“Friendly to Us:” NYT Buries Its Own Role in Trump’s Attacks on Rule of Law

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There comes a time in almost every Trump legal scandal where evidence comes out that Trump insiders believe they manipulated Maggie Haberman to serve Trump’s interests.

Evidence that both Roger Stone and Rick Gates used Maggie for various purposes came out in the Mueller investigation files, as when Gates claimed leaking Trump’s foreign policy speech to Maggie was a way to share it with Stone.

At Trump’s NY trial, Michael Cohen described how he deliberately misled Maggie about the nature of the payments he made to Stormy Daniels.

Perhaps the most damning example came in Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, where she described how, after her last appearance before the January 6 Committee while still represented by Stefan Passantino, he took a call from Maggie and confirmed that Hutchinson had just finished testifying to the committee.

His phone is ringing.

I look down at his phone. It’s Maggie Haberman calling him. And I looked at Stefan, and I said, “Stefan, did you tell Maggie Haberman that we were meeting with the committee today?”

And he’s like, “No, no. Maybe that’s not what she’s calling me about.”

And I said, “Stefan, did you tell Maggie that we were meeting with the committee today?

And he said, “No, no, but I should probably answer to see if she knows, right? I should answer.”

And said, “Stefan, no. I don’t think you should answer that call. She probably wants to know if we met with the committee today.”

He said, “Cass, I’m just going to answer. It will just be 2 seconds. I just want to find out what she’s going to talk to me about.”

He answers.

I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I hear Stefan say, “Yeah, yeah, we did just leave her third interview. You can put it out, but don’t don’t – don’t – don’t make it too big of a deal. I don’t think she’ll want it to be too big of a deal. All right. Thanks.”

And I said, “Stefan, was that Maggie Haberman asking about my interview?”

And he said, “Yeah, but don’t worry. She’s not going to make it a big deal.”

I said, “Stefan, I don’t want this out there.”

He said, “Don’t worry. Like, Maggie’s friendly to us. We’ll be fine.”

So I was just like, “Whatever.” I was annoyed.

Hutchinson went on to describe how, even as Passantino was discouraging Hutchinson from reviewing documents in a SCIF that would allow a follow-up appearance, Passantino and Alex Cannon spent the weekend talking to Maggie about Hutchinson’s testimony.

So I reached out to him on Monday, May 23rd: “Has [redacted] reached out about the SCIF?”

And then he was just kind of being wishy-washy with it.

He also let me know on that phone conversation that Maggie Haberman, quote, “got a story from the committee about my third interview,” end quote, and he spent he, Stefan, spent the whole weekend with Alex Cannon convincing Maggie Haberman not to publish the story that she got from the committee about my third interview.

Hutchinson described her particular disinterest in sharing her story with Maggie (and Josh Dawsey, another Trump whisperer).

And s0 now we’re moving into the phase of you know, I did my best throughout this whole period — I don’ like talking to reporters. Reporters would text me during this period. Ninety-nine percent of reporter texts always go unresponded to. I don’t like talking to reporters. I think there are some that I have, like, a friendship/working relationship with that I knew from being on the Hill and at the White House, but, like, Josh [Dawsey], Maggie Haberman, all those people, I stay very clear from.

But Josh [Dawsey], for example, had started reaching out to me and saying that he heard that the committee was in talks with Stefan about bringing me in for a SCIF interview and a live testimony; where did I stand on that with Stefan?

Say what you will about Maggie’s role in all this: Assuming it was her on Passantino’s phone (Hutchinson does not name the journalist in her book), she was just chasing a big story.

But there’s no doubt that one source of Hutchinson’s distrust of Passantino in the period leading up to her decision to get new lawyers stemmed from his willingness to share details of her testimony with Maggie — at least as she portrayed it — against her wishes.

“I don’t think you should answer that call,” Hutchinson said.

“Don’t worry,” the attorney representing Hutchinson but paid by a Trump entity said. “Like, Maggie’s friendly to us. We’ll be fine.”

None of that shows up in NYT’s faux savvy review of the game behind Barry Loudermilk’s referral of Liz Cheney for criminal investigation for allegedly intervening in Hutchinson’s legal representation at the time. NYT doesn’t bother to disclose to readers that, as Hutchinson described it, Maggie — who is bylined — played as significant a role in the breakup of the relationship between Passantino and Hutchinson as Cheney did.

Having failed to disclose Maggie’s alleged role in all that, here’s how — starting 28¶¶ in — NYT ultimately describes Loudermilk’s report and the claims within it.

The House report on Ms. Cheney, prepared by a Republican-led subcommittee on oversight, was specifically focused on the former representative, who broke with her G.O.P. colleagues over their ongoing support of Mr. Trump in 2021. But she has also infuriated Mr. Trump not only because she helped to lead the congressional investigation into him, but because she crossed party lines in the election and campaigned against him in support of Ms. Harris.

The report claimed that Ms. Cheney may have violated “numerous federal laws” by secretly communicating with Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee, without the knowledge of Ms. Hutchinson’s lawyer.

When Ms. Hutchinson was first approached to provide testimony to the committee, she was represented by a lawyer who had once worked in the Trump administration’s White House Counsel’s Office.

After meeting with Ms. Cheney, she hired a different lawyer and her subsequent public testimony was damaging to Mr. Trump. It included allegations that he had been warned his supporters were carrying weapons on Jan. 6, but expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him.

The report asked the F.B.I. to investigate whether Ms. Cheney’s dealings with Ms. Hutchinson were carried out in violation of a federal obstruction statute that prohibits tampering with witnesses. The report also accused Ms. Hutchinson of lying under oath to the committee several times and suggested that investigators examine whether Ms. Cheney had played any role in “procuring another person to commit perjury.” [my emphasis]

There’s a lot that’s misleading in this description. As I’ve noted, the section of the report describing DOD’s failures is actually longer (39 pages as compared to 36) than the section on Cheney and Hutchinson. Particularly given Loudermilk’s silence about Kash Patel’s role in what Loudermilk claims was DOD misconduct, to claim the report was “specifically focused” on Cheney is particularly misleading.

Maggie, writing with Alan Feuer, takes as proven the timeline Loudermilk lays out, which overstates what the evidence shows. While Cheney did communicate directly with Hutchinson, that was in June 2022, hours after Passantino had advised Hutchinson to take the “small element of risk to refus[e] to cooperate” with the committee any further in light of DOJ’s declination to press contempt charges against Mark Meadows. Hutchinson initiated the communication with Cheney and did so because, as she told Passantino, “I don’t want to gamble with being held in contempt.”

NYT asserts that what was damning about Hutchinson’s testimony after she ditched Passantino was Trump’s knowledge that people were refusing to go through magnetometers, but he wasn’t concerned because they wouldn’t hurt him. Hutchinson did tell that story publicly on June 28, 2022 (and J6C played earlier video testimony she had provided). But that thread of testimony started in her first interview in February 2022 and continued in her May 2022 interview, both of which Passantino attended. It all stemmed from texts she exchanged with Tony Ornato (texts that also make clear Trump “kept mentioning [a trip to the Capitol] before he took the stage” to give his speech).

To the extent this is among the things Loudermilk claimed Hutchinson lied about, Loudermilk’s case is based on word games, conflating formal intelligence with notice from Secret Service manning the rally that rally goers had (at least) flagpoles that were triggering the mags, misrepresenting a conversation Hutchinson claims she and Tony Ornato had with Mark Meadows, and ignoring that one of Ornato’s denials amounted to a claim he didn’t remember.

Plus, Hutchinson always emphasized that Trump’s concern was “get[ting] the shot,” packing enough bodies into the audience to make it look crowded, and not about ensuring that his supporters could keep their weapons before they marched to the Capitol. The claim that Trump knew his supporters were armed was legally damaging; it meant he knew the risk when he riled them up further about Mike Pence. But that’s not how Hutchinson spun it and it was testimony rooted in what she said in Passantino’s presence.

A reader might expect some assessment of Loudermilk’s claims in an article that boasts, as the headline of this does, that “Republicans Map a Case Against Liz Cheney.” No they didn’t. They floated a number of flimsy claims that don’t amount to a crime. You’re reporters. Act like it. Make that clear (as Philip Bump did here), rather than pretending Loudermilk’s claims aren’t mere whitewash.

The report neither links nor shows much understanding of the report itself. Even where it quotes lawyers about the viability of the charges, it doesn’t mention (for example) that the Jack Smith investigation resulted in a new Speech and Debate opinion that would apply to Cheney’s actions.

The real sin with the four-paragraph description of Loudermilk’s case, however, is one closely tied to Maggie’s own undisclosed role in it. NYT claims that Passantino was merely a former Trump White House Counsel. That’s not the issue. The issue, which goes to the core of the dispute and the reason Hutchinson replaced him, is that he was paid by entities associated with Trump, and Hutchinson came to believe he represented Trump’s interests over her own.

Loudermilk packages up as a crime actions Cheney took to give Hutchinson confidence her attorney was representing her interests, not Trump’s. Loudermilk packages up as a crime Hutchinson’s effort to avoid what even Passantino depicted as a risk of a contempt referral.

When Passantino told Hutchinson that it was okay for him to share information against her wishes because, “Maggie’s friendly to us,” was he also expecting that Maggie might misrepresent his role in all this (and leave his name unmentioned)?

That’s why you disclose such things.

The rest of this column (NYT bills it as analysis and claims the reporters who wrote it have “deep experience in the subject,” which is one way you might describe involvement in the story you’re telling) focuses on describing how delivering this report after Trump’s public demands, “reliev[es] Mr. Trump of the potentially fraught step of explicitly ordering the inquiry himself.”

A “friendly to us” reporter treats Trump’s word games as if they absolve him of responsibility.

¶¶4-14 describe Trump’s contradictory claims, including an uncorrected quote from Trump’s spox that “the nation’s ‘system of justice must be fixed and due process must be restored for all Americans.'”

¶¶15-23 describe Trump’s efforts to gin up investigations into his adversaries in his first term and going forward. The section includes multiple grossly misleading claims. First, it falsely insinuates that Trump never got the investigation of Hillary he demanded.

During his first presidential campaign, he often joined crowds at his rallies in chanting, “Lock her up!” — a reference to his opponent Hillary Clinton, whom he and other Republicans believed should have been investigated for using a private email server while she was secretary of state. After he won that election, however, Mr. Trump appeared to soften his stance, telling The New York Times editorial board that he did not want to “hurt the Clintons.”

But Mr. Trump, facing a special counsel investigation of his own, changed his mind again in 2018, telling his White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate Mrs. Clinton.

[snip]

While the White House counsel ultimately declined to approve his plans to investigate Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump made clear on social media during his years in office that he believed various people should be prosecuted.

NYT simply ignores the Clinton Foundation investigation predicated in significant part on Bannon-associated oppo research that (as NYT reported) continued throughout Trump’s first term.

More problematic, given the suggestion that someone stopped Trump from getting a Special Counsel investigation into Hillary, it ignores that Special Counsel John Durham not only insinuated two false statement indictments against people associated with Hillary — both of which ended in acquittal — were conspiracies, but fabricated a claim about Hillary to which he dedicated an 18-page section in his final report.

NYT goes onto to — again — falsely suggest that Trump never got a special counsel investigation into Joe Biden.

Mr. Trump has called for Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal cases against him last year, to be “thrown out of the country.” And after he was arraigned on the first of Mr. Smith’s indictments, he said that, as president, he would appoint “a real special prosecutor” to “go after” President Biden and his family. (He has since backed away from his position on specifically investigating the Bidens.)

NYT’s “friendly” journalists would have you to believe they are ignorant that:

  • Trump extorted Ukraine for dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden
  • During Trump’s first impeachment, his personal attorney solicited such dirt from known Russian agents
  • Bill Barr set up a side channel via which Rudy could share that dirt obtained from Russian agents and others
  • Somehow, an FBI informant willing to frame Joe Biden came to share a claim that Mykola Zlochevsky bribed Biden that got laundered to the Biden investigation via that side channel
  • Trump spoke directly to both Barr and Jeffrey Rosen about the investigation into the Bidens
  • After David Weiss announced a plea deal with Hunter Biden, Trump attacked Weiss, contributing to threats against Weiss’ family
  • After Barr made public representations about the false bribery allegation, Weiss reneged on Hunter’s plea deal and obtained Special Counsel status and chased the bribery allegation, only to discover it was false

Trump already got his Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden, and just in time for election season. And while it flopped when Weiss discovered Scott Brady’s vetting failed to find obvious problems with the bribery claim, it nevertheless led to felony charges against Hunter and a humiliating trial in June.

Suggesting Trump didn’t get a Special Counsel to investigate the Bidens is propaganda, just as suggesting he didn’t get one to pursue Hillary is.

But I guess that’s what Trump’s people know they’ll get when they work with a journalist “friendly to us.”

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David Weiss’ Rush Job on Alexander Smirnov’s Sentencing

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As I noted in an update to this post, Alexander Smirnov, the FBI informant who attempted to frame Joe Biden with bribery in 2020 as part of Bill Barr’s side channel for dirt on Hunter Biden, has pled guilty.

In his plea deal, Smirnov admitted,

The events Defendant first reported to the Handler in June 2020 were fabrications. In truth and fact. Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016 — in other words, when Public Official 1 could not engage in any official act to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office. Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.

Yesterday, Judge Otis Wright accepted Smirnov’s plea.

I’ll have a more substantive post about how David Weiss, along with an absolutely supine media, appears to have buried the frame job to which he was a witness.

For now, I want to point to a notable feature of the plea: the timing of it. One of the terms of the deal was that Smirnov agree to be sentenced within 30 days of his plea colloquy, but not before January 8.

3. Defendant agrees to:

a. At the earliest opportunity requested by the SCO-W and provided by the Court, appear and plead guilty to:

i. Count Two of the indictment in United States v. Alexander Smirnov, 2:24-CR-00091-ODW, which charges defendant with causing the creation of a false and fictitious record in a federal investigation, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1519 (hereafter the “obstruction of justice indictment”).

ii. Counts One, Five and Eight, of the indictment in United States v Alexander Smirnov, 2:24-CR-00702-ODW, which charges the defendant with tax evasion for tax years 2020, 2021 and 2022, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7201 (hereafter the “tax evasion indictment”).

b. Request that the Court sentence the defendant within 30 days of entry of the entry of his guilty pleas, but not sooner than January 8,2025

In yesterday’s plea, Judge Wright set that schedule in motion.

The Court refers the defendant to the Probation Office for the preparation of an EXPEDITED presentence report and continues the matter to January 8, 2025 at 10:30 a.m., for sentencing. Position papers are due 2 weeks before the sentencing. If the papers are NOT submitted in time, they will not be considered.

All dates other than the sentencing hearing date are vacated as to this defendant.

Counsel are notified that Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 32(b)(6)(B) requires the parties to notify the Probation Officer, and each other, of any objections to the Presentence Report within fourteen (14) days of receipt. Alternatively, the Court will permit counsel to file such objections no later than twenty-one (21) days before Sentencing. The Court construes “objections” to include departure arguments. Requests for continuances shall be filed or requested no later than twenty-one (21) days before Sentencing. Strict compliance with the above is mandatory because untimely filings impede the abilities of the Probation Office and of the Court to prepare for Sentencing. Failure to meet these deadlines is grounds for sanctions. [bold original]

It’s hard to convey how impossibly aggressive this timeline is. Three months to sentencing is more common than 23 days. After Hunter pled guilty on September, for example, his sentencing was set for December 16, more than three months in the future.

As the paragraph above notes, the only way the parties could even dispute anything in the presentence report (one was drafted for Smirnov’s detention fights, but a PSR would need to test the sentencing guidelines prosecutors adopted for the plea, which recommends 48 to 72 months in prison), would be to object tomorrow. And the two sides have just over a week to get their sentencing guidelines in.

This entire plea was an effort to get Smirnov to be sentenced on (but not before) January 8.

I’m not sure what leverage prosecutors used to get Smirnov to agree to this schedule; it’s not like the 4-year proposed sentence is that generous.

Perhaps Smirnov wants what prosecutors are likely pursuing: the opportunity for prosecutors to write a very damning closing Special Counsel report before Weiss gets fired, either by Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Perhaps this is a bid to harm Joe Biden while he remains President, for depriving prosecutors of the glee of sentencing his son.

We’ll know soon enough.

Update: There’s one more reason why this rush to, uh, judgment is so curious. As noted, the plea included a fairly stiff 48-72 month sentence.

18. Defendant and the SCO-W agree that the base offense level for Count Two in the obstruction indictment is 14, pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 2J1.2(a)(2) and the base offense level for Counts One, Five and Eight is 20, pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 2T4.1(H). Defendant and the SCO-W reserve the right to argue that additional specific offense characteristics, adjustments, and departures under the Sentencing Guidelines are appropriate.

19. Defendant and the SCO-W agree that, taking into account the factors listed in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(l)-(7) and the relevant sentencing guideline factors, an appropriate disposition of this case is that the Court impose a sentence of: no less than 48 months and no greater than 72 months’ imprisonment; 1 year supervised release with conditions to be fixed by the Court; $400 special assessment; $675,502 restitution and no fine. The parties also agree that the defendant is entitled to credit in both Cr. Nos. 24- 91 and 24-702 for the period of his pretrial detention since the day of his arrest and that credits that the Bureau of Prisons may allow under 18 U.S.C. § 3585(b)) may be credited against this stipulated sentence, including credit under Sentencing Guideline § 5G1.3

But according to the sentencing table, the base assessment for Smirnov’s false statement of 14 would result in a range of 15-21 months (though those ranges are almost never actually applied for obstruction). And the 20 base assessment for Smirnov’s tax evasion (for three years, as compared to Hunter’s one) would be 33-41 months, assuming they were both applied with a no criminal history category.

Those add up to 48 to 62 months, not 48 to 72 months.

No defendant would agree to these terms before a tough judge (as Otis Wright is), unless he were certain that he’d soon be pardoned. There’s not even language stipulating how much credit Smirnov would get for pleading guilty (usually 2-3 points, which might bring the range down to 49 months).

This plea deal is designed to result in a wildly overinflated sentence (as it happens, for crimes equivalent to those that Hunter Biden was convicted of), all scheduled before Joe Biden leaves office.

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Kash Patel Also Lied about Trump’s Personalization of US Intelligence

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First Mother Jones and then NYT had stories this week laying out a bunch of false claims that Kash Patel made about his experience at DOJ.

The headline lie in both is that, in his Government Gangsters book and interviews since, Kash lied about how significant a role he played in the Benghazi investigation, as MoJo lays out here.

“I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, DC,” Patel writes.

Several FBI and Justice Department officials who worked the Benghazi case say this description is an exaggeration. Asked about Patel’s characterization, a former FBI special agent who was on that investigation for years exclaimed, “Oh my god, no. Not on that case. Not on Benghazi.”

[snip]

This former agent said that the counterterrorism section had a small role in the Benghazi probe. Primarily, the FBI and the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, handled the case. “I don’t recall Patel having any influence on it,” he said. He recounted one meeting during the investigation that Patel attended in which Patel was not taken seriously by the main attorneys on the investigation. “The issue was whether or not we had the information needed to make a charge,” the former agent said. “He wasn’t a very experienced attorney and was dismissed by some of the attorneys at the table. The message was, we’re not paying attention to you.”

NYT adds a second, perhaps more important reason why Kash’s lies matter: Because he lied in an attempt to claim Democrats went soft on terrorism.

“Despite the fact that we had reams of evidence against dozens of terrorists in the Benghazi attack, Eric Holder’s Justice Department decided to only prosecute one of the attackers.”
— “Government Gangsters”

“I remember this meeting with then-A.G. Holder. And we had a deck of like 19 guys we wanted to prosecute. You know, JSOC had them rolled up and we wanted to get them all. They killed four Americans. You know, it’s a legit terrorist attack. And the basic general response from the F.B.I. and D.O.J. leadership was ‘it’s only politically convenient to get one guy.’”
— “The Shawn Ryan Show”

Mr. Patel’s statements suggest that the Justice Department under the Obama administration decided to initiate criminal proceedings against only one of the attackers, Mr. Khattala.

But as early as late 2013, the department had already filed sealed complaints against about a dozen militants, officials said at the time. Criminal complaints initiate prosecutions, but are often kept under seal if the charged person remains at large.

And prosecutors filed more secret complaints as the investigation identified additional suspects. A complaint filed against a Libyan man, Mustafa al-Imam, in May 2015, for example, became public only after his capture in 2017. (He was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to more than 19 years in prison.)

Other Benghazi suspects have since died.

Mr. Patel’s statement that the military had already “rolled up” as many as 19 attackers implied that they were already in American custody, raising the seemingly inexplicable question of why they did not get sent to trial.

In fact, to date, only Mr. Khatalla and Mr. al-Imam have been tried because the military has not captured any others — including on Mr. Patel’s watch as the Trump White House’s senior director for counterterrorism.

Capturing a specific person in a war-torn country where the military has scant ground presence is costly, risky and difficult. The operation to find and grab Mr. Khatalla required months of complex planning, including recruiting an informant to befriend and then lure Mr. Khattala to an oceanside villa, where an F.B.I. agent and American commandoes captured him and took him to an American warship waiting off the coast.

These fact checks will make for some interesting questions at Kash’s confirmation hearing. With some unspecified exceptions, these stories are primarily sourced to former officials:

  • Former agent
  • Former official in counterterrorism section
  • Andy McCabe
  • A former FBI agent who worked for years on the Uganda investigation
  • Robert D’Amico, a former F.B.I. agent
  • Public documents and interviews with several current and former law enforcement officials

That has the upside of allowing people to talk without fear. It means these people are no longer inside the bureaucracy, able to push back from within.

In any case, none of this will prevent Kash from being confirmed. Like Kash, John Ratcliffe fluffed his counterterrorism experience, in Ratcliffe’s case, to get elected. That led Trump to ditch his nomination a first time, but not in 2020 when he was confirmed on a largely partyline vote; the second vote was successful in significant part because then Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, who was being babysat by Kash, was such a shitshow that Ratcliffe was a less-awful alternative.

But Kash has lied about more than his own inexperience. As NYT noted, he also likes to lie for partisan gain. That’s how he has convinced Republicans to support his nomination.

It’s a third kind of lie that hasn’t factored much in discussions of his tenure at FBI. Kash Patel has been absolutely central to Trump’s efforts to personalize intelligence obtained by US officials. And there is abundant reason to believe he lied about that, at least publicly, when he claimed, in May 2022, that Trump had declassified all the documents found at Mar-a-Lago. There’s a bunch about Kash’s role in the classified documents investigation — for example, why Kash and John Solomon suddenly got status as Trump’s representatives to the archives when prosecutors asked for surveillance video, or what Kash told prosecutors in November 2022 when he sat for immunized testimony — that is not yet public.

But it may become public, possibly as early as this week and presumably well before his confirmation hearing. Indeed, if (for example) one of the things the FBI found during the August 8, 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago but did not charge was some version of the Crossfire Hurricane binder, that may show up in Jack Smith’s closing report.

Another thing that might show up in Jack Smith’s report is what someone whose potty mouth resembles that of Eric Herschmann (person 16 here) had to say, in an interview days before Kash testified, about the claims that Trump “declassified everything” made by some “unhinged” person who exactly matches Kash (person 24).

As MoJo and NYT lay out, Kash Patel has lied to inflate his own resumé. He has lied to attack Democrats. According to Olivia Troye (whom Kash did not sue after threatening to do so).

But he was also a key player in Trump’s effort to take home classified documents and put them to his own personal use.

That, too, is unlikely to give Republican Senators pause before putting him in charge of FBI’s signals collection (often with NSA involvement) and informant programs. But it is likely to be far more important than fluffing his resumé going forward.

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If an Informant Narcs on a Riot But No FBI Agent Asks about It, Did It Really Happen?

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Way at the back of the DOJ IG Report on January 6 showing that there were roughly 26 informants present at the attack, only three of whom had been tasked with telling their handlers what was going down, is the FBI response.

Here’s the signature block.

These are normally signed. For example, the report on subpoenas to Congress and journalists was signed by Brad Weinsheimer, the top career official at DOJ.

But on the day Chris Wray announced his upcoming departure, no one at FBI wanted to take responsibility for their response.

The response disputes a key finding of the Report: DOJ IG concludes (after a close review of emails that went out) that no one bothered to ask field offices if their informants knew anything about the event.

[T]he FBI did not take a step that could have helped the FBI and its law enforcement partners with their preparations in advance of January 6. Specifically, the FBI did not canvass its field offices in advance of January 6, 2021, to identify any intelligence, including CHS reporting, about potential threats to the January 6 Electoral Certification. Several FBI officials told the OIG that it is common practice for the FBI to ask field offices to canvass their sources for information—in advance of a large event, such as the Inauguration, the Super Bowl, or other events with significant attendance and to report that information to the requesting field office, which, in this instance, would have been the WFO. FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, who was Associate Deputy Director at the time, described the lack of a canvass prior to January 6 as a “basic step that was missed,”

The FBI, however, says,

[T]he FBI continues to disagree with certain of the factual assertions in the Report regarding the manner of specific steps, and the scope of the canvas undertaken by the FBI in advance of January 6, 2021, a time period during which the Report recognizes as including multiple field offices providing information in response to direction from Washington Field Office and FBI Headquarters.

Among the things that an FBI informant knew but — not having been asked by his or her handler — did not report until after the riot? That the informant reported on the meeting between Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio in a parking garage.

During the course of the FBI’s January 6 investigation, the FBI learned that on the night of January 5 the CHS was in contact with Tarrio and reported on a meeting with Tarrio and Rhodes, which became a subject matter of the Tarrio prosecution

An earlier report from this informant, claiming 100 Proud Boys would make the trip and they were beginning to get cranky, did get filed in DC on January 4. But not the detail that Stewie and Enrique were in cahoots — a meeting that remains unexplained to this day, a piece of intelligence that might have led to a different approach to policing the militias or the Trump associates they had in common, people like Roger Stone and Alex Jones.

The FBI also didn’t share another informant’s tips about Rhodes’ plans to travel to DC for January 6.

On December 15, the Field Office 1 CHS reported to the Field Office 1 Handling Special Agent and the Field Office 1 RA 1 Special Agent that Rhodes intended to travel to DC for the events of January 6. This was the first time the Field Office 4 CHS provided reporting that specifically referenced January 6. According to the FD-1023 documenting this contact, the Field Office 1 CHS reported that Rhodes had been “trying to attract Oath Keepers who are current law enforcement members to travel for events on that day so they can carry concealed firearms legally.” In addition, the FD-1023 stated, “Rhodes has made recent public statements suggesting Oath Keepers and the militia can be called up on [sic] to assist the current president to stay in office and resist perceived deep state enemies.” The Field Office 1 CHS reported that the CHS “[doesn’t know of] specific plans by Rhodes or any of his associates to instigate any acts of violence,” but was “very concerned that extremist members of Oath Keepers or other groups may become involved in unplanned violent activity on January 6.

This information, including that Rhodes was planning to travel to DC for January 6, was recorded in Field Office 1 case files on December 22 but was not emailed or otherwise provided to WFO. The Field Office 1 handling agent told the OIG that the Field Office 1 RA 1 Special Agent, as the assessment’s case agent, took the lead in communicating with WFO and that she may have sat in on conference calls with WFO, but she did not initiate any contact with WFO.

[snip]

The Field Office 1 RA 1 Special Agent told the OIG that even though this source reporting was properly documented and was not “dynamic” information, “this was one where I kick myself every day” for not emailing a copy of the reporting to WFO and DTOS. The Field Office 1 RA 1 Special Agent said that given that Rhodes had been present for the MAGA I and MAGA II election protests and was so visible about his objections to the election results, and given Field Office 1’s many communications with DTOS and WFO about Rhodes, he would have expected DTOS and WFO to be made aware that Rhodes was planning to be in DC on January 6.

We determined that the last reporting from the Field Office 1 CHS before January 6 was on January 4 when the Field Office 1 CHS told the Field Office 1 handling agent that the Oath Keepers “contingent headed to DC is 200+ strong.” The FD-1023 includes the statement that the “CHS did not have anything more detailed to provide.” This reporting also was not provided to WFO or filed in any WFO case file. The Field Office 1 CHS did not travel to DC for the events of January 6.

The report is, nevertheless, unbelievably soft on the FBI, which built and sustained a phone dragnet for fourteen years after 9/11 because the FBI missed one phone call involving Osama bin Laden. Here, FBI’s informants gave it multiple warnings about plans men since convicted of sedition had on January 6. And a number of those warnings weren’t shared.

Instead of hammering the FBI for missing such leads from its informants, the report concluded that the FBI didn’t miss anything “critical” by failing to call on its extensive informant network to find out what they knew.

Although WFO and DTOS did not direct field offices to canvass their CHSs in advance of January 6, our review of documented CHS reporting in FBI field offices as of January 6 did not identify any potentially critical intelligence related to a possible attack on the Capitol on January 6 that had not been provided to law enforcement stakeholders prior to January 6. For example, the FBI had received CHS reporting about online threats to the Electoral Certification that included maps of the Congressional tunnels. WFO distributed this intelligence through the established January 6 coordination mechanisms. Moreover, we found that the USCP, the MPD, the USPP, DHS, and the Supreme Court Police all learned about similar intelligence in advance of January 6 through their own intelligence gathering mechanisms and other established coordination efforts. 95 Additionally, our review of information in the FBI’s possession as of January 6, in addition to the then-documented CHS reporting, did not identify any potentially critical intelligence that had not been provided to, or was not otherwise known to, law enforcement stakeholders prior to January 6. We also took note of the fact that the extensive previous oversight (by Congress, the GAO, and other Inspectors General) of the events of January 6, including preparation by law enforcement in advance of January 6, did not identify potentially critical intelligence that was not shared by the FBI in advance of January 6. [my emphasis]

This applies a wildly different standard for white seditionists than it did, for decades, for Muslim men.

And yet, having been treated with an incredibly lax standard, the FBI still refuses to own up to their January 6 failures.

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The Lessons of Zero Accountability for a Kash Patel Bureau

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This is not your Chris Wray resignation post.

That’ll come later.

This post is a lessons learned about how Republicans — not just at FBI — exploited efforts to share fabricated evidence about Hunter Biden with Wray’s FBI.

In this post, I laid out the five different examples of fabricated evidence FBI or DOJ dealt with in the Hunter Biden case, along with four more instances where we can’t assess the rat-fuckery.

  1. After sharing a debunked Fox News meme, Alexander Smirnov makes false claims of bribery
  2. Derek Hines narratively plants a crack pipe in Wilmington
  3. The gun shop also lied on the gun form
  4. Tony Bobulinski[‘s FBI report] claims he saw a diamond pass hands
  5. Gal Luft claims Joe Biden met directly with CEFC Chairman Ye in 2016
  • FBI enthusiastically welcomes “The Economist’s” claims
  • The Scott Brady side channel launders dirt Rudy Giuliani obtained from Russian agents
  • FBI makes Peter Schweizer their special Hunter Biden informant
  • Judge Maryellen Noreika admits a laptop that has never been indexed

I argued that several examples of that fabricated evidence directly harmed Hunter Biden’s due process. The pressure to chase Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to frame Joe Biden with bribery seems to have played a significant role in the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal and the ratcheting up of charges afterwards. At least as early as Hunter’s bid to defeat a vindictive prosecution claim, AUSA Derek Hines misrepresented Hunter’s own memoir to claim the book helped prove Hunter was doing drugs when he owned a gun, a misrepresentation Hines sustained before the jury that convicted Hunter. While evidence that others lied on gun purchase forms, as the gun shop owner had done by doctoring the very gun form on which Hunter was convicted of lying, is routinely excluded at trials, doing so in this case prevented Hunter from arguing his lie was not material.

Fabricated evidence was allowed to infringe on the due process rights of the son of the President. And the dick pic sniffing media didn’t make a squeak.

But in other of the attempts to politicize Hunter’s case that I laid out, things worked the way it is supposed to. Other examples of fabricated or potentially fabricated evidence were excluded by diligent prosecutors or FBI agents. AUSA Lesley Wolf attempted to keep dirt funneled from Russian spies, Smirnov, and Rudy Giuliani through the Brady side channel from infecting the case. At the request of case agents, FBI supervisory agent Tim Thibault shut down Peter Schweizer as an informant … again, out of an interest to preserve the integrity of the case. Someone in that same vicinity deemed Tony Bobulinski’s claims to be suspect, so investigators didn’t rely on his testimony, but continued to investigate Hunter’s payments from CEFC via other means.

But this is the important lesson, especially going forward: those efforts to maintain the integrity of the investigation were punished, severely. House Republicans (assisted by the disgruntled IRS Agents, in the case of Wolf), treated Wolf and Thibault like villains, eliciting threats against them and leading to their retirement. Because they attempted to prevent the case against Hunter from being deliberately politicized, Trump’s allies in the House made them pariahs and chased them out of government.

This is what already happened to people who tried to uphold rule of law. This is what will happen more going forward. Congress will work in tandem with a politicized DOJ to ensure that the good guys get targeted and chased out.

Often, House Republicans efforts to demonize people who had upheld the integrity of evidence relied on “whistleblowers” who (with just a few exceptions) had themselves been caught politicizing law enforcement themselves, and to retaliate, ran to Jim Jordan to complain.

Aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel funded some of these people telling stories to undermine FBI’s efforts to uphold its integrity.

That’s not the only role the House GOP played in this process.

Congressman like Jim Jordan and James Comer are protected by Speech and Debate even if they lie. And they did lie — or perhaps were too stupid to realize the claims they made were baseless. They lied on right wing propaganda outlets. They lied in reports and hearings.

Whereas the legal prosecution against Hunter generally relied on actual facts (even if Derek Hines moved them around to where he wanted them to be), the House did not. They platformed Bobulinski (and then thought better of it), they championed Luft and Smirnov (and then thought better of it), they championed the Brady side channel. They made Matt Taibbi’s mistaken misrepresentations about the FBI a repeat feature. They turned loan repayments and daily check-in calls into international spy scandals. They guaranteed that the claims discarded by the Bureau because they didn’t meet evidentiary standards would be magnified in the public sphere.

In the Republican House, you don’t need facts to make a case in the court of public opinion. And such false claims played a key role in persecuting even the people who had done nothing more than exercise their First Amendment rights, people like disinformation experts and former spooks honestly expressing concerns about Russian influence operations.

As Kash Patel likely assumes control over an agency that is supposed to be bound by facts — but that even under Wray had begun to be corrupted by Trump’s politicization — remember how Congress has served as a annex to the presumptively evidence-bound investigations as to matters of law, an annex spun free of such bounds. Even before Patel dismantles those bounds, there’s always the alternative of having the loudmouths in Congress do Trump’s dirty work.

Importantly, the loudmouths can do so only as long as a supine press plays along.

But play along they have.

With Hunter Biden, two things facilitated that. For the political and DOJ beat journalists, the existence of the laptop seemingly melted their brain, making them incapable of seeing details through the dick pics.

But for Hill journalists, process was the hook. Jordan and Comer guaranteed breathless coverage by delivering bullshit disguised as events that Hill journalists treated as normal — a stern letter, a subpoena (issued, at first, without the authority to enforce it, which went widely unnoticed and unreported), a formal impeachment inquiry. Never mind that the thing underlying those events was a naked political stunt. Few ever got around to stepping back and observing that the House GOP blew almost their entire two year majority on making enemies. Few ever reported that the House GOP had spent millions of taxpayer dollars, not in paying the bills or funding highways, but in creating enemies. And by treating that process as normal legislative process, journalists normalized it all.

As we move forward to an even more politicized DOJ, keep in mind that with this kind of symbiosis already in place, with the House GOP already prepared to blow up stuff that gets thrown out by the FBI, much of Patel’s work — chasing out honest people trying to protect the integrity of investigations, manufacturing more bullshit claims — will be done for him.

There is one thing that Kash can and undoubtedly will do: recruit more allies — people like Schweizer, or the Proud Boys Bill Barr deputized to try to turn Antifa into a thing — to inform against Republican adversaries. With Pam Bondi’s help, Kash can trade immunity for fabricated claims against his targets, just as Rudy Giuliani was selling in search of dirt on Hunter Biden.

Otherwise, though, Kash can instead focus on ensuring that none of Trump’s people face consequences for their actions.

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The Myths of Bluebeard and Orangeskin

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I have been tamping down my disgust for the last four weeks, just as many of you have.

I’m completely disgusted with talking head punditry blaming everyone but themselves, including Democrats and Democratic Party-wannabes who decided after the election that it was a good time to kick minority groups and blame them, or turned stupid before the camera and insist the barrier to winning was something facts say it wasn’t.

But I have a specially level of revulsion allocated for – brace yourself, it’s not about some of you personally – white women.

53% of white American women have voted for Donald the adjudicated rapist Trump not once, not twice, but three fucking times – in 2016, in 2020, and yet again in 2024.

For some it was about financial issues like taxes – I earned this, I’ve got mine, fuck you, they voted, wanting Trump to ensure their rank in the economic pecking order was conserved.

For others it was about race and/or misogyny. Internalized oppression makes these voters believe they are somehow exempt from the oppression when they are only a future victim.

In a handful of states it’s clear reproductive rights were important to this bloc of voters because they voted against abortion restrictions. And yet they still voted for Trump.

Trump’s claims that he would leave abortion to states to decide apparently convinced them they could have things both ways. They could belong to the cult of Trump and white patriarchal supremacy and still retain their reproductive rights.

What poppycock. Trump had already made the biggest move possible to eliminate their rights at federal level by ensuring the Roberts’ Supreme Court would undermine them.

It’s infuriating and yet somehow predictable.

This cognitive dissonance in women is the stuff of myth, the kind of behavior we’ve been warned about in stories nearly a millennia old.

We’re watching once again the unfolding myth of Bluebeard.

~ ~ ~

Here’s the tl;dr version of the Bluebeard myth from Simple Wikipedia:

A rich man has a blue beard which frightens young women. He has been married several times but no one knows what has happened to his wives. He woos two young sisters in the neighborhood but neither are inclined to consider marriage. He treats them to a lavish time in his country house. The younger sister decides to marry him. Shortly after the wedding (and before he travels to a far land on business), Bluebeard gives his wife the keys to his house. One key opens a door to a distant room. He forbids her to enter this room. He leaves and his wife opens the door to the forbidden room. Here she finds Bluebeard’s former wives, all dead and lying on a floor covered with blood. She drops the key. It is magic and becomes stained with blood that cannot be washed away. Bluebeard returns. He discovers the blood-stained key and knows his wife has disobeyed his order. He tells her she will take her place among the dead. He grants her a few minutes to pray. She calls her sister Anne and asks her to go to the top of the tower to see if her brothers are on the road. After several tense moments, Anne reports seeing the men approaching. Bluebeard raises a cutlass to decapitate his wife. Her brothers burst into the room. They kill Bluebeard. Their sister is safe.

I’m not going to write out the full Bluebeard myth here. I’m going to trust readers to do their homework reading the original, more complex Wikipedia entry and possibly the Charles Perrault version available for free at Project Gutenberg.

There are many versions of this myth across languages, countries, and cultures. It has been adapted in contemporary culture repeatedly. In other words, humans have been telling a story in which the same familiar elements have occurred because humans universally find it relatable across history and now.

We’ve even begun discussion of universal liberation and the enslavement of fully-conscious AI “women” to serve Bluebeardian men, as in writer/director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015).

It should not be difficult to see the parallels between Bluebeard and Trump – the multiple silenced wives, the naïve woman/women who yield to promises of wealth and pleasure, the unpleasantness of discovering the truth beneath the promises, the mortal price to be paid.

Nor should it be difficult to see the meta layer of this myth, where wealthy men feel entitled to demand subordination by women including the suppression of knowledge and therefore consent. To slip this leash is to suffer loss unless rescued at the last moment. That rescue is the only thing separating the bride from the corpses of sister brides.

The biggest single variant between versions of the Bluebeard myth is the means of rescue. A sister or sisters, brother or brothers, or a mother figure steps in at the very last moment to save the final girl.

Unfortunately, the parallel here is that they believe naively they will always be the lucky final girl; in truth we as societal siblings are always the rescuers.

We did a shit job three elections in a row, mostly because we assumed the victim(s) were fully informed and aware of the danger, failing to reach them at a level mythic stories connect. Many were fully informed and blithely voted for Trump because he said he would leave reproductive rights to the states.

Like the last bride in Bluebeard’s myth, they may have been amply informed of the manifold deaths of previous wives yet plunged ahead into marriage believing they were somehow immune.

What if the victim(s) refuse efforts to save them?

~ ~ ~

Three women married Trump, two of whom should have known better. More women were involved with him consensually; they, too should have known better.

Note status of consent here – some girls and women were forced to be involved with Trump without their consent, from minors at the Miss Teen USA pageant to E. Jean Carroll. Don’t confuse these persons with the former. Many of them fought in some way not to be involved with Trump, informing more women about his nature as they did so, clawing back against his efforts to stuff them in his bloody oubliette by way of SLAPP suits and other forms of legal harassment.

The women who voted for Trump three times are among those who expressed their consent at the ballot box. They agreed to what he offered them as a candidate.

Like the younger sister who heard all the rumors about Bluebeard, who may have been warned by mother and sisters against him, they went ahead and consented to Trump as president.

The only thing which gave Bluebeard’s final wife pause was her own discovery in the personal pursuit of information. In many versions of the myth she is merely overwhelmed by her own curiosity about the forbidden. In other versions she is upset about being denied access to what is hers by rights as his wife. Whatever it is that drives her, it is she who must put the key into the lock, she who makes the discovery of the many corpses, she who in terror drops the key and eventually exposes her intransigence to Bluebeard.

It is she who must be threatened for her failure to obey and she who must face the intense fear of death.

She will seek her ready rescuers only after she has been confronted with the reality of Bluebeard’s immense monstrousness and his intent to kill her.

In short, the 53% of white women who voted for Trump will only realize the enormity of their mistake when he threatens them personally at immense personal cost.

They will ask us for help once they are fully aware of the immediate danger to themselves and loved ones – not before then.

Or as Adrian Bott as @Cavalorn tweeted so elegantly on the dead bird app back in 2015,

‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

So very prescient that he used a woman as a face-eaten victim.

Until a substantive number of these 53% of white women voters actually lose their faces so to say, they will not reach out for aid.

~ ~ ~

You may be depressed now. You may already be angry. But you must be prepared for the day that last bride, the final girl, the blundering substantive number of white women Trump voters emerge from their privileged state of heedless unawareness – unwokeness, dare I say – holding out a bloody key of knowledge asking frantically to be saved.

Because you’re going to have to be ready to save her sorry stupid ass in order to save us all.

If this wasn’t true humans wouldn’t be telling this story over and over so many times in so many ways, both as a warning to the women who need to be informed, and as a reminder to the rescuers they will be needed if Bluebeard is to be stopped from taking yet more victims.

Furthermore, you need to prepare yourself to tell your children and grandchildren about the myth of Bluebeard.

Now with Orangeskin.

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Kash Patel’s Bullets

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Since Tim Miller posted it, I haven’t been able to stop looking at Kash Patel’s enemies list.

It’s not that Kash has an enemies list — though that’s an alarming accessory in an FBI nominee.

It’s the nature of the list, both the physical nature of it, but also its composition (the latter of which Philip Bump also discussed).

First, it’s dated — even more dated than it probably had to be for its September 2023 publication date. The most recent villain on the list may be Cassidy Hutchinson, who became a villain in June 2022. Jay Bratt, who became a personal villain to Kash when compelling his testimony in Trump’s stolen documents case no later than November 2022, is not on the list. Nina Jankowicz is on the list. She became a villain around the same time Hutchinson did: when the Biden Administration briefly tried to do something about disinformation until right wingers misrepresented some things she had said about Christopher Steele and the Hunter Biden laptop, which led her to resign and the effort to crash by July 2022. The description of James Baker as the former Deputy General Counsel of Twitter reflects Elon Musk’s firing of him for trying to maintain the privacy of records from Matt Taibbi et al; but Baker may be there as one of Kash’s Durham villains, because other Twitter File villains — most notably Yoel Roth — don’t appear on the list, nor any of the other disinformation experts who’ve been targeted non-stop since the Twitter Files.

Then there are the organizational characteristics. Hutchinson, like Michael Atkinson and Joe Biden, above, as well as Jim Comey, Crossfire Hurricane FBI Agent Curtis Heide, have bullets betraying some formatting problem, as if Kash added a bunch of people to an existing list. “Oh, and that Joe Biden guy! He’s a villain too!” as if he had to delay admitting that Biden was actually President (though Kamala Harris’ bullet is formatted like everyone else’s).

That’s not Kash’s most serious organizational problem. He claims the list is “alphabetical by last name.” But Joe Biden, with his funny bullet, comes after Stephen Boyd. Heide, another funny bullet, comes after Fiona Hill. Charles Kupperman comes after Loretta Lynch. And Alexander Vindman appears between Andrew Weissmann and Christopher Wray.

How are you going to systematically work through your enemies list if you can’t even alphabetize them properly?

Finally, Kash notes that his list is not exhaustive:

It does not include other corrupt actors of the first order such as … members of Fusion GPS or Perkins Coie…

But he’s wrong about that. The list includes Nellie Ohr primarily because she was an “Independent Contract [sic] for Fusion GPS.” And it includes Michael Sussmann as a “former partner at Perkins Coie.” The only other worthy villain for someone like Kash who had been at Perkins Coie — Republican nemesis Marc Elias — left Perkins Coie even before Sussmann did.

This list evinces a mind that struggles with basic structures, not an evil mastermind ready to hit the ground running.

That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.

The fact that this sloppily organized list is two years old suggests one of the problems with attempting to forestall Trump and Kash’s vengeance by pardoning the people on the existing enemies list. These are yesterday’s enemies, and Trump’s minions have no limit on their ability to find new ones.

Just yesterday, after all, Kash demonstrated the point. Jesse Binnall threatened to sue Olivia Troye for calling Kash a liar.

On December 2, 2024, you appeared as a live guest on MSNBC and made several false and defamatory statements about Mr. Patel. These comments include that Mr. Patel would “lie about intelligence” and would “lie about making things up on operations” to the point where Mr. Patel “put the lives of Navy Seals at risk when it came to Nigeria,” and that Mr. Patel was even misinforming Vice President Mike Pence.

This is a complete fabrication, and you know it is false by virtue of your former position in the White House.

Mark Zaid, who is already representing Troye in a lawsuit filed by Ric Grenell, has a fundraiser to support what is no doubt going to be booming business going ahead.

On the one hand, this demonstrates that Kash will simply add new enemies to an ever evolving mis-alphabetized list, targeting each new person who tells the truth about him.  Like the campaigns targeting disinformation that didn’t make Kash’s book, this assault on enemies is an assault on the truth.

Those not on a list focused on Crossfire Hurricane and Trump’s first impeachment are not safe.

Nor can criminal pardons protect targets (and in some ways would be counterproductive) in the face of efforts to harass critics, because these people will sue make-believe cows just to harass a critic.

At the same time, consider how stupid it is to target Troye in this way if you’re an aspiring J Edgar Hoover. In two months, Kash may well have the ability to target Troye with government sanction. Instead of waiting, Troye’s comments will benefit from the Streisand Effect. Since she stands by her claims, Troye may get more opportunities to explain how Kash lied to Mike Pence, to the press, and possibly even to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Plus, there are at least a few Republican Senators who likely know and trust Troye more than they do Kash, so he has added surface area for attack in his own confirmation process.

And if Kash tries to target Troye if and when he does have the power to do so legally, it’ll be an immediate red flag for judges that the FBI — the entire FBI — is not to be trusted.

Don’t get me wrong. If Kash can get confirmed, he’ll supervise 35,000 people, almost all of whom would be able to alphabetize his enemies list and a good chunk of whom would be able — even with FBI’s notoriously archaic computer systems — to automate them. That’s what they do. That’s the danger of putting a guy with an enemies list in charge of the Bureau.

But there’s so much about this list that betrays a guy obsessed with reliving his best moment, a guy who used Congress’ oversight infrastructure to trick the world into supplanting the real Russian investigation with the Steele dossier.

Back in his heyday, Kash’s Nunes memo served simply to project, to obscure the legitimate basis for the Russian investigation. Kash succeeded in telling the origin myth Trump needed from which he has spun all the polarization that followed.

But now, he’s just playing a frantic whack-a-mole, striking at anything or anyone that might speak the truth.

That’s incredibly dangerous. The arbitrary nature is, itself, part of the intended terror.

But it’s also the cry of a guy who doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.

Update: This description of Kash’s book (which I’m hoping to avoid reading) is utterly consistent with this enemies list.

But a truth starts to dawn as Patel unleashes on the FBI: He doesn’t know a lot about it. He hasn’t worked in it, experiencing it only at arms length as an aide of Nunes’s, and viewing it through a prism of deceit of his own choosing.

That is, Kash has to invent a Deep State, but it bears little resemblance to the real thing.

Update: After standing by her comments, Troye offers to testify at Kash’s confirmation hearing.

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Devlin Barrett Makes Shit Up about Hunter Biden, Again

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Because I want to address how we move forward when both law and journalism will increasingly fail to tell the truth, I want to address this weird 3-paragraph Devlin Barrett … um, blog post? … that NYT chose to publish earlier this week. Devlin picks a big ol’ straw man and carries it across the line for his right wing fans.

Here’s how it works:

  • Headline: Judge Scuppered Hunter Biden Plea Deal, Not Political Pressure
  • ¶1: President Biden blamed “political pressure” for the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal
  • ¶2: The plea deal fell apart in spectacular fashion [linking this article] because Judge Noreika rejected the structure of the deal
  • ¶3: The collapse of the plea deal because of its structure “is a far cry from the president’s suggestion that the deal for Hunter Biden to avoid prison time and a felony conviction collapsed because of political pressure”

Now, as a threshold matter, Devlin oversimplifies what happened in the plea hearing, which I reconstructed here. Two things happened and Maryellen Noreika had two concerns. Yes, there was the way the plea deal (which she had authority to reject) invoked the diversion agreement (which Probation refused to sign after having previously approved it, and which Noreika repeatedly complained she should get to approve but legally should not). Devlin’s right that that was an issue, but Noreika’s complaints extended to areas she had no authority, the scope of immunity the government offered.

But there was also the confusion about the scope covered by the agreement. And that confusion arose because, after David Weiss’ First AUSA had told Chris Clark on June 19 that, “there was not another open or pending investigation” into Hunter, Leo Wise asserted at the July 26 hearing that there was an ongoing investigation, one he later suggested might pertain to FARA.

Don’t take my word for this, though: Here’s what the linked article that Devlin pretends backs his argument says:

Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump appointee, repeatedly informed the two sides that she would be no “rubber stamp.” She picked apart the deal, exposing substantial disagreements over the extent of the immunity provision.

Mr. Clark said the deal indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals. Mr. Wise said it was far narrower — and suggested the government was still considering charges against Mr. Biden under laws regulating foreign lobbying.

Poor Devlin couldn’t even get the plea hearing right.

But the plea hearing is a straw man. Devlin gets there by misrepresenting what Joe Biden said about the prosecution.

Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. [1] Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. [2] Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.

[3] The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. [4] Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.

[5] No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough. [my brackets]

Biden made these assertions:

  1. A false statement on a gun form is not normally charged unless there are aggravating factors
  2. Addicts who fail to pay their taxes usually can resolve that civilly (note: This is the claim to which Mark Scarsi, with merit, objected, partly because Hunter waited months after he filed to actual pay his taxes, and partly because Hunter also pled guilty to evading his 2018 taxes, not just failing to pay)
  3. The charges only came about after Republicans instigated them to attack him
  4. A carefully negotiated plea deal unraveled and “a number of my political opponents in Congress [took] credit for bringing political pressure on the process”
  5. No reasonable person can doubt that Hunter was singled out [the comment to which Scarsi objected to without merit]

Joe Biden made absolutely no claim about why the plea deal unraveled in the hearing!! Devlin simply made that up. Rather, Biden observed factually that “a number of my political opponents in Congress [took] credit for bringing political pressure on the process.” [my emphasis]

The words, “political pressure,” are about Republicans claiming credit, not about what led David Weiss to renege on the earlier assurances there was no ongoing investigation or led Noreika to complain about the scope of the diversion immunity (it remains unanswered what led Weiss to renege and what led Noreika to complain about the scope, much less what led Weiss to refuse to fix any of the flaws Noreika pointed out, but to instead ratchet up the charges).

And Biden’s opponents did take credit.

James Comer took credit that same day. Jason Smith took credit when David Weiss got Special Counsel status. The disgruntled IRS agents claimed credit in … the very article Devlin linked.

“It appears that if it weren’t for the courageous actions of these whistle-blowers, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, Hunter Biden would never have been charged at all,” a team of lawyers for one of the I.R.S. agents said in a statement, adding that the initial agreement reflected preferential treatment.

Where Biden does say those same Republicans had a role in the case is in the charges being filed in the first place. “Several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them.”

The record is less certain on that claim. Hunter’s attorneys provided a bunch of evidence that Weiss equivocated throughout May and June 2023, as Republicans in Congress, Donald Trump, Bill Barr, and the disgruntled IRS agents claimed that prosecutors had stymied the investigation (a claim not backed by the very documents the IRS agents released).

But one place you might look to measure that claim is, again, the story Devlin claims backs his false claims. That story famously describes that Weiss told someone he didn’t want to bring any charges (which someone who might be Weiss “forcefully” denied).

Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)

It also describes, in a story about the pressure from House Republicans, how Weiss changed the terms he was willing to offer.

On Tuesday, May 23, after four days of silence, Ms. Wolf delivered unwelcome news. Mr. Weiss had revised what he wanted in the deal, now demanding that Mr. Biden plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes. It crossed a red line for Mr. Clark.

The article that Devlin links claiming it supports his incomplete representation of the plea hearing (the straw man Devlin uses to make false claims about what Biden said) actually supports both of Biden’s claims about political pressure: the pressure led to charges in the first place, and those who applied the pressure claimed credit for killing the plea deal.

All Devlin did with that link is prove that Biden, not Devlin, made claims that match the public record.

And yet NYT published his little blog post as if it — and not the reported article which it claims to rely on — were true.

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Judge Mark Scarsi’s Umbrage: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

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I think that Hunter Biden’s two prosecutions are gone. After he submitted notice of a pardon and David Weiss’ prosecutors complained, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued an order terminating all proceedings.

ORAL ORDER: Having reviewed the parties’ submissions (D.I. 272, 274, 276 ) and in the absence of binding precedent and whereas pursuant to the Executive Grant of Clemency signed by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. on December 1, 2024, Defendant Robert Hunter Biden has been pardoned for, inter alia, the offenses for which a jury rendered a verdict in this case (D.I. 275 ), IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that all proceedings in this case are hereby terminated. ORDERED by Judge Maryellen Noreika on 12/3/2024.

Judge Mark Scarsi … did something else. He issued a blistering opinion suggesting Hunter’s pardon was partly defective (because the President issued the pardon through the day he issued it, suggesting it attempted to grant four hours of prospective immunity), but that he would terminate the case once someone from the Executive Branch gave him a certified copy of the pardon. Mostly, though, Scarsi accused President Biden of impugning him personally and rewriting history by claiming that Hunter was prosecuted only because he was Joe’s son.

According to the President, “[n]o reasonable person who looks at the facts of [Mr. Biden’s] cases can reach any other conclusion than [Mr. Biden] was singled out only because he is [the President’s] son.” But two federal judges expressly rejected Mr. Biden’s arguments that the Government prosecuted Mr. Biden because of his familial relation to the President. (Order on Mots. to Dismiss 32–55); Mem. Opinion 6–19, United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-cr-00061-MN (D. Del. Apr. 12, 2024), ECF No. 99. And the President’s own Attorney General and Department of Justice personnel oversaw the investigation leading to the charges. In the President’s estimation, this legion of federal civil servants, the undersigned included, are unreasonable people.

In short, a press release is not a pardon. The Constitution provides the President with broad authority to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1, but nowhere does the Constitution give the President the authority to rewrite history.

This is why I would have preferred Biden not have pardoned his son — because I wanted these verdicts, including Scarsi and Noreika’s rulings that Hunter wasn’t selectively or vindictively prosecuted, to be appealed to judges less intemperate than Scarsi.

Not least because there are several problems with Scarsi’s rant.

First, Scarsi, Weiss’ prosecutors, and Noreika (in her original opinion) are all engaged in navel-gazing. All argued, to one degree or another, that this prosecution could not be political because Biden and his selected Attorney General oversaw it. There were enormous problems with that argument: the degree to which Biden’s adversary was permitted to elicit threats against the prosecutorial team, the unwise retention of David Weiss for a second term, the role that Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Joe Biden played in David Weiss’ decision to first obtain Special Counsel status and then ratchet up charges against Joe Biden’s son. But ultimately, prosecutors argued and judges adopted the claim that because Joe Biden was in charge, the prosecution could not have been political.

But since all that went down, John Roberts rewrote history and vested all the authority over prosecutions in the executive power of the President.

Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1

[snip]

The indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were “sham[s]” or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.

Under Roberts’ logic, if the President, exercising his executive authority at its zenith, deems this prosecution political, then it was.

Moreover, Scarsi wildly misrepresents the nature of Biden’s comment. The legal opinions that Scarsi cites address whether Hunter’s case met the very narrow legal definitions of selective or vindictive prosecution, as he himself laid out.

Proving selective prosecution “is particularly demanding.” Reno v. Am.-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 525 U.S. 471, 489 (1999). Because “[a] selectiveprosecution claim asks a court to exercise judicial power over a special province of the Executive,” “in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, courts presume that [prosecutors] have properly discharged their official duties.” Armstrong, 517 U.S. at 464 (internal quotation marks omitted).

[snip]

“Particularly when a vindictiveness claim pertains to pretrial charging decisions, the Supreme Court urges deference to the prosecutor. Deference is appropriate for pretrial charging decisions because, ‘in the course of preparing a case for trial, the prosecutor may uncover additional information that suggests a basis for further prosecution.’” United States v. Brown, 875 F.3d 1235, 1240 (9th Cir. 2017) (citation omitted) (quoting Goodwin, 457 U.S. at 381). “[J]ust as a prosecutor may forgo legitimate charges already brought in an effort to save the time and expense of trial, a prosecutor may file additional charges if an initial expectation that a defendant would plead guilty to lesser charges proves unfounded.” Goodwin, 457 U.S. at 380. Thus, “in the context of pretrial plea negotiations vindictiveness will not be presumed simply from the fact that a more severe charge followed on, or even resulted from, the defendant’s exercise of a right.” Gamez-Orduno, 235 F.3d at 462 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted).

Deference to the prosecutorial decision to bring charges, notwithstanding significant pretrial negotiations between the parties to avoid them, is warranted.

Of course, once you adopt Roberts’ logic, then if the President overrides the original prosecutorial judgment of prosecutors, then his view must hold sway. If President Biden says the decisions were unfair, then they were.

Sure. That’s wildly problematic. Welcome to Roberts’ Calvinball.

But as Barb McQuade laid out, whether a prosecutorial decision meets the very narrow definition of selective or vindictive prosecution and whether a prosecution was an unwise exercise of prosecutorial discretion are two different things.

I disagree with McQuade about whether there was evidence of selective or vindictive prosecution. After all, as I noted, Scarsi misrepresented what the record on the comparator of Roger Stone said. Again, that’s why I wanted these cases to be appealed.

But it is also the case that a whole series of events related to this prosecution — Trump’s demand for such an investigation from both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and publicly, DOJ’s laundering of dirt Trump’s personal lawyer obtained, including from a known Russian agent, into this case, efforts by Trump’s debate guest to introduce misleading evidence into this investigation, the way a key witness in the gun case leaked information to affect the 2020 election, and Bill Barr’s subsequent pressure for a prosecution — that were excluded from both judges’ rulings altogether. Both judges simply ignored that David Weiss reneged on his assurances to Hunter’s team that there was no ongoing investigation before he entered into the deal, a detail that was central to any vindictive prosecution analysis. Neither judge addressed how Alexander Smirnov’s alleged attempt to criminally frame Biden himself played into the prosecutorial decisions (I am not sure that was formally before Scarsi, though it was before Noreika).

So while it is a fact that two judges credited the arguments made by prosecutors whose claims Biden has now overridden on the selective and vindictive prosecution issue, it is also a fact that a great deal of evidence of politicization was excluded from all consideration. Biden’s judgment incorporated a great deal of things specifically and surgically excluded from the selective and vindictive prosecution analysis.

Finally, though, there are the ways that Scarsi himself rewrote history to get to his selective and vindictive prosecution decision.

As I laid out here, Scarsi made much of errors that Abbe Lowell made in his selective and vindictive prosecution argument. For example, after pointing out that Lowell misquoted coverage of David Weiss’ comments about threats elicited by political pressure on the case, Scarsi simply ignored the role of threats on prosecutorial decisions, because those “significant threats” were not publicly described as death threats. Importantly, as Noreika did in her opinion, after (correctly) catching Lowell misstating the timeline, Scarsi himself fiddled with the timeline so as to permit himself only to look at the prosecutorial decision in December 2023, not the decision to renege on the plea agreement in June and July 2023.

Scarsi’s treatment of this passage from Hunter’s motion deserves closer consideration:

Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to the tax misdemeanors, but when the plea deal was made public, the political backlash was forceful and immediate. Even before the Delaware court considered the plea deal on July 26, 2023, extremist Republicans were denouncing it as a “sweetheart deal,” accusing DOJ of misconduct, and using the excuse to interfere with the investigation.13 [2] Leaders of the House Judiciary, Oversight and Accountability, and Ways and Means Committees (“HJC,” “HOAC,” and “HWMC,” respectively) opened a joint investigation, and on June 23, HWMC Republicans publicly released closed-door testimony from the whistleblowers, who, in the words of Chairman Smith, “describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes.”14 Then, one day before Mr. Biden’s plea hearing, Mr. Smith tried to intervene [4] to file an amicus brief “in Aid of Plea Hearing,” in which he asked the court to “consider” the whistleblower testimony.15

13 Phillip Bailey, ‘Slap On The Wrist’: Donald Trump, Congressional Republicans Call Out Hunter Biden Plea Deal, USA Today (June 20, 2023), https://www.usatoday.com/.

14 Farnoush Amiri, GOP Releases Testimony Alleging DOJ Interference In Hunter Biden Tax Case, PBS (June 23, 2023), https://www.pbs.org/.

15 United States v. Biden, No. 23-mj-00274-MN (D. Del. 2023), DE 7. [brackets mine]

Here’s how Scarsi treats this passage laying out what happened between the publication of the plea and the failed plea hearing:

The putative [sic] plea deal became public in June 2023. Several members of the United States Congress publicly expressed their disapproval on social media. The Republican National Committee stated, “It is clear that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice is offering Hunter Biden a sweetheart deal.” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform, “The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’” Phillip M. Bailey, ‘Slap on the wrist’: Donald Trump, congressional Republicans call out Hunter Biden plea deal, USA Today (June 20, 2023, 11:17 a.m.), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/20/donald-trump-republicans-react-hunter-biden-plea-deal/ 70337635007/ [https://perma.cc/TSN9-UHLH]. 28 On June 23, 2023, the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives voted to publicly disclose congressional testimony from the IRS agents who worked on the tax investigation. Jason Smith, chair of the Ways and Means Committee, told reporters that the agents were “[w]histleblowers [who] describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes.” Farnoush Amiri, GOP releases testimony alleging DOJ interference in Hunter Biden tax case, PBS NewsHour (June 23, 2023, 3:58 p.m.), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/gop-releases-testimony-alleging-dojinterference-in-hunter-biden-tax-case.29 One day before the plea hearing in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, Mr. Smith moved to file an amicus curiae brief imploring the court to consider the IRS agents’ testimony and related materials in accepting or rejecting the plea agreement. Mem. of Law in Support of Mot. for Leave to File Amicus Curiae Br., United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-mj-00274-MN (D. Del. July 25, 2023), ECF No. 7-2; Amicus Curiae Br., United States v. Biden, No. 1:23-mj-00274-MN (D. Del. July 25, 2023), ECF No. 7-3.30

28 This source does not stand for the proposition that “extremist Republicans were [1] . . . using the excuse to interfere with the investigation.” (Selective Prosecution Mot. 5–6.) Of Mr. Weiss, Mr. Trump also wrote: “He gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence. . . . Maybe the judge presiding will have the courage and intellect to break up this cesspool of crime. The collusion and corruption is beyond description. TWO TIERS OF JUSTICE!” Ryan Bort, Trump Blasts Prosecutor He Appointed for Not Giving Hunter Biden ‘Death Sentence,’ Rolling Stone (July 11, 2023), https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-suggests-hunter-bidendeath penalty-1234786435/ [https://perma.cc/UH6N-838R].

29 This source does not stand for the proposition that several leaders of house committees “opened a joint investigation.” (Selective Prosecution Mot. 6.) [3]

30 The docket does not show that the Delaware district court resolved the motion, and the Court is uncertain whether the court considered Mr. Smith’s brief. [brackets mine]

First, Scarsi uses an ellipsis, marked at [1], to suggest the only reason Lowell cited the USA Today story was to support the claim that Republicans moved to intervene in the investigation, when the sentence in question includes three clauses, two of which the story does support. The sentence immediately following that three-clause sentence [2] makes a claim — OGR, HWAM, and HJC forming a joint committee, that substantiates that claim. Scarsi’s complaint at [3] is not that the cited article does not include Jason Smith’s quotation; rather, it’s that Lowell has not pointed to a source for the formation of a joint investigation (a later-cited source that Scarsi never mentions does include it). Meanwhile, Scarsi applies a measure — whether Judge Noreika considered Smith’s amicus, not whether he tried to file it — that Lowell doesn’t make (and which is irrelevant to a vindictive prosecution motion, because Noreika is not the prosecutor); Smith did succeed in getting the amicus unsealed, including the exhibits that Hunter claimed include grand jury materials. Whether or not Judge Noreika considered the content of the amicus, that Smith filed it is undeniable proof that Smith tried to intervene, which is all Hunter alleged he did.

Meanwhile, Scarsi relegates Trump’s Social Media threats — which Scarsi later corrects Lowell by noting that they came during precisely this period — to a footnote.

Here’s one thing I find most interesting. Scarsi’s two most valid complaints about Lowell’s filing are that, in one part of his timeline but not another, he misrepresented Trump’s pressure as happening after the plea failed, and that Lowell claimed that Weiss testified he had gotten death threats when instead the cited source (and the Weiss transcript I assume Lowell does not have) instead say that Weiss feared for his family. He acknowledges both those things: Trump attacked Weiss, and Weiss got threats that led him to worry for the safety of his family.

But he never considers Weiss’ fear for his family’s safety in his consideration of what happened between June and July. He never considers whether those threats had a prejudicial [e]ffect on Hunter Biden.

And aside from that correction regarding the safety comment, nor does Scarsi consider the most direct aspect of Congress’ intervention in the case — that Congress demanded Weiss testify, and he did so just weeks before he filed the charges actually before Scarsi.

In other words, Scarsi accuses Lowell of making a post hoc argument, claiming that he is simply pointing to prior events to explain Weiss’ subsequent actions. Except he ignores the impact of the two most direct allegations of influence.

And in Scarsi’s own fiddling with the timeline, he found a way to ignore how Donald Trump’s threats and direct intervention by Congress may have infected the decision to renege on the plea deal, and instead focused solely on the later decision to indict.

We’re in a post-truth world and Scarsi’s intemperate rant will certainly get the attention of those looking for Trump judges to promote.

But the fact of the matter is that Scarsi did precisely what he accuses the President of, rewriting the history of the Hunter Biden prosecution.

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How Jeff Bezos Smothered Pete Hegseth News because Hunter Biden Was Pardoned of Already Declined Charges

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When I went to bed last night, the WaPo was feeding me the following stories at the top of its digital front page.

WaPo has since added a story about Biden’s attempt to surge weapons to Ukraine before Trump cuts them off.

There was not and is not any story dedicated to Kash Patel’s promises to target Trump’s enemies at FBI — a story that not only is more urgent than any of the seven Hunter Biden pardon stories, but is fundamentally tied to the how and why of the Hunter Biden pardon.

There was not and is not any story on Jane Mayer’s report about how Pete Hegseth,

was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

Even as Hegseth made visits with the Senators whose vote he would need to be confirmed (definitely watch this video), the rag owned by defense contractor Jeff Bezos chose to litter its front page with seven stories and columns about Hunter Biden’s pardon rather than report out that Hegseth has a history of failing to manage the budgets of even just two medium-sized non-profits.

And it’s not just that Bezos’ rag buried far more urgent news about Trump’s nominees.

It’s that (with the exception of this column explaining the risks and difficulty of seizing weapons from addicts) the Hunter Biden stories were not all that useful.

Will Lewis has again chosen to platform Matt Viser’s dick pic sniffing about Joe Biden, this time trying to drive the controversy about the pardon; as far as I’m aware, Viser still has not disclosed to WaPo’s readers that an error in his own reporting caused a false scandal about Hunter’s art sales.

Viser’s 1800-word post includes 22 words that address, with no specifics, Pam Bondi and Kash Patel’s promise to persecute Trump’s enemies: “His picks for attorney general, Pam Bondi, and for FBI director, Kash Patel, have urged retribution against Trump’s political adversaries and critics.” It does, however, float an inaccurate quote also included in this Aaron Blake piece (as well as these Betsy Woodruff and Ken Vogel stories), claiming that Hunter’s pardon is broader than any since Nixon’s pardon.

Former Pardon Attorney Margaret Love hates this pardon and she’s not afraid to mislead reporters to criticize it, as when she told Woodruff that Nixon was the only precedent.

“I have never seen language like this in a pardon document that purports to pardon offenses that have not apparently even been charged, with the exception of the Nixon pardon,” said Margaret Love, who served from 1990 to 1997 as the U.S. pardon attorney, a Justice Department position devoted to assisting the president on clemency issues.

“Even the broadest Trump pardons were specific as to what was being pardoned,” Love added.

Love’s claim conflicts with what she herself laid out to Politico, the very same outlet, when Mike Flynn was pardoned four years ago.

“Pardons are typically directed at specific convictions or at a minimum at specific charges,” said Margaret Love, former pardon attorney for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who now leads the Collateral Consequences Resource Center. “I can think of only one other pardon as broad as this one, extending as it does to conduct that has not yet been charged, and that is the one that President Ford granted to Richard Nixon.”

“In fact, you might say that this pardon is even broader than the Nixon pardon, which was strictly cabined by his time as president,“ Love said. “In contrast, the pardon granted to Flynn appears to extend to conduct that took place prior to Trump‘s election to the presidency, and to bear no relationship to his service to the president, before or after the election.“ [my emphasis]

And I believe even then, Love misstated the intended scope of Flynn’s pardon.

Like Hunter’s pardon, Flynn’s pardon excused the crimes included in his charging documents (false statements, including false statements about being an unregistered agent of Turkey). While Hunter’s pardon specifically invoked the conduct in his Delaware and Los Angeles dockets, Flynn’s pardon excused conduct reviewed in two jurisdictions, DC and EDVA. Like Hunter’s pardon, which would cover the false statements referral from Congress, Flynn’s pardon would have covered the contradictory sworn statements he made as he tried to renege on his plea deal. But Flynn’s pardon also covered,

any and all possible offenses arising out of facts and circumstances known to, identified by, or in any manner related to the investigation of the Special Counsel,

This pardon attempted to excuse any crime based on a fact that once lived in Robert Mueller’s brain or case files.

As I laid out here, that certainly would have covered referrals from Mueller elsewhere (including to DOD), it might have attempted to pardon crimes in process, if (for example) Flynn’s relationship with Russia developed into something more in the future. Flynn’s pardon, unlike Hunter’s didn’t have an end date, and as a result, if Congress wants to continue to harass Hunter about stuff he just accepted a pardon for, he’ll have less protection than Trump intended Flynn to have.

And while Republicans might argue that Hunter’s allegedly false claim to Congress — regarding how he cut Tony Bobulinski out of a deal with CEFC to protect his family’s name — served to protect his father, even the most feverish Republican fantasies would amount to three Biden men profiting from a Chinese company after Biden left the Obama Administration and before he decided to run again. Flynn’s conflicting claims about whether “The Boss is aware” of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, including regarding undermining sanctions, served to protect Trump’s actions as incoming President. (Another thing WaPo decided was less important than seven pieces about Hunter’s pardon was that Chinese national Justin Sun, who has been charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million.) That is, you can measure the pardon in terms of familial closeness to the President granting it (none of these stories mention Charles Kushner, much less his nomination to be Ambassador to France); you can also measure the pardon in terms of the silence or lies about the guy giving the pardon it buys. And any one of about ten pardons from Trump, including the Flynn one, were far more corrupt by that measure.

But here’s the other reason why Blake’s piece, one of the seven pieces littering the front page instead of stories about Kash Patel or Hegseth’s unfitness, is not useful. Here’s how Blake introduces the scope of Hunter’s pardon.

Biden didn’t just pardon his son for his convictions on tax and gun charges, but for any “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024.”

That’s a nearly 11-year period during which any federal crime Hunter Biden might have committed — and there are none we are aware of beyond what has already been adjudicated — can’t be prosecuted. It notably covers when he was appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2014 all the way through Sunday, well after the crimes for which he was prosecuted.

Hunter Biden hasn’t been charged for his activities with regard to Burisma or anything beyond his convictions, and nothing in the public record suggests criminal charges could be around the bend. Congressional Republicans have probed the Burisma matter and Hunter Biden extensively and could seemingly have uncovered chargeable crimes if they existed, but haven’t done so.

Blake glosses over a great deal with his reference to things that have “already been adjudicated,” and in doing so, ignores the problem. Yes, both prosecutors and Republicans in Congress looked long and hard for something to hang a Burisma charge onto; yes, none of them found it. But — here’s the important bit — they still want to pursue one anyway.

The investigation into Hunter Biden started six years ago, based off a Suspicious Activity Report tied to a payment to a sex worker. Investigators tried to turn that into a criminal investigation based on the same Burisma focus that Rudy Giuliani was chasing; in fact, investigators first got data from Apple on the day Trump released the Perfect Phone Call, a transcript that may or may not have expunged a specific reference to Burisma. According to Joseph Ziegler, his supervisor at the time documented the problem of chasing a tax investigation that tracked Trump’s public demands for dirt on the Bidens related to Burisma.

You can actually trace how investigators cycled through one or another potential FARA violation — Burisma, Romania, CEFC — each time, with even the disgruntled IRS agents conceding they couldn’t substantiate those FARA cases (not least because Hunter was pretty diligent about not doing influence peddling himself, at bringing in others to do any of that kind of lobbying). Tips from Gal Luft — awaiting extradition on foreign agent charges — and Alexander Smirnov — awaiting trial on false statements — were key elements of that investigation.

But we know that in the precise period when someone was leaking to try to pressure prosecutors to bring certain charges, David Weiss had decided not to charge 2014 and 2015. Here’s how Gary Shapley wrote up the October 7, 2022 meeting that set him off.

In 2022, David Weiss told Shapley he would not charge 2014 and 2015, which is one thing that led Shapley to start reaching out to Congress to complain.

Prosecutors included more detail in Hunter’s tax indictment.

a. The Defendant timely filed, after requesting an extension, his 2014 individual income tax return on IRS Form 1040 on October 9, 2015. The Defendant reported owing $239,076 in taxes, and having already paid $246,996 to the IRS, the Defendant claimed he was entitled to a refund of $7,920. The Defendant did not report his income from Burisma on his 2014 Form 1040. All the money the Defendant received from Burisma in 2014 went to a company, hereafter “ABC”, and was deposited into its bank account. ABC and its bank account were owned and controlled by a business partner of the Defendant’s, Business Associate 5. Business Associate 5 was also a member of Burisma’s Board of Directors. The Defendant received transfers of funds from the ABC bank account and funds from the ABC bank account were used to make investments on the Defendant’s behalf. Because he owned ABC, Business Associate 5 paid taxes on income that he and the Defendant received from Burisma. Starting in November 2015, the Defendant directed his Burisma Board fees to an Owasco, PC bank account that he controlled.

One reason Hunter wasn’t charged for 2014 and 2015 is because Devon Archer was paying taxes in that period.

But the point is (as reflected in Blake’s note this was all adjudicated), a prosecutor made that decision. And Republicans in Congress and, specifically, Kash Patel, squealed about the injustice of not charging Hunter because the evidence didn’t merit charges.

This decision and the backlash with those dissatisfied by it dictates the lengthy period of Hunter’s pardon. Not just because they want to charge Burisma whether or not there’s evidence of a crime. But because the five year statute of limitations for FARA and the six year SOL on tax crimes, to charge anything related to Burisma, they’d have to apply crimes — like Espionage or certain kinds of Wire Fraud — that have ten year statutes of limitation.

Kash Patel and Republicans in Congress have already said they want to charge Hunter Biden regardless of whether there’s evidence to do so. When David Weiss first offered a plea deal, Trump posted that Hunter should instead have gotten a death sentence.

These people have made it clear they want to prosecute Hunter regardless of what the evidence supports. They have said that over and over. That’s what dictates the pardon, not any corruption by Biden. And to flip that on its head — to flip Trump and Kash Patel’s demand for prosecutions regardless of evidence — on its head is to cooperate in Trump’s assault on rule of law.

This is a point reflected by experts quoted in Vogel’s piece (and expanded by Kim Wehle in her own post).

Mr. Morison, who worked for years in the Office of the Pardon Attorney before going into private practice, added that the Bidens may have seen risk in crafting the pardon grant more narrowly.

“I assume that Hunter’s lawyers were worried that an especially vindictive Trump DOJ would have looked for something to charge him with if they were too specific, so they asked for a blanket pardon, subject only to a fairly broad date range,” he wrote in an email.

Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, predicted that if Mr. Trump’s Justice Department were to charge Hunter Biden, he would raise the pardon in a motion to dismiss the case.

Ms. Wehle, the author of a recent book detailing how the lack of constraints on presidential clemency powers invite abuse, said in an email that it was Mr. Trump — not President Biden — who initiated “the norm-violating behavior” by pledging to use the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies.

“This is not a corrupt pardon,” she said in an email. “It’s about taking care of a family member knowing what Trump will do otherwise.”

The reason you have to pardon broadly is because Trump has demanded an outcome divorced from evidence. And to get to his desired outcome, he would have to do something expansive, something that could not be foreseen by the scope of the existing investigation that (as Blake notes) has already been adjudicated.

You can tell this story about how broad the pardon is — structured very similarly to the Mike Flynn one.

But if you leave out the story of how this investigation from the start paralleled Trump’s extra-legal effort to gin up dirt on Joe Biden’s son, if you leave out the fact that even in his first term, Trump’s DOJ solicited information from at least one Russian spy and a Chinese agent to pursue dirt on Hunter Biden, then you are flipping the matter of justice on its head. That’s what Trump did already, in his desperation to find something to hang on Hunter Biden. And particularly given his picks of Bondi and Patel (the latter of whom played a role in extorting a foreign country for such dirt, too), there’s no telling what Trump will do in a second term.

That’s what dictates the terms of this pardon. A prosecutor issued a declination for charges related to 2014 and 2015, and almost the entire Republican party said, we’re going to find something anyway. And if you hide that detail, you’re burying the most crucial information, just like you’re burying detrimental information about Hegseth and Patel below a seventh post on Hunter Biden.

This is what a captive oligarch press looks like: Burying detrimental information on the guy who might oversee Jeff Bezos’ defense contracts, while hiding the reasons why the Hunter Biden pardon looks like it does.

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