Months ago, I started laying out a framework to provide background to explain how Trump has trained the GOP to hate rule of law, a key part of how he has brought us close to fascism. My weekend post on Bill Barr’s obfuscation about his role in Ukrainian matters (to which there will be a follow-up) started to fill in another of the remaining bullets.

• Trump’s narcissism makes him easy to trigger
• Trump released documents that past actors assumed would never be released
• The first time Trump “colluded” with Russia was to help Bibi Netanyahu dodge accountability
• Corruption is a process and a tool
• What is WikiLeaks
• Russia’s flipping focus
• My understanding of the Russian attack
• The import of chat rooms
• Rudy Giuliani was never investigated as the possible UNSUB
• John Durham’s studied ignorance
• Seth DuCharme’s information collection
• The GRU propaganda from the US Attorney for Pittsburgh
• Was Bill Barr even more corrupt than we knew? [Barr Time 1]

Today, and in parallel, LOLGOP and I will begin to release some podcasts as we explain the important part: how all this brings us to where we are, with both Aileen Cannon and SCOTUS taking active measures [heh] to help Donald Trump avoid accountability.

So I need to explain how I think of the Russian attack.

Generally, people think of the Russian attack in the same way Robert Mueller set up Volume I of his Report:

• Volume I Section II: [Dead] Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s social media campaign
• Volume I Section III: GRU’s hack and leak campaign
• Volume I Section IV: Russian Government contacts to the Trump campaign

Remember, his report was an explanation of prosecutorial decisions. It was only intended to determine whether things were crimes. It only included the prosecutorial decisions that had been concluded by Mueller. So, for example, the report itself didn’t describe the referrals sent to other districts, such as SDNY’s prosecution of Michael Cohen for financial crimes and hush money payments or EDNY’s prosecution of Tom Barrack on foreign agent crimes, which ended in acquittal; it remains unclear how much of these referrals show up in the referral section. Mentions of ongoing investigations, such as into the suspected $10 million payment to Trump from an Egyptian back or evidence that Roger Stone conspired with Russian in the hack-and-leak, were relegated to the appendix or a footnote.

The SSCI Report instead considered whether these things posed a counterintelligence risk, rather than a crime. As such, they considered a long list of possible compromises, categorized both by people (like Paul Manafort or Maria Butina — the latter of whom was not included in scope of Mueller Report) and events (like the June 9 meeting). Viewed from that framework, having a guy who spent years implementing influence operations for Russian allies Manafort, work for “free” on the campaign looks quite different, like a grave counterintelligence risk to Donald Trump. Great swaths of that report — such as a section on Andrii Telizhenko’s influence operations, which may even have incorporated Bill Barr — remain redacted.

But as this effort to interfere in the US election proceeded, Russia conducted at least two (and, I argue, at least a third) devastating attacks on US intelligence, which had ties to the election year attack itself.

• The Shadow Brokers release of NSA’s hacking tools, which (I was told but have not reconfirmed) shared one forensic link and has several human infrastructure links to the election attack
• The Vault 7/Vault 8 release of CIA’s hacking tools, which in implementation continued a pressure campaign by Julian Assange rooted in the election year attack
• A concerted campaign against the FBI, largely focused but not exclusively reliant on the Steele dossier

The Solar Winds attack, discovered in the last year of Trump’s presidency, could be another such attack, one used by Sidney Powell’s team (including Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne) in their attack on democratic elections, one that stole Chad Wolf’s emails as he helped Trump discredit election integrity efforts, one Trump is using in his attack on rule of law. The attack was first initiated years earlier, possibly as early as 2016. But so little is known about the attack — aside from that it targeted a number of government agencies and court filing systems — that I will bracket that for now.

This sets up a structure something like this:

What Mueller includes in his contacts with Russia section is possible (and in some cases, definite) attempted recruitment. That kind of thing is a constant.

In advance of the Russian attack, however, Russian entities may have been behind a number of efforts focused on Trump and his associates. Deripaska worked a brutal double game that made it more likely to get Manafort’s cooperation, witting or not. Joseph Mifsud brokered ties to Russian officials for George Papadopoulos — leading to an (aborted) plan to set up a meeting with Putin’s team in London. A former GRU officer and two sanctioned banks got involved in Felix Sater’s pitch of a Trump Tower to Cohen, resulting in Dmitry Peskov collecting proof of Trump’s willingness to work with GRU before the Hillary hack was ever revealed. Someone dangled stolen emails before Roger Stone, ultimately giving him an advance peek — in exchange for what, we don’t know — but Stone started pursuing a pardon for Julian Assange no later than November 15 (and probably as early as October 3).

With the exception of the Manafort pitch (which leveraged his financial desperation), none of those pitches from Russia — whether they were backed by Russian spooks or not — would have required anything more than recklessness and venality from the Trump side. For example, in January, when Cohen called Dmitry Peskov to ask for Putin’s help finalizing the Trump Tower deal, Trump probably doubted he was going to win and there was no reason to be particularly alarmed by the GRU tie; but after the revelation that GRU hacked the DNC, after Trump got the nomination, the existence of the January call became potentially devastating. The Coffee Boy bragged to diplomats from three different countries that Russia was going to attack Hillary, which looked dramatically different when WikiLeaks released the stolen DNC emails (which is when the Australians shared their knowledge of it).

If I’m right that Russia deliberately used some of the same infrastructure in the hack-and-leak and the Shadow Broker operation, it would serve as a stick unveiled at precisely the moment Roger Stone bit on the carrot of advanced access to John Podesta emails, basically tying Stone’s outreach to an attack on the NSA.

Similarly, the unveiling of the Vault 7 release, which WikiLeaks (or an intermediary between Josh Schulte and WikiLeaks) sat on from May 2016 until March 2017, made Stone’s sustained commitment to winning a pardon for Assange all the more damaging. It is unknown whether Russia got an advanced look at those files (which would have provided a way to identify CIA’s assets in Russia), but Assange used a Deripaska-linked attorney to try to negotiate immunity in advance of releasing the files, tying its release to Russia.

Along with Stone, this entire operation came to a focus on Don Jr.

Obviously, there’s the June 9 meeting pitch, which again requires nothing more than recklessness from Don Jr, but which resulted in him receiving a pitch for sanctions relief in exchange for dirt on Hillary. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Maria Butina similarly tried to pitch Trump’s son.

Don Jr, who joined some of the most rabid Trumpsters in validating the Prigozhin’s trolls, likewise would have represented an overlap between those trolling operations and the ones run by right wing extremists.

At least as interesting is the way Assange repeatedly incorporated Don Jr into his pitch. On September 20, WikiLeaks alerted Don Jr to an anti-Trump campaign and provided a password.

59. On or about September 20, 2016, at approximately 11 :59PM, Target Account 1 sent a private message to a high level individual associated with the Campaign (the “high-level · Campaign individual”). 4 The message stated: “A PAC run anti-Trump site ‘ ‘ is about to launch. The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war·PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘. See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”

Jr passed it onto the campaign, making it clear he had accessed the site. This was the basis of the (totally appropriate) prosecution declination for Jr. only disclosed after years of FOIA challenge by Jason Leopold.

In October, at a time when WikiLeaks was rebuffing Stone’s outreach, WikiLeaks repeatedly suggested Don Jr push out links (and recommend his father do so too). A figure in the Douglass Mackey DM threads by the name of P0TUSTrump kept pushing those links as if in response.

The day of the election, WikiLeaks pushed Don Jr to convince his dad not to concede.

Hi Don; if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred–as he has implied that he might do. He is also much more likely to keep his base alive and energised this way and if he is going to start a new network, showing how corrupt the old ones are is helpful. The discussion about the rigging can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption etc. We don’t like corruption ither [sic] and our publications are effective at proving that this and other forms of corruption exists.

On December 16, 2016, WikiLeaks pushed Jr to convince his dad to give Assange an Ambassadorship (which would amount to immunity).

Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well! In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC “That’s a really smart tough guy and the most famous australian you have! ” or something similar. They won’t do it, but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons. Background: justice4assange.com

As news of the June 9 meeting broke, WikiLeaks advised Jr to release his emails via WikiLeaks and also advised he reach out to Margaret Kunstler.

When these DMs were released on November 14, 2017, Assange tweeted out a follow-up to the December 2016 one, adding a threat by hashtagging, Vault8, the source code to the CIA files, a single example of which WikiLeaks had just released on November 9, 2017.

I read this as a concerted effort to shift from Stone to Don Jr. Whether Don Jr was actively soliciting this help or not, WikiLeaks made sure to tie Trump’s son to their plight, both publicly and privately.

Whatever else may have gone on between WikiLeaks and the failson, around the time that Mueller’s questions would have alerted Trump that he knew of the pardon pitches, at a time when WikiLeaks’ ties with Russia were under far greater scrutiny, Jr’s buddy Arthur Schwartz went after Cassandra Fairbanks, disabusing her of any hopes Trump would pardon Assange. She ultimately flew off to London to tell him.

None of this says that Don Jr conspired with Russia on the 2016 attack. What is says is that Russian assets systematically viewed him as an idiot that could be and was often useful. And Jr ended up connecting all the through-strands: he bridged the hack-and-leak and social media campaigns with the right wing lists, he reliably got his dad to act on his instructions, and then — as the cost of all this went up — Assange repeatedly targeted Jr as he increased the cost of the hack of the CIA, effectively extorting Jr as he started releasing CIA source code.

Even before I turn to the dossier, viewed this way, the Russian operation in 2016 isn’t so much about getting Trump elected. Rather, it’s about sowing irreparable polarization in the US that deliberately tied Trump’s people to the twin attacks on the Deep State — Shadow Brokers and Vault 7/8.

With little involvement beyond predictable recklessness and venality (and Don Jr’s stupidity), then, Russian assets implicated Trump’s people in attacks on the Deep State that raised the cost of their openness to Russian help in 2016, but which would have made any admissions by Trump all the more costly.

Russia didn’t need cooperation from Trump’s people (though they got it from at least Manafort and Stone and a certain idiot who proved useful). They just needed to make any already improbable conciliation impossible, impossible politically and impossible for a Narcissist like Trump to do. That would practically guarantee that Trump would attack the country to defend himself, his son, his ego.

That, in turn, would make the aftermath of the 2016 attack far more fertile for recruitment, because it would prioritize allegiance to Trump over allegiance to country.

The reason it matters that Trump brought in Paul Manafort to work on his campaign again for “free” this year is that in 2016, Manafort shared the campaign’s strategy with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who (according to the Treasury Department) is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with [that] sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”

The reason it matters that Manafort — as he did in 2016 — claims he has stepped aside from that “free” job to find other ways to help Donald Trump is that he continued to coach the campaign even after he lost, projecting Trump and Russia’s own voter fraud claims onto Hillary Clinton. It also matters because after Trump won, Manafort met with a key Oleg Deripaska deputy to “recreat[e] old friendship.” After that meeting, he advised Reince Priebus to discredit the Russian investigation by focusing on the Steele dossier (recall that Deripaska had paid Steele to collect intelligence about Manafort before Fusion asked Steele to collect more broadly). That strategy worked spectacularly well, with every Russigate conspiracy theorist both making false claims about dossier reporting and, at the same time, claiming that because the dossier turned out to be false, everything else must be too.

The reason it matters that — even as he threatens to abandon NATO much less Ukraine — Trump welcomed Manafort onto his campaign again is that both at the meeting where Trump’s former campaign manager shared campaign strategy and for several years after, Manafort and Kilimnik kept talking about plans to carve up Ukraine. Kilimnik even told Manafort, in December 2016, that they could have peace in Ukraine within a few months with just a wink from Trump. Trump makes similar boasts all the time now.

You’ll find none of that in the NYT story reporting on Manafort’s announcement that he will help Trump in an unofficial role (or WaPo or CNN’s story either).

Seven paragraphs in, Maggie (writing with Jonathan Swan) describes that Manafort went to prison, but doesn’t bother to explain that he laundered money and violated FARA to hide that his influence peddling was backed by Russian-aligned oligarchs.

Mr. Manafort helped stave off efforts to thwart Mr. Trump’s nomination at the 2016 convention, went to prison for various financial crimes and was pardoned by Mr. Trump.

Hell, even just the thought of letting a massive tax cheat play a role in his campaign should be a key focus; instead, NYT brushes that off as, “various financial crimes.”

Three paragraphs later Maggie suggests some tie between those pro-Russian oligarchs and Manafort being “ensnared” by Mueller, but doesn’t describe what Mueller found.

In August 2016, he was ousted in part over headlines about his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Later, Mr. Manafort was ensnared in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

Two paragraphs latter, Maggie and Swan suggest that five advisors, most quite senior (George Papadoloulos, Gates, Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone) who were sentenced to prison equate to a “few,”

Mr. Manafort was one of only a few Trump advisers who were sentenced to prison, for crimes unrelated to the campaign.

That doesn’t count the two other advisors from 2016 (Mike Flynn and Elliot Broidy) who were pardoned before they were sentenced, and the three (Allen Weisselberg, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navarro) who have more recently been sentenced to prison.

I mean, sure, compared to the dozens of senior GOP officials currently facing prosecution for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election and the hundreds of Trump devotees already sentenced for 2020, five or seven or whatever is teeny, but “few”? Since when did having even a few — much less seven — advisors from one campaign get convicted merit the word, “only”?

Maggie (and Swan) never mention that Amy Berman Jackson found that Paul Manafort lied to cover up the details of his relations with Kilimnik in 2016, a lie about something directly related to the election, but that Mueller simply chose not to prosecute those lies.

The sole mention of Mueller’s focus pertained to something that Mueller found Manafort didn’t orchestrate: the change in the platform on Ukraine.

[I]n a controversy that received little attention at the time, language was inserted into the platform watering down language supporting Ukraine with military aid against Russian incursions. That language change was among the issues Mr. Mueller sought information about during his investigation.

In other words, Maggie and Swan buried the real reason why Manafort threatened — and still threatens, given past history — to discredit Trump’s campaign or undermine US democracy: Wittingly or not — we don’t know because of the lies and the pardon — he was at the center of a key part of the Russian attack on American democracy.

Journalists should not simply bury that.

Worse, too, this is not the first time that a story bearing Maggie’s byline has covered up Manafort’s tie to Deripaska in all this. This story not only tried to shift the timing of the August 2 meeting Manafort had with Kilimnik, but it took out language describing Kilimnik sending Deripaska polling data as well as to Manafort’s Ukranian benefactors. (Since that story, a bunch of files liberated by Jason Leopold have shown Manafort’s efforts to suck up to Deripaska.)

A correction was made on Jan. 9, 2019:

A previous version of this article misidentified the people to whom Paul Manafort wanted a Russian associate to send polling data. Mr. Manafort wanted the data sent to two Ukrainian oligarchs, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, not to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin.

The story remains a source of disinformation and confusion five years later.

As I showed in this post, that change was made in the same period that Rick Gates, immediately after Bill Barr’s confirmation, started to revert his story to what it had been when he was still getting caught in false stories in interview after interview.

I get that outlets telling this story (WaPo and CNN were no better) want to avoid relitigating the Russian investigation. I get that Trump always complains when journalists report on the actual facts disclosed by the Russian investigation and the open questions his pardons guaranteed would never be answered.

That’s not a reason to bury it all. Burying these facts is nothing more than capitulating to a bully.

Holding Trump accountable for his past documented abuses should be the easy part of journalism.

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

Hope all of the mothers in our community are having a restful Sunday, whether mothers in fact or mothers of invention.

Not wishing a happy day to this senator, however.

Remember this GOP senator’s freakish fundie-speak rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union? She’s back with an attempt to move this country ever closer to Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale.

She and 13 co-sponsors — Sen. Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Cramer (R-ND), Sen. Daines (R-MT), Sen. Grassley (R-IA), Sen. Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Sen. Marshall (R-KS), Sen. Moran (R-KS), Sen. Ricketts (R-NE), Sen. Rounds (R-SD), Sen. Schmitt (R-MO), Sen. Tillis (R-NC), Sen. Wicker (R-MS), and Sen. Lankford (R-OK) — submitted S.4296, the “More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act,” a.k.a. the “MOMS Act” this past week.

As Salon and the Guardian reported, the bill creates a database which allows the federal government to track persons who use a government-developed and hosted website, “pregnancy.gov,” while seeking information and resources related to pregnancy.

The bill may initially look innocuous to those who aren’t familiar with how websites work, but one doesn’t have to read very deeply to see this is horrifying:

11 “(a) WEBSITE. — Not later than 1 year after the date
12 of enactment of this section, the Secretary shall publish
13 a public website entitled ‘pregnancy.gov’. The Secretary
14 may not delegate implementation or administration of the
15 website below the level of the Office of the Secretary. The
16 website shall include the following:
17 “(1) A clearinghouse of relevant resources
18 available for pregnant and postpartum women, and
19 women parenting young children.

[page] 3
1 “(2) A series of questions through which a user
2 is able to generate a list of relevant resources of in-
3 terest within the user’s zip code.
4 “(3) A means to direct the user to identify
5 whether to list the relevant resources of interest that
6 are available online or within 1, 5, 10, 50, and 100
7 miles of the user.
8 “(4) A mechanism for users to take an assess-
9 ment through the website and provide consent to use
10 the user’s contact information, which the Secretary
11 may use to conduct outreach via phone or email to
12 follow up with users on additional resources that
13 would be helpful for the users to review.

The server on which the website is hosted would capture the user’s IP address. That’s normal for all web servers. Because we don’t have a national standard curriculum for computers and networks, the average American will not understand they shed this information whenever they visit any website.

If the prospective user then seeks any resource near them, they may not only validate their physical location but pregnancy or postpartum status.

Someone from Health and Human Services could follow up with them — *shudder* — although the bill gives a weak nod to consent.

If they speak other than English — think asylum seekers here — their ethnic/national identity might be deduced by this bit on page 5 of the bill:

3 “(d) SERVICES IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES.— The
4 Secretary shall ensure that the website provides the widest
5 possible access to services for families who speak lan-
6 guages other than English.

Worse, all this data will be reported to Congress:

7 “(e) REPORTING REQUIREMENTS.—
8 “(1) IN GENERAL.— Not later than 180 days
9 after the date on which the website is established
10 under this section, the Secretary shall submit to
11 Congress a report on—
12 “(A) the traffic of the website;
13 “(B) user feedback on the accessibility and
14 helpfulness of the website in tailoring to the
15 user’s needs;
16 “(C) insights on gaps in relevant resources
17 with respect to services for pregnant and
18 postpartum women, or women parenting young
19 children;
20 “(D) suggestions on how to improve user
21 experience and accessibility based on user feed-
22 back and missing resources that would be help-
23 ful to include in future updates; and

[page] 6
1 “(E) certification that no prohibited enti-
2 ties are listed as a relevant resource or are in
3 receipt of a grant under subsection (b)(3).
4 “(2) CONFIDENTIALITY.— The report under
5 paragraph (1) shall not include any personal identi-
6 fying information regarding individuals who have
7 used the website.

The confidentiality requirement is a fucking joke. Once this data is released to Congress, it’d be far too easy to hunt down the users. It’s yet another opportunity to breach users’ privacy, just like every other website and application for any purpose.

There’s nothing helpful about this at all. It’s a means to allow the federal government directly into women’s uteruses across the country, not exactly small government.

This also blows away the idea of states’ rights when it comes to regulating reproductive rights, though the states are supposed to provide the contact information of approved Gilead resources to be offered through this national website. If states want to offer pregnancy or postpartum resources they can do that through state health departments. They don’t need the feds harvesting this data in a central repository.

The really aggravating part about this bill? The creation of yet more federal and state government bureaucracy intended to get deep into mothers’ and prospective mothers’ crotches, while a non-governmental solution has existed for years with federal support through block grants, eventually suppressed by far-right anti-reproductive rights lawmakers and the orange hellbeast.

Maybe you’ve even heard of it before — it’s a national nonprofit called Planned Parenthood.

~ ~ ~

Comment Operations Note

You may have noticed a change in the comments system this week. After many complaints about comments being unreadable after fourth or fifth reply to a reply to a comment especially on mobile devices, the maximum width of threaded nested comments has been set to four.

In other words, this is what will be permitted as seen on a desktop:

A fifth reply to the fourth comment in this thread will not see a Reply button.

If you wish to leave a reply to that fourth comment, preface the comment with the user’s name and date/time of the comment to which you wish to reply. You can also pick up the link to that comment by right-clicking on the date/time and then pasting into the preface of your reply. Example:

Rayne (edit)

Reply to Legonaut, May 3, 2024 at 6:11 pm

Nice or Noise?

Not an actual reply in that thread, just an example of how to leave a fifth-wide comment and what it will look like.

Will it slow your comments down? Sorry, yes, it may, but if you really feel compelled to share a comment this is a trade-off for readability. What good is your comment if it can’t be read by a substantial portion of the EW community?

I should also add here that wordy comments lacking concision have also helped force this change. You know who you are; think more about your audience here because even at four wide, some comments will still be challenging on mobile devices. Under the previous setting, those overlong comments acted like a Denial of Service to other readers.

There will be more changes to comments in the near future, though a couple tweaks to the righthand sidebar will happen first. Watch for them.

~ ~ ~

Treat this as an open thread.

June 6 of last year was the official publication date for Bill Barr’s book. In it, he claimed — at least three different times — that under him, DOJ did not investigate Joe Biden’s role in pushing Petro Poroshenko to fire Viktor Shokin. “[T]he facts about this episode were out in the open and didn’t warrant a criminal investigation,” Barr said in one instance.

The day after release of a book making that assertion, on June 7, 2023, Bill Barr went on the record with Margot Cleveland insisting that investigation into an allegation that we now know came from Alexander Smirnov, claiming that Mykola Zlochevsky had bribed Joe Biden, not only hadn’t been shut down in August 2020, but had been sent to Delaware “for further investigation.”

“It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

On June 6, Bill Barr claimed his DOJ didn’t investigate Biden’s ties to Burisma because all the facts were out in the open. On June 7, he insisted DOJ had sustained a secret investigation into an allegation that Burisma bribed Joe Biden.

Barr’s book mentions Ukraine almost 70 times. He mentions the Bidens, in an investigative context, over 56 times. Virtually everything he says on the topic conflicts as dramatically with known events as that claim on June 7 did.

It was always clear these claims were an attempt to spin the events, Barr’s CYA about fairly damning events in which he was involved. Given the subsequent disclosures of the the SDNY warrants, claims Lev Parnas’ has made since this book came out, Brady’s testimony about the side channel, and Smirnov’s indictment, I want to look at how Barr describes his involvement in efforts to investigate Joe Biden and his son.

At best, they show that Bill Barr was an easy mark for Russian disinformation.

Barr needed a bribery allegation and an informant fabricated it for him

Here’s how Barr describes the Brady side channel, which we now know resulted in an FBI informant with ties to Russian spies fabricating a claim about Joe Biden that right wingers successfully demanded be used to renege on a plea deal for Hunter Biden during the 2024 election season, a claim that — had Brady done the vetting he and Barr claimed he did — would have been identified as a fabrication in 2020.

With impeachment still pending, Giuliani embarked on yet another round of grandstanding. He went about claiming he had compiled significant evidence relating to the Bidens that he wanted to present to the Justice Department. While anyone is free to present evidence to the DOJ, the fact Giuliani was making such a public display obviously made his motives suspect. It looked to me that Rudy was trying to run the same play against Biden that I thought the Clinton campaign had tried to run against Trump in 2016: giving just enough evidence to law enforcement to have some allegation investigated, then claiming one’s adversary was “being investigated.” This presented a quandary. On the one hand, I wasn’t going to let the department be drawn into Giuliani’s game, and I wasn’t about to allow the work of other prosecutors on other, potentially related matters be tainted by commingling their evidence with whatever Giuliani had pulled together. On the other hand, the department has an obligation to be open to all comers who believe they possess relevant evidence; we could not merely dismiss his information out of hand without looking at it. Yet merely receiving information does not imply the department believes opening an investigation is warranted. My solution to Giuliani’s posturing was to create an intake system for evidence originating in Ukraine—including but not limited to Giuliani’s—that dispelled any suggestion that, by accepting the information, the department was signaling it considered the allegations credible.

I set up a screening process whereby an office outside of Washington—in this case, the US Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh— would vet the information provided by Giuliani, working with the FBI and intelligence experts on Ukraine. That office, which was run by a trusted US attorney, Scott Brady, who was well known to me and my staff, would not be responsible for deciding whether to open any investigation, just for assessing the credibility of the information. This would be an intermediary step before any information was forwarded to an office responsible for making any investigative determinations. Employing such a “taint team” is a well-established procedure within the department for screening potentially suspect evidence. These precautions were especially apt in the case of Giuliani, whose political passions and previous associations in Ukraine possibly affected his own critical faculties.

At an unrelated press conference in early February 2020, I made clear I was skeptical of information coming out of Ukraine. “We have to be very careful with respect to any information coming from the Ukraine,” I said. “There are a lot of agendas in the Ukraine, a lot of crosscurrents. And we can’t take anything we received from Ukraine at face value.” My usual critics on the Hill and in the media, as always getting the point exactly backward, screamed that I was giving Giuliani special access to the department. Wrong. It was an exercise in caution and an effort to protect other investigations that the DOJ had going on at the time.

While the effort to push the Ukrainians to investigate Biden was foolish, I do not believe it was criminal. Not all censurable conduct is criminal. The current tendency to conflate the foolish with the legally culpable causes more harm than good. Trying to apply the criminal law to diplomatic give-and-take is especially dangerous. A quid pro quo is inherent in almost all diplomacy, and Presidents frequently ask foreign countries to do things that are politically beneficial to the Presidents. A President might, for example, make a large, secret concession to a foreign country in order to expedite release of a hostage or win some other timely agreement the President expects will yield substantial political benefits prior to an election. The fact that the action sought from the foreign government will yield political benefit should not make the request criminal. It may have been in the national interest. Nor should it be criminal because the concession made by a President seems disproportionate or even reckless. Nor should it make a difference that the President was subjectively motivated by the expectation of political benefit.

The fact is that diplomatic transactions frequently involve “mixed motives.” The quo being sought will provide a political benefit and will likely satisfy a legitimate policy purpose of the government. In any particular case, the political motive may loom much larger than the governmental purpose, but as long as the latter is present, it would be hazardous to criminalize diplomacy by attempting to assess the balance of subjective motivations. Of course, if the quo being sought objectively has no governmental purpose at all and is purely a private benefit—say, a payment of cash for private use—then we are in the realm of bribery. But so long as the quo arguably advances a public policy objective, then policing the propriety of diplomatic transactions should be left to the political, not the criminal, realm.

To this extent, I viewed Vice President Biden’s pushing for Shokin’s termination as similar to President Trump’s pushing for an investigation of Biden’s role. The quo sought by Biden—the firing of Shokin—held a potential political benefit for Biden: avoiding the embarrassment of having his son’s company investigated for corruption. It also, ostensibly, had a legitimate public policy purpose: advancing the US anticorruption agenda. Similarly, Trump would benefit politically from an investigation into Shokin’s termination, but bringing transparency to that episode would also arguably advance America’s anticorruption agenda.

Biden supporters would say that, in his case, his policy purpose was overarching and supervened any possible political agenda. Trump supporters would say the same about his aims. My point is that the criminal justice process cannot legitimately be used to investigate politicians’ motivations when those politicians are asking for some rational and lawful policy concession. What Biden was demanding in Ukraine, quite apart from whether it would benefit his son, technically had a legitimate governmental purpose. And what Trump was demanding, quite apart from whether it would benefit his reelection, had the same. (309-312)

Russiagate dominated the first two years of President Trump’s term, looming over every aspect of the administration. I was on the outside as a private citizen during this time, and so my early reaction to the collusion claims was based on public reporting and my own informed speculation. Only in early 2019, when I joined the administration as Attorney General, did I begin to get a fuller picture of this manufactured scandal. From that time forward, it became increasingly clear to me that there were never any legitimate grounds for accusing Trump or his campaign of colluding with the Russians. This was not only my conclusion. Every investigation into the matter—including those of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—also found no evidence of collusion.

I would soon make the difficult decision to go back into government in large part because I saw the way the President’s adversaries had enmeshed the Department of Justice in this phony scandal and were using it to hobble his administration. Once in office, it occupied much of my time for the first six months of my tenure. It was at the heart of my most controversial decisions. Even after dealing with the Mueller report, I still had to launch US Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the genesis of this bogus scandal. At the end of my first year in office, the President was impeached over a harebrained effort, involving Rudy Giuliani, to push back on the Russia collusion canard by digging up an alleged counter-scandal in Ukraine implicating the Clinton campaign or Vice President Biden and his son Hunter.

The fallout from Russiagate continued during my last year in office. My relationship with the President frayed as he became frustrated by my failure to bring charges against those who had ginned up Russiagate and the failure of Durham’s investigation to produce more rapid results. (180-181)

Of course Barr’s “Russiagate” claims are riddled with lies. We’re used to that.

The HPSCI investigation did ask every Trump-friendly witness if they had evidence of “collusion,” and they all said no (though it’s clear that Devin Nunes worked directly with the White House to craft at least one of these scripts). Senators split on partisan lines regarding whether the SSCI investigation showed “collusion.” The Mueller investigation did not make a conclusion about “collusion.” And not only did the report itself imply there was evidence of conspiracy — just not enough to charge — but a footnote Barr hid until right before the 2020 election revealed that an investigation into whether Trump’s rat-fucker joined a CFAA conspiracy with Russia continued after Mueller finished. Perhaps because of that, the declinations section on conspiracy actually didn’t make a conclusion, one way or another, about whether Trump’s people conspired with Russia on the hack-and-leak itself; that section addresses Section II and IV of the first volume, but not Section III, where the hack-and-leak was described.

Like I said, we’re used to those lies. I’m interested in this passage, which repeats Barr’s tired old lies about the Russian investigation, because of the relationship Barr sets up between those lies and what came before and after. Barr admits that he made a conclusion about the merit of “Russiagate” based on “public reporting” (presumably of the kind a right winger would see) and what Barr describes as his “own informed speculation.” Based on that conclusion, he decided to return to government to kill the investigation.

Barr built his justification to investigate Democrats from there.

Barr’s description of the Durham investigation — something he “had” to launch and something that he expected, in 2020 and presumably even in 2023 (his book came out just weeks after Durham gave up the ghost), would have “results” in the form of prosecutions — ties directly to his false claims (which may or may not be beliefs) about the Russian investigation. The Durham investigation had to produce results because Barr needed it to be true that the Russian investigation had no merit.

That imperative may explain Barr’s inconsistent claims. On page 180, describing that he had to open the Durham investigation, Barr made clear he believed an imagined Hillary effort to set up an investigation against Trump was criminal. On page 310, Barr explained that he didn’t believe an effort to push Ukraine [including known Russian assets, but Barr doesn’t mention that part] to investigate the Bidens was criminal. Rudy’s effort to solicit dirt from known Russian spies was not criminal, but Russian injection of disinformation into Hillary’s oppo research was.

It’s in that framework where Barr describes his personal involvement in Ukraine dirt — which the available record shows started no later than August 2019 and continued through at least October 2020, which an unreliable Parnas claims started far earlier, and which in paragraphs following Barr’s description of the side channel he improbably claims he first learned from a warning John Bolton gave him in early August. Rather than an impeachment focused on Trump, it focused on Rudy, and rather than an attempt to cheat in an election, it was an attempt to create a “counter-scandal.” In this passage, it is all portrayed as a ham-handed but, in Barr’s mind, justified effort to respond to the Russian investigation. In this passage, there’s no mention of Barr’s involvement in it at all. Only later would Barr refashion it (in the side channel passage above) as an effort to get transparency about Biden’s role in firing Shokin, transparency that multiple direct witnesses had already provided as part of the impeachment.

But in this passage, everything — the Durham investigation, the Ukraine response, and a bunch of things Barr conflates with the two, including the Brady side channel — arise out of Barr’s imperative to kill the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. That’s what justifies it all. Barr’s attempt to sustain false claims about the Russian investigation. Barr turned those false claims into license to retaliate.

That’s the before (the need to investigate Hillary as part of the imperative to kill the Russian investigation) and after (the side channel that protected Rudy from consequences for soliciting dirt from Russian spies and had the result of framing Joe Biden).

The AG doth protest too much, methinks

With those in mind, consider how Barr denials about the Durham investigation serve as a way to disclaim any involvement with Ukraine, where [3], “Conjuring up criminal conspiracies about political opponents had been honed into a fine art form.” This long passage, full of prevarications and word games, denies Trump asked him to open the kind of Biden investigation Barr opened up with the side channel.

As I was launching John Durham’s investigation in the spring of 2019, I was aware of the claims that the Ukrainians had interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Clinton. Because these allegations were relevant to the origins of the Russia collusion narrative, they legitimately fell within the ambit of Durham’s inquiry. I put little stock in them and suggested to Durham that he defer any Ukraine-related work, and so these claims weren’t being pursued actively at that point. I was dubious of the idea that the Ukrainians, not the Russians, had been responsible for hacking into the DNC. [1] It had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation and seemed contrary to the evidence developed by the intelligence community and by Mueller’s investigation. Moreover, contrary to the President’s claims, CrowdStrike did not appear to be controlled by Ukrainians and seemed to be a reputable company. I doubted the firm had any reason to fabricate its analysis of the hack. In any event, I wanted Durham to hold back from engaging with Ukraine because I considered it [2] a land of smoke and mirrors, where disinformation was everywhere and reliable evidence extremely difficult to find. There were so many different actors with varying agendas—pro-Western politicians, pro-Russian politicians, countless oligarchs, each with his own aim—that it was hard to determine the provenance and motivations behind any information collected there. [3] Conjuring up criminal conspiracies about political opponents had been honed into a fine art form. I was especially concerned that Ukrainian actors could act as channels for Russian disinformation. I didn’t want Durham to get bogged down in that morass.

Consequently, in the spring and early summer of 2019, when John [Durham] and I discussed the international dimensions of his work, [4] we agreed to engage with the three countries we felt would be most helpful to the investigation: the United Kingdom, Australia, and Italy. I started by making contact with the ambassadors of these countries, and later had discussions with senior officials in each. I traveled to both Italy and the UK to explain Durham’s investigation and ask for any assistance or information they could provide. I alerted the President that we would be making these contacts and asked him to mention Durham’s investigation to the prime ministers of the three countries, stressing the importance of their help. In contrast, [5] I never talked with the Ukrainians or asked President Trump to talk to the Ukrainians. The President never asked me to talk to the Ukrainians. Nor had I talked with Rudy Giuliani about Ukraine. I was also not aware of anyone at the department requesting the Ukrainians to open up an investigation. As far as I was concerned, if Durham ever found a reason to look into Ukrainian activities, he would do the investigation, not leave it to the Ukrainians.

What really fueled the impeachment drive was the attempt to sic the Ukrainians on allegations about Vice President Biden. It was one thing to argue, as the President’s private defense attorneys did, that Ukrainians had interfered with the 2016 election. That would have had a bearing on collusion allegations against the President. It was something else to argue, as the President’s defense also did, that Joe Biden’s son Hunter had traded on his surname and engaged in un- ethical deal making in Ukraine. That looked less like defensive work and more like an offensive thrust against President Trump’s likely opponent in the 2020 election. Moreover, although the Department of Justice was investigating election interference, [6] DOJ was not investigating Joe Biden, and I didn’t think there was a legitimate basis to do so. The conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to the President or Vice President.

The key facts regarding Biden’s role in the ouster of the Ukrainian anticorruption prosecutor were largely a matter of public record. In 2014 the Vice President’s son Hunter, with virtually no relevant experience, had received a lucrative position on the board of Burisma at a time when the Vice President had the “lead” in the Obama administration’s push to get Ukraine to step up anticorruption efforts. In late 2015 Vice President Biden, by his own account, used the threat of withholding loan guarantees to pressure the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, the lead Ukrainian anticorruption prosecutor. The public record is fairly clear that there was frustration in US and European policy circles with Shokin’s failure to pursue corruption cases aggressively, and his removal was widely favored by key US figures. It also appears he was not actively pursuing Burisma at the time of his dismissal, although he claimed later that he was planning to investigate the company. In my view, while the whole situation was [7] shameful and unethical, the facts did not provide a basis for criminally investigating Vice President Biden.

[8] By the spring of 2019, I had noticed news stories stating that Giuliani was pushing the Ukrainians to investigate Biden’s role in Shokin’s dismissal. But other than what I glimpsed in the media, I had no knowledge of the former mayor’s activities. During the spring, I expressed my concern about Giuliani with the President. As I was leaving an Oval Office meeting on another topic, I paused briefly to raise the matter.

“Mr. President,” I said, “I don’t think you are being well served by Giuliani at this point. Mueller is over, and Russiagate is dying. Why is Giuliani thrashing about in Ukraine? It is going to blow up—”
“Yeah,” the President said, cutting me off. “I told him not to go over there. It was a trap.” President Trump gave the impression Giuliani had a degree of independence and was going to pull back. I did not press the point.

Unfortunately, the President’s careless statement to Zelensky erroneously implied some connection between me and Giuliani. Early in the conversation, the President asked Zelensky to “get to the bottom” of CrowdStrike and the server allegations, and said he was going to have the Attorney General talk to him about this. If the President had stopped there, I wouldn’t have been especially upset, because at least these particular allegations were within Durham’s purview, albeit on the back burner. However, later in the conversation, the President asked Zelensky to investigate Biden’s role in Shokin’s removal and said he should work with the Attorney General and Giuliani. When I read this, I hit the ceiling. When the transcript was released, I had the department put out a categorical statement:

[9] The President has not spoken with the Attorney General about having Ukraine investigate anything relating to former Vice President Biden or his son. The President has not asked the Attorney General to contact Ukraine—on this or any other matter. The Attorney General has not communicated with Ukraine—on this or any other subject. Nor has the Attorney General discussed this matter, or anything relating to Ukraine, with Rudy Giuliani.

Although this seemed to be largely accepted by journalists covering the department, some commentators still speculated that the President might have been pressing me to have the DOJ investigate Biden’s role.

This didn’t happen. The President had not asked that the Justice Department investigate the former Vice President, and it would not have made a difference if he had. [10] As far as I was concerned, the facts about this episode were out in the open and didn’t warrant a criminal investigation. Although Hunter Biden’s position was obviously a sordid instance of monetizing his father’s office, the Vice President did not violate the law because federal conflict-of-interest laws do not apply to Vice Presidents. Moreover, given the evidence that Biden was acting in line with US policy, and the absence of good evidence that Shokin was actively pursuing Burisma and that his removal would inhibit future action against the company, it would be impossible to prove that the Vice President acted with corrupt intent in pressing the Ukrainians to dismiss Shokin. And if there ever were a reason to pursue the matter, we would do it ourselves and certainly not pressure the Ukrainians to do it. (annotated numbering my own) (300 -304)

Three times, here, Barr claims he didn’t think the facts behind the Burisma allegations merited the kind of criminal investigation he would later set up.

[6] DOJ was not investigating Joe Biden, and I didn’t think there was a legitimate basis to do so.

the whole situation was [7] shameful and unethical, the facts did not provide a basis for criminally investigating Vice President Biden.

[10] As far as I was concerned, the facts about this episode were out in the open and didn’t warrant a criminal investigation.

He does so in a passage that claims to have avoided Ukrainian dirt because of the very same “smoke and mirrors” [2] Barr used to justify the side channel in January 2020. Those smoke and mirrors and Ukraine’s fine art form of conjuring up criminal conspiracies were the reason (Barr claims) he kept Durham out of Ukraine; but those very same smoke and mirrors are what Barr used to rationalize a side channel assessing dirt from known Russian spies that conjured up a criminal conspiracy against Joe Biden!

In other words, this disavowal of Ukranian involvement as part of the Durham investigation — which is transparently misleading in any case — serves as a proxy denial of the Ukrainian involvement we know Barr undertook elsewhere.

Barr’s discussion of the Durham investigation attempts to disclaim chasing Ukrainian dirt in three different ways.

First, he claims he didn’t know about any of Rudy’s efforts until … he doesn’t say precisely when. Barr claims at [8] that, “other than what I glimpsed in the media, I had no knowledge of the former mayor’s activities.” He situates the claim, vaguely, in “the spring of 2019,” far earlier than the warning he describes that Bolton gave him in early August pages later.

Parnas claims that Barr knew of their scheme from the start, from February, which would also be Barr first started getting briefings on the SDNY investigation, though Parnas didn’t say whether Barr learned of the scheme via SDNY briefings or separately, from Rudy’s effort to broker meetings with Barr. It might be true that the briefings Barr was getting on the Parnas investigation didn’t emphasize the tie to Rudy by whenever in spring Barr means. The first warrant against Rudy’s grifters had just a passing mention of Rudy; Kevin McCarthy, Rick Scott, Ron DeSantis, and Trump himself were all a more central focus of that warrant. The second, dated May 16, which focused directly on Marie Yovanovitch (and Pete Sessions’ role in her ouster), took out a reference to Rudy. SDNY obtained that warrant days after one possible date for Barr’s expressed concern to Trump that Rudy was “thrashing about in Ukraine.” Ken Vogel reported on May 9 that Rudy would head to Ukraine for election year dirt, only to report two days later that Rudy was canceling the trip after Adam Schiff and others made a stink; both reports postdated Trump’s comments to Hannity that Barr would investigate all this. That probably would be around the time when, according to Barr, he knew and warned Trump about “Giuliani thrashing about in Ukraine,” but claimed only to know that from press coverage.

By making the timing of this so vague, Barr makes it impossible to tell whether this conversation happened before or after the decision — made as part of, “inter‐department discussions well above” Joseph Ziegler’s second-order supervisor and originally attributed by Ziegler to Barr himself — to put the Hunter Biden investigation in Delaware, which made no sense if Hunter were the target but made perfect sense if Joe were. (Elsewhere in the book, Barr boasts that the investigation preceded his tenure, which it did, but the grand jury investigation did not, and — as noted — Ziegler originally said Barr personally made choices about the grand jury investigation.)

In any case, it would have happened long before the Perfect Phone call in July and meetings with Victoria Toensing — allegedly witnessed by Lev Parnas — regarding Dmitry Firtash. Barr is not denying getting involved in all this. He’s saying that he didn’t know what he was in for until sometime in later spring or summer 2019. By August, in any case, briefings on the Parnas investigation would have made SDNY’s increased focus on Rudy’s search for dirt on Hunter Biden clear. Barr knew what Rudy was up to well before DOJ chose to review only the transcript of Trump’s call for possible crimes, rather than the full whistleblower complaint that invoked Parnas and Fruman. Barr knew that if DOJ reviewed the entire whistleblower complaint, it would tie Trump’s call to an ongoing criminal investigation into unlawful influence peddling.

In short, even if Barr is telling the truth, even if he and Trump hadn’t spoken about Rudy’s efforts by the time Trump told Hannity they had, Barr had internal knowledge of both the SDNY investigation and Trump’s enthusiasm for Rudy’s efforts well before DOJ ensured the full whistleblower complaint would not be reviewed.

Having fiddled with the timing but not denied he was involved in Rudy’s efforts before the Perfect Phone Call, Barr then made much of what he claims was an affirmative choice not to pursue Ukrainian leads. He claims  [1] that he didn’t send Durham to chase (what were, but which he didn’t identify as) Konstantin Kilimnik’s claims of Ukrainian tampering in the 2016 investigation because it felt like disinformation.

Remember: the foundational theory of the Durham investigation — what Durham imagined was a fully-blown “Clinton Plan” — was based on possible Russian disinformation, and from there Durham (and Barr) fabricated more. Durham’s pursuit of a conspiracy theory that Hillary made a plan to fabricate information implicating Trump in Russia’s attack was not only based on files that the intelligence community always warned might be Russian disinformation, but Durham — almost certainly with Barr’s help — fabricated an additional element to it: that Hillary would invent false evidence, rather than simply point to true evidence of Trump’s affinity for Russia.

That’s not the only disinformation Barr chased. He and Durham went on junkets around Europe chasing the ginned up conspiracy theories of George Papadopoulos, including at least one fostered by Joseph Mifsud’s attorney.

Which brings us to Barr’s claim at [4] that he and Durham, “agreed to engage with the three countries we felt would be most helpful to the investigation: the United Kingdom, Australia, and Italy,” Barr is referring, in the last case, to chasing the Coffee Boy’s Mifsud conspiracies, every bit as obvious disinformation as Kilimnik’s Ukraine conspiracies. And when Barr explains at [5] that “I never talked with the Ukrainians or asked President Trump to talk to the Ukrainians,” he’s limiting his comments to official contacts.

Barr is attempting to distinguish, “ask[ing Trump] to mention Durham’s investigation to the prime ministers of [the UK, Australia, and Italy], stressing the importance of their help,” from Trump’s mention of Barr’s efforts to Zelenskyy, in which he stressed the import of Ukraine’s help.

That’s why it’s so interesting what a big deal Barr makes of the statement at [9], what he describes as a categorical denial of Trump’s mention to Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he’d have Barr reach out.

Barr doesn’t include another part of the statement that DOJ put out (or a follow-up sent out the same day), which described, “certain Ukrainians … volunteer[ing] information to Mr. Durham.”

A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Wednesday. “While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating.

Nor does he mention a statement he referred to over and over in the weeks that followed, one he sent on his personal cell phone.

Barr did have contacts with Ukrainians; he even discussed how Durham could get information confidentially from him.

They just were not members of government, Barr claimed.

To this day, we don’t know who those Ukrainians are (and all this would be in addition to discussions with Victoria Toensing about Dmitry Firtash, discussions that Parnas claims involved a quid pro quo for a Hunter Biden laptop).

But as I laid out here (and as I’ll return to), there’s good reason to suspect they include one or more of the Derkach associates Treasury sanctioned in January 2021.

Bill Barr told on himself the day after his book came out: He did investigate Joe Biden. Worse, he set up a system via which an informant responded to Andrii Derkach’s election interference by framing Biden.

Bill Barr walked into the AG job determined to kill an investigation into Russian interference. Before he walked out, he set up a system that protected election interference from Russian agents in Ukraine, election interference that resulted in Joe Biden being framed.

As I said above, a comparison of Barr’s claims with everything we’ve learned in the year since then shows that, at a minimum, Bill Barr was an easy mark for Russian disinformation.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

A series of decisions came down today in the Hunter Biden gun case that tee up the case for trial starting on June 3.

Those were:

• A Third Circuit order denying his bid for an interlocutory appeal
• A scheduling order hewing to the previous schedule to start trial on June 3
• Judge Maryellen Noreika’s order denying Hunter’s motion to dismiss on Second Amendment grounds
• Noreika’s order denying all Hunter’s requests for discovery
• Two oral orders scheduling a status conference to deal with major issues on which the deadline has already passed:

ORAL ORDER: Defendant’s counsel has represented that he is unavailable to appear at the in-person May 10, 2024 status conference set in the Court’s Scheduling Order ( 112 ). Although the government objects to moving the conference, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that the status conference is rescheduled for Tuesday May 14, 2024 at 11:00 am in Courtroom 4B. Defendant is not required to attend.

Virtually all of these should be regarded as expected to presumed. For example, while it wasn’t clear whether Noreika would rule on the 2A challenge before trial (Abbe Lowell had invited her not to), she relied on a recent 8th Circuit appeal to deny his motion, which made it far easier.

The Third Circuit appeal was unsurprising, and involved two Democratic appointees, including a judge — Cindy Chung — appointed by Hunter’s father. I think Hunter has a very good argument on a number of these points on appeal, but little basis to argue for interlocutory appeal.

Parts of the discovery order, however, are different. To be sure, many of these were expected. Having denied Hunter’s selective prosecution (while relying on evidence from Rudy Giuliani and falsely attributing it to Hunter’s memoir!!), it’s unsurprising that Noreika denied his discovery requests about Rudy’s role in the side channel that led to the Alexander Smirnov tip and therefore the collapse of the plea deal. It is nearly impossible to get discovery on grand jury proceedings, not even in a courthouse where a key staffer has it out for a defendant’s dad (which Abbe Lowell didn’t mention and may not know), so it’s unsurprising it failed here. Judges generally rely, as Noreika did, on prosecutors’ assurances they have complied with Brady, even in cases where it’s clear that AUSAs have been sheep-dipped so they don’t learn about Brady.

The degree to which David Weiss sat in a courtroom watching prosecutors make claims he knew to be false will all be ripe on appeal. But it’s not now.

Noreika’s order that prosecutors can sandbag Hunter with 404(b) material (describing otherwise incriminating details, which I expect will include an account from a sex worker in California about Hunter having a gun there, and probably other things from his memoir) a week before trial is churlish, but the kind of thing you might expect after you’ve threatened to mandamus a judge. It is totally within her purview, which is why it so risky to attempt to mandamus a judge before trial.

The one decision that surprises me is Noreika’s decision not to order prosecutors to tell Hunter where they’ve gotten evidence from the laptop.

Defendant closes his motion with a request that the government be ordered to “generally point defense counsel” to where, on a forensic image of Defendant’s “Apple MacBook Pro,” certain text and photographs can be located. (D.I. 83 at 18). That forensic image was produced to Defendant in October 2023 without an index, without any Bates stamps and without any indication of what will be used at trial. (Id. at 17). Although the government produced the laptop in the specific format requested by Defendant (D.I. 86 at 19), he complains that he has been unable to locate on the image certain text and photographs relied upon by the government (D.I. 83 at 17-18). In its opposition, the government provides an exhibit with images and annotations that appears to identify where the information resides on the laptop. (See D.I. 86 at Ex. 1). As best the Court can tell, this response satisfied Defendant, and there are no further outstanding requests with respect to the laptop. (See D.I. 89 at 19-20 (recognizing that the government has no index and expressing appreciation for the government’s disclosure of location of information)). Therefore, Defendant’s request as applied to the Apple MacBook Pro appears moot.

Given that Noreika has relied on laptop-derived evidence while ruling that Rudy didn’t have any influence in this case, this alarms me.

For reasons I don’t understand, after threatening to file a motion to suppress the laptop, Abbe Lowell has not done so. But the admissions Derek Hines made so far make it clear he has already relied on material that may violate US v. Riley not to mention material that will be ripe for other evidentiary challenges. And that came before the Robert Savage lawsuit made it clear this investigation has been tainted by fabricated evidence.

The decision not to move to suppress laptop evidence is Abbe Lowell’s. I can’t pretend to understand that choice.

Nevertheless, if prosecutors try to rely on laptop-based evidence, as they did extensively in defeating Hunter’s motion to dismiss, the decision to let prosecutors proceed without Bates stamps seems wildly ill-considered — all the more so given that they relied on evidence that arguably should have been treated as privileged and claimed sawdust was cocaine.

At the very least, it’ll dramatically raise the import of expert disclosure, which hasn’t even started, because someone from Hunter’s team and from the government team are going to have to argue at trial about whether every bit of evidence is reliable or is, instead, potentially the result of hacking. And it risks bogging down the trial. Thus far, the government hasn’t committed — at all!! — to have someone testify about why someone allegedly called John Paul Mac Issac to find out how to break into the machine before they had a warrant, about why they never took basic forensic steps with the laptop. If they intend to rely on laptop based evidence without Bates stamps, it will dramatically intensify any effort to admit this evidence.

Like I said, almost all of these decisions could be expected. They tee up a trial that will be enormously damaging to the President’s son.

But they also lay out decisions that I believe are incredibly ripe for appeal … after trial.

Update: Judge Mark Scarsi has denied David Weiss’ demand that Scarsi make Hunter adhere to the existing pretrial schedule. Hunter’s bid for interlocutory appeal is slightly less of a longshot in the 9th Circuit, though threatens to hold Hunter to existing deadlines.

To be clear, the Court has not vacated the pretrial schedule, and absent a request for relief, Mr. Biden ignores the Court’s orders at his own peril. If the Ninth Circuit dismisses the interlocutory appeal for lack of jurisdiction, the Court intends to proceed to trial without significant delay.

Remember when I noted that there were two sealed dockets that had been deemed “related” to the Henry Cuellar docket?

There are two cases related to this one, 4:24-cr-00089, 4:24-cr-00113, both of which were charged this year, both of which remain sealed. That means several other people involved in this scheme are also being prosecuted.

There are several key participants in this alleged scheme who might be candidates for either parallel prosecution or cooperation deals. For example, one of the Cuellars’ adult children has allegedly been getting a cut of these deals and, in 2021 (both schemes appear to have paused in 2020), took over the Azerbaijani scheme and got payments to close out the Mexican scheme. As noted below, absent that child’s involvement, at least the Azerbaijani side of the indictment would face timeliness problems.

The indictment also describes that a San Antonio associate of Cuellar’s served as middleman for the contract with Mexico, allegedly laundered through Cuellar’s former Chief of Staff; three paragraphs of the indictment describe conversations the San Antonio associate had with Cuellar back in 2015 that must arise from his direct testimony.

They’ve been unsealed.

They belong to the San Antonio associate, Florencio Rendon, and the former Chief of Staff, Mina Strother.

Both entered into cooperation plea deals in early March.

That news comes amid news that several other current Cuellar aides have quit.

Which leaves one thing to be resolved: How DOJ plans to rope the Cueller’s adult child into this, without whose inclusion this prosecution has timeliness problems (though it’s possible they’ll trade that child’s fate for quick pleas).

In other Cueller related news, DOJ filed to start the CIPA process today, doing so at a far earlier point in the prosecution than SDNY did in the Bob Menendez case. I had noted that there where dated, probably intercepted discussions among Azerbaijani officials about recruiting Cuellar. I would imagine DOJ hopes to protect more recent such intercepts via the CIPA process.

I said already, this prosecution is a lot more straightforward than the Menendez one. Particularly if DOJ can leverage the child, this thing may not go to trial.

As I laid out in this post, Julie Kelly is an important right wing propagandist who has ginned up quite a lot of attention from accused fraudsters for her willingness to lie about Jan6ers and Donald Trump. Her propaganda may have given Aileen Cannon cover to delay trial for Trump’s alleged unlawful retention of National Defense Information, including a nuclear document.

I say she’s a propagandist willing to lie based on an extended discussion we had in 2021 about January 6ers charged with assaulting cops (at a minimum, 18 USC 111(a)). She reviewed my (incomplete) list, challenged a number of people on it — for example, people who had been charged with 18 USC 111 via complaint but charged with something else, like 18 USC 231, upon indictment. There were 112 people on the list. Nevertheless, Julie never retracted her false claim — a foundational one in Jan6 hagiography — that fewer than 100 Jan6ers had been charged with assaulting cops. Having been presented with proof she was wrong, she simply continued to tell the same lie, downplaying the alleged (and since then, adjudicated) violence of the Jan6ers she was claiming were peaceful protestors.

Because trolls keep pointing to her latest work, in which she accused the FBI of doctoring the initial photo released from the Mar-a-Lago search, I wanted to point out how Julie continues to struggle with numbers, this time the difference between ten and two, and as a result has badly deceived all those poor trolls.

She claims that Jay Bratt lied in his description of what the FBI found at Mar-a-Lago, in which he referred to the famous photo from the search, which Bratt specifically described as a photo of documents and classified cover sheets found in a container seized in Trump’s office.

Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:

“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”

The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents.

Here is Bratt’s new version of the story, where he finally admits a critical detail that he failed to disclose in his August 2022 filing:

“[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.”

But before the official cover sheets were used as placeholder, agents apparently used them as props. FBI agents took it upon themselves to paperclip the sheets to documents—something evident given the uniform nature of how each cover sheet is clipped to each file in the photo—laid them on the floor, and snapped a picture for political posterity. [Italics Julie’s, bold emphasis mine]

Julie’s passage starts by quoting from Bratt’s description of the photo in his August 2022 declaration. The contents of the container in question are clearly identified in the picture as 2A — that is, the contents of box 2. In his declaration, Bratt specifically identifies that the box was recovered in the office. Until DOJ learned of the box of presidential schedules Chamberlain Harris had under her desk in various places, that was the only box known to be seized from the office (though some albums and loose documents were found as well).

Then, Julie nods to, but does not cite, Stan Woodward’s description of the appearance of slip sheets in boxes of unclassified documents when she describes Bratt as, “being busted recently by defense attorneys.” I quoted Woodward’s filing at length here.

She then quotes from Jay Bratt’s description of something other than that photo: of how, as the FBI searched individual boxes, the FBI inserted a replacement — sometimes a classified cover sheet, but after they ran out of those, a handwritten piece of paper — when it pulled the classified documents from the boxes. Here’s more of what Bratt said.

The filter team took care to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but it was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box. If a box contained potentially privileged material and fell within the scope of the search warrant, the filter team seized the box for later closer review. If a box did not contain potentially privileged documents, the filter team provided the box to the investigative team for on-site review, and if the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose, until the FBI ran out because there were so many classified documents, at which point the team began using blank sheets with handwritten notes indicating the classification level of the document(s) seized. The investigative team seized any box that was found to contain documents with classification markings or presidential records.

So Julie relies on (1) a description of a photo of the documents with classification markings removed from box 2 on August 8, 2022, (2) Woodward’s description of what boxes from which documents with classification markings have been removed currently look like, and then (3) Bratt’s description of the search process used in August 2022. From that, she declares that Bratt’s description of some contents of a single box doesn’t match his description of a process used to search boxes and therefore the evidence in the picture must have been doctored.

Already, poor Julie has a problem. First, Bratt’s descriptions are of different things. The August 2022 declaration describes what they found at Mar-a-Lago after pulling documents with classification markings from boxes. The recent response describes what the FBI did when pulling documents with classification markings from boxes.

Woodward, too, describes something different than what Bratt described in August 2022. In the filing that Julie doesn’t cite, Woodward describes what boxes from which documents with classification markings have already been removed currently look like. Again, there is a difference between what remains in boxes versus what got pulled from boxes.

Plus, Bratt’s description is consistent with the picture; Julie’s is not.

Bratt said that a subset of the documents did have cover-sheets — the bit that she italicizes. Julie simply asserts, as fact, that the FBI attached the seven cover sheets that appear in the picture (but for what she imagines is a doctored photo, did not attach cover sheets to the other documents in the picture). To match Bratt’s later description, all the documents with classification markings in the picture would have cover sheets, which also would have made a more damning photo. Julie doesn’t consider the possibility that the seven or so cover sheets in the picture which she describes to be attached to documents were among those documents that Bratt described that did have cover sheets. She doesn’t puzzle through why, if the FBI were trying to make things look as bad as possible, they didn’t put cover sheets on everything.

And to reiterate, this picture does not depict what Julie thinks she’s describing at all; what she’s describing is what got left after the classified documents were segregated from ones without classification markings. What the picture shows on the floor is only documents with classification markings.

It gets worse.

Poor Julie the propagandist states as fact that, “Classified cover sheets were not ‘recovered’ in the container.”

As I noted here, Stan Woodward bases his description of the troubling box with documents out of place as item 10. He describes, “Box A-15 is a box seized from the Storage Room and is identified by the FBI as Item 10.”

The inventory certified as part of the Special Master process back in September 2022 describes item 10 (identified as box A-15 in the warrant return) this way:

It is, as I noted, the box with the biggest number of classified documents in it, but they were classified at a lower level — Confidential and Secret.

The inventory describes nothing about cover sheets.

But that’s not the box in the picture!! That’s not the box Jay Bratt described back in August 2022!

The box in the picture is box 2, a leatherbound box found in the office.

Here’s how the uncontested description from the Special Master inventory describes that box, the one that Jay Bratt was actually talking about. [my red annotation]

The inventory describes that, in addition to 24 classified documents — 7 of them Top Secret, of which just five are reflected in cover sheets in the picture — there were also 43 empty classified folders.

And yet poor Julie states as fact that, “Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container.” While folders and these cover sheets are different things, they serve to cover classified documents. There were 43 empty classified folders in box 2.

Remember: Tim Parlatore admitted that Trump retained at least one classified cover folder when he was trying to explain why his search team found one marked “Classified Evening Summary” in Trump’s bedroom. Is Julie calling Parlatore a liar now too?

In any case, Julie is talking about an entirely different box, one that the inventory doesn’t record as having any classified cover sheets in it. Based on a claim that item 10 (box A-15) didn’t have cover sheets, Julie stated as fact that item 2 didn’t either.

She simply made it up.

Based on the uncontested inventory, the FBI could have made that picture far more damning than they did, had they paper clipped cover sheets to “each” document with classification marks, as Julie claims they did. They could have put cover sheets on two more Top Secret documents for the picture and added cover sheets on up to 12 more Secret documents. They could have stacked up those 43 empty folders that once had documents in them, but no longer did on August 8, 2022. Instead, they took a picture showing that some of those documents had cover sheets and some did not, which (accurate or not) is precisely what Bratt described, apparently leaving out the 43 damning empty folders altogether.

Poor Julie took a description of a box found in the storage closet, treated it as a description of a box found somewhere else, and then simply never bothered to check what that box — the box Jay Bratt was actually referring to — actually contained.

Julie the propagandist suggests that if the picture were accurate — if there really were seven documents that still had cover sheets in the box that Jay Bratt was actually describing — then it would accurately support an argument that, “the former president is a criminal and threat to national security.” And wow, that may be a problem, conceding that that picture supported an argument that Trump was a national security threat! Because nothing Julie claims in her post describes this box. And her claims that the FBI made this picture as damning as possible is debunked when you look at the actual contents of the box (or even, the picture itself).

So instead, she described something entirely different — something entirely unrelated to the box contents in this picture — and claimed the FBI, and not Julie the propagandist herself, was engaged in deception.

Update: Julie now says that in spite of all the proof she got caught lying, she must still be right because the paperclips in the picture are tidy.

When Aileen Cannon issued her order delaying Trump’s stolen documents trial indefinitely, I posted this on Xitter.

The post was factual. Trump nominated Judge Cannon on May 21, 2020. Judge Cannon’s order ceded to the requests of Trump and his co-defendants for hearings on all sorts of requests that, before any other judge, would be deemed frivolous. She adopted deadlines Trump asked for last year. The order undoubtedly delayed accountability in this case, with the next deadlines set for a month after the original trial date. And Trump is alleged to have stolen nuclear documents. In the original 15 boxes returned in January 2022, there were three documents classified FRD, for a total of 57 pages and charged document 19, which was seized on August 8, 2022, is also classified FRD, formerly restricted, a classification used for nuclear stockpiles and targeting. All would have been covered by the Presidential Records Act and so belong to the US Government; Trump could declassify none of them on his own.

By 11 my time (plus-5 from ET), it had gone viral, with 200k views, 47 QTs, 4.4k likes, 1.6k RTs, and 300 responses.

The post is a good way to start thinking about the information economy that led us to a place where a Republican judge helps delay accountability for stealing nuclear documents and storing them in a closet normally storing campaign swag. This information economy creates an environment in which a former prosecutor like Aileen Cannon either believes, or claims to believe, outlandish claims of bias and ill-treatment solely because career national security officials — rebranded by Trump as the Deep State — did their job.

Take the responses. In addition to a bunch of lefty responses — including a bunch imagining there was some quick fix switch that Jack Smith can hit to remove Aileen Cannon — there were a range of MAGAt responses, including a bunch doubting that there were really nuclear documents.

One of those was a full Pepe meme invoking Obama’s birth certificate.

Several used the superbly inane retort MAGAts like to use with me: that my moniker should be “emptyhead” instead of “emptywheel.”

Several of the responses in the thread came from Alexander Sheppard, a Jan6er convicted of obstruction whom John Bates ordered released part way through a 19-month sentence pending the outcome of Joseph Fischer’s challenge to the application of 18 USC 1512(c)(2) over government objections that Sheppard still insists he’s a political prisoner.

This kind of viral response on Xitter is the point — right wingers have deliberately stoked such toxic viral responses for years. This is the kind of “engagement” Xitter’s billionaire owner has chosen to foster.

The point is not rational discussion, but instead the replacement of it with brainless mob-think, a mob-think designed to reinforce unquestioning partisan identity, a mob-think designed to drown out rational consideration of what it means that Judge Cannon has intervened in this way.

A mob-think that can be wielded to drown out the basic fact that Trump is accused of refusing to give back a nuclear document.

Of course, Elon Musk’s decision to grant people with a certain sized following, which includes me, checkmark status some months ago helps to ensure that anything I say will be visible to and therefore subject to this kind of mob treatment. Because of that involuntary checkmark, anything I say will be a magnet for this kind of mob response.

One reason the comment went viral is because of a few QTs from right wing influencers, not least Julie Kelly, who plays a key role in the right wing propaganda world. (The first post here is a QT, claiming that I am an example of the people invoked in her prior Tweet who (she falsely claims) hasn’t covered things I have covered; that is, Julie made my post go viral based on an outright lie, on top of the lie that I have never advocated that Smith ask Cannon to recuse because I doubt it would work.)

Julie has spent her time since January 6 running a PR campaign for the defendants, falsely claiming they were treated differently than other similarly situated defendants. I have repeatedly showed that Julie has refused to correct lies she has told about the number of January 6 defendants charged with assault and in some but by no means all cases, detained pre-trial. I’ve also had to explain really basic things to poor Julie, like how white people get charged with terrorism.

Julie has moved on from January 6 to Trump’s cases, providing the same kind of inflammatory, factually flawed claims she did for men who attacked cops. And she’s effective. Indeed, she spun the latest development that Aileen Cannon may use as political cover for shutting down the prosecution of a guy who stole nuclear documents. Julie has claimed that because FBI replaced certain documents with slip sheets, all the slip sheets were planted there by the FBI. That’s not remotely what the evidence shows (indeed, the evidence shows that a number of boxes had cover sheets without any documents, something even Tim Parlatore has backed). Nor does it convey the one place where altered box order will matter, which is for Trump — except that the altered document order shown thus far is almost certainly not implicated in any of the charged documents, because it involves Confidential, not Top Secret, documents.

Here is Julie’s coverage of the Robert Hur report, in which she spins Biden granting permission for the FBI to just come and grab boxes as somehow worse than Trump stalling, refusing to let the FBI actually look in boxes when they arrive, then withholding boxes and boxes.

Unlike the expansive raid of Mar-a-Lago, however, the bureau came unprepared. “The FBI dispatched two agents to retrieve the boxes in the garage the following day,” Hur wrote of the FBI’s visit to Delaware on December 21, 2022. “[The] agents conducted a limited search of the garage intended to determine whether it contained other classified documents. The two agents lacked sufficient resources to conduct a comprehensive search of the entire garage given the volume of material stored there.”

Authorities waited for Biden’s consent–he apparently did not want to turn over his notebooks–to search his home; agents were sent to Delaware on January 20, 2023. One item retrieved by the FBI, according to Hur, was Biden’s 2009 “handwritten memo [to President Obama detailing his opposition to the troop surge in Afghanistan] that contains information that remains classified up to the Secret level.”

But Biden and his associates will be spared prosecution. The same media echo chamber that raged for months about Trump’s threat to national security instead is condemning Hur for his “gratuitous” remarks about Biden’s faulty mental faculties.

In the meantime, Trump and his co-defendants are preparing for a tentative May 20 trial date in Florida, embroiled in costly and time-consuming legal battles with the DOJ.

Another example of the two-tiered standard of justice in Joe Biden’s America.

In spite of Julie’s close coverage of the Hur report, she has not told her rubes that the FBI similarly reordered documents in the most important box seized from Biden, nor gone back to admit that the problem she is now misrepresenting — that there were so many classified documents at Mar-a-Lago that FBI ran out of slip sheets — is evidence that the FBI was similarly unprepared for the Trump search.

Julie has similarly spun documents that show Mark Meadows was significantly responsible for getting the Biden White House involved in efforts to retrieve documents (because he tried to reach out to WHORM personally), and show key players at NARA hesitating before asking for further involvement of DOJ as the opposite, an aggressive effort to get Trump.

It doesn’t have to be true. It only has to feed the rubes.

And by feeding the rubes shamelessly false claims, Julie has become quite the celebrity, speaking at CPAC and regularly appearing on Steve Bannon’s show. Bannon knows a useful propagandist when he sees one!

Now, I’m not begrudging Julie the fame she has carefully cultivated with her shamelessness. She has earned it! The right wing propaganda network — the deliberate fostering of lies masterminded by people like accused fraudster Bannon — always rewards people who will tell the rubes what they want to hear.

What I’m trying to explain is how her role gives Aileen Cannon cover to do truly astonishing things, like entertain the notion that  putting a non-partisan in charge of the investigation of Trump for classified documents while putting a Trump appointee who had already deprived a Trump target of due process in charge of the Biden investigation is instead proof of selective prosecution against Trump.

In addition to that premise — that investigating Trump in the same way as investigating Biden is proof of selective prosecution against Trump — Aileen Cannon’s order yesterday and earlier orders signalled she is entertaining the following claims:

• That Walt Nauta, who doesn’t claim to have sorted through any documents, must have the ability to sort through classified documents
• That because the document investigation, which included crimes in DC, started in DC, and used DC SCIFs for the investigation, it’s proof that Jack Smith was deliberately attempting to bypass SDFL
• That because Mark Meadows and Pat Philbin got the White House involved in document response, it’s proof that Biden improperly intervened
• That even though multiple Trump-friendly witnesses testified that Trump didn’t even know Tom Fitton’s Clinton socks theory until 2022, he should be able to argue to jurors he applied it in 2021
• That because NARA informed DOJ about classified documents, the same way they did with Joe Biden, it’s proof that NARA are part of the prosecution team as opposed to the victim
• That because Trump’s surveillance system uses difficult software and one of the defense lawyers only uses an iPad, prosecutors have failed to meet discovery obligations
• That Trump has immunity to steal nuclear documents that he couldn’t even declassify on his own

These are all, individually and collectively, crazy. It’s unclear whether Cannon truly believes them or simply doesn’t care. She has chosen to treat Trump’s claims according to the reality his propaganda bubble has created rather than the actual facts before her.

A lot of the responses to my Tweet were lefties imagining that Jack Smith has some kind of button he can press to get Aileen Cannon replaced; he doesn’t.

But even if he did, it wouldn’t solve the problem. Because the problem before us is that Trump’s mob and his judges have been trained to believe that applying any law to him amounts to a two-tiered system of justice by a very comprehensive propaganda machine.

Trump’s propaganda machine has drowned out facts and replaced it with grievance.

And until something starts cutting through that grievance, mere trials aren’t going to fix this.

Aileen Cannon has made official what has been obvious for some time. She has no intention of moving forward on Donald Trump’s stolen documents trial with any kind of order or speed.

The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture—before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and CIPA issues remaining and forthcoming—would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury.6 The Court therefore vacates the current May 20, 2024, trial date (and associated calendar call), to be reset by separate order following resolution of the matters before the Court, consistent with Defendants’ right to due process and the public’s interest in the fair and efficient administration of justice.

Instead, she will entertain every one of his frivolous motions for months and months and months.

Again, none of this is surprising. But it is Cannon’s commitment to let a man accused of stealing hundreds of classified documents potentially regain the White House with no accountability for his alleged theft.