or not credible. If there is nothing to be gained, I don’t want to waste their time if they said: Oh, yeah, we’ve looked at that, and this bank account doesn’t show up anywhere in our records.

Q So, if you had some kind of information or question about a bank account, was there anything stopping you from just passing that onto Delaware without asking them also to tell you whether they had received any information pursuant to a subpoena or any other lawful process?

A We could have, but that wasn’t my understanding of our assignment. Our understanding of the assignment was to really separate the wheat from the chaff and not waste their time with a dump of information, maybe, you know, a percentage of which would be credible or have indicia of credibility. So they have limited resources. They have, you know, a broad tasking. So we didn’t want to waste their time by doing that. We thought it would be more efficient to engage them, ask them: Have you seen this?

Yes, no. And then pass it on, make a determination of what to pass onto them.

Aside from the fact that this sounds like it took more time than simply sending a bunch of bank account numbers to allow the Delaware team to deduplicate — the FBI does have computers as it turns out, and one of the FBI’s best forensic accountants has worked on this investigation — the timing of this matters.

This happened in April and May 2020, so in the months and weeks before Brady’s team did a search on Hunter Biden and Burisma — or maybe it was Zlochevsky and Burisma — and found a 3-year old informant report mentioning the former Vice President’s son.

So Brady sent, and after some back-and-forth, got some interrogatories from Weiss’ team, and then the next month discovered an informant that Delaware presumably hadn’t chosen to reinterview.

“Do not answer” about the vetting

By the point when Brady described randomly searching on Hunter Biden and Burisma — or maybe it was Zlochevsky and Burisma — the former US Attorney had already repeatedly balked when asked if he had vetted anything pertaining to Zlochevsky.

The first time, his attorney, former Massachusetts US Attorney Andrew Lelling and so, like Brady, a former Trump appointee — I think this is the technical term — lost his shit, repeatedly instructing Brady not to answer a question that goes to basic questions about the claimed purpose for this project: vetting leads.

Q All right. The statements that are attributed to Mr. Zlochevsky, did you do any work, you or anyone on your team, to determine whether those statements are consistent or inconsistent with other statements made by Mr. Zlochevsky?

Mr. Lelling. He’s not going line by line from a 1023. He’s not discussing at that level of detail.

Q. Okay. Could you answer the question that I asked you though?

Mr. Lelling. No. Do not answer.

Q. That was not a line-by-line question.

Mr. Lelling. Do not answer the question. You picked the line. You read it. You were asking him

Q. That’s not no, I didn’t. What line did I read from?

Mr. Lelling. Okay. I’m being figurative.

Q. Okay. I’m asking

Mr. Lelling. He is not going to go detail by detail through the 1023.

Q. I’m not asking that. No, I’m not going to ask that. I am asking a general question about whether he tried to determine whether there were consistent or inconsistent statements made by one of the subsources, generally.

Mr. Lelling. Yeah. No. He can’t answer that. This is too much

Q. So we’re going to keep asking the questions I understand he may not want to answer. We’re going to keep asking the questions to make a record. If you decline to answer

Mr. Lelling. Sure. I understand. And some maybe he can. This is

Q. We’re going to keep asking the questions though.

Mr. Lelling. This is a blurry line, a

Q. Understood.

Mr. Lelling. deliberative process question. And I’m sort of making those judgments question by question. So, maybe, categorically, he can’t answer any of the questions you’re about to ask. Maybe he can. So

Q. Well, if you let me ask them, then we can have your response.

Mr. Lelling. Sure.

Q. Fair? Okay. So the subsource, Mr. Zlochevsky, did you make any effort in your investigation to look in public sources, for example, whether Mr. Zlochevsky had made statements inconsistent with those attributed to him by the CHS in the 1023?

Mr. Brady. I don’t remember. I don’t believe we did. I think what our broadly, without going into specifics, what we were looking to do was corroborate information that we could receive, you know, relating to travel, relating to the allegation of purchase of a North American oil and gas company during this period by Burisma for the amount that’s discussed in there. We used open sources and other information to try to make a credibility assessment, a limited credibility assessment. We did not interview any of the subsources, nor did we look at public statements by the subsources relating to what was contained in the 1023. We believed that that was best left to a U.S. attorney’s office with a predicated grand jury investigation to take further.

Brady’s team looked up whether Burisma really considered oil and gas purchases at the time. They looked up the informant’s travel. But did nothing to vet whether Zlochevsky’s known public statements were consistent with what he said to the informant.

Democrats returned to Brady’s description of how he had vetted things, including the FD-1023, later in that round. He was more clear this time that while his team checked the informant’s travel and while he repeatedly described his vetting role as including searching public news articles, his team never actually checked any public news articles to vet what the 1023 recorded about Zlochevsky’s claims.

Q Okay. But open source so, other than witness interviews, you did do some open source or your team did some open source review to attempt to corroborate some of what was in the 1023? Is that fair?

A Just limited to the 1023?

Q Well, let’s start with that.

A Yes.

Q Okay. And what does that generally involve, in terms of the open source investigation?

A It could be looking at it could be looking at public financial filings. It could be looking at news articles. It could be looking at foreign reporting as well, having that translated. Anything that is not within a government file would be open source, and it could be from any number of any number of sources.

Q So, when you look at news reports, for example, would you note if there was a witness referred to in the 1023 that had made a statement that was reported in the news article, for example? Would that be of note to your investigators?

A Relating to the 1023? No. We had a more limited focus, because we felt that it was more important to do what we could with certain of the information and then pass it on to the District of Delaware, because then they could not only use other grand jury tools that were available but, also, we didn’t have visibility into what they had already investigated, what they had already done with Mr. Zlochevsky, with any of the individuals named in this CHS report. [my emphasis]

Scott Brady claimed to search news reports, even in foreign languages. But did not do so about the matter at the core of his value to the GOP impeachment crusade because, he claimed, his team had no visibility into what the Delaware team had already done with Zlochevsky.

Only they did have visibility: they had those interrogatories they got in May.

Having been told by Brady that he didn’t bother to Google anything about what Zlochevsky had said publicly, Democratic staffers walked him through some articles that might have been pertinent to his inquiry, quoting one after another Ukranian saying there was no there there.

Only the claims in the June 4, 2020 article rang a bell for Brady at all, though he did say the others may have made it into a report he submitted to Richard Donoghue (who by that point had swapped roles with DuCharme at Main DOJ) in September 2020.

But as to Brady? The guy who spent nine months purportedly vetting the dirt the President’s lawyer brought back from his Russian spy friends claims to have been aware of almost none of the public reporting on the matters Rudy pitched him. Which apparently didn’t stop him from calling Geoffrey Berman and telling Berman he knew better.

The open source that Scott Brady’s vetting team never opened

Even before they walked Brady through those articles, some appearing days before the informant reinterview, Democratic staffers raised Lev Parnas.

Was Brady familiar with the interview, conducted less than a year before his team reinterviewed the informant, that Parnas claimed Vitaly Pruss did with Zlochevsky on behalf of Rudy Giuliani, the one that had been shared with the House Intelligence Committee as part of impeachment?

Okay. And just to be clear, I think my colleague has already explained this, but this document was provided to investigators on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2019, before your assessment began, in relation to the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump. But you indicated you were not aware that that evidence was in the record of that investigation?

A Correct.

[snip]

Q Okay. So you indicated you’ve never seen this document before. May I actually ask you, before we go through it: You, during the course of your investigation, you asked the FBI or directed others to ask the FBI to review their holdings for any information related to Burisma or Zlochevsky, correct?

A Yes. We asked them, for certain specific questions, to look in open source, as we talked about, and then to look in their investigative files to see if they had intersected with these names or, you know, this topic before.

Q Okay. And they yielded this 2017 1023 that then led you to interview the CHS, correct?

A Yes.

Q Okay. But you never asked, for example, the House Permanent Select Committee investigators or anyone associated with that investigation to do a similar inquiry for evidence relating to Zlochevsky?

A No, I don’t believe we did.

Q Okay. And, like you said, you were not aware that this interview had taken place in 2019. Is that fair to say?

A I don’t believe I was, no.

Q Okay. And anyone on your team, as far as you know, was not aware that Mr. Zlochevsky had been interviewed at the direction of Giuliani before your assessment began?

A I don’t believe so.

One of the Democratic staffers got Brady to agree that, yes, he had found a 3-year old informant report and tried to contact Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, discreetly, but hadn’t bothered to see whether there were relevant materials in the wealth of evidence and testimony submitted as part of the impeachment.

Q Okay. I guess my question was just more based on your own description of your own investigative efforts. I mean, you went on your own, on your own initiative, to search FBI records that had anything to do with Zlochevsky, correct?

A Correct.

Q Or Burisma, but you don’t know what the search term was.

A Correct. There were multiple, but yes. I can’t remember the specific one that uncovered the underlying 1023.

Q Okay. But you didn’t make a similar effort to search the impeachment investigative files that were released and public at that time and dealing with the same matter. Is that

A Correct. To my knowledge, yes

Q Okay.

A that’s correct.

As Brady described, the team he put together to carry out a task assigned during impeachment that closely related to the subject of impeachment, “we were certainly aware” of the ongoing impeachment, but, “I don’t believe that our team looked into the record.”

Brady, at various times, also excused himself from anything pertaining to Lev Parnas because Rudy’s former associate had been indicted.

Mr. Brady. So, just to clarify, without going into detail, because Mr. Parnas had been indicted by SDNY, we didn’t develop any information relating to Mr. Parnas that either Mr. Giuliani gave us or that we received from the public, and we felt that it was best handled by SDNY, since they had that full investigation.

[snip]

[W]e cordoned that off as an SDNY matter. So, any information that we received from Mr. Giuliani, for example, relating to Mr. Parnas, we relayed to SDNY.

In the same way that the scheme Barr set up to gatekeep Ukraine investigations meant SDNY wouldn’t look at Andrii Derkach, because that had been sent to EDNY, Scott Brady wasn’t going to look at Lev Parnas, because he was sending that to SDNY.

That’s important backstory to the FD-1023 being sent to Delaware as if it had been vetted.

The things Rudy didn’t tell Scott Brady

It matters not just because it exhibits Brady’s utter failure to do what he claimed the task was: using open source information to vet material (which does not rule out that his team performed some other task exceptionally well). It matters because, Brady claims, Rudy didn’t tell him any of this.

One of the minor pieces of news in the Scott Brady interview came in an email that Brady and DuCharme exchanged about interviewing Rudy that probably should have — but, like other responsive records, appears not to have been — released to American Oversight in its FOIA.

Q And I’ll get copies for everyone. It’s very short. This is an email from Seth DuCharme to you, subject: “Interview.” The date is Wednesday, January 15, 2020. And, for the record, the text of the email is, quote, “Scott I concur with your proposal to interview the person we talked about would feel more comfortable if you participated so we get a sense of what’s coming out of it. We can talk further when convenient for you. Best, Seth.” And tell me if you recall that email.

A Yes, I do recall it.

Q Okay. And the date, again, is January 15, 2020, correct?

A That’s right.

Q So that was 14 days before the interview that you just described at which you were present, correct?

A Correct.

Q Does that help you recall whether this email between you and Seth DuCharme was referring to the witness that you participated in the interview of on January 29, 2020?

A Yes, it definitely did.

Q Okay. Just for clarity, yes, this email is about that witness?

A Yes, that email is about setting up a meeting and interview of Mr. Giuliani.

Q Okay. So the witness was Mr. Giuliani? That’s who you’re talking about?

A Yes.

Neither the date of this interview nor Brady’s participation in it is new. After the FBI seized his devices, Rudy attempted to use the interview to claim he had been cooperating in law enforcement and so couldn’t have violated FARA laws. And NYT provided more details on the interview in the most substantive reporting to date on Brady’s review, reporting that conflicts wildly with Brady’s congressional testimony.

The new detail in the email — besides that DuCharme didn’t mention Rudy by name (elsewhere Brady explained that all his “discrete” communications with DuCharme were face-to-face which would make them “discreet”) or that the email was written two days before Jeffrey Rosen set up EDNY as a gate-keeper — is DuCharme’s comment that “we” would be more comfortable if Brady participated so “we” got a sense of what was coming out of it.

I don’t want to take this away from you, because I know you and I

A Oh, sure.

Q just have one copy. But just, again, what this email says is, “I concur with your proposal to interview the person we talked about.” And then he says, “Would feel more comfortable if you participated so we get a sense of what’s coming out of it.” Do you see that?

A Uhhuh.

Q Okay.

A Yes.

Q So what did he mean by “we”? Who was he referring to by “we”? Do you know?

A I don’t know.

Q Okay. Is it fair to infer that he is referring to the Attorney General and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General where he was working?

A I don’t know. Yeah, some group of people at Main Justice, but I don’t know specifically if it was DAG Rosen, Attorney General Barr, or the people that were supporting them in ODAG and OAG.

Q Okay. But they wanted to, quote, “get a sense of what’s coming out of it,” correct? A

From the email, yes.

Scott Brady was supposed to vet Rudy, not just vet the dirt that Rudy shared with him.

And on that, if we can believe Brady’s testimony, Brady failed.

As Democratic staffers probed at the end of their discussion on the Parnas materials from impeachment, it was not just that Brady’s own team didn’t consult any impeachment materials, it’s also that Rudy, when he met with Brady on January 29, 2020, didn’t tell Brady that he had solicited an interview in which Zlochevsky had said something different than he did to the informant.

Q Okay. Then the other question I think that I have to ask about this is: This is a prior inconsistent statement of Mr. Zlochevsky that your investigation did not uncover, but it’s a statement that Mr. Giuliani was certainly aware of. Would you agree?

A Yes, if based on your representation, yes, absolutely.

Democratic staffers returned to that line of questioning close to the end of the roughly 6-hour deposition. After Republicans, including Jim Jordan personally, got Brady to explain that he was surprised by the NYPost story revealing that Rudy had the “laptop” on October 14, 2020, Democratic staffers turned to a Daily Beast article, published three days after the first “Hunter Biden” “laptop” story, quoting Rudy as saying, “The chance that [Andrii] Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50” and opining that it “Wouldn’t matter” if the laptop he was pitching had some tie to the GRU’s hack of Burisma in later 2019.”What’s the difference?”

Using that article recording Rudy’s recklessness about getting dirt from Russian spies, a Democratic staffer asked if Brady was surprised that Rudy hadn’t given him the laptop. Brady’s attorney and former colleague as a Trump US Attorney (and, as partners at Jones Day), Lelling, intervened again.

Q So when you said earlier that you were surprised you hadn’t seen the laptop, were you surprised that Mr. Giuliani didn’t produce it to you?

A Yes

Q And why is that.

Mr. Lelling. I don’t think you can go into that. You can say you were surprised.

Q You can’t tell us why you were surprised?

Mr. Lelling. He can’t characterize his rationale for his surprise. That’s correct.

Q Why is that? Just for the record, what is the reason?

Mr. Lelling. Because it gets too close to deliberative process concerns that the Department has.

Q It’s deliberative process to explain why he was surprised that Giuliani didn’t give him something that Giuliani said he had public access to?

Mr. Lelling. Correct.

Then Democrats returned, again, to Lev Parnas’ explanation of how Vitaly Pruss had interviewed Zlochevsky, this time using this October 24, 2020 Politico story as a cue. Democrats asked Brady if he was aware that, eight months before the vetting task started, Rudy had heard about laptops being offered.

Okay. And what I am asking you is, have you ever heard that during the course of your investigation that Mr. Giuliani actually learned of the hard drive material on May 30th, 2019?

A No, not during our 2020 vetting process, no.

Q Mr. Giuliani never shared anything about the hard drives or the laptop or any of that in his material with you?

Mr. Lelling. Don’t answer that.

Q Oh, you are not going to answer?

Mr. Lelling. I instruct him not to answer.

Q. He did answer earlier that the hard drive. That Mr. Giuliani did not provide a hard drive.

Mr. Lelling. Okay.

Mr. Brady. He did not provide it. We were unaware of it.

Then Democrats explored Parnas’ claim in the Politico story that Zlochevsky said he’d provide dirt, if Rudy helped him curry favor with DOJ (note, the staffers misattributed a statement about extradition in the article, which pertained to Dmitry Firtash’s demand, to Zlochevsky). When they asked Brady if he knew that Zlochevsky had reason to curry favor with DOJ because was accused of money laundering, Brady first pointed to two other jurisdictions where such investigations were public, then asked for legal advice and was advised not to respond.

Q Okay. And according to the article Pr[u]ss told Giuliani at the May 30th, 2019, meeting that Mr. Zlochevsky had stated that he had, quote, “derogatory information about Biden, and he was willing to share it with Giuliani if Giuliani would help Zlochevsky, ‘curry favor with the Department of Justice and help him with an extradition request or other efforts by DOJ to investigate or prosecute Zlochevsky.’” Do you see that allegation in the report?

A I see the first part, I’m sorry. I don’t see the extradition.

Q Okay. So what it says in the article is that Zlochevsky was interested in currying favor with the Department of Justice, correct?

A Yes.

Q Are you aware that Mr. Zlochevsky was accused of money laundering among other financial crimes?

A I’m sorry, by which jurisdiction? I’m aware that there were allegations regarding potential money laundering and Mr. Zlochevsky that were investigated by the U.K. and by Ukrainian prosecutors. Could I just have one second?

Q Sure.

Mr. Lelling. I don’t think he can give you further detail.

The day after this October 23 interview, in which Brady claimed to have randomly discovered the 3-year old informant report that led to the reinterview that led to the FD-1023 Republicans want to build impeachment on by searching on Hunter Biden and Burisma — or maybe it was Zlochevsky and Burisma, Grassley released his letter with a slightly different story than the one Brady offered about how Brady came to learn about the 3-year old informant report.

While Grassley, whose understanding tends to rely on disgruntled right wing gossip, is often wrong in his claims about causality and here only speculates that Zlochevsky came up, Grassley nevertheless revealed a US Kleptocapture investigation into Zlochevsky, one that was opened in 2016 and shut down in December 2019.

Although investigative activity was scuttled by the FBI in 2020, the origins of additional activity relate back to years earlier. For example, in December 2019, the FBI Washington Field Office closed a “205B” Kleptocracy case, 205B-[redacted] Serial 7, into Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of Burisma, which was opened in January 2016 by a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act FBI squad based out of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. This Foreign Corrupt Practices Act squad included agents from FBI HQ. In February 2020, a meeting took place at the FBI Pittsburgh Field Office with FBI HQ elements. That meeting involved discussion about investigative matters relating to the Hunter Biden investigation and related inquiries, which most likely would’ve included the case against Zlochevsky. Then, in March 2020 and at the request of the Justice Department, a “Guardian” Assessment was opened out of the Pittsburgh Field Office to analyze information provided by Rudy Giuliani.

During the course of that assessment, Justice Department and FBI officials located an FD-1023 from March 1, 2017, relating to the “205B” Kleptocracy investigation of Zlochevsky. That FD1023 included a reference to Hunter Biden being on the board of Burisma, which the handling agent deemed at the time non-relevant information to the ongoing criminal financial case. And when that FD-1023 was discovered, Justice Department and FBI officials asked the handler for the Confidential Human Source (CHS) to re-interview that CHS. According to reports, there was “a fight for a month” to get the handler to re-interview the CHS. [my emphasis]

Lev Parnas claimed that Zlochevsky was offering to trade dirt on Biden for favor with DOJ in May 2019, and according to Grassley, in December 2019 — the same month Rudy picked up dirt in Ukraine — DOJ shut down a 3-year old investigation into Zlochevsky, one that was opened during the Obama Administration when Hunter was on the board of Burisma. The source of the tip on the informant is, at least if we can believe Grassley, the investigation on Zlochevsky that got shut down the same month as Rudy picked up his dirt.

Given Brady’s refusal to answer whether he knew about the money laundering investigation, it’s likely he knew about that investigation and so may even have been doing this math as he sat there being quizzed, discreetly, by Democratic staffers. The source of the informant tip his “vetting” operation pushed to the Hunter Biden investigation — the one on which Republicans want to build impeachment — may be the source of Zlochevsky’s interest in trading dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for favor with DOJ.

According to Brady, Rudy didn’t tell him about the earlier events, and his “vetting” team never bothered to look in impeachment materials to find that out.

The possible quid pro quo behind Republicans’ favorite impeachment evidence

To be sure, there are still major parts of this evolving outline that cannot be substantiated. The letter Parnas sent to James Comer doesn’t include the detail from Politico about currying favor (though it does include notice in June 2019 of a laptop on offer).

SDNY found Parnas to be unreliable about these topics (though who knows if that was based on “corrections” from Scott Brady?). As noted, Democratic staffers conflated Dmitry Firtash’s efforts to reach out to Bill Barr with this reported effort to curry favor. In a November 2019 interview not mentioned by Democratic staffers, Pruss denied any role in all this.

But the claimed timeline is this. In May 2019, Vitaly Pruss did an interview of Zlochevsky, seeking dirt on Biden for Rudy. After Rudy erupted at a June meeting because Zlochevsky had none, Pruss floated some, possibly a laptop, if Rudy could curry favor with DOJ. In August, a whistleblower revealed that Trump asked Zelenskyy to help Rudy and Barr with this project, kicking off impeachment in September. In October 2019, Parnas and Rudy prepared to make that trade in Vienna, dirt for DOJ assistance, only to be thwarted by Parnas’ arrest. According to the FBI, six days later (but according John Paul Mac Isaac, the day before the Parnas arrest), JPMI’s father first reached out to DOJ offering a Hunter Biden laptop. In December, a bunch of things happened: Rudy met with Andrii Derkach; the government took possession — then got a warrant for — the laptop, followed the next day by Barr’s aides informing him they were sending a laptop; the House voted to impeach Trump, and if we can believe Grassley — on an uncertain date — DOJ closed the Kleptocracy investigation into Zlochevsky they had opened during the Obama Administration. Sometime in this period (as I noted in this thread, the informant’s handler remarkably failed to record the date of this exchange, but it almost certainly happened after the Zelenskyy call was revealed and probably happened during impeachment), the informant’s tie to Zlochevsky, Oleksandr Ostapenko, interrupted a meeting about other matters to call Zlochevsky which is when Zlochevsky alluded to funds hidden so well it would take 10 years for investigators to find them.

Then, just days into January, DuCharme tasked Brady with ingesting dirt from Rudy, and after consultation with DuCharme, Brady decided he’d attend the interview with Rudy “so we get a sense of what’s coming out of it.” In that interview, Rudy didn’t tell DOJ about the interview that Parnas claims he solicited with Zlochevsky. He didn’t tell Brady he had first heard of laptops on order in June 2019. Nor did he tell DOJ, months later, when he obtained a hard drive from the laptop from John Paul Mac Isaac, still several weeks before Brady submitted a report to Richard Donoghue on the dirt Rudy was dealing.

If you corroborate Parnas’ claims about what happened in May and June 2019, then Zlochevsky’s later comments — possibly made after a DOJ investigation into him got shut down — look like the payoff of a quid pro quo. Remarkably, Brady never factored that possibility into his vetting project because he didn’t actually vet the most important details.

Scott Brady will undoubtedly make a more credible witness than Gal Luft if and when Republicans move to impeach Joe Biden. After all, he’ll be able to show up without getting arrested!

But this deposition made several things clear. First, his task, which public explanations have always claimed was about vetting dirt from Rudy Giuliani, did very little vetting. And, more importantly, if Lev Parnas’ claims to have solicited an interview on behalf of Rudy are corroborated, then Rudy would have deliberately hidden one of the most consequential details of his efforts to solicit the dirt that the DOJ, just weeks after closing an investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky, would set up a special channel to sheep dip into the investigation into President Trump’s opponent’s son.

It turns out that the most senior, credible witness in Republicans’ planned impeachment against Joe Biden actually has more to offer about Trump’s corruption than Biden’s.


Stan Woodward Claims He Doesn’t Know Where the Missing Beautiful Mind Boxes Went

Perhaps the most amazing detail in the stolen documents transcript of last week’s hearing before Judge Aileen Cannon is that until the summer, Trump still had a Q clearance.

There is a category of documents that it — actually in unclassified discovery, we learned a week or two ago that there is a certain category of documents that require what is called a “Q clearance” and it includes one of the charged documents, and we learned that it’s a Department of Energy program. We learned that President Trump continued to have an active security clearance, even after he was indicted in this case, with the Department of Energy. Now that, in our view, is the definition of Brady. It was — I’m not going to say it was buried, but it was provided to us in discovery as part of miscellaneous materials at some point in the third or fourth production. I mean, it is literally a memo from the Department of Energy dated June — dated late June of this year, June 28th of this year, saying that, oh, we should remove Donald J. Trump from the person who has an active security clearance. He has been charged with possessing a document in violation of federal law, when he has an active security clearance with the holder of that document.

The detail doesn’t help as much as Trump’s attorney, Todd Blanche, would have you think. Whatever clearance Presidents get under the Atomic Energy Act (especially since presidents don’t get clearance; on Bluesky, Cheryl Rofer suggests he may have gotten DOE clearance while still a candidate) obliges them to follow document handling rules that might not have been as meticulously spelled out for Trump under his access to other classified documents. That he still had access when he was found with nuclear documents in August 2022 only means he was affirmatively violating the terms of his Q clearance, not that he could legally store nuclear documents in his gaudy bathroom.

Most people who get charged under the Espionage Act have or had clearances; those clearances actually make it easier to prosecute them.

Though Trump finally added someone appropriate to an Espionage Act trial last month, former SDNY National Security AUSA  Emil Bove, Blanche still seems to have a woefully inadequate understanding of how 18 USC 793 elements of the offense get proven at trial.

And Jay Bratt seems to be unable to conceive that his counterparts (and, probably, Judge Cannon) fail to understand that.

Bratt’s attempt to explain all this — something that makes a lot of sense to me from covering so many of these trials — was just one of two times where (in the transcript at least) Cannon abruptly cut off Bratt, as she often does when she risks embarrassment.

BRATT: I do not — we do not believe that the motion to compel litigation needs to be complete before they can file with the Court their theory of defense with respect to the 793 charges, and it kind of strains credulity that they say they can’t do that. You know, the elements of 793 are unauthorized possession of a document containing national defense information, possessing it willfully, that is with knowledge that what you are doing is unlawful, and failing to return it to a proper person. All that information they can flesh that out for the Court, and there is really — they may have legal — separate legal challenges to the 793 charges, but if you look at the elements, those are the defenses: Either he didn’t possess it, or he was authorized to possess it, or the information doesn’t contain national defense information, or he wasn’t acting willfully, or he returned it before he was being asked to return it. Those are the defenses, and they may have other color they want —

THE COURT: But to some extent, of course, one would have to review the relevant classified discovery in order to formulate a meaningful response, even if maybe not entirely complete, it would be difficult to just sketch out a skeleton, so to speak, of your theory without really doing so rooted in the documents themselves.

MR. BRATT: So I’m not sure that you do need to be able to say, no, we know this doesn’t contain NDI for the Court to rule on whether or not what we are presenting in Section 4 is relevant and helpful to the Defense, I don’t think so. I understand that, you know, they have said in their pleadings that they are going to strongly contest whether or not the information was national defense information, strongly contest whether it was closely held. Our burden is to prove that it was, and we embrace that burden; but these documents, you know, I —

THE COURT: That’s fine. We don’t need to talk about the actual contents of the documents, obviously, given this is a public hearing.

Blanche was pretty obsessed with the classification determinations, marveling over the fact that prosecutors had to talk to the Intelligence Community before deciding what documents to charge, what documents they could charge.

We have seen communications between NARA and the Department of Justice and the White House and the Special Counsel that started way before what has been publicly disclosed and extensive meetings, extensive communications; and so we feel very strongly and expect that we will win on that, when we file the motion that NARA is absolutely part of this prosecution team and that the intelligence communities that they worked very closely with in determining the — well, from what we can tell, the particular documents that they chose to charge, so there is purportedly a tranche of documents that have classified headings on them, and then 32 that they decided to charge. That wasn’t just done in a vacuum. They didn’t just, you know, pick 32 documents out of a hat and say, “We will go with these.” There was a lot of coordination that we can tell from the materials we do have with the intelligence community that ultimately led them to proceed the way they did.

So yes, we have an answer with them. They say very strongly that they view the prosecution team as being limited to the Special Counsel’s Office and the FBI, and we very strongly believe that’s wrong.

That may have been a cynical ploy to treat the IC as part of the prosecution team, which in turn may be an attempt at graymail.

Blanche also claimed that the defense had not yet received all the classification reviews for these documents, and had yet to receive Jencks production for people he imagines will sit on the stand and attest to the classification of each document, in a trial where the standard is National Defense Authorization, not classification.

THE COURT: What about classification reviews, have you received all of those?

MR. BLANCHE: No, Your Honor, we have not received all of them. That is one of the things that we are continuing to ask about. We have received them for — I believe for the charge documents; but as what should be obvious from the volume compared to the 32 counts, there is a tremendous number of documents that are extraordinarily important to our defense that are purportedly classified that we don’t have any information about at this time.

[snip]

A little bit about the classified Jencks material, as was discussed. The issue of whether a particular document is classified or not is something for the jury. And what we are looking for in discovery and what we don’t have is that has to be from a witness. There has to be a witness that is testifying about why a particular document is classified; and as part of that, like any witness, we are entitled to 3500 and Jencks material and we don’t have that. We don’t have that for all the witnesses, and our concern is that there is this class or category of Giglio and Jencks material that we are going to get at some later date which we are then going to — it’s another Section 4 litigation, at that point, because we are going to then ask the Court what we can use to impeach the witness, what information we are allowed to cross-examine him or her on.

Bratt did correct Blanche to say that Trump had already gotten all the classification determinations for all the classified documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.

THE COURT: Now, I went through some of these categories with Mr. Blanche, but classification reviews, are those included in the 5,500 and/or the disks?

MR. BRATT: Yes. And just to respond to something Mr. Blanche said, and it may have been oversight, it is not just for the 32 documents. It is for all 340-some documents that were at Mar-A-Lago.

But I just think that Blanche doesn’t get how easy it’ll be to convince jurors that you can’t put nuclear documents in a beach resort shower (and that’s all before the smoke and mirrors that the government uses in all Espionage Act trials, which will be epically contentious here).

I don’t think he understands any of this.

This all brings me to something I’ve been wondering: what the government has been withholding anticipating its CIPA 4 filing, which has been delayed by various Trump games about CIPA. CIPA 4 covers stuff they’ll share with Judge Cannon to have her rule whether the material needs to be turned over to the defense (the standard is whether the material is relevant and helpful to the defense), and if so, whether DOJ can use substitutions for some of the information.

This is my updated track of the universe of classified discovery.

Pretty much everything that should obviously be there is there:

  • The stolen documents themselves
  • All the witness testimony about the documents
  • The discussions about classification reviews of the documents (which Brian Greer has suggested were likely somewhat limited in anticipation of trial)

But there’s one thing not mentioned — at least not obviously — that always proves contentious in 793 cases: The damage assessment.

One way defendants always attempt to prove that things aren’t National Defense Information is by pointing to a report — if they get one — that nothing blew up after they released a document or left it in their beach resort shower.

Often defendants don’t get them.

I’m particularly interested in what kind of damage assessment the Intelligence Community did here because of a footnote included in the 11th Circuit appeal last year, which I wrote about here:

footnote modifying a discussion about the damage assessment the Intelligence Community is currently doing referenced a letter then-NSA Director Mike Rogers wrote in support of Nghia Pho’s sentencing in 2018. [This letter remains sealed in the docket but Josh Gerstein liberated it at the time.]

[I]n order to assess the full scope of potential harms to national security resulting from the improper retention of the classified records, the government must assess the likelihood that improperly stored classified information may have been accessed by others and compromised. 4

4 Departments and agencies in the IC would then consider this information to determine whether they need to treat certain sources and methods as compromised. See, e.g., Exhibit A to Sentencing Memorandum, United States v. Pho, No. 1:17-cr-631 (D. Md. Sept. 18, 2018), D.E. 20-1 (letter from Adm. Michael S. Rogers, Director, National Security Agency) (“Once the government loses positive control over classified material, the government must often treat the material as compromised and take remedial actions as dictated by the particular circumstances.”).

Even on its face, the comment suggests the possibility that the Intelligence Community is shutting down collection programs because Trump took documents home.

You can’t very well do nothing after you learn some of the most sensitive government documents were parked on a stage in a room hosting weddings attended by all manner of foreigner and grifter. You can’t do nothing after learning that Trump freely blabbed about the content of his stolen documents to anyone who bought access to him. You can’t do nothing after a Five Eyes document gets dumped out of a box in a storage closet that musicians and other resort personnel have accessed. You’ve got to go to your Five Eyes allies and explain that America’s former President is a dumbass and so the allies should take measures assuming that some drunken guest got a look at that document.

You might not even be able to charge documents as sensitive as these if the underlying programs hadn’t had to be rolled up. The spooks are going to prefer to protect the programs over vengeance against the dumbass former President.

Which brings me to the most intriguing claim made at the hearing.

Stan Woodward — Walt Nauta’s attorney — claims that neither he nor the government have figured out where all the missing boxes have gone.

[T]he Special Counsel has directed us to certain portions of the CCTV footage that they view as the most relevant, but there is — from what we know and from our defense, there is a tremendous amount of CCTV footage that we believe has been produced that is not what they have identified that is extremely relevant to us. For example, to the extent that boxes were moved on occasions other than what is delineated in the indictment, that is certainly something that matters to us.

[snip]

We have, of course, the benefit of consultation with our clients and are able to talk about what video we should be looking at and what video we should not be looking at. And the entire nature of the allegations, of the charges in this case are about missing boxes, right? The indictment is charging Mr. Nauta — and I’ll just stick with my client, with Mr. Nauta — with having moved boxes. Some number of boxes come out of a storage room, a lesser number of boxes go into the storage room, and Mr. Nauta is charged with hiding those boxes from whether it is Trump’s then counsel or whether it is the Government. And obviously, we are interested in knowing where those boxes are if they are, in fact, missing. The CCTV footage is what is going to help us understand that riddle.

Now, the Government does not know where those boxes went. As far as I can tell, to this day, the Government does not know where the boxes they allege were hidden ended up.

[snip]

I have a whole separate computer that I’m using just to do these extractions so that I can go in and start watching this days of video so that we can make an assessment of what this case is all about and whether it is about missing boxes or about boxes that just weren’t found when the FBI conducted its search of the property.

Now, Woodward has a habit of saying things that I find … shall I say, unpersuasive?

This certainly feels like one of those instances, coming as it did amid a schtick whereby Woodward repeatedly referred to the government, then corrected himself to say Special Counsel, something that seems to mirror Judge Cannon’s own preferences for calling Jack Smith’s office the OSC (John Durham used this abbreviation but no one else does).

Woodward is attempting to claim that he needs to delay the trial past the election because he needs to review all of ten years worth of surveillance video to defend his client. I’ve seen him make similar claims in January 6 trials.

More importantly, this is not a remotely fair representation of the charges against Nauta, which have to do with Nauta claiming to know nothing about moving boxes within days of being caught on surveillance video moving boxes, then allegedly attempting to destroy the video that captured him moving those boxes. Importantly, even if someone else moved a bunch of boxes that aren’t otherwise included in the indictment, it doesn’t exonerate Nauta. It could even inculpate him: if boxes were at Mar-a-Lago for someone else to move because Nauta had taken steps to withhold them from the government, it means his alleged obstruction would have made those other movements possible.

Plus, one big reason why the government charged Nauta, I believe, is because they believe he knows what happened to the missing boxes, including the ones he packed up to go to Bedminster where they disappeared forever.

I don’t doubt that the government hasn’t accounted for all the missing boxes; certainly Bratt did not correct Woodward on this point.

But one reason the government would have had to get ten years of video is to attempt to see who else entered that closet, to see who was in the closet when a Five Eyes document tumbled out, to see whether any of the foreign visitors to Mar-a-Lago seemed to know to look in the closet.

That’s not something that would show up in the indictment, not without proof that Trump willfully told visitors where the documents were.

But if Woodward is telling the truth about needing to see who else was moving boxes around, rather than just using the volume of video to stall, it might suggest he’s trying to find out what you might otherwise learn from a damage assessment. It might suggest that either Nauta hasn’t been entirely forthcoming with Woodward or Trump isn’t being forthcoming with his lawyers or his trusted valet.

Learning what the government saw in the surveillance video about moving boxes is not remotely necessary for defending Nauta against the charges against him. It might have a lot to do with understanding how ugly the story prosecutors will tell at trial will be.


James Comer Finally Finds Evidence Supporting Impeachment — of Donald Trump

Back on October 7 (after Hunter Biden sued Garrett Ziegler on September 13, after Hunter Biden sued the IRS on September 18, after Hunter Biden sued Rudy Giuliani on September 26, and after Matthew Graves testified to the House Judiciary Committee on October 3) — Abbe Lowell sent Graves a letter asking him to investigate whether Tony Bobulinski lied to the FBI on October 23, 2020.

The letter was first reported by NBC.

Jamie Comer has now seized on the letter in his latest demand for more information — and testimony of Hunter Biden. But this time, the evidence implicates Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.

The substance of Lowell’s allegation boils down to a claim that Bobulinski lied in his FBI interview when he claimed to have attended a key meeting with CEFC on February 19, 2017. If Bobulinski didn’t attend the meeting, he therefore lied in his interview when he made claims about personally witnessing the involvement of Joe Biden in all this.

The most significant set of false statements is central to Mr. Bobulinski’s entire interview and self-aggrandizement. The memorandum states that “BOBULINSKI first met in person with members of the BIDEN family at a 2017 meeting in Miami, Florida. BOBULINSKI, GILLIAR, WALKER, HUNTER BIDEN, and YE all attended the meeting.”11 This is deliberately false; Mr. Bobulinski did not attend a meeting with Mr. Biden and his associates in Miami in 2017, nor did he meet members of the Biden family then. Around February 13, 2017, Messrs. Biden, Walker, and Gilliar traveled to Miami to meet with CEFC Chairman Ye, Director Zhang, and other CEFC members to discuss a possible business venture. It is here that Mr. Biden met Chairman Ye for the first time, and at that meeting, a tentative business agreement was reached in principle to set up a joint venture with CEFC, and a business structure was discussed.

Despite what Mr. Bobulinski told investigators to pretend he had firsthand knowledge, he was never in and did not attend this meeting in Miami on February 14, 2017. [bold emphasis Lowell’s]

That’s not the only allegation in the letter; Lowell accuses Bobulinski of a bunch of other lies.

The most important — aside from his provable presence (or not) at that February 2017 meeting — has to do with the origin of the “10 held by H for big guy” letter that Fox News has made a focus of their propaganda for three years.

Lowell provided background to a series of communications in May 2017, during a period when the proposed Joint Venture involving Hunter, Bobulinski, James Gilliar, and Rob Walker, was losing ground in the competition for CEFC’s support in the face of a group involving James Woolsey. That’s what led Gilliar — not Hunter — to propose getting Joe Biden involved.

It is in this context that, on May 11, 2017, Mr. Bobulinski and Mr. Gilliar discussed their concerns that Chairman Ye had skipped meetings with Mr. Biden in New York, while separately attending a party held by Mr. Witkoff. (Ex. G attached hereto.) Mr. Gilliar acknowledges this growing concern about competition for CEFC in a May 11 message to Mr. Bobulinski: “Man U are right let’s get the company set up, then tell H and family the high stakes and get Joe involved.” (Id.) Importantly, this notion of “get[ting] Joe involved” was referenced as an idea by Mr. Gilliar to Mr. Bobulinski in private, and never sent to Mr. Biden, as potential leverage to counter the competition for CEFC’s U.S. investment.

This is consistent with what Gilliar told the WSJ in October 2020, in the wake of Bobulinski going public with these claims (as Lowell notes in his letter). But as Lowell also noted, Bobulinski’s claims that a split involving Joe Biden was real and happened earlier rests on his claim — which Lowell asserts to be false — to have been at the CEFC meeting in Miami.

Mr. Bobulinski took this lie even further when he willfully told investigators that the reference, “10 held by H for the big guy,” originated from deal discussions that he witnessed as between Mr. Biden and Chairman Ye in Miami in February 2017. As explained above, Mr. Bobulinski was never at that meeting in Miami and this fantasy was his and Mr. Gilliar’s.

Lowell pointed to additional texts seemingly supporting the claim that the idea of involving Joe only ever came from Gillier and Bobublinski. Weeks earlier, Hunter laid out a 50-50 split with CEFC, in turn split four ways (not including his uncle), and days after, Bobulinski bitched that bringing Jim Biden in — as a fifth recipient — would only serve to up the proportions of the Biden family. Gilliar responded that bringing Jim Biden in as a 20% stakeholder was his own idea, to buy loyalty, not Hunter’s.

As laid out, this means that Bobulinski or Gilliar, not Hunter Biden, may have been contemplating monetizing access to Joe Biden with the Chinese in 2017.

This allegation will get litigated in days ahead, I’m sure. As noted, Comer pointed to this letter about Bobulinski to justify doing what they were already planning on demanding: calling Hunter to testify.

For now, I’m interested in some logistical aspects of the allegation.

First, while Bobulinski’s claims have long been out there, Lowell only has a hook to package it up in a letter to Matthew Graves because the IRS agent who spent five years investigating his client, Joseph Ziegler, released the Bobulinski and Rob Walker interview materials on September 27 in support of his insinuation that the Delaware US Attorney’s office dropped the ball by not doing follow-up interviews with Bobulinski.

While providing this information in front of agents with the FBI, Bobulinski makes multiple references to Former Vice President Joseph Biden’s potential involvement with Sinohawk and the CEFC joint venture. 5.

In investigative team meetings that occurred after this, I can recall that agents on the investigative team brought up on multiple occasions to the assigned prosecutors that they wanted to do an interview of Bobulinski with the assigned case agents. I can recall being told that they would think about it and then ultimately being told there was no need for the team to interview Bobulinski and that Bobulinski was not viewed as a credible witness.

Note that the Bobulinski 302, unlike the Rob Walker or the Gal Luft 302s, is not the official 302.

The others, along with the IRS memorialization of James Biden’s interview, all appear in the official form and the FBI 302s have the “Official Record” stamp in the right hand corner.

The Bobulinski interview report Ziegler released, however, has not been entered in the official 302 form and by title is just a revision of his interview, with the author marked as one of the agents in the original interview; it appears to have been saved from Microsoft Word.

Ziegler doesn’t even call this a 302 and his description of how it came into his possession is tortured (though it’s similar to his description of how he got the Luft 302, which was saved from Notes).

This was a memo and attachment that was provided to the RHB investigative team by agents with the FBI regarding information that was provided to agents with the FBI Washington Field Office from Anthony Bobulinski.

That is, the form of the interview report raises real questions about whether Ziegler was ever supposed to have access to it or even whether the report was ever officially filed (a question Chuck Grassley also has raised). Though in Tim Thibault’s interview, he referred to the interview report as a 302 and described asking those involved, “how are you sending this information to Baltimore,” and being, “advised it was like an [sic] e-Guardian system. So there’s receipts for that.”

It took just ten days — September 27 to October 7 — after reading that interview report for Abbe Lowell to write a letter about the problems with it. That would suggest writing this letter, calling out the problems with Bobulinski’s testimony, was not a close call.

The possibility that the story Bobulinski told the FBI was subsequently discredited would explain a lot. Gary Shapley-adjacent reporting from last summer complained that Bobulinski had not been asked to testify before a grand jury. Long after Democratic Ranking Members Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, and Richard Neal would have gotten a copy of the Lowell letter, Chuck Grassley demanded details about how Bobulinski’s interview was treated. And Joseph Ziegler, who seems to have little appreciation for how badly his conspiracy theories have damaged the case he tried to bring against Hunter Biden, revealed that, “ultimately,” prosecutors described, “Bobulinski was not viewed as a credible witness.”

If Lowell’s letter is right, there’s a good reason why Bobulinski was not viewed as credible: Because prosecutors would have quickly identified holes in Bobulinski’s story, making his tie to the White House — made explicit in his FBI interview when he described getting a COVID test at the White House the previous day even if they didn’t see reports that he had been Trump’s guest at the debate the day before — absolutely toxic.

And after (per Ziegler’s claims) prosecutors decided they didn’t want Bobulinski anywhere near their prosecution and definitely didn’t want him in front of the grand jury, Ziegler decided to share the details of Bobulinski’s interview with the FBI for all the world to see, a world that includes Hunter Biden’s lawyers, who now know that prosecutors were repeatedly asked about Bobulinski but, presumably for reasons that had to do with preserving plausible deniability about Bobulinski’s actions, didn’t do anything that would have required providing details about Bobulinski in discovery.

The reason you don’t put someone whose location data and other comms show he wasn’t where he claimed to be in front of an investigative team, much less the grand jury, is to preserve a fragile claim that the entire investigation wasn’t a political witch hunt directed from the President, to hide from defense attorneys that the President of the United States had ties with someone who would pitch (per Lowell) false claims to the FBI. But Joseph Ziegler, goaded on by a trio of dumbass Republican Committee Chairman, decided to make that available to Hunter’s legal team anyway.

Lowell’s letter doesn’t describe where he obtained the exhibits attached, but they include texts involving Hunter Biden (and so presumably in his possession), texts not involving Hunter Biden, and a scan of a stapled printed email involving Bobulinski. Even for the texts involving Hunter Biden, Lowell appears to lack reliable metadata.

And these are definitely cherry picked communications, enough so to counsel caution about this being the full story. Then again, Bobulinski tried to cherry-pick the communications he provided to the FBI himself, offering up three devices but asking to delete most of the content first. I would imagine that after Rob Walker told the FBI of Bobulinski’s rumored tie to Viktor Vekselberg just 16 days later, they would have taken steps to obtain a set of his communications that he hadn’t cherry picked.

The point being, whatever Abbe Lowell has, we can assume the FBI has a far better set of data, including location  and travel data to track where Bobulinski really was at what time on February 19, 2017. The FBI doesn’t need Abbe Lowell to tell them that Bobulinski lied in this interview, if in fact he did; this letter to Graves (as opposed to sharing copies of it with the three Ranking Democratic members of committees involved in the impeachment charade) serves only to advertise that the FBI could have, but has not yet, responded differently to Bobulinski’s involvement.

It serves to flip the script that Republicans have been inventing.

I mean, let’s be clear what Abbe Lowell alleges, with some backup: He’s accusing Tony Bobulinski of doing the same thing for which Trump’s hand-picked Special Counsel John Durham prosecuted Michael Sussmann. But unlike that case, in which multiple witnesses testified that the Hillary campaign would never have wanted to share information with the FBI, in this case, Bobulinski showed up at the White House the day before and waltzed into the FBI with a former Trump White House Counsel.

And, frankly, Lowell pulls his punches on this — a bunch of them.

He briefly mentions and footnotes the passages from Cassidy Hutchinson’s book that describe contacts with Bobulinski, both the night before and some weeks after his FBI interview on October 23. Lowell doesn’t mention Hutchinson claims that, in advance of the second meeting — the one where Bobulinski showed up in a ski mask, someone told her that “the boss” asked Mark Meadows to meet with Bobulinski.

When staff began to deplane, we climbed back down and made our way to the offstage announcement area. A senior campaign official jabbed his finger into my shoulder. Alarmed, I spun around. “Chief’s still on the plane talking to the boss,” he said. “He’s going to meet up with Tony Bobulinski. Can you go get him?”

I took a step back and crossed my arms. “What do you mean?” I asked. He said gruffly, “The boss asked him to meet up with Tony Bobulinski. He’s here. It has to be low-key, though, so just find somewhere away from any cameras.” I looked at Tony Ornato, expecting him to say something. Instead, he pointed at Mark leaving Air Force One. “He’s coming,” he said. The aide walked away.

I didn’t know much about Tony Bobulinski, just that he was a former business associate of Hunter Biden’s and had something to do with the laptop controversy. Trump had brought him as a guest to the presidential debate in Nashville on October 22. I wasn’t tracking the story closely enough to know more. But as Mark approached, I had a weird feeling that we were in danger. I couldn’t explain it, but the feeling was real. “Mark shouldn’t do this,” I said to Tony. “He’s being set up.” Tony shrugged. “Don’t overthink things. It’s not a big deal. Chief knows what he’s doing. Bobulinski came with us to Nashville, remember? Don’t worry, kid.” He patted my shoulder and walked away as Mark approached me.

“You’re not meeting Tony Bobulinski here, Mark. We can send someone from the campaign.” I heard my voice whine with childlike desperation. “Please, Mark. This isn’t a good idea. Just trust me.” Mark looked at his Secret Service agent, then back at me. “Just go find him, and work with Secret Service to find a hidden spot. Come get me once you have him there.”

[snip]

As Brian thanked him, I recognized a few of the men sitting in idling Secret Service vehicles and rushed over to them. I asked if they could park four of the vehicles in the shape of a square, and explained that the chief needed to have a quick meeting with someone out of sight. They were reluctant at first and questioned why Mark couldn’t just meet the person where staff were congregated. “The chief of staff needs to have a private meeting,” I said, lying with convincing confidence. “If you want me to ask Tony Ornato to explain more, I’m happy to call him over.” They began lining up the vehicles, and Brian and I made our way into the crowd, searching for the fenced-in house.

[snip]

“There,” Brian said, and pointed to the house. “I don’t want to talk to him,” I told him, as three men came out of the house. I tried to pick out Tony Bobulinski, but they were all wearing hats and ski masks. Brian introduced himself and explained that we would bring them to the chief. I spun around and started pushing through the crowd to make a path for the group a good distance behind me.

[snip]

“This is really stupid of you, Mark. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s really stupid,” I said. He didn’t have time to respond as I ushered him into the makeshift area, away from cameras, as requested, but not from watchful Secret Service eyes.

In the shadows of the bleachers, I observed Mark and Tony Bobulinski’s interaction through a gap in the vehicles. When they said their goodbyes, I saw Mark hand Tony what appeared to be a folded sheet of paper or a small envelope. Mark walked toward me, staring at the ground. He was silent for several moments as we made our way back to the staff holding area. [my emphasis]

Lowell also notes that Hutchinson raised concerns about the lawyering of Stefan Passantino, who represented Bobulinski at the interview. But he doesn’t mention that by the time of Bobulinski’s October 23, 2020 interview, Passantino had pitched Bobulinski as a source to the WSJ — with the involvement of then-White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, as well as Don Jr’s best buddy Arthur Schwartz.

The three had pinned their hopes for re-electing the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.

That’s the story that ended in a flop, partly because records very similar to the ones Lowell included with his letter didn’t back Bobulinski’s story, and partly because Gillier refuted it in an interview with the WSJ.

Abbe Lowell doesn’t mention that, per the NYT story on this pitch to WSJ, Donald Trump knew the story was coming.

Mr. Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a conference call that day.

Which means that when Lowell refers in his letter to,

The materials reveal the extraordinary lengths Mr. Bobulinski and other individuals were willing to go to implicate Mr. Biden or members of his family in some false and meritless allegations of wrongdoing. [my emphasis]

He never explicitly says that multiple sources say those “other individuals” include Donald Trump, personally.

Plus, Lowell goes easy on Bobulinski’s motives. Hunter Biden’s lawyer only assumes that Bobulinski allegedly lied, “to boost his own sense of self- worth,” not for any of a long list of more nefarious reasons that might involve being handed an envelope by the President’s Chief of Staff.

He relegates the allegations about Chinese cultivation of James Woolsey for his access to Trump in the Gal Luft indictment to a footnote. And while he raises Bobulinski’s possible ties with a range of hostile countries — including his alleged ties to Viktor Vekselberg — he doesn’t pursue the implications any of that would have for claims of foreign influence operations targeting Hunter Biden.

And Lowell plays coy about the reasons why Bobulinski would keep insisting on speaking with agents “read in[to]” any investigation into Hunter Biden.

In what can only be described as a strange exchange at the start of his interview, Mr. Bobulinski asked the interviewing agents whether they were “read in” on the information he was about to tell them. The interviewing agent responded that that was not how the process works and advised they did not have any specific knowledge of the information. Mr. Bobulinski and his attorney, Stefan Passantino, reiterated their request that Mr. Bobulinski only speak with agents who were “read in” to his testimony. The FBI agent then reminded Mr. Bobulinski that his testimony was voluntary. The expectation by Mr. Bobulinski and his attorney that FBI agents taking his voluntary testimony would be “read in,” whatever that means, is particularly troubling given that Mr. Bobulinski had met with President Trump and his campaign team the day before in Nashville.

Remarkably (or maybe not, as I’ll return to), the FBI seems to have anticipated that Bobulinski may have been sent by Trump to fish for information. Thibault explained that the reason Bobulinski was sent to the DC office rather than Baltimore was to keep the investigation secret. “[T]he whole idea that he came to WFO is they were trying not to disclose that there was an investigation in Baltimore is my belief,” described, later attributing that decision to the supervisor who set up the interview.

Again, none of these details are exactly new. But the specific circumstances created by Jamie Comer and Joseph Ziegler provided an opportunity to point out that Comer has more evidence worthy of impeaching Donald Trump than he does Joe Biden.


Trump’s New Appellate Argument about His 100 Million Imaginary Friends

Judge Tanya Chutkan issued her order denying Trump a stay of her gag order on October 29.

That was admittedly a Saturday. Nevertheless, it took Trump four days before he ran to the DC Circuit to cry about an emergency infringement on the First Amendment rights of him and his mob.

He took those four days even as he demanded that the DC Circuit — which had been expecting Trump’s initial brief on November 8 — rule on this motion by November 10.

The Court should stay the Gag Order pending appeal. In addition, President Trump respectfully requests that the Court enter a temporary administrative stay pending resolution of this motion and issue its ruling by November 10, 2023. If the Court denies this motion, President Trump requests that the Court extend its administrative stay for seven days to allow him to seek relief from the U.S. Supreme Court.

During those four days that Trump didn’t file for a stay, John Lauro found time to file three different things (one, two, three) in Judge Chutkan’s docket. In those four days, Trump posted a slew of attacks on Joe Biden, the 2020 election, and his prosecution (though admittedly many of the recent posts targeted Arthur Engoron), many of them attacks that — he claims — this gag prevents him from making.

I’ll leave it to smarter people to explain the posture that leaves this case.

What I’m more interested in are the arguments that Trump makes that should not withstand prolonged scrutiny, at least not at the DC Circuit, arguments that are surely designed to trigger the interest of Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas.

In his appeal, Trump argues — substantially for the first time — that his gag subjects him to viewpoint discrimination. There’s a very short section dedicated to the topic, citing an inapt precedent.

7. The Gag Order reflects forbidden viewpoint discrimination.

By forbidding speech that “target[s]” certain individuals, the Gag Order prohibits only (vaguely defined) negative speech about them. See infra, Part I.C. In Matal v. Tam, the Supreme Court held that prohibiting only negative or “disparaging” speech constitutes forbidden viewpoint discrimination. 582 U.S. 218, 243 (2017) (plurality opinion). Such a prohibition “constitutes viewpoint discrimination—a form of speech suppression so potent that it must be subject to rigorous constitutional scrutiny.” Id. at 247 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment). To prohibit “disparaging” speech “reflects the Government’s disapproval of a subset of messages it finds offensive. This is the essence of viewpoint discrimination.” Id. at 249; see also R.A.V., 505 U.S. at 391- 92. The Gag Order violates these principles

Trump lards the rest of the discussion with claims that a gag tied to the crimes alleged against Trump amounts to censorship of right wing views.

Based this speculation, the district court entered a sweeping, viewpoint-based prior restraint on the core political speech of a major Presidential candidate, based solely on an unconstitutional “heckler’s veto.” The Gag Order violates the First Amendment rights of President Trump and over 100 million Americans who listen to him.

[snip]

President Trump’s viewpoint and modes of expression resonate powerfully with tens of millions of Americans. The prosecution’s request for a Gag Order bristles with hostility to President Trump’s viewpoint and his relentless criticism of the government—including of the prosecution itself. The Gag Order embodies this unconstitutional hostility to President Trump’s viewpoint. It should be immediately stayed.

[snip]

As a viewpoint-based prior restraint on the core political speech of a Presidential candidate to an audience of over 100 million Americans, the Gag Order is virtually per se invalid.

There are nine appearances of the word “viewpoint” in the entire appendix. All appear in Trump’s filings bidding for a stay, not his underlying opposition to the gag. But all of those also appear as part of an argument about political speech — an important argument, but one largely divorced from the circumstance of this gag, not as a free-standing argument about the free speech of nutjob right wingers.

That argument is closely related to (and builds on) another argument that Trump belatedly raised: that gagging his speech harms the First Amendment rights of his 100 million followers.

4. The Gag Order violates the rights of tens of millions of Americans to receive President Trump’s speech.

The First Amendment’s “protection afforded is to the communication, to its source and to its recipients both.” Va. State Bd. of Pharmacy v. Va. Citizens Consumer Council, Inc., 425 U.S. 748, 756 (1976) (citing many cases); Packingham v. North Carolina, 582 U.S. 98, 104 (2017) (recognizing the right to “speak and listen, and then … speak and listen once more,” as a “fundamental principle of the First Amendment”); Red Lion Broad. Co. v. F.C.C., 395 U.S. 367, 390 (1969). A restriction on President Trump’s speech inflicts a reciprocal injury on the rights of over 100 million Americans who listen to him, irrespective of their political beliefs.

This right of listeners to receive President Trump’s message has its “fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office,” especially for the Presidency. Susan B. Anthony List, 573 U.S. at 162. Ford emphasized that, if Congressman Ford were silenced, “reciprocally, his constituents will have no access to the views of their congressman on this issue of undoubted public importance.” 830 F.2d at 601. Likewise, Brown stated that “[t]he urgency of a campaign … may well require that a candidate, for the benefit of the electorate as well as himself, have absolute freedom to discuss his qualifications….” 218 F.3d at 430.

In Trump’s appeal, he doesn’t cite evidence supporting this number, but — as I already noted — the underlying motion relies on garbage double counting of bots on the Twitter platform Trump no longer uses. Given that this argument is based on fraudulent numbers, it amounts to a defense of the First Amendment rights to listen of Trump’s imaginary friends, including the Russian bots the now-deceased Yevgeniy Prigozhin deployed to fuck with US politics.

The problem with this argument is, as DOJ noted in its response to Trump’s bid for a gag, Trump misrepresented the record on that point.

11 The defendant did not invoke these interests in his response to the Government’s motion for an order under Local Criminal Rule 57.7(c). And while the defendant claims to have invoked these interests at the hearing, only to have been unfairly interrupted by the Court (ECF No. 110 at 17), his citations mischaracterize the record. For example, he asserts (id.) that the Court interrupted him in response to his statement, “And what the government is proposing here is an order not just directed against President Trump but against the American electorate that wants to hear from President Trump under these circumstances.” The Court did not, in fact, interject in response to that point. See ECF No. 103 at 44. Rather, it was only several sentences later, after defense counsel returned to his oft-repeated talking point that “[t]his is the first time we’ve had a sitting administration prosecute a political opponent” that the Court responded, “I’m going to interrupt you. . . . You have said that. You have said it repeatedly. I have heard it.” Id. Likewise, the defendant asserts (ECF No. 110 at 17) that, when counsel said, “The American people are entitled to understand that and understand the consequences of that,” the Court simply responded, “No.” The Court did no such thing. After defense counsel’s comment, the Court asked why the defendant “is entitled to suggest that an appropriate punishment would be death.” ECF No. 103 at 59-60. When defense counsel invoked the First Amendment in response, the Court said, “No. As part of that. But again, the First Amendment protections must yield to the administration of justice and the protection of witnesses.” Id.

In a footnote of Judge Chutkan’s order denying the stay, she agreed.

Defendant’s Motion argues that his speech restrictions are inconsistent with the “right of listeners to receive President Trump’s message.” Motion to Stay at 15. Defendant did not squarely raise that argument in his opposition brief to the government’s original motion; the closest he came to identifying any authority for it was an unrelated “see also” citation to United States v. Ford, 830 F.2d 596, 598 (6th Cir. 1987), a case that he now quotes to support his right-of-listeners argument. Compare ECF No. 60 at 5, with Motion to Stay at 16. But the court expressly addressed and distinguished that case. Order at 2–3. In any event, the argument does not alter the fundamental principle that First Amendment rights, whether those of the speaker or the listener, may be curtailed to preclude statements that pose sufficiently grave threats to the integrity of judicial proceedings.

Undeterred by that footnote, Trump argues that Chutkan’s failure to address something he didn’t raise is her reversible error, not a waiver on his part.

Though the issue was raised repeatedly, A159-60, A165, A178; A47, A62-63, the district court gave the First Amendment rights of President Trump’s audiences no meaningful consideration. The Gag Order does not mention them, see A1-3, and the district court declined to consider them when President Trump raised them, e.g., A47, A62-63. That is reversible error.

I’ve linked two of the spots in the record, above, where John Lauro imagines he raised this — A47, which he cites twice, was in the oral arguments, not the underlying brief. None was a substantive argument about his imaginary 100 million friends. Here’s the appendix if you want to see if you can find what other things he is citing to.

There are other problems with this appeal. Trump doesn’t address the part of Chutkan’s order that explicitly permits Trump to attack, “the current administration or the Department of Justice.” Trump does not engage, at all, with the evidence DOJ submitted of expected trial witnesses testifying under oath about how mobs started threatening them after Trump tweeted mean things. Notably, Trump’s citations to the government’s examples of threats that Trump made between August 2 and September 26 doesn’t cite to the footnotes in the government response that reference the threat — made the day after the linked threat, “if you come after me I’m coming after you” — to Judge Chutkan herself.

By the time the Gag Order was entered, the case had been pending for almost three months, and President Trump had often spoken about it. The prosecution provided seventeen examples of public statements by President Trump between August 2 and September 26, 2023, that it considered objectionable. A140-46; A190- 91. However, it did not produce any evidence that any prosecutor, witness, or court staffer experienced “threats” or “harassment” after President Trump’s speech. Likewise, it did not produce any evidence that any witness or prosecutor felt threatened or intimidated by President Trump’s speech—however subjectively—during three months of President Trump’s public commentary on the case. See A140-46; A190-91.

Lauro claims DOJ didn’t present any evidence that anyone, including court staffers but not the judge herself, felt intimidated by threats that followed on Trump’s incitement and simply ignores that footnote. But someone in Judge Chutkan’s chambers alerted the Marshals after that threat, and the FBI deemed it sufficiently dangerous to arrest Abigail Jo Shry for making it.

So there are other problems with this appeal, exhibiting the same obstinate refusal to address the record as it stands that Judge Chutkan described in her opinion refusing the stay.

But the key dynamic, in my opinion, is that Trump is trying to refashion his argument to trigger the known biases of Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas. But he’s doing so — launching a bid to protect the First Amendment rights of his imaginary friends — after the fact.

This is not a frivolous argument. The legal arguments should bear the weight of the historic decision that ultimately will result.

But instead of making serious arguments, John Lauro has pitched the Supreme Court’s right wing justices an argument about Trump’s imaginary Twitter friends.

Update: A DC Circuit panel of 3 Democratic appointees (Obama, Obama, Biden) has stayed the gag and ordered and set an expedited briefing that is quick enough SCOTUS is unlikely to have any reason to intervene.

PER CURIAM ORDER [2025399] filed considering motion to stay case [2025149-2], ORDERED that the district court’s October 17, 2023, order be administratively stayed pending further order of the court. Further ordered that his case be expedited. setting briefing schedule: APPELLANT Brief due 11/08/2023, at 5:00 p.m.. APPENDIX due 11/08/2023, at 5:00 p.m.. APPELLEE Brief due on 11/14/2023, at 5:00 p.m., APPELLANT Reply Brief due 11/17/2023, at 12:00 p.m., scheduling oral argument on Monday, 11/20/2023. Before Judges: Millett, Pillard and Garcia. [23-3190] [Entered: 11/03/2023 05:06 PM]


Jim Jordan Dragged Martin Estrada Away from Fighting Fentanyl To Chase Hunter Biden’s Dick Pics

Yesterday, Ohio Senator JD Vance gave a speech explaining that he is holding up the confirmation of a US Attorney candidate for his own state because Donald Trump is being prosecuted for stealing classified documents but — Vance claimed in an earlier version of this rant — “the President and his family [go] completely untouched.”

Meanwhile, yesterday’s version of Vance’s harangue claimed that “it is Joe Biden’s border policies that have invited this fentanyl into our country at record levels.”

It’s an interesting take, given that Republicans keep dragging law enforcement away from fighting the fentanyl crisis  so they can explain that the conspiracy theories right wingers believe about the investigation into Hunter Biden are false.

In a July hearing where both Jim Jordan and now-Speaker Mike Johnson complainedrelying on Terry Doughty’s badly misinformed opinion — that (they claimed) the FBI had prevented millions of people from sniffing Hunter Biden’s dick pics before the 2020 election, Chris Wray pointed to the impact two drug busts had had in Marion, Ohio.

Just last month, for instance, the FBI charged 31 members of two drug trafficking organizations responsible for distributing dangerous drugs like fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine throughout the area around Marion, Ohio. In that one investigation, run out of the FBI’s 2-man office in Mansfield, we worked with partners in multiple local police departments and sheriff’s offices to take kilos of fentanyl off  Marion’s streets, enough lethal doses, I should add, to kill the entire population of Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, combined.

As I noted at the time, this was good staff work. Marion, Mansfield, and Lorrain are all in Jim Jordan’s district (and so all obviously constituents of Vance, as well).

Jim Jordan took time out of Chris Wray’s day so he could complain about Hunter Biden’s dick pics, while ignoring the drug problems facing his own constituents.

It’s not just Wray.

In testimony last week before Jordan’s committee, the US Attorney for Los Angeles, Martin Estrada, struggled to explain to Jordan’s staffers why his own top AUSAs didn’t think it smart to reallocate prosecutors to partner on the Hunter Biden investigation at a time his office was 40 prosecutors short of the number they’re supposed to have. As Estrada explained, instead, CDCA granted Special AUSA status to some prosecutors from Delaware and had done so even as Gary Shapley wailed that nothing was going on in LA.

Jordan’s top aide Steve Castor was incredulous that Estrada wouldn’t know specific details about what the Delaware prosecutors granted Special Assistant status to pursue a case against Hunter Biden in LA were doing.

I mean, this is a potential prosecution of the President’s son. If the lawyers from the District of Delaware were out in your district discussing the case, don’t you think you’d know about it?

When Estrada tried to get Castor to understand how different the priorities looked when you were running the country’s biggest US Attorney’s office, fentanyl was the first thing he raised.

I think a little context would be helpful. So, as I said, we have the largest district in the country. We have a Fentanyl epidemic which is one of the worst in the country’s. We’ve done more death-resulting cases than any other district in the country. We’re on pace to do more this year than we ever had before.

[snip]

There are a lot of high-profile cases, so I don’t meet with attorneys on every single high-profile case.

[snip]

We have a fentanyl epidemic. That includes not just death-resulting cases, it includes going after cartels which are distributing these pills, not just in powder form but in pill form. We routinely seize over a million pills at a time from vehicles, and we need to prosecute those cases. Each pill could be a death. And routinely now we’re finding cartels transporting fentanyl in liquid form, which is a new thing that they’re doing. So we have to do those cases.

Republicans claim to care about the fentanyl crisis. But in reality, they keep proving that they care more about Hunter Biden’s dick pics than they do about their troubled constituents in Marion, OH.


NYT Keeps Downplaying Trump’s Past Retribution Tour

Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan keep teaming up to write the same story over and over: A second Trump term is going to be bad … really bad.

Just some of these stories, in reverse order from Tuesday’s latest installment, are:

There are several aspects to these stories: a bid to eliminate civil service protections, a personalization of power, and the elevation of people who proved willing to abuse power in his first term: Russel Vought (who helped obstruct the Ukraine investigation), Stephen Miller, and Johnny McEntee (who even before January 6 was making a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act a litmus test for hiring at DOD), and Jeffrey Clark.

The series, thus far, skirts the language of authoritarianism and fascism.

At the core of the stories is that Trump is going to use a second term for retribution, to which the June 15 article is dedicated.

When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”

These stories admit that Trump did some of this in his first term. But they describe a process of retribution by the guy who got elected — with abundant assistance from Maggie Haberman — on a platform of “Lock her up!,” who breached the norm of judicial independence 24 days into office when he asked Jim Comey to “let this” Mike Flynn “thing go,” as something that took a while to “ramp up.”

In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.

Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.

Yet even though Savage did some important reporting on some of this (reporting that was counterbalanced by Maggie’s central role in helping Trump obstruct criminal investigations), these pieces always vastly understate how much politicization Trump pulled off in his first term, and never describe how that politicization continues at the hands of people like Jim Jordan.

In the spring of 2018, Mr. Trump told his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and James B. Comey Jr., the former head of the F.B.I. Mr. McGahn rebuffed him, saying the president had no authority to order an investigation, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

Later in 2018, Mr. Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into officials involved in the Russia investigation. The following year, Attorney General William P. Barr indeed assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, John Durham, to investigate the investigators — styling it as an administrative review because there was no factual predicate to open a formal criminal investigation.

Mr. Trump also said in 2018 and 2019 that John F. Kerry, the Obama-era secretary of state, should be prosecuted for illegally interfering with American diplomacy by seeking to preserve a nuclear accord with Iran. Geoffrey S. Berman, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan whom Mr. Trump fired in 2020, later wrote in his memoir that the Trump Justice Department pressured him to find a way to charge Mr. Kerry, but he closed the investigation after about a year without bringing any charges.

And as the 2020 election neared, Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham to file charges against high-level former officials even though the prosecutor had not found a factual basis to justify any. In his own memoir, Mr. Barr wrote that the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” eroded their relationship even before Mr. Barr refused Mr. Trump’s baseless demand that he say the 2020 election had been corrupt.

Where Mr. Trump’s first-term efforts were scattered and haphazard, key allies — including Jeffrey B. Clark, a former Justice Department official who helped Mr. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election — have been developing a blueprint to make the department in any second Trump term more systematically subject to direct White House control.

This effort was in no way haphazard!!! Most FBI personnel involved in the Russian investigation, from Jim Comey down to line analysts, had their careers systematically ruined, with Peter Strzok (who, the actual record of the Russian investigation shows, repeatedly took steps to protect Trump and Mike Flynn, even if he disliked Trump) offered up as an example of what will happen to people who don’t meekly just accept their punishment or, better yet, retreat to the private sector. The exceptions were the cyber guys who completely bolloxed the Alfa Bank investigation and people like Bill Barnett, who misrepresented the steps he himself took to provide “proof” of corruption on the Mueller investigation. That precedent has been sustained as right wingers take out other FBI agents deemed insufficiently loyal, like Tim Thibault, who personally opened an investigation into the Clinton Foundation in 2016 but who was targeted last year because in 2020 he didn’t mainline disinformation about Hunter Biden.

Yes, Bill Barr ordered Geoffrey Berman to investigate John Kerry. But he also set up a complex, systematic structure to halt  any investigation into Rudy Giuliani so the President’s lawyer could get dirt from Russian spies, feed it to Scott Brady, who would then push that information into the investigations of Hunter Biden and others. When Berman and Jessie Liu refused to break (after a good deal of bending to Barr’s will), he fired them both.

Barr didn’t just pressure John Durham to prosecute high-level people: He skipped, hand-in-hand, with Durham as they used Russian intelligence to fabricate an attack on Hillary Clinton, the organizing logic of an investigation that swept up private sector people and who had the temerity to research Donald Trump or — worse!! — to help Hillary recover from a hack-and-leak. The effort even took out academic researchers who were simply trying to keep the US safe from Russian hacking. Trump did get DOJ to investigate Hillary, with investigations lasting the entirety of his presidency, and that investigation included precisely the kind of fabricated evidence and coached testimony that NYT imagines is a hypothetical left for Trump’s second term.

To the extent these stories talk about Trump’s pardons, they do so prospectively. There’s no discussion of how the pardons of Mike Flynn and Roger Stone rival any of the most corrupt in US history, but were necessary to prevent DOJ from developing proof that Trump conspired with Russia.

These articles don’t describe how Congress has served as a wing of this politicization, from the leaks to Mike Flynn in 2018 about how to undermine his own investigation to sham hearings — like the one with George Papadopoulos unencumbered by the documents that would have provide evidence of “collusion,” in which he spewed out conspiracy theories that Bill Barr and John Durham quickly got on a plane to chase. These articles don’t describe how the current unrelenting attempt to manufacture an impeachment out of the detritus of Hunter Biden’s life could not have happened if Bill Barr hadn’t made very systematic attempts to enable Trump’s retribution tour in 2020.

And these articles don’t describe the violent threats that have become routine for anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. The threats Trump deployed against Lisa Page and Marie Yovanovitch — “she’s going to go through some things” — exist on an unrelenting continuum as the threats against Ruby Freeman and Lesley Wolf and Fani Willis and Don Bacon’s wife.

Yes, it’s important to warn about what Trump plans to do with a second term. But calling Trump’s past retribution “haphazard” is a journalistic cop-out, a way to avoid admitting that we don’t yet fully understand how systematic Trump’s past retribution was or — worse — don’t want to come to grips with our own central role in it.

For a warning to be effective, we have to show the human costs of all the past retribution — the thousands of Jan6ers who had their lives ruined, the significant degradation in US national security, the fear, especially the fear among Republicans — costs that no one, no matter how loyal, will ultimately escape.


Hours After Aileen Cannon Suggests She’ll Stall Florida Prosecution, Trump Moves to Stall DC One

Judge Aileen Cannon has not yet released a ruling describing how much she’ll bow to Trump’s manufactured claims of classified discovery delays in the stolen documents case, but she made clear that she will delay the trial somewhat. As reported, at least, that delay will come because of the competing schedule in DC.

Trump’s lawyers argued that they need a delay in the documents case because preparations for it will clash with the federal election case, which is slated to go to trial on March 4 and could last several months.

Trump’s indictment in the election case — which came days after Cannon set her initial timeline for the document case — “completely disrupted everything about the schedule your honor set,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche told Cannon.

Another Trump lawyer, Chris Kise, personified the crunch the former president’s attorneys are facing, phoning into the hearing from a New York courthouse where Trump is undergoing a civil trial targeting his business empire.

“It’s very difficult to be trying to work with a client in one trial and simultaneously try to prepare that client for another trial,” Kise said. “This has been a struggle and a challenge.”

Note: as DOJ pointed out, Kise’s NY trial schedule was already baked into Cannon’s schedule.

Having secured that delay, Trump turned to delaying his DC trial, with a motion to stay all other DC proceedings until his absolute immunity claim is decided, a 3-page motion Trump could have but did not submit when he was asking for a delay before submitting his other motions. Everything he points to in that 3-page motion, the completed briefing on the absolute immunity bid, was already in place on October 26. But he waited until he first got Cannon to move her trial schedule.

As I laid out the other day, Trump is not making legal arguments sufficient to win this case — certainly not yet. He is making a tactical argument, attempting to run out the clock so he can pardon himself.

Update: LOL. Trump filed the DC motion too soon, giving DOJ a chance to notice the cynical ploy in DC before Aileen Cannon issues her order.

Yesterday, the Court conducted a hearing on the defendants’ motion to adjourn trial, in which defendant Trump claimed that trial in this matter should be delayed in part because “[t]he March 4, 2024 trial date in the District of Columbia, and the underlying schedule in that case, currently require President Trump and his lawyers to be in two places at once.” ECF 167 at 1. Defendant Trump’s counsel reiterated that argument during the hearing yesterday. However, defendant Trump’s counsel failed to disclose at the hearing that they were planning to file – and yesterday evening did file – the attached motion to stay the proceedings in the District of Columbia until their motion to dismiss the indictment based on presidential immunity is “fully resolved.” See United States v. Donald J. Trump, No. 23-cr-257-TSC, ECF No. 128 at 1 (D.D.C. Nov. 1, 2023), attached as Exhibit 1. As the Government argued to the Court yesterday, the trial date in the District of Columbia case should not be a determinative factor in the Court’s decision whether to modify the dates in this matter. Defendant Trump’s actions in the hours following the hearing in this case illustrate the point and confirm his overriding interest in delaying both trials at any cost. This Court should [sic] allow itself to be manipulated in this fashion.


Chuck Grassley and James Comer Brag that 40 Informants Couldn’t Substantiate a Crime against Biden

Philip Bump notes that James Comer is now fundraising not just off his own conspiracy theories, but also Chuck Grassley’s.

Comer presents himself as a warrior for the truth, standing up to the media and the left-wing hordes, etc. Then the money ask appears.

Now, I track Comer and the Oversight Committee’s work more closely than most, so what struck me wasn’t that the chairman was trying to fundraise off what he was doing (he’s done that more than once in the past) but that he was trying to fundraise off this. After all, the allegation about the informants wasn’t something that came from his and his party’s efforts. The pitch couches that a bit, asserting in boldface text that “[i]t has come to light” that these informants purportedly existed. But there’s no news release about it from the normally news-release-enthusiastic House majority and no mention of it on Comer’s X/Twitter feed. The account for the Oversight Committee did mention it once, pointing back to the source of the claim: Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

[snip]

That Comer is raising money off Grassley’s claim — raising money by exaggerating the claim to assert that there were 40 informants for 50 years — is the point. This wasn’t his work; it was simply an allegation that those who would respond to an “I’m fighting Biden for you” appeal would find compelling. I once referred to Comer’s efforts as a fishing expedition, but he’s not simply throwing out bait to see what he gets, he’s throwing out as much bait as he can to vacuum up as many fish as there are in the sea.

Actually, Comer is fundraising off Fox’s breathless regurgitation of Chuck Grassley’s conspiracy theories, which appeared in a letter to Chris Wray and Merrick Garland.

I find Bump’s observation notable for several additional reasons, beyond what Bump lays out.

First, it comes as Jamie Raskin’s whack-a-mole efforts to track Comer’s lies have gotten punchy. Monday, Raskin released a new 9-page letter listing the top lies Comer told after sniffing too many dick pics, to which the Maryland Congressperson appended the previous 12 letters Raskin sent debunking Comer’s bullshit.

  • Falsely claimed that witness interviews actually conducted by Committee staff never happened;27
  • Referred to a fugitive from justice charged with multiple felonies as a “very credible witness;”28
  • Suggested you were present at a transcribed interview that you did not attend;29
  • Repeatedly mischaracterized the statements of witnesses in interviews while refusing to publicly release interview transcripts; 30
  • Claimed that the National Archives and Records Administration failed to turn over records to the Committee when they were actively cooperating;31
  • Wrongly claimed that a transcribed interview suggested the President was involved in his family’s business dealings; 32
  • Incorrectly asserted that suspicious activity reports, which you routinely mischaracterize as “bank violations,” implicate President Biden in wrongdoing; 33
  • Dishonestly suggested that the President had the prosecutor of Ukraine fired as part of a bribery scheme;34
  • Falsely accused the Biden-Harris Administration of obstructing the Committee’s investigation and interfering in U.S. Attorney Weiss’s investigation;35 and
  • Falsely denied the existence of bank records in the Committee’s possession.36

See below for Raskin’s footnotes to just these 10 bullet points.

One reason the far right might stoke the conspiracy fires via Chuck Grassley rather than Comer is because Comer’s claims never last more than 20 minutes before Raskin or Dan Goldman expose them as nonsense. Grassley can make wildly unsubstantiated and often recycled and debunked claims and no one in the Senate will mock him for it.

But his claims are, if possible, even more ridiculous than Comer’s.

Take the headline claim — the one Comer is fund-raising off of: Chuck Grassley claims that the FBI sicced forty informants on Joe Biden, his brother, and his son.

As just one initial example, I’ve been made aware that at one point in time the FBI maintained over 40 Confidential Human Sources that provided criminal information relating to Joe Biden, James Biden, and Hunter Biden. An essential question that must be answered is this: did the FBI investigate the information or shut it down? Indeed, if those sources were improperly shut down, it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the FBI, as this letter will address.

Four-zero. Forty.

When just three informants interacted with Trump’s Coffee Boy as part of the Russian investigation, Republicans squealed about it for years. They claimed it was a gross weaponization of the FBI, not against Trump’s Coffee Boy (who told one of the informants, “I have to be an idiot not to monetize” access to Trump and “if [Trump] loses probably could be better for my personal business”), but Trump himself. But Chuck Grassley rolls out the claim that the FBI used forty informants against Biden and his immediate family, some known examples of which would have come during the period when Biden was the expected or declared candidate against Trump, and somehow he doesn’t see flashing sirens of abuse at the FBI?

🚨🚨🚨🚨

Nope. Instead, he’s sure that the FBI must have ignored those forty informants because they haven’t yet substantiated any crime against Biden and his family.

Grassley makes a similar move when he raises the FD-1023 he recklessly released this summer, which showed that Mykola Zlochevsky said something different in late 2019, probably during impeachment, than he had said earlier in the year. Grassley points to what he claims as confirmation from Bill Barr, Chris Wray, and Paul Abbate that there’s an ongoing investigation into the allegation as proof that it must have validity (in reality, Wray and Abbate appear to have been trying to protect the viability of this and all other informants, which Grassley instead decided he should burn to the ground).

The report, including information on the Biden family 1023, was ultimately transmitted to U.S. Attorney Weiss who, according to Attorney General Garland, had every investigative tool at his disposal even before being designated as a special counsel. 14

Since making the Biden family 1023 public on July 25, 2023, it’s been made clear by former Attorney General Barr, Director Wray, and Deputy Director Abbate that the 1023 is part of an ongoing investigative matter, indicating its investigative credibility and authenticity. 15 As such, it’s essential that we examine the alleged attempts by FBI personnel to sweep it under the rug, as well as what steps U.S. Attorney Weiss has taken to use the document for his ongoing investigation.

The one person who said there was an ongoing investigation pertaining to the FD-1023 was David Weiss, in a letter to Lindsey Graham. The fact that the guy in charge of the Hunter Biden investigation said this is a pretty good indication it hasn’t been swept under the rug.

As to the rest of Chuck Grassley’s claims, they have been almost entirely debunked by the House investigation.

For example, Grassley cites to his own letter about Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley’s testimony to support a claim that Lesley Wolf “prevented investigators from seeking information” about Biden’s involvement in what he claims were Hunter Biden’s “criminal arrangements.”

Also on October 23, 2020, Justice Department and FBI Special Agents from the Pittsburgh Field Office briefed Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, one of U.S. Attorney Weiss’s top prosecutors, and FBI Special Agents from the Baltimore Field Office with respect to the contents of the Biden family 1023. However, the meeting did not include any IRS agents, and AUSA Wolf prevented investigators from seeking information about Joe Biden ‘s involvement in Hunter Biden’s criminal arrangements. 18

What the evidence actually shows, however, is that agents blew off Wolf’s restrictions on references to the then-President-elect, and asked those questions anyway. In response, Hunter’s former partner, Rob Walker, told investigative agents that Joe was never involved in Hunter’s business. “I certainly never was thinking at any time the VP was a part of anything we were doing.”

But even that was a cherry-pick. After Shapley revealed that claim, Ziegler released the full Walker transcript (compare the excerpt from Shapley’s deposition with the full transcript released in September). The excerpt Shapley released at first left out critical details, details that impact Grassley’s complaints that Tony Bobulinski hasn’t been treated as a star witness.

The full Rob Walker interview makes it clear there was a whole lot of bad blood between Hunter Biden and Bobulinski that should raise questions about Bobulinski’s biases. At least per Walker — at the time (in 2017), Hunter believed that Bobulinski was too close to some Russians, which Walker explained that he treated as credible because the first time Walker met Bobulinski, Bobulinski was with someone claimed to be Viktor Vekselberg’s son.

Walker: …but ah.., um.., I.., I think that he was “blown off” because um.., ah.., Tony’s a.., an asshole…,

Wilson: (Laughs).

Walker: …um, but um.., you know, I think Hunter ah.., at one point, was ah.., um.., a little “bent out of shape” with Tony and ah..,

Wilson: Hmph hmph.

Walker: …granted he wasn’t in his.., his right mind but ah.., he thought that ah…, um.., Tony had some weird ah.., business background stuff…

Wilson: Okay.

Walker: …and Hunter did tell me that he had Tony, ah, checked out at one time…,

[snip]

Walker: …and he ah.., he thought that ah.., Tony was ah.., close or too close to ah.., ah.., some Russians.

[snip]

Walker: The first time, which it didn’t seem so unbelievable to me because the.., the.., the first time that I met Tony, um, I was in ah.., Las Vegas.  Ah, James came over, um, and ah.., I had a friend from here come up with me and ah.., some people from Los Angeles came over that were friends of James.  One was Tony and Tony was with ah, a kid named Alex and ah.., Tony didn’t tell me this but Alex was Russian and they thought it was ah.., or I was told it was ah.., Viktor…

Soline: Hmph hmph.

Walker: …Vexelberg’s (phonetic) son who was ah.., who Viktor is.., at the time he wasn’t on the sanctions list I’m sure.., but I think he’s been sanctioned now…

[snip]

Walker: …Tony’s background was that he.., ah.., you know.., had been pushing deals in the past in New York.., in and around New York.., and um.., ah.., with ah.., ah.., Russians and ah.., Russian money.

At the time Walker shared these details in December 2020, he was absolutely livid about Bobulinski’s public claims after the release of the “laptop,” so Walker’s comments shouldn’t be credited all that heavily either. But Walker temporally placed both Hunter’s suspicions about Bobulinski and the even earlier incident in Vegas years before Bobulinski’s Fox News media tour. Walker wasn’t insinuating that Bobulinski had ties to Russia because he was involved with the laptop caper; he was describing what he and Hunter believed three years before the laptop caper.

That’s important background to Grassley’s similarly unsubstantiated claim that Bobulinski’s testimony — at which he was represented by White House Counsel Stefan Passantino — matched something in Gary Shapley’s testimony.

On October 23, 2020, Tony Bobulinski met with and was interviewed by James Dawson, a Washington Field Office Special Agent in Charge, Acting Assistant Special Agent in Charge Giulio Arseni, Special Agent William Novak, and Special Agent Garrett Churchill. 16 Bobulinski provided first-hand knowledge as an eye and ear witness to Joe Biden’s involvement in potentially criminal schemes with Hunter Biden. Notably, on October 13, 2022, I wrote a letter to the both of you and U.S. Attorney Weiss with respect to a summary of Bobulinski’s FBI interview that my staff reviewed which included, in part, reference to the Biden’s receiving an unsecured $5 million loan, intended to be forgivable, from CEFC in 2017 that would serve as payment for actions Joe Biden took during his vice presidency. This financial strategy to illegally treat income as a loan is consistent with IRS whistleblower testimony that indicated Hunter Biden attempted the same with respect to other income, including payments received from Burisma. 17

It’s true that Shapley made this allegation over and over (it’s also true that Hunter did rely on loans as he grew more and more broke overcome by his addiction). But Ziegler’s testimony and David Weiss’ own explanation for not charging the earlier Burisma years revealed that the circumstances of the Burisma payments were not as clearcut as Shapley claimed.

[N]ow that the U.S. Attorney looked at the case, they don’t want to move forward with it.

And essentially what he told me is that not only are they not going to join the case and give us assistance — so give us another AUSA, give us someone to help there — they also told our prosecutors that they don’t think we have — that we can — or they don’t think that we have the charges — or not the ability, but the evidence for the charges to charge in D.C.

Then there are the other Grassley complaints that had already been debunked by Tim Thibault’s and other House witnesses’ testimony.

Grassley complains that “an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” was ordered closed by Tim Thibault.

In that same letter, I noted that in October 2020, an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tim Thibault. My office has been made aware that FBI agents responsible for the information that was shut down were interviewed by the FBI HQ team in furtherance of Auten’s assessment.

Grassley doesn’t admit what Peter Schweizer has admitted: that he was the “avenue of derogatory … reporting” in question: Steve Bannon’s sidekick and propagandist (and so two degrees from two influence operations the FBI investigated, that of Andrii Derkach and that suspected of Guo Wengwui).

Schweizer is one of the 40 informants Grassley boasted about and the reason why he claims that the other 39 informants may have been shut down too.

Grassley seems to have botched the details about his handlers being interviewed by the Foreign Influence Task Force: Thibault tried to get them into the briefing, but FBI refused — in part because the daughter of one was posting related content on Daily Caller).

As Thibault testified, there were two reasons why he shut down Schweizer (based on whose book, Clinton Cash, Thibault had opened an investigation into Hillary in 2016). The first was that the Baltimore FBI team didn’t want Schweizer’s reporting, some of which was sourced to the laptop, because they already had the laptop and follow-on warrants and Schweizer’s involvement would only provide something Hunter’s attorneys might one day use to undermine the credibility of the inevstigation.

Here’s how Grassley twists what must be that discussion.

On October 5, 2020, Supervisory Special Agent Eric Miller and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Thibault participated in a call with the Washington Field Office; Baltimore Field Office; Wilmington, Delaware FBI agents; and FBI management personnel. That call allegedly included Assistant Special Agent in Charge Alfred Watson, Supervisory Special Agent Joe Gordon, Special Agent Susan Roepcke and Special Agent Joshua Wilson. Notably, FBI agents from the Baltimore Field Office were attached to U.S. Attorney Weiss’s investigation. My office has been informed that on that call it was confirmed the Delaware case currently run by U.S. Attorney Weiss was opened as a money laundering and Foreign Agents Registration Act case, not a bribery case as the Biden family 1023 would appear to require, and that it was jointly worked with the IRS. On that call, it was made clear that Delaware FBI agents were in possession of email evidence that contradicted denials made by Joe Biden that he was never aware of or involved in Hunter Biden’s business arrangements.

When Grassley said that the Delaware team was in possession of email evidence that, “contradicted Biden’s denials,” he meant they had the laptop and probably the iCloud warrant returns. There, too, he appears to be parroting Shapley’s claims about the laptop, which spun Hunter claiming to involve his father in business calls as proof that Joe was involved.

The other reason Thibault shut down Schweizer is because of what he learned in a Foreign Intelligence Task Force briefing that provided more context about things. Grassley claims that what persuaded Thibault was a Brian Auten assessment about disinformation that “improperly” discredited claims about Hunter Biden as disinformation.

On July 25, 2022, I wrote to the both of you.5 In that letter, I described whistleblower allegations that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden ‘s criminal financial and related activity but ultimately shut it down based on false assertions that it was subject to foreign disinformation. It’s been alleged that the basis for shutting the investigative activity down was an August 2020 assessment created by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten. That assessment was used by an FBI HQ team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.

Yet Laura Dehmlow testified to the House that the claim that, “there was an assessment on Hunter Biden disinformation,” was inaccurate and agreed that, “the allegations … with respect to Mr. Auten are just wrong.”

Grassley ends with a claim that his story is based on “multiple credible whistleblowers” and a wail about political infection.

Based on the information provided to my office over a period of years by multiple credible whistleblowers, there appears to be an effort within the Justice Department and FBI to shut down investigative activity relating to the Biden family. Such decisions point to significant political bias infecting the decision-making of not only the Attorney General and FBI Director, but also line agents and prosecutors. Our Republic cannot survive such a political infection and you have an obligation to this country to clear the air.

But we know these whistleblowers aren’t credible. Several of them are undoubtedly agents disgruntled because Thibault shut down a propagandist as a source. One likely disgruntled agent — the aforementioned father whose daughter was reporting related content on Daily Caller — went to work for Heritage Foundation after he quit the FBI rather than be reassigned from a position where he could politicize public corruption investigations. Another chased the ItalyGate conspiracy theory long after Richard Donaghue debunked it. Ziegler and Shapley’s claims have been debunked by every witness who testified and a great many of the documents they themselves shared.

And that’s just the whistleblowers. Consider what we know about those forty informants. They definitely or may include (as Raskin partly addressed):

  • Gal Luft, whose March 2020 claims came amid interviews where he also allegedly lied to the FBI
  • The aforementioned June 2020 FD-1023 reporting a late 2019 statement from Zlochevsky that conflicted with things Zlochevsky had said earlier in 2019
  • Steve Bannon flunky Peter Schweizer’s election 2020 season pitches
  • Probably at least three Ukrainian sources that were part of Rudy’s campaign efforts
  • People tied to Dmitry Firtash and Andrii Derkach

There may be localized people with their own political gripes, too; for example, in addition to metadata that could have been manufactured by anyone in possession of a “Hunter Biden” “laptop,” one reason the FBI treated John Paul Mac Isaac’s claims seriously was “intelligence” that said Hunter was in Delaware at the time.

The point being, even if the notion that the FBI used forty — 40!!!! — informants to investigate Donald Trump’s rival doesn’t set off alarm bells, the quality and the biases of the known informants should.

The House investigation has made it clear that Grassley’s credible whistleblowers aren’t credible whistleblowers. As DC US Attorney Matthew Graves charitably described it, Grassley’s sources delivered, “the garble that can happen when you layer hearsay on top of hearsay on top of hearsay. And when you look at a lot of this, it’s someone said that someone said that someone said.” The House investigation also made clear that at least some of Grassley’s forty informants aren’t credible sources, either.

And that may be why Republicans are recycling these debunked claims over in the Senate, where they’ll continue to churn up Fox viewers, but where they’ll avoid the scrutiny that has already debunked the claims in the House.


27 Letter from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, to Chairman James Comer, Committee on Oversight and Accountability (Sept. 19, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/2023-09- 19.JBR%20to%20Comer%20re%20Schwerin%20Interview.pdf); see also House Republicans Downplay Meeting with Key Biden Aide, HuffPost (Sept. 19, 2023) (online at www huffpost.com/entry/eric-schwerin-oversightcommittee-joe-biden_n_65098430e4b0d98f39e80e1d).

28 Letter from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin and Rep. Dan Goldman, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, to Chairman James Comer, Committee on Oversight and Accountability (July 11, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/2023-07- 11.JBR%20Goldman%20to%20Comer%20re%20Luft.pdf); Rep. James Comer (@RepJamesComer), X (July 7, 2023) (online at https://twitter.com/RepJamesComer/status/1677414170411560962?s=20).

29 Rep. Dan Goldman (@RepDanGoldman), X (Aug. 7, 2023) (online at https://x.com/RepDanGoldman/status/1688667691584737280?s=20).

30 Memorandum from Democratic Staff to Democratic Members, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Transcribed Interview of Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent (Aug. 16, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/2023-08- 16.Democratic%20Member%20Memorandum%20re%20FBI%20SSA%20Transcript.pdf); Transcript of Devon Archer Testimony Doesn’t Back Key Claims About Joe and Hunter Biden, PolitiFact (Aug. 4, 2023) (online at www.politifact.com/article/2023/aug/04/transcript-of-devon-archer-testimony-doesnt-back-k/); Devon Archer Said the Opposite of What Republicans Claimed, Washington Post (Aug. 3, 2023) (online at www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/03/devon-archer-transcript-biden/); Memorandum from Democratic Staff to Democratic Members, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Oversight Committee Investigation into Presidential and Classified Records and Transcribed Interview of Former Executive Assistant to then-Vice President Biden (May 3, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/5.3.2023%20Chung%20Memo%20- %20FINAL.pdf).

31 Rep. Comer to Newsmax: Impeachment Inquiry Vote Possible Mid-Sept., NewsMax (Sept. 7, 2023) (online at www newsmax.com/Politics/newsmax-tv-biden-impeachment-inquiry/2023/09/07/id/1133671/); Committee on Oversight and Accountability Democrats (@OversightDems ), X (Sept. 8, 2023) (online at https://x.com/OversightDems/status/1700178556175692271?s=20).

32 Transcript of Devon Archer Testimony Doesn’t Back Key Claims About Joe and Hunter Biden, PolitiFact (Aug. 4, 2023) (online at www.politifact.com/article/2023/aug/04/transcript-of-devon-archer-testimony-doesnt-backk/); Devon Archer Said the Opposite of What Republicans Claimed, Washington Post (Aug. 3, 2023) (online at www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/03/devon-archer-transcript-biden/); Memorandum from Democratic Staff to Democratic Members, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Transcribed Interview of Devon Archer (Aug. 3, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/2023-08- 03.Democratic%20Member%20Memorandum%20re%20Archer%20Transcribed%20Interview%20Final.pdf).

33 The Faulkner Focus, Fox News (Apr. 21, 2023) (online at www.foxnews.com/video/6325510578112); Chairman James Comer (@RepJamesComer), X (Apr. 16, 2023) (online at https://twitter.com/jamescomer/status/1647645180260958211?s=46); Memorandum from Democratic Staff to Democratic Members, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Chairman Comer’s Misuse and Distortion of Confidential Bank Information (May 10, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/2023.05.10%20Memo%20to%20Me mbers%20re%20Misuse%20and%20Distortion%20of%20Confidential%20Bank%20Information%20FINAL.pdf); Comer Releases Biden Family Probe Update Without Showing Link to President, Politico (May 10, 2023) (online at www.politico.com/news/2023/05/10/james-comer-biden-probe-00096067).

34 Fox and Friends, Fox News (Mar. 31, 2023) (online at https://video.snapstream net/Play/8cJmJQ9KSgTuI2622JTEza?accessToken=cr1lk3ctb7qf0); Jesse Watters Primetime, Fox News (July 3, 2023) (online at www foxnews.com/video/6330534582112); My Fellow Republicans: One Disgraceful Impeachment Doesn’t Deserve Another, Washington Post (Sept. 15, 2023) (online at www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/15/congressman-ken-buck-biden-impeachment/); Debunking 4 Viral Rumors About the Bidens and Ukraine, New York Times (Oct. 29, 2019) (online at www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/business/media/fact-check-biden-ukraine-burisma-china-hunter.html); Memorandum from Democratic Staff to Democratic Members, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Chairman Comer and Senator Grassley’s Decision to Publicly Release FBI Form FD-1023 (July 24, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/2023-07- 24.Dem%20Memo%20re%20Comer%20Grassley%20Letter%20FD-1023_.pdf).

35 Sunday Morning Futures, Fox News (Aug. 20, 2023) (online at www.foxnews.com/video/6334869612112); Kudlow, Fox Business (June 29, 2023) (online at www.foxbusiness.com/video/6330314725112); The Daily, New York Times (Sept. 15, 2023) (online at www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/podcasts/the-daily/biden-impeachment html?showTranscript=1); McCarthy Launches Biden Impeachment Inquiry—With Zero Evidence, New Republic (Sept. 12, 2023) (online at https://newrepublic.com/post/175504/mccarthy-biden-impeachment-inquiry-no-evidence-not-enough-votes); Memorandum from Democratic Staff to Democratic Members, Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Oversight and Accountability, IRS and FBI Witnesses Debunk Republicans’ False Claims About Political Interference in Special Counsel Weiss’s Investigation (Sept. 27, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/2023-09- 27%20Joint%20Democratic%20Memorandum%20re%20IRS%20and%20FBI%20Witnesses%20Debunk%20Politic al%20Interference%20Claims.pdf).

36 Mornings with Maria, Fox Business (Oct. 25, 2023) (online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFkB5qFBhaQ); Letter from Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, Committee on Oversight and Accountability, to Chairman James Comer, Committee on Oversight and Accountability (Oct. 26, 2023) (online at https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight house.gov/files/2023.10.26.%20JBR%20to%20Com er%20re.%20Subpoenas.pdf); GOP Touts Bombshell Biden Payments—But Records Suggest Otherwise, Messenger (Oct. 26, 2023) (online at https://themessenger.com/politics/gop-touts-bombshell-biden-payments-but-recordssuggest-otherwise); Another GOP “Bombshell” About Joe Biden Turns Out to Be a Dud, HuffPost (Oct. 23, 2023) (online at www huffpost.com/entry/james-biden-payment-joe-biden_n_6536badee4b0689b3fbd8cf1).

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