Zero Accountability: The Five-Plus Times DOJ Got Fabricated Evidence against Hunter Biden

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The other day, former FBI Agent Asha Rangappa attributed the 11-year scope of Hunter Biden’s pardon to the possibility that, “For the 1st time, the FBI and Justice Department could literally fabricate evidence, or collaborate with a foreign government to ‘find’ evidence of a ‘crime,’ with zero accountability.”

Rangappa is not wrong that the ability to fabricate evidence to invent new crimes with which to charge Hunter likely helps explain the scope of the pardon.

But her suggestion that a second Trump term would be the “1st time” the FBI was in a position to do that is, itself, a symptom of the “zero accountability” that allowed Trump to win a second term.

FBI and DOJ already allowed various types of people — from spies to grifters to informants to an AUSA — to fabricate evidence against Hunter Biden and his father at least five times, with another four instances of potentially false evidence. It appears that such fabricated evidence played a role in the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal, David Weiss’ request for Special Counsel authority, and the evidence that convicted Hunter in his Delaware trial.

And whatever its influence on Hunter’s ultimate conviction, how Republicans worked to insert fabricated and otherwise suspect information into Hunter’s case is a lesson for how it’ll continue to happen.

The following list includes five examples, with numbered headings, that present compelling evidence of fabricated information used either by Congress or DOJ to go after Hunter and his father, along with four suspect incidents. The first five are presented in order of seriousness with regards to the effect on Hunter’s due process. This post will review each. I’ll do a followup that explains the lessons we can take from this.

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

1. After sharing a debunked Fox News meme, Alexander Smirnov makes false claims of bribery

Fabrication: Longtime FBI informant Alexander Smirnov allegedly falsely claimed Mykola Zlochevsky twice told him that he was bribing Joe Biden.

Resolution: According to Scott Brady’s testimony, prosecutor Lesley Wolf had treated the Smirnov allegation with the same skepticism she did other tips shared via the side channel from Rudy. But after Congress leaked the Smirnov FD-1023 and Bill Barr publicly complained that David Weiss was supposed to have investigated it, it appears to have been part of — if not the primary reason — why Weiss reneged on the plea deal with Hunter, obtained Special Counsel status, and ratcheted up charges afterwards.

In January 2020, right in the middle of impeachment, Bill Barr set up a “discreet” side channel overseen via Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady via which Rudy Giuliani could share the dirt on Hunter Biden he had obtained, in part, from known Russian agent, Andrii Derkach.

As part of that process, Brady checked in on all investigations implicated by the side channel: the SDNY investigation into whether Rudy was acting as an unregistered agent of various Ukrainians, David Weiss’ investigation into Hunter Biden, and two oligarchs from whom Rudy solicited dirt on Hunter: Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky. In his interview, Brady didn’t claim to have looked into the investigation into another oligarch from whom Rudy solicited dirt (indirectly): Mykola Zlochevsky. That investigation reportedly started in 2016 while Joe Biden was Vice President and got shut down the previous month, December 2019, right in the middle of an impeachment focused on corruption at Burisma. Rather, Brady dubiously claimed he discovered Smirnov in a search on Hunter and Burisma.

As Alexander Smirnov’s first indictment describes it, it worked the other way. When Smirnov saw a report of Derkach’s meetings with Rudy, Smirnov started texting his handler that, “bribe of [Joe Biden] should soon be in the news))).” He promised to get proof — and then started sending already debunked memes made popular on Fox News.

Neither story convincingly explains how Brady came to reach out to Smirnov to give him opportunity to frame Donald Trump’s opponent. Perhaps one of Smirnov’s three ties to Trump and his people, including the financial ties to Economic Transformation Technologies, which in turn has ties to one of the construction companies that has partnered with Trump Organization in the Middle East, that are the subject of a second indictment against Smirnov, better explains it. That is, perhaps someone in Trump’s camp knew to send him.

Whatever the case, after Brady came calling, Smirnov claimed that at a meeting in 2017, Zlochevsky insinuated he was paying Hunter Biden as protection, from Joe, for himself. Smirnov further claimed that on a phone call the previous year (in 2019, around the time Rudy was expecting a Hunter laptop, and close to the time the investigation into Zlochevsky would be shut down), the Burisma head bragged about hiding his payments so well it would take ten years to find them.

Here was the bribery claim that Trump had first demanded a year earlier from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, all wrapped up with a bow in that Brady side channel!

Brady told Congress his investigators vetted Smirnov’s claims, which was, after all, the purported reason for his side channel. The Smirnov indictment repeatedly described how precisely the thing — Smirnov’s travel records — that Brady claimed he had used to validate Smirnov’s allegations instead debunked them. Jerry Nadler referred Brady for investigation for those false claims to Congress, an investigation that will presumably be killed after inauguration.

On October 23, 2020 — days after Trump personally yelled at Bill Barr about the investigation into Hunter Biden and on the same day that Tony Bobulinski, accompanied by a former Trump White House lawyer, claimed to have personally witnessed a key meeting with CEFC — David Weiss’ team was ordered by Richard Donoghue to receive a briefing on this allegation.

With the personal involvement of Bill Barr, PADAG Richard Donoghue and before him Seth DuCharme, and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, Scott Brady found an informant who — if you believe the indictment — was willing to fabricate a bribery claim against Joe and Hunter Biden during an election year.

Don’t tell me that a second Trump administration will only prospectively use fabricated evidence, because it already happened, and the guy currently investigating how it happened was a witness to the process and one of the interviews in this case.

When DOJ ordered prosecutors to accept this alleged fabrication in 2020, AUSA Lesley Wolf reportedly treated it with the same skepticism she treated all the other dirt laundered through the side channel, and it went nowhere. But it didn’t go away. Republicans resuscitated it, in 2023, during their baseless effort to impeach Joe Biden. The FBI tried but failed to limit sharing of Smirnov’s FD-1023. Marjorie Taylor Greene promptly leaked details of it. Bill Barr started making public claims about it in response to Jamie Raskin’s accurate description of what happened in 2020. Then a “whistleblower” leaked the form itself via Chuck Grassley and James Comer. And amid that frenzy, Weiss reneged on his office’s previous assurances that there was no ongoing investigation, told Lindsey Graham that Smirnov’s FD-1023 was part of that ongoing investigation, and then obtained Special Counsel status, out of which the Smirnov false statements prosecution arose.

Yes, after the Smirnov allegation served as a precipitating factor in the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal, he too is now being prosecuted. But by all appearances, the fabrication and the way Republicans leveraged it nevertheless played a central role in the plight of Hunter Biden, a central role in prosecuting him with far more serious charges than originally planned. The fabrication had its effect, and the effect was to make Hunter a felon.

Update: On December 10, Alexander Smirnov signed a plea deal admitting his bribery claims against Joe Biden were fabricated.

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

2. Derek Hines narratively plants a crack pipe in Wilmington

Fabrication: AUSA Derek Hines repeatedly claimed that a line from Hunter Biden’s memoir set in February to March 2019 in New Haven happened in 2018 in Wilmington.

Resolution: None. Hines presented a version of this claim to jurors.

Prosecutors faced a number of challenges with charging Hunter Biden for the gun crime David Weiss had earlier decided to divert. They needed to defend against a vindictive prosecution claim that they had ratcheted up the gun charges against Hunter Biden because he didn’t accept the narrowed plea agreement after Weiss reneged on his June 19, 2023 assurances there was no ongoing investigation. Their plight was made worse because investigators had never taken the most basic investigative steps to pursue the gun charge: they had never obtained a warrant to search Hunter’s digital evidence for proof he was addicted when he owned the gun, and they had never done laboratory analysis on the pouch in which the gun was found. They did both those things after indicting Hunter for the gun crimes in 2023, after the statute of limitations had already expired.

The decision to charge Hunter with the gun crimes appears to have amounted to, “We know Hunter was an addict based on stuff obtained on the laptop and published in the right wing press” (indeed, one of Judge Maryellen Noreika’s decisions mistook stuff published by Murdoch rags for evidence before her).

Abbe Lowell has claimed that, at least in August 2023, prosecutors told him they had no need to rely on the laptop for evidence at trial. Prosecutors seem to have believed, incorrectly, that the laptop was an exact match of Hunter Biden’s iCloud. They similarly seem to have believed that Hunter’s memoir provided adequate proof that Hunter was doing drugs during the 11-day period in October 2018 he owned the gun. In fact, the memoir says almost nothing about that period.

Nevertheless, AUSA Derek Hines made a version of that argument — that the memoir reflected drug use during or closely after the period he owned the gun — over and over, at least seven times by my last count. Hines did so by claiming that his favorite line from the memoir — “It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8, not knowing which the fuck way was up” — took place in fall 2018 in Wilmington, DE, and not in Hunter’s stopover in New Haven between the time he left Keith Ablow’s treatment in February 2019 and arrived back in Wilmington, before then moving back to Los Angeles permanently.

He simply moved the narrative reference to the crack pipe in a Super 8 from one crime scene to the one where he needed it to be, from 2019 to 2018, from New Haven to Wilmington. Just like a dirty cop moves an actual crack pipe from one location to another.

(This post includes the full memoir excerpt and a summary of Hunter’s spending around New Haven; it also notes that the claim he was staying in Super 8s was, as so much auto-biography is, embellishment.) The argument was absolutely crucial to Hines’ responses to Hunter’s selective and vindictive prosecution claims, falsely substantiating a defense of the prosecutorial decision to charge Hunter with the gun crimes (and even the tax crimes) because there was so much evidence against Hunter in the memoir, when in fact the memoir had a gap for the crucial period.

Hines sustained this fabrication with the jury by selectively presenting the memoir to exclude the discussion of leaving Ablow’s treatment and the way it exacerbated Hunter’s addiction. And when he walked his summary witness through the memoir, he again falsely insinuated that the line took place in 2018, not 2019.

Q. And how about any section in Chapter 9 or Chapter 10, the relevant time period for 2018?

A. No.

Q. And finally, page 208, continuing in the same chapter, after Mr. Biden describes full blown addiction, Exhibit 19, page 208, does Mr. Biden write “crack is a great leveler.” And then he goes on to say “just like in California.” Is that what he goes on to say here?

A. Yes.

Q. If you zoom out, above that, does he say in the first paragraph, “It was me and a crack pipe and a super eight, not knowing which the fuck way was up.” Are those his words?

A. Yes.

Q. And this is in the same chapter when he describes his return in the fall of 2018; correct?

To be sure: Hunter was also staying in cheap motels while he was in Wilmington in 2018, including the night before Hallie Biden found the gun. But those stays don’t appear in his memoir, and so prosecutors had little to no evidence that he was smoking a crack pipe while staying there. As noted, virtually nothing from those weeks in Wilmington appears in his memoir.

But that was true of the evidence against Hunter generally. While there was a great deal of evidence showing Hunter using drugs before and after the period he owned the gun, there was little definitive evidence showing him using in those 11 days.

Prosecutors charged a case for which they had very little direct evidence of drug use during the period in question. One way they won a conviction anyway was by misrepresenting the timing and location of this line in the memoir.

3. The gun shop also lied on the gun form

Fabrication: Sometime after reporting the gun purchase, the gun shop added a claim to the original form that they had asked Hunter for a second form of ID, in addition to his passport (which, because it lacks an address, would not suffice). 

Resolution: Judge Noreika prevented Hunter from presenting the doctored form to the jury or questioning specifically on the question (though Abbe Lowell did elicit closely related answers), thereby preventing Hunter from discrediting the gun shop practices generally or the proving Hunter’s lie on the gun form was not material. 

According to a contested Abbe Lowell filing, before the election in 2020, the guy who owned the gun shop from which Hunter bought a gun, Ron Palimere, and the State Trooper who first investigated the gun in 2018, Vincent Clemons, exchanged WhatsApp texts about how they could release the paperwork tied to the gun purchase in order to help beat Joe Biden.

[Vincent] Clemons was the Delaware State Police officer who first arrived at Janssens’ grocery store on October 23, 2018 when Hallie Biden threw a bag containing the handgun into a trash can in front of the store. It was Clemons who took statements about the handgun from both Hallie and Hunter Biden and was part of filling out an official police report on the issue. Two years later, he is in the communications with [Ron] Palimere about the Form 4473, one of which states: “Yep your side is simple – Hunter bought a gun from you, he filled out the proper forms and the Feds approved him for a purchase.” (emphasis added). Palimere later responded, “I’ll keep it short and sweet as well: Hunter bought a gun. The police visited me asking for verification of the purchase and that’s all I can recall from that day. It was over 2 years ago.” (TAB 6B, 10/26/20 Palimere-Clemons Texts at 4, 6.) The reference to filling out the “proper forms” is not lost on defense counsel given what transpired thereafter. And, despite the importance of Clemons (e.g., the person who actually took the statements), the Special Counsel is foregoing him as a witness to call two other Delaware officers instead.

As part of their effort to use Hunter’s gun purchase to hurt his father in the 2020 election, it appears that on October 22, 2020 they for the first time printed out the receipt recording Hunter’s purchase of the gun.

They would leak these materials, as well as the partisan write-up of the investigation penned after the fact by Clemons, to right wing propagandists.

Their reference to “proper forms” was important, Lowell argued, because some time after the original gun form was emailed to ATF after the gun had already been lost and recovered, it got altered, to falsely reflect that the gun shop obtained a second form of ID before selling a guy they knew to be Joe Biden’s kid a gun. (There’s no way this vehicle registration could have served as a second ID to supplement the passport, because Hunter was driving his father’s Cadillac, and so the registration would have been in Dad’s name.)

Hunter got evidence that these key witnesses tried to use these documents as part of a political hit job long after his selective and vindictive prosecution bids were rejected. And Judge Maryellen Noreika prohibited Hunter’s team from introducing either that the gun shop owner hated Joe Biden and also wanted to get Hunter out of his shop as quickly as possible and as a result sold him a gun without first getting the proper paperwork, or that they altered the form after the fact. Jurors were left with no explanation of why gun shop employee Jason Turner repeatedly claimed to have written “DE Vehicle Registration” on the form, but it didn’t appear on the form before them (see this post for more on the way the gun shop employees’ testimony materially conflicted).

The means by which prosecutors managed to cover up that the gun shop had also broken the law is fairly banal: They relied on secondary witnesses for key testimony rather than that of people more directly implicated in similar conduct as Hunter (the gun shop owner was immunized to sustain this case), and performed ignorance of details about this corruption at trial.

That happens all the time in criminal trials prosecuted by AUSAs who excel at prosecutorial dickishness. Judge Noreika’s decision to exclude a doctored gun form (and instead rely on a scan at trial) might have been a ripe issue for appeal. Certainly, by excluding evidence that the gun sale went through without proper paperwork, she excluded evidence that Hunter’s lie was not material.

But the larger issue is that Hunter Biden was prosecuted for lying on a gun form even while prosecutors covered up that the gun shop owner himself had an employee fabricate the form after the fact, possibly to hide his own role in leaking to the press and trying to push such a case against Joe Biden’s kid.

4. Tony Bobulinski[‘s FBI report] claims he saw a diamond pass hands

Fabrication: After Trump hosted Tony Bobulinski at a debate, the FBI recorded claims that Bobulinski personally witnessed a key CEFC meeting.

Resolution: After prosecutors deemed Bobulinski’s testimony unreliable and so avoided follow-up, IRS agents claimed prosecutors improperly withheld Bobulinski’s testimony, leading to his platforming of slightly different claims in a hearing purporting to support impeachment. Bobulinski accused FBI of misrecording his interview.

The day after being hosted by Donald Trump at one of the Presidential debates, Tony Bobulinski — represented by onetime White House Counsel and future January 6 witness attorney Stefan Passantino — went to the FBI and made certain claims about Hunter Biden’s ties to CEFC. Among other things, he claimed that he participated in a Miami meeting between Hunter Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming.

BOBULINSKI first met in person with members of the BIDEN family at a 2017 meeting in Miami, Florida. BOBULINSKI, GILLIAR, WALKER, HUNTER BIDEN, and YE all attended the meeting. Also in attendance was Director JIAN ZANG (“ZANG”), a CEFC Director involved in forming new businesses and capitalizing them at the request of CEFC. At the meeting, BOBULINSKI witnessed a large diamond gemstone given as a gift to HUNTER BIDEN by YE.

The work conducted by CEFC, GILLIAR, WALKER, HUNTER BIDEN, JAMES BIDEN and YE over the preceding two years was discussed in detail at the Miami meeting. In particular, CEFC was closing significant investment deals in Poland, Kazakhstan, Romania, Oman, and the Middle East during this period of time. CEFC had used its relationship with HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN – and the influence attached to the BIDEN name – to advance CEFC’s interests abroad. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any monetary compensation for their assistance in these projects. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any compensation because JOSEPH BIDEN was still VPOTUS during this time period.

He also claimed that when he met Joe Biden in May 2017, they discussed the business deal.

Further, BOBULINSKI met with JOSEPH BIDEN in person on May 2, 2017 at approximately 10:30 PM at the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel bar in Beverly Hills, California where they discussed SINOHAWK

In his congressional testimony, Bobulinski disclaimed several things recorded in his FBI interview report. He said he did not attend the meeting in Miami nor witnessed the transfer of a diamond to Hunter. He backed off his description of the substance of his meetings with Biden.

Not only did Joe Biden meet with me twice for an extensive amount of time — and we weren’t talking about the weather or niceties. We had an extensive discussion about his family, my family, my business career, where I was successful, the military background, and what I was doing with the Chinese. However, coached before that meeting to not go into a lot of detail by Hunter and Jim Biden. Okay?

The effect here is subtle. Bobulinski — who is furious that Hunter cut him out of this deal — is still trying to put Joe Biden at the center of it, he’s still trying to claim (contracts and finances notwithstanding) that the aspiring President got 10% of the deal. That’s the now partly-disclaimed story he told, allegedly presenting himself as a direct witness to more than he was, when he waltzed into the FBI fresh off his campaign event with Donald Trump.

5. Gal Luft claims Joe Biden met directly with CEFC Chairman Ye in 2016

Fabrication: Uncorroborated testimony that Hunter’s financial payments from CEFC started while Joe Biden was still Vice President.

Resolution: Public release of charges after Luft got House Republicans to claim a cover-up.

At a time when he would have known he was under investigation for his role in Patrick Ho’s influence-peddling scheme, March 2019 (for which he was charged and currently awaits extradition), Gal Luft met with investigators in Belgium for two interviews, one focusing on his role in Ho’s activities, another focused on Hunter Biden. At the latter, he claimed that Joe Biden had met with Ye when he was still President, in 2016, and Hunter had gotten paid in 2016 too.

LUFT is aware that YE met with BIDEN and HUNTER at the end of 2016 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.

The meeting at which Biden was present was later, in March 2017. Here’s how Rob Walker described it.

Walker: It was out‐of‐office.  Ah, we were in ah.., D. C. at the Four Seasons…

Soline: Hmph hmph. Walker: …and ah.., we were having lunch and he.., he stopped in…

Soline: Hmph hmph.

Walker: …then he’d ah, leave.

Wilson: Okay.

Walker: That was it.

Wilson: Just said hello to everybody and then…

Walker: Yes.

Wilson: …took off?

Walker: He literally sat down.  I don’t even think he drank water.  I think Hunter said um.., I may be tryin’ to start a company, ah, or tried to do something with these guys and could you.., and  think he was like “if I’m around”….and he’d show up.

So, too, was a $3 million payment that Luft said Hunter (actually, Rob Walker) received. Luft said it was paid in December 2016; it was paid in March 2017.

At the meeting, Luft “was directly asked to identify his CEFC CHINA ENERGY source(s) but refused to do so.”

Here’s how the tax indictment against Hunter (though not dissimilar to Bobulinski’s claims) described these ties.

8. In the late fall of 2015, the Defendant, Business Associate 1, and Business Associate 2 began to investigate potential infrastructure projects with individuals associated with CEFC China Energy Co Ltd. (CEFC), a Chinese energy conglomerate.

9. In or around December of that year, the Defendant met in Washington, D.C., with individuals associated with CEFC. During the next two years the Defendant, Business Associate 1, and Business Associate 2 continued to meet with individuals associated with CEFC, including in February 2017, with CEFC’s then-Chairman (hereafter “the Chairman”).

10. On or about March 1, 2017, State Energy HK, a Hong Kong entity associated with CEFC, paid approximately $3 million to Business Associate 1’s entity for sourcing deals and for identifying other potential ventures. The Defendant had an oral agreement with Business Associate 1 to receive one-third of those funds, or a million dollars. The Defendant, in turn, directed a portion of those million dollars to Business Associate 3.

On these topics, Luft’s testimony is subtle — just a temporal shift by a few months to make the sleazy Biden relationship with CEFC more damning (and put FARA charges that SDNY seems to have declined by the time Luft went public in 2022 back on the table).  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Luft slightly adjusted his claims about his testimony when he went to NYPost after his arrest, correcting the monetary amounts and timing focusing instead on the later event at which Biden was co-present with Ye.

Luft’s comments about Hunter Biden don’t appear in his own indictment. And indeed, there’s no evidence he wittingly lied himself; whereas Bobulinski had claimed firsthand knowledge of the Miami meeting, Luft was only claiming to have second-hand knowledge of this information. It could well have been an effort from his own sources to harm the Bidens. In his effort to allegedly disavow his own involvement in this influence peddling, Luft certainly had cause to want to shift CEFC’s attempt to recruit James Woolsey, likely sparked by Trump’s election win, to instead focus on what was surely a similar attempt to cultivate the Biden family, something that had less value after Trump’s win.

The files released by the disgruntled IRS agents show that by 2021, SDNY was no longer pursuing a FARA investigation against the Bidens with relation to CEFC, so whatever Luft claim, it has not (at least thus far) done lasting damage, which is the way investigations are supposed to work.

FBI enthusiastically welcomes “The Economist’s” claims

There are a range of Ukrainians who shared dirt on Hunter Biden that made it to investigators. The first two of those, by chronology, were Ukrainians who were briefly made informants by people in Los Angeles, but who were subsequently deemed to be part of an influence operation targeting Joe Biden.

As Johnathan Buma described it, the thumb drive Ukrainians he called Rollie and the Economist provided targeting Hunter Biden in early 2019 (which would have been almost immediately after the investigation into Hunter was opened in Delaware) largely focused on the sex and drugs that reflect Hunter’s addiction, as well as financial improprieties.

After receiving the presentation from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST, THE ECONOMIST provided me a thumb drive with some supporting documentation, much of which was in the Ukrainian language, which I do not speak. After I submitted my FD-1023 reports on this information, I was put in touch with two agents working out of the Baltimore office on a case based in Delaware involving Hunter. spoke on the phone with these agents, who were very interested in the information due to its relation to their ongoing investigation that was mostly involving allegations of Hunter’s involvement with drugs and prostitution. Information derived from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST had previously been found to be credible, so this was handled carefully and quickly transferred over to the agents in Baltimore and was serilized in their case file. While I transferred the information, I could not read the Ukrainian language, and it required translation in order to determine the viability of the electronic document’s presumed support of the allegations related to Hunter and Burisma, which were presented and summarized in a PowerPoint presentation created by THE ECONOMIST and serialized in the case file. I had no involvement in the subsequent investigation concerning Burisma and the Bidens and never received any update from these agents as to whether the information was corroborated, but later learned from the media that some of the allegations appeared to have been true. Based on the level of corruption and the RIS’ past usage of Ukraine for influence operations raw single-source information derived from Ukraine is always viewed with skepticism by members of the USIC with some specialty and experience in Ukrainian matters.

Buma went on to describe how, when he shared information about Rudy’s ties to Russian spies, his supervisor shut him down.

I’ve written why I am skeptical of Buma. It’s also worth noting that, in fact, in spite of four years of investigation, the FBI never managed to substantiate what he seems to suggest the claims were, so he’s likely wrong that the tips from Rollie and the Economist held up to scrutiny.

Given that, per Buma’s description, these two were quickly disqualified as informants, it seems likely that their information was deemed problematic. That is, it seems likely that this information was vetted and found wanting, which is (again, like the Luft allegations) precisely what is supposed to happen with potentially motivated informant information.

The Scott Brady side channel launders dirt Rudy Giuliani obtained from Russian agents

It’s what DOJ did with Rudy Giuliani’s information, obtained in part from known Russian agents trying to interfere in the election, that defies excuse.

By setting up the Brady Side channel (and related steps), Barr thwarted the SDNY investigation into whether Rudy was himself an unregistered agent of Ukrainian sources. SDNY did not then — and it appears, did not ever — get access to the interview Brady did with Trump’s personal lawyer about how he collected this information. And Brady attempted to intervene in the SDNY investigation to tell them they had gotten it wrong.

As noted above, at Barr’s direction, Brady also created a way that Smirnov could fabricate an allegedly false bribery claim against Joe Biden. He created a way to, effectively, spy on several ongoing investigations.

And, while his sole purpose was supposed to be vetting, his vetting process appears to have done nothing more than serve as a laundry service, insulating Rudy and his sources from investigators and parachuting his information in with the sanction of top DOJ personnel, as when Richard Donoghue ordered DE USAO to provide information about their investigation and accept information in exchange, into the Hunter investigation.

Q And did your AUSAs ever communicate to you issues they were having with Ms. Wolf?

A Not with Ms. Wolf specifically — well, no strike that.

There was an occasion with Ms. Wolf as well, but they would communicate to me the issues that we were having, our investigative team was having with both the FBI and with Delaware and with SDNY. Really the only office we didn’t have any issues with was EDNY. It was Rich Donoghue’s office.

Q Okay.

And so, before you communicated with the PADAG that you needed assistance, did you have an initiative to talk with Mr. Weiss?

A Yeah, I wouldn’t always run to the principal right away, right. I would try to go professional to professional, you know, U.S. attorney to U.S. attorney, and we would try to resolve things. And, only when we couldn’t, would we elevate it to the DAG’s office and involve the PADAG.

Mr. Rosen was never involved directly in our communications. It was always the PADAG.

Q Okay.

And what feedback was Mr. Weiss giving you during that time period before you had to involve the PADAG?

Mr. Lelling. Only in general terms.

Mr. Brady. Usually Mr. Weiss was in receiving mode and would say that he would talk to his team to try to resolve it?

Q At any point did you have to advise Mr. Weiss that you’ve been, you know, you’ve been charged by the DAG to collect this information, and part of your charge and your duty, and correct me if I’m wrong, is to analyze it and hand it off?

A That’s correct and to coordinate with other offices. And, yes, I reminded Mr. Weiss of that obligation that we have, of that requirement, and the FBI on a regular basis as well.

[snip]

Q And were you ever told that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office did not want a briefing from your office?

A I believe I was. I don’t remember. But I know that we had trouble scheduling it.

Q Okay. And then, further down, it states AUSA Wolf’s comments made clear she did not want to cooperate with the Pittsburgh USAO, and that she had already concluded no information from that office could be credible stating her belief that it all came from Rudy Giuliani.

Were you ever made aware of Ms. Wolf’s processing and decisions regarding this briefing, and why she didn’t want the briefing?

A I was not. We did, however, make it clear that some of the information including this 1023 did not come from Mr. Giuliani.

We do not know what kind of information got laundered through this process. We do know that after four years of investigation, DE USAO did not charge any of the allegations that Rudy’s Russian spy buddies were pushing. Again, it looks like prosecutors in Delaware properly viewed this information with skepticism.

FBI makes Peter Schweizer their special Hunter Biden informant

But the import of that process shares a feature with another of the efforts to launder dirt into an investigation into Hunter Biden.

By 2020, even as Arkansas’ US Attorney’s Office was four years into an investigation of the Clinton Foundation predicated in three different venues at least partly on Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, some FBI agents in DC had not just used his writing, but made him a formal informant to report on Hunter Biden. It seems that Schweizer was at least partly repackaging allegations based on the laptop, because (according to testimony from retired FBI agent Tim Thibault), when FBI agents from Delaware asked to stop getting the information, they effectively said they already had it.

At the request of the Delaware investigators, Thibault shut down Schweizer as an informant, four years after Thibault had been one of the the three FBI agents who had chased the Clinton Foundation allegations based on Schweizer’s work.

But like the Brady Side channel, this privileged means of sharing dirt — of uncertain quality — on Hunter Biden became a means to discipline those who tried to protect the integrity of investigations by limiting the partisan shit dumped into them. As Lesley Wolf also did, Thibault faced an entire campaign of retaliation (including from two agents who were themselves firebreathing partisans, who claimed that Thibault shut good work down), including public humiliation in an oversight hearing with Chris Wray.

The threats that Wolf faced may have been worse than what Thibault faced. But unlike Wolf, Thibault is on the (dated) Kash Patel’s enemies list.

We don’t know what substance of information Schweizer share with the FBI; we know the investigative agents didn’t want it, at least in that form.

But a more important point is that Thibault’s efforts (at the request of the investigative team itself) to protect the investigation from partisan taint, just like Wolf’s, made him a target for professional and potentially dangerous retaliation.

Judge Maryellen Noreika admits a laptop that has never been indexed

Which brings us, of course, to the laptop (and accompanying hard drive, purportedly a copy of the laptop but the Cellebrite report from which was 62% longer).

There are a great deal of reasons to be skeptical about the laptop: the discrepancies between John Paul Mac Isaac’s story and the FBI’s, JPMI’s claim that the FBI tried to boot it up four days before the known warrant, the possibility that Bill Barr got sent a copy.

But the biggest caution has to do with its handling.

Immediately after the release by NYPost, Rudy ran his yap and said it didn’t really matter if Derkach was a Russian spy and that he regarded the hard drive copy of the laptop he had to be an “extension” of his efforts to collect dirt from Russian spies. (In congressional testimony, Scott Brady admitted that Rudy never told him about the laptop.)

Thanks to Gary Shapley, we know the panicked meeting that ensued, as the investigative team tried to justify the year that they had spent snooping in a laptop that might have, after all, had something to do with Russia’s information operation. And Shapley recorded in real time not just that prosecutors had an email, dated March 31, 2020, recording some kind of concerns “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive,” but that they would not share it with anyone who might have to testify at trial. He also described that, at the time of that October 22, 2020 meeting, the FBI had never checked when the files on the laptop got added when. They had never checked to see if someone had packaged Joe Biden’s son’s digital life up onto a laptop to be dealt to the FBI.

My suspicion is that, after that time, prosecutors decided they shouldn’t try to introduce the laptop at any trial, because they could never clean it of this stench (they don’t appear to have considered investigating that stench, which continues to baffle me to this day). But after brashly telling Abbe Lowell in August 2023 they didn’t need no fucking laptop to charge the gun case, a different set of prosecutors discovered they had almost no evidence showing that Hunter Biden was doing drugs in the 11 days he owned a gun. They discovered that the all-critical communications between Hunter and Hallie Biden from that period — saved from a phone he used until replacement phones for ones he lost days before he bought the gun arrived during this same period — existed only on that laptop which he did not yet possess.

And rather than going back and pretending they were the FBI, acting like the FBI — rather than going back and doing the index that would tell them whether the laptop really did reflect Hunter’s use of it or someone else packaging up the digital life of the then President’s son — they instead bulldozed through things like the dickish prosecutors they are.

They never indexed the laptop. Never.

They never Bates stamped their own exhibits.

They never provided the laptop in e-discovery format.

In fact, after Hunter’s team did their own extraction so they could do searches, prosecutors raised questions about the integrity of their own source, the laptop.

When Judge Noreika denied my request for the extraction reports that Derek Hines claimed authenticated the laptop, she admitted that she had never required a report that actually referred to the laptop by some kind of identifier. The laptop evidence came in with no formal validation whatsoever.

The only two pieces of authentication used to validate the laptop at trial were the fact it had accessed Hunter’s iCloud account (but Zoe Kestan testified at trial that so had her own laptop), and that JPMI had sent an invoice to Hunter’s public iCloud email.

That was it.

The laptop and the most damning evidence against Hunter all came in without the most basic kind of validation. And as a result, we still can’t say with certainty we know fuckall about its provenance. Nor can we say whether its existence as a collection of evidence was doctored by hostile players (who would just as likely be Republican rat-fuckers as Russian spies).

We simply don’t know, and anyone claiming they do, is lying or withholding reporting and testimony that could have come in as part of the trial.

So we still can’t say whether the most famous prop in this whole story involved fabrications or manipulations or merely the disordered digital life of a hopelessly addicted man.

Hunter has been pardoned from these convictions (though James Comer has promised to continue hounding him going forward). Even still, these nine instances of dodgy evidence used against the President’s son provide lessons — none pretty — about what we should expect going forward.

You Can’t Pardon America’s Way Out of Trump’s Assault on Rule of Law

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The NYT has matched Jonathan Martin’s reporting that Biden’s aides are considering pardoning some subset of the people who will be targeted by Trump.

Those who could face exposure include such members of Congress’ Jan. 6 Committee as Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Trump has previously said Cheney “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” Also mentioned by Biden’s aides for a pardon is Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became a lightning rod for criticism from the right during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The West Wing deliberations have been organized by White House counsel Ed Siskel but include a range of other aides, including chief of staff Jeff Zients. The president himself, who was intensely focused on his son’s pardon, has not been brought into the broader pardon discussions yet, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

The conversations were spurred by Trump’s repeated threats and quiet lobbying by congressional Democrats, though not by those seeking pardons themselves. “The beneficiaries know nothing,” one well-connected Democrat told me about those who could receive pardons.

Smart lefty commentators are embracing the concept.

With the possible exception of Mark Milley, I think this is an exceedingly stupid idea. It’s the kind of magical pony thinking that led people to demand Merrick Garland, with no effort from them, make Trump go away, thereby ceding the ground for Trump to claim he was prosecuted in a witch hunt.

And it won’t work.

Biden’s pardon won’t even save Hunter Biden

Start with the fact that Biden’s pardon won’t even save his own son.

Sure, it’ll save him from going to prison for the crimes for which he was convicted.

But it might not even insulate him and his team from further harassment. That’s true, first of all, because prosecutors have continued to pursue an investigation — no doubt facilitated by the House investigation into Hunter — into whether Kevin Morris’ support for Hunter in 2020, as he was trying to sustain sobriety, amounted to a campaign benefit for Joe Biden.

While pursuing the false allegations of foreign-influence wrongdoing led nowhere, the
Special Counsel seems to have given in to other demands to expand his investigation of Hunter,
his family, and those close to them. Throughout 2024, Special Counsel prosecutors have sought
information about financial support Hunter received in 2020 and 2021 around the time of the 2020 presidential election and questioned whether such support could be deemed improper political
contributions. This latest inquiry is the exact demand that the disgruntled IRS agents alluded to in
their statements to congressional committees and the media.92 The results of this investigation
expanding—the theory of which was rejected in the case of former Senator John Edwards93—are
nevertheless likely to be a focal point of any final report the Special Counsel prepares for Congress,
which will no doubt result in more demands for baseless charges against Hunter.

Nothing in Hunter’s pardon protects Morris or, through him, Abbe Lowell. Indeed, I expect this prong of the investigation is one reason prosecutors fought to terminate Hunter’s prosecution, rather than dismiss the indictment: because it would make it easier to use the prosecution to show some benefit.

Plus, as far as I know, David Weiss will still have his Special Counsel report to write up, and because Alexander Smirnov has his existing false statement charge and a new tax indictment ahead of him (to say nothing of an appeal of David Weiss’ Special Counsel appointment under the same argument via which Trump got his own documents case dismissed), the report will go to Pam Bondi and not Merrick Garland. So Hunter can expect to be dirtied up some more in that report.

More importantly, House Republicans have already floated bringing Hunter in for more testimony. In recent years, the House GOP has spun entirely free of gravity and facts, so it would (and did, particularly in their referral of Hunter’s uncle Jim) take little to refer Hunter for prosecution on false statements.

Nothing about Hunter’s pardon will prevent Republicans from inventing new crimes going forward.

That’s true of anyone on a list. If you pardon Anthony Fauci, nothing prevents Congress from calling him to testify again to invent some new reason to prosecute him.

There are too many targets to play whack-a-mole

Another reason pardoning your way out of this problem won’t work is because there is an infinite supply of potential targets, but a finite attention span with which to protect them. As I noted, the Kash Patel enemies list on which the discussion is focused is dated; it excludes three of the names — Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, and (even!) Anthony Fauci — that, per NYT, are at the center of the discussion (Adam Schiff and Mark Milley are on there). Mike Flynn has his own list. Random mobs of MAGAts also have their own.

Olivia Troye, Kash’s current focus, is (as far as I know) on none of them.

Much of this discussion simply disappears most of the people who’ve already gone though this, who will continue to be targeted so long as there’s utility to it.

Importantly, the more invisible or easily dehumanized targets are, the easier they will be to take down.

Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Adam Schiff, Mark Milley? They’re all people that some very powerful people will fight for, or at the very least be discomforted as they watch passively. Those would be the easiest cases to defend.

There are legal privileges to protect

One reason, for example, that Adam Schiff”s targeting might discomfort those who absolutely loathe him is because, to punish him for his imagined sin — speaking openly of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in 2016 and daring to pursue him in impeachment after impeachment — would solidly be protected by Speech and Debate. The same is true of Liz Cheney.

To go after Adam Schiff for his imagined crimes, you’d have to rely on litigation approaches that might make — say — Mitch McConnell queasy.

Which may be one reason Schiff told Politico he thinks the whole idea is unnecessary.

“I would urge the president not to do that,” Schiff said. “I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”

Plus, the opinion via which Scott Perry protected many of the communications from his phone was signed by Karen Henderson, Greg Katsas, and Neomi Rao, the latter of whom are Trump appointees.

The same is true for Jack Smith (or Jay Bratt, whom Republicans also want to target). As prosecutors, they have broad immunity for their actions. That may have its drawbacks. But a whole lot of people who would be reporting to Pam Bondi have a lot invested in defending them.

If you pardon the easiest, highest profile, easily defended targets, you’ll leave weaker targets unprotected.

It would forestall the long overdue defense of rule of law

There’s this fantasy — assisted by shoddy legacy media coverage — that this kind of retaliation didn’t happen in the first Trump Administration.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page would beg to differ with you.

Andrew McCabe would beg to differ with you.

Marie Yovanovitch would beg to differ with you.

Alexander Vindman would beg to differ with you.

Michael Cohen would beg to differ with you.

Michael Sussmann would beg to differ with you.

Igor Danchenko would beg to differ with you.

Dis- and misinformation researchers would beg to differ with you.

51 spooks who exercised their First Amendment rights would beg to differ with you.

John Bolton would beg to differ with you.

Hunter Biden would beg to differ with you.

Some of these cases got a lot of attention. Michael Cohen has done a superb job of making himself the center of attention; he knows what he’s dealing with. Many got the wrong kind of attention; certain outlets sent rabid packs of 20 journalists to cover the Hunter Biden legal case, without sending a single journalist interested in rule of law.

But Trump’s efforts have been most successful when they didn’t, when all the same people screaming we need to do pardons looked away.

What this moment requires is not a magical pony, some gimmick that will protect the strongest targets while ceding moral high ground, but a return to the work of actually defending rule of law day to day, especially those who are easy to isolate or demonize. This moment also requires actual journalism. I shouldn’t be the only one who cares about Hunter Biden’s due process rights more than his ickiness.

And yes, I realize that means that people will continue to get hurt, just as they’ve been getting hurt going back to 2017. Trust me, like many other people, I’m doing my own risk mitigation for the days ahead.

Pardoning the highest profile likely current targets of Trump capitulates to Trump’s narrative that there is no rule of law, there’s just one party against another. Instead defending the conduct of the people Trump targets takes a lot more work, a lot more courage. But without that work, Trump has won the fight.

Mark Milley’s defense of the Constitution

For most of the targets in question, the story you’d tell would be precisely the one Trump wants you to tell. If you pardon Cheney and Schiff because they investigated Trump, for example, you condone his narrative that that’s a crime.

It’s not.

If you pardon Fauci because he made difficult health insurance according to the best — albeit imperfect — science, you condone the pack of cranks Trump plans to install in every health-related agency.

But Mark Milley is different.

He’s different because the reason why Republicans would target him is that he upheld the Constitution, rather than Trump.

He’s different because he did something crucial — reaching out to his counterparts overseas to deescalate threats of nuclear catastrophe. Republicans want to spin that vital work as treason.

He’s different because a prosecution of Milley will be used as an excuse to deprofessionalize the military officer corps.

And he’s different because Trump might try to target Milley via military justice or might seek penalties not on the table for his other targets.

I don’t know if Milley wants that protection or if, like Schiff, he would prefer to defend his own actions. That’s his business.

The point though is nothing Biden can do will eliminate the risk that Trump will keep doing what he has been doing for eight years. Someone or someones will be that target, and imagining we can make that risk go away, it’ll only lead people to look away again instead of giving the attention the focus that it has lacked.

If we don’t find the solution to that problem, if we seek instead a quick fix, then it’ll get continually harder to defend rule of law as Trump stacks the courts and guts the guardrails at DOJ.

You can’t pardon your way out of Trump’s attack on rule of law. It’s going to take much harder work than that.

Update: Ian Millhiser makes the same argument about the inefficacy of pardons, noting as well that pardons can’t prevent lawsuits or state retribution.

Kash Patel’s Bullets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, Kash notes that his list is not exhaustive:

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

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

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

That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Trump Rolled Out this Kash Patel Pick Is Part of Spinning False Claims about Rule of Law

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I was busy serving Thanksgiving Dinner and watching Irish election returns yesterday when Trump announced Kash Patel as his pick to be FBI Director. I’ve long been assuming that, wherever Patel ended up, he would have access to any files at FBI (look to John Solomon and Catherine Herridge to have a lot of inside tracks on propaganda). So the question was just a matter of how Trump gave Patel access to politicize FBI. By picking Patel as the Director rather than Deputy Director (only the former of which requires confirmation), Trump did so in the maximally confrontational way.

Here are four thoughts on how that confrontation plays out.

First, by picking Kash and including false claims about the Deep State in his announcement, Trump forces journalists to address his false claims. Here’s how Devlin Barrett and Maggie Haberman chose to replicate Trump’s false claims with no correction, for example.

Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.

Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post.

He called Mr. Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American people.”

Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.

It is provably false that the investigations into Trump were partisan. There were three investigations of Hillary during the 2016 election (the server investigation, the Clinton Foundation investigation predicated off of right wing oppo research, and a third that was probably the Emirates’ effort to cozy up to her campaign). Joe Biden was investigated for retaining classified documents, just like Trump was. Thousands of other people were investigated for January 6.

Your choice to describe Trump’s false claim (and describing it as a belief, which you cannot know) without correction is simply participation in propaganda. (Politico at least called out Patel for “perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.”)

And what Trump calls a hoax resulted in judgments that Trump’s Coffee Boy, National Security Adviser, campaign manager, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker all lied to cover up what really happened with Russia in the 2016 election. Journalists could choose to state that every time Trump calls it a hoax. NYT has almost never chosen to do that, which is how Trump’s propaganda works so well.

But longtime FBI journalists like Barrett will offer some other reason why Patel is a terrible pick — here, insinuating he doesn’t have the experience to do the job. I don’t know: After babysitting Ric Grenell at ODNI, Kash babysat Christopher Miller at DOD. That’s high level — if brief — experience.

Others — like CNN — look to the 10-year term set by statute to suggest Patel’s appointment is problematic.

FBI directors serve 10-year terms in part to shield the bureau’s leader from political pressure. FBI directors serve decadelong terms as the result of a post-Watergate law passed in response to J. Edgar Hoover’s controversial 48-year leadership of the agency.

The breaking of this norm is not new for Trump, who fired Comey shortly after taking office in 2017. Comey, who helmed the FBI during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as well as the Hillary Clinton email controversy, was fired by Trump in May 2017 after serving in the position for over three years.

It’s true there’s a 10-year term. But I looked: Only William Webster served 10 and only 10 years. Robert Mueller was kept overtime, in part because he had authorized surveillance programs that were under fire. Louis Freeh resigned in the midst of scandals, leaving the seat open in advance of 9/11. Comey, of course, was fired because he wouldn’t kill the investigation into Mike Flynn before Mike Flynn confessed to lying to cover up his calls with Russia’s ambassador.

I raise that point because the question of whether Kash’s politicization of the Bureau would be so detrimental that it would lead to threats against the US going undisturbed should be the key issue in this confirmation fight. Undoubtedly, corruption (including in the form of Jared’s father being appointed to be Ambassador to France, which Trump also announced yesterday) will start to erode US remaining integrity, up and down government and the economy. It’s certainly possible that counterintelligence and hacking threats will go ignored; already in the first Trump Administration, people with expertise on Russia were driven out, and that would presumably continue. Mis- and disinformation would be protected.

Are those who oppose a Kash appointment able to explain those risks, which is what has really driven Director’s terms?

The Kash appointment heightens my interest in what DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz will do going forward. Trump has threatened to fire the Inspectors General and Horowitz is the most prominent — but Chuck Grassley has pushed back. That said, Horowitz has survived where he is by catering to Republican demands. So I’m wondering not just whether Horowitz could survive in the job, which would serve as a strong check on Patel. But also whether we’ll get two reports that will expose Trump’s past politicization in ways important to a potential Patel pick.

The report on January 6, for example, will lay out how Jeffrey Clark tried to take over DOJ to make it into an object of Trump’s reelection. It will also describe how FBI’s treatment of right wing extremists as informants undermined DOJ’s ability to anticipate January 6. Horowitz has committed to try to release this report by inauguration, but if he does, it could precipitate his firing.

There’s also a report on the investigation of journalists and Members of Congress to find sources for anti-Trump coverage in the first Trump term. This is precisely the kind of politicized investigation that Kash has promised (he has specifically promised to go after people who accurately report on things like the Hunter Biden laptop). The report is badly overdue, but it also threatens to trigger a backlash.

Finally, consider two aspects of the timing of this pick. First, by announcing it now, Trump has made Chris Wray a lame duck. Anyone investigating something that might implicate Trump — such as those investigating Polymarket CEO Shane Coplan — will know that they will have no top cover in a matter of weeks. That was already true, mind you: Pam Bondi would see to that. Plus, it was already clear that Trump was going to replace Wray. Still, this could have a chilling effect on ongoing investigations — or it could create very interesting martyrs at the beginning of Trump’s term.

Then there’s another aspect to the timing. Trump announced this pick — as he did the decision implanting all his defense attorneys at DOJ — while Jack Smith’s prosecutors are working on their report. And Kash should show up in that report, at least to lay out his false public claims that Trump had declassified all the documents he took with him (and possibly even his demand that he got immunity before giving that testimony). I’m not sure how central that will be to a report. But Trump had a choice about how confrontational to be with how he installed Kash in a place to dismantle the so-called Deep State, and his choice to be maximally confrontational may have a tie to this report.

People are currently thinking of all the other ways Kash has helped serve Trump’s false claims in the past — the false claim that the Russian investigation was predicated on the Steele dossier, efforts to override Ukraine experts during that impeachment, attempts to misrepresent the Russian investigation. But the Smith report may well explain that Trump’s FBI Director nominee played a more central role in Trump’s effort to spin Trump’s efforts to take hundreds of classified documents home. So when Kash gets a confirmation hearing, it will put the veracity of the Smith report centrally at issue. If Senators find the report convincing, they should have renewed cause to reject Patel’s nomination, but Trump has almost without exception forced GOP Senators to believe his false claims to avoid scary confrontations with him, so I wouldn’t bet against Trump and Kash.

Trump has spent eight years sowing propaganda about his own corruption and crimes. Not just Patel’s nomination to a position in which he could thoroughly politicize rule of law, but also the means by which Trump made that nomination, is part of that same project.

We have a brief two months to try to reverse eight years of propaganda, propaganda often assisted by journalists playing data mule for Trump’s Truth Social propaganda or exhibiting laziness about correcting his false claims. If Trump succeeds, it will grow far more difficult to sort out truth from crime anymore.

That was always going to be true. But the means by which Trump is conducting his effort is all part of the propaganda campaign.

Update: Roger Parloff linked the 302 interview with someone who is likely Eric Herschmann describing someone who is almost certainly Kash Patel lying about having a standing declassification order.

Also, LOLGOP re-released our Ball of Thread episode that focuses closely on Patel’s propaganda about Crossfire Hurricane.

With Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s Myth Cannot Fail — It Can Only Be Failed

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Folks, I know this is bad timing, but in about 20 minutes, I’m going to temporarily shut down comments here, as we’re going to do some planned maintenance. Hopefully it won’t take too long.

I keep thinking back to this June 2023 exchange between Matt Gaetz and John Durham.

It came at the end of Durham’s testimony after delivering his report, in which Durham said a lot of inflammatory things, but ultimately concluded that the allegations of Russian interference should have been investigated, but should have been opened at a lower level of investigation.

After four years, Durham blamed Hillary Clinton for things Russians (like those suspected of filling the Christopher Steele dossier with disinformation) had done. But he hadn’t done the one thing Republicans needed him to do: assert that the Russian investigation was a hoax.

At the end of it, Jim Jordan adopted a tactic he has come to use in his hearings. He took a break for votes, giving staffers a half hour to prepare a rebuttal. And then three Republican members took turns, including Matt Gaetz for his second turn, unrebutted by any Democratic member.

He came prepared.

Gaetz cued up video from Robert Mueller’s July 2019 testimony, showing Jim Jordan grilling Mueller about Joseph Mifsud. Jordan asserted that Bill Barr and John Durham were trying to find out what Mifsud was doing. After Durham responded that they did try to pursue that angle, Gaetz asserted that Durham’s investigation was “an op.”

You had years to find out the answer to what Mr. Jordan said was the seminal question, and you don’t have it. It just begs the question whether or not you were really trying to find that out. Because it’s one thing to criticize the FBI for their FISA violations, to write a report. They’ve been criticized in plenty of reports. Some have referred to your work as just a repackaging and regurgitation of what the Inspector General already told us. So if you weren’t going to do what Mr. Jordan said you were going to do in that video, and give us the basis for all of it, what’s this all been about?

Now, in point of fact, who Mifsud really was was never the seminal question. Or rather, he only ever became a question via conspiracy theories Jordan and Mark Meadows laundered through a sham Congressional appearance from George Papadopoulos. Under their direction, the Coffee Boy provided no primary documentation with which staffers could hold him to account. Instead, Papadopoulos laundered conspiracy theories first posted in right wing propaganda outlets.

Q Okay. So, and Mifsud, he presented himself as what? Who did he tell you he was?

A So looking back in my memory of this person, this is a mid-50’s person, describes himself as a former diplomat who is connected to the world, essentially. I remember he was even telling me that, you know, the Vietnamese prime minister is a good friend of mine. I mean, you have to understand this is the type of personality he was portraying himself as.

And, you know, I guess I took the bait because, you know, usually somebody who — at least in Washington, when somebody portrays themselves in a specific way and has credentials to back it, you believe them. But that’s how he portrayed himself. And then I can’t remember exactly the next thing that happened until he decided to introduce me to Putin’s fake niece in London, which we later found out is some sort of student. But I could get into those details of how that all started.

Q And what’s your — just to kind of jump way ahead, what’s your current understanding of who Mifsud is?

A My current understanding?

Q Yeah. A You know, I don’t want to espouse conspiracy theories because, you know, it’s horrifying to really think that they might be true, but just yesterday, there was a report in the Daily Caller from his own lawyer that he was working with the FBI when he approached me. And when he was working me, I guess — I don’t know if that’s a fact, and I’m not saying it’s a fact — I’m just relaying what the Daily Caller reported yesterday, with Chuck Ross, and it stated in a categorical fashion that Stephan Roh, who is Joseph Mifsud’s, I believe his President’s counsel, or PR person, said that Mifsud was never a Russian agent.

In fact, he’s a tremendous friend of western intelligence, which makes sense considering I met him at a western spying school in Rome. And all his interactions — this is just me trying to repeat the report, these are not my words — and when he met with me, he was working as some sort of asset of the FBI. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’m just reporting what my current understanding is of this individual based on reports from journalists.

[snip]

Q And then at what point did you learn that, you know, he’s not who he said he was?

A Like I said, I don’t have the concrete proof of who this person is. I’m just going with reports. And all I can say is that I believe the day I was, my name was publicly released and Papadopoulos became this person that everyone now knows, Mifsud gave an interview to an Italian newspaper. And in this newspaper, he basically said, I’m not a Russian agent. I’m a Clinton supporter. I’m a Clinton Foundation donor, and that — something along those lines. I mean, don’t quote me exactly, you could look up the article yourself. It is in La Republica. And then all of a sudden, after that, he disappears off the face of the planet, which I always found as odd.

[snip]

I guess the overwhelming evidence, from what I’ve read, just in reports, nothing classified, of course, because I’m not privy to anything like that, and considering his own lawyer is saying it, Stephan Roh, that Mifsud is a western intelligence source. And, I guess, according to reports yesterday, he was working with the FBI. [my emphasis]

And that’s what led Barr and Durham to jump on a plane together and chase Papadopoulos’ conspiracy theories — without ever interviewing Papadopoulos directly. Mifsud’s own lawyer — the one who couldn’t help Durham figure out how to subpoena him — who started the conspiracy theory that Mifsud worked for Western, not Russian, spies.

Durham and Barr did more than just chase Papadopoulos’ conspiracy theories together. Durham fabricated a key part of the theory of his case. He ignored key events — most notably, Trump’s invitation for Russia to hack his opponent — that made all the actions of Hillary’s people make sense. He relied on a Twitter account as the foundation of his indictment against Igor Danchenko, then whined when such communications were deemed inadmissible without a witness to introduce them.

Yet ultimately, the rules of criminal procedure and some very very good defense attorneys (no doubt paid with life savings) managed to thwart Durham’s efforts to spin from his own fevered imaginations a conspiracy implicating Hillary Clinton.

For that, Matt Gaetz accused Durham of “inoculating” the FBI.

Your report seems to be less an indictment of the FBI and more of an inoculation — lower case I, of course. And like many inoculations, it may have worse consequences down the road. It’s just hard to pretend as though this was a sincere effort. When you don’t get to the fundamental thing that started the whole deal.

Because reality ultimately debunked Durham’s conspiracy theories, Gaetz deemed him to be part of the Deep State.

I get that Matt Gaetz’ nomination is one of the most likely to be rejected by the Senate. I get that there’s still a chance this guy — the guy who proclaims even a fellow conspiracist part of the Deep State if he permits himself to discover that reality doesn’t back his fever dreams — won’t be Attorney General.

But this is what it means that Trump wants to take a hammer to DOJ and FBI: not just that they’ll avoid any investigations implicating Trump or his allies, but they will find a way to meld reality to their own myth.

As it was, Bill Barr’s DOJ added post-it notes to evidence in ways that happened to feed Trump’s myth of grievance. They claimed travel records of the informant with something akin to a Let’s go Brandon cap matched his claims about Joe Biden accepting a bribe when, purportedly, the opposite is true.

Bill Barr’s DOJ already made shit up to feed Trump’s myth.

Since then, a Trump judge admitted a laptop full of evidence at a criminal trial with little more validation than an access to an iCloud account to which multiple outsiders had access, and an email sent to a publicly available email address.

But whoever Trump installs atop DOJ will take all this one step further. No longer will it be a select crony US Attorneys who forget to remove post-it notes with erroneous but convenient dates or claim travel records say the opposite of what they actually say. It will be the litmus test from the top: Donald Trump’s myths cannot fail, they can only be failed.

Update: Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration.

David Weiss Dons His “Let’s Go Brandon” Frame

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In a bid to defeat a motion in limine from Alexander Smirnov prohibiting mention of his nine lawfully owned guns, David Weiss’ prosecutors revealed that they only want to use the guns, if necessary, to prove ownership of other things found in a search of Smirnov’s home, including an anti-Biden hat.

On February 21, 2024, after securing a search warrant signed by United States Magistrate Judge Brenda Weksler, FBI agents executed a search of the defendant’s residence in Las Vegas. During the search, agents found nine firearms. Agents also found other items, including electronic devices, and other evidence, such as a hat emblazoned with an anti-Public Official 1 euphemism. These items are directly relevant to the charges in this case. For example, the government plans to introduce communications found on the defendant’s electronic devices that similarly evidence bias again Public Official 1. And the hat seized from his residence demonstrate the same bias, which bears on the defendant’s motive in providing the FBI with false derogatory information about Public Official 1, who was a candidate for President of the United States, in the months leading up to the 2020 election.

On one level, by all means, show us Alexander Smirnov’s Let’s Go Brandon hat! It’ll work wonders in Los Angeles!

On another level, I can’t help but think that David Weiss’ team has just given Smirnov (who might well get a pardon anyway after Trump is inaugurated) a case for selective prosecution.

Smirnov, recall, is accused of lying to the FBI and in so doing causing the filing of a false report.

But these very same prosecutors — Derek Hines and Leo Wise — were in the last year faced with witnesses with an anti-Biden bias, the guy who sold Hunter Biden a gun in 2018 and the Delaware cop who first spoke to the gun shop owners, the former of whom (according to a filing from Abbe Lowell) similarly caused a false document to be filed, the gun purchase form to which his staffer belatedly added a claim that Hunter had provided a second form of ID when he purchased the gun. Hines and Wise have not charged those people, even though they reportedly sent WhatsApp texts during the 2020 election in an effort to publicize the gun purchase, the same kind of biased messages that Hines and Wise intend to submit to prove their case against Smirnov.

It also reveals a now-exposed attempt by the gun store to fabricate a false narrative about the gun sale. Palimere said the addition of the seller transaction serial number (“5,653”) may have been added on October 26, 2018. (TAB 4, Palimere FD-302 at 4). He said the vehicle registration reference was added in 2021. Yet, the government provided WhatsApp communications from October 2020 and February 2021 between Palimere, friends of his, and then-Delaware state trooper Vincent Clemons3 (see TABs 6 – 6C), all of which refer to the form, a plan to send it to others, needing to get their stories straight about what occurred in 2020, and wanting the gun sale issue and the form exposed during the Presidential campaign.

3 Not to be lost is the fact that Clemons was the Delaware State Police officer who first arrived at Janssens’ grocery store on October 23, 2018 when Hallie Biden threw a bag containing the handgun into a trash can in front of the store. It was Clemons who took statements about the handgun from both Hallie and Hunter Biden and was part of filling out an official police report on the issue. Two years later, he is in the communications with Palimere about the Form 4473, one of which states: “Yep your side is simple – Hunter bought a gun from you, he filled out the proper forms and the Feds approved him for a purchase.” (emphasis added). Palimere later responded, “I’ll keep it short and sweet as well: Hunter bought a gun. The police visited me asking for verification of the purchase and that’s all I can recall from that day. It was over 2 years ago.” (TAB 6B, 10/26/20 Palimere-Clemons Texts at 4, 6.) The reference to filling out the “proper forms” is not lost on defense counsel given what transpired thereafter. And, despite the importance of Clemons (e.g., the person who actually took the statements), the Special Counsel is foregoing him as a witness to call two other Delaware officers instead.

I’m at a loss to imagine how Hines and Wise would distinguish the doctored gun form from the FD-1023 from Smirnov they claim is false. Both were an effort to criminalize the Biden family during the 2020 election. If anything, the retroactively doctored gun purchase form was more dangerous. And yet Hines and Wise charged Smirnov but didn’t charge the gun shop owner. Indeed, they successfully buried precisely the kind of texts showing bias they want to use against Smirnov.

This apparent double standard regarding doctored forms comes even as prosecutors are trying to prevent Smirnov from invoking Hunter’s failed plea hearing to claim (falsely) that Hunter got a sweetheart plea deal. In a filing signed by Wise, prosecutors claim that Smirnov was not mentioned at Hunter’s failed plea hearing, and so he would have no evidentiary reason to rely on the transcript.

[C]ontrary to the defendant’s representation, in the 110 pages of transcript attached to his motion, there is not a single reference to (1) the defendant or this prosecution, (2) “the sitting President,” (3) any accusations against the defendant, (4) the defendant’s “loyal service” to the FBI, or (5) that the defendant was a “Russian Spy.”

I asked Weiss’ spox whether Leo Wise was really claiming that Smirnov went unmentioned. “We will decline to comment beyond our statements and filings in court,” he replied.

But when Leo Wise responded to Judge Maryellen Noreika that, yes, even though Hunter Biden had been assured a month earlier there was no ongoing investigation, that there was in fact was an ongoing investigation,

THE COURT: All right. So you said there might be additional charges. Are you at liberty to tell us what you’re thinking those might be or is that just a hypothetical that there might be?

MR. WISE: It was a hypothetical response to your question.

THE COURT: Is there an ongoing investigation here?

MR. WISE: There is.

THE COURT: May I ask then why if there is we’re doing this piecemeal?

MR. WISE: Your Honor may ask, but I’m not in a position where I can say.

And then said he could still charge FARA violations,

MR. WISE: So I can tell you what I think we can’t charge. I can’t tell you what the ongoing investigation is. So, for instance, I think based on the terms of the agreement, we cannot bring tax evasion charges for the years described in the factual statement to the Plea Agreement. And I think we cannot bring for the firearms charges based on the firearm identified in the factual statement to the Diversion Agreement.

THE COURT: All right. So there are references to foreign companies, for example, in the facts section. Could the government bring a charge under the Foreign Agents Registration Act?

MR. WISE: Yes.

And then got Special Counsel status that would only be required if Weiss were pursuing something implicating Joe Biden — like Smirnov’s bribery claim — he almost certainly was invoking Alexander Smirnov.

Wise made that claim even while Smirnov was still fighting to obtain material on David Weiss’ decision to chase the Smirnov allegation (there was a hearing on this yesterday, but nothing is docketed on it yet).

The Defendant requested communication related to the request that U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team “assist” with “an investigation of allegations” related to the FD-1023. The government refuses to produce this material and ignores that fact that the government chose to include the following language in the Indictment: “In July 2023, the FBI requested that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware assist the FBI in an investigation of allegations related to the 2020 1023. At that time, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware was handling an investigation and prosecution of Businessperson 1.” Accordingly, not only did the government, in its Indictment, place the communications at issue, it is clear that the communication are relevant and discoverable. This request has been outstanding since March 5, 2024.

And the apparent double standard comes as Smirnov is attempting to put the conduct of Smirnov’s FBI handler — the guy who didn’t take alarm when Smirnov sent him already debunked Fox News disinformation — at issue.

The dispute over the handler’s conduct is taking two forms. First, prosecutors are trying to exclude Smirnov’s expert witness Gregory Scott Rogers, a former FBI agent who would testify to errors that Smirnov’s handler made. They’re also trying to exclude the content of three reports on the handling of Smirnov.

It has, predictably, declined into a display of prosecutorial dickishness.

In their motion to exclude Rogers, for example, the same prosecutorial team who claimed sawdust was cocaine made much of the that Smirnov’s expert witness said “upmost” instead of “utmost.”

Next, the disclosure states, “A CHS providing the type and amount of information provided by Smirnov should be handled with the upmost [sic.] diligence.” Disclosure at 5. According to Merriam-Webster, “upmost is frequently used as a mistaken spelling of utmost in its adjective and noun forms.” https://www.merriamwebster.com/grammar/utmost-vs-upmostdifference#:~:text=In%20its%20dictionary%20sense%2C%20upmost,its%20adjective% 20and%20noun%20forms (last viewed by author on November 1, 2024). The government assumes that Rogers meant to say “utmost,” but the fact that he can’t even produce an error free disclosure speaks to the quality of his proposed testimony. In any event, like his opinion that the defendant was “poorly handled,” his opinion that the defendant should have been handled with the “upmost diligence” is also undefined. So what does “upmost diligence” mean? The disclosure doesn’t tell us.

Of course, these prosecutors aren’t above making their own typos, as when a filing signed by Leo Wise uses “again” instead of “against.”

For example, the government plans to introduce communications found on the defendant’s electronic devices that similarly evidence bias again Public Official 1.

Yet they want to treat far more significant errors made by Smirnov’s handler as “essentially ministerial errors.”

Among the errors documented in the Source Reports include getting Smirnov’s name and birth country wrong.

The reports are also critical to the defense, including based on the anticipated testimony of the Defendant’s noticed expert. For example, in the February 13,2013, Field Office Annual Source Report, FOASR, the following deficiencies were noted:

1. The Handler failed to give the CHS extraterritorial travel admonishments;

2. The Handler allowed the CHS to conduct otherwise illegal activity, OIA, outside of approved time periods;

3. The Handler documented the CHS’s true name in the wrong CHS subfile;

4. The Handler placed an unrelated CHS’s NCIC record in this CHS’s file;

5. The Handler identified the wrong country of birth for this CHS in his file;

6. The Handler failed to document appropriate receipts for payments to the CHS;

7. CHS was allowed to conduct personal international travel without appropriate approval and documentation in his file.

In a later Standard Validation Report covering 2013-2021 it was noted:

1. HA continued to fail to appropriately obtain approval and document CHS’s international travel;

2. Derogatory information reported about the CHS and more unreported/undocumented otherwise illegal activity, OIA.

In the Source Validation Report for the period March, 2021-November, 2023 FBIHQ recommended that FBI Seattle, the office where the HA had transferred to from FBI San Francisco in 2019 and brought Smirnov’s file with him, stop operating the CHS noting that they believed that the CHS was no longer fully under the HA’s control, may be committing unauthorized illegal activity, UIA, and concern that the media’s reporting of the CHS’s information concerning the Biden family’s influence peddling in Ukraine would vitiate his ability to continue to function as a CHS. In that same document, it was recommended that CHS be polygraphed. Based upon the records provided by the government, it does not appear that a polygraph of Mr. Smirnov was ever scheduled or conducted.

Smirnov claims he can prove that he said and did things with his handler that did not get documented. If he can prove that, then it’s going to be hard for prosecutors to prove that Smirnov’s claims are lies rather than that the FBI agent fucked up.

That said, there’s something more interesting about the validation reports on Smirnov: They go through November 2023 and still treat him as a viable informant. November is when, on November 7, David Weiss said the Brady side channel would only appear in his final report. November is when, on November 15, Abbe Lowell asked for discovery on the side channel. And November is when, on November 16, CNN reported that the FBI had dropped its pursuit of FARA and bribery allegations.

Smirnov’s lawyers are right there’s a tie between how Hunter Biden was treated and why he was charged. But they’ve got the emphasis wrong.

All the evidence suggests that prosecutors had to charge him or risk their Hunter Biden case too.

Filings

September 26: Smirnov motion to continue

September 27: Weiss response on motion to continue

October 14: Smirnov warns of motion to compel

October 15: Judge Otis Wright denies continuance

October 28: Government response to discovery

October 31: Smirnov reply on discovery

October 31: Smirnov motions in limine

November 1: Government motions in limine

November 4: Renewed bid to continue trial based on delayed discovery

November 5: Motion to dismiss for discovery violations

November 5: Opposition to renewed bid to continue

November 8: Judge Wright denies motion to compel

November 12: Response to motion to dismiss on discovery violations

November 15: Defense response to motions in limine

October 31: Government response to motions in limine

Special Counsel Reports Include Declination Decisions

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In this appearance on BradCast last week, I scoffed a bit at this Devlin Barrett/Glenn Thrush piece. The headline news — that Jack Smith will step down before Trump comes in — was fairly obvious from Smith’s request for three weeks to figure out what to do. The focus on Smith’s obligatory report is something I made clear a week earlier. To be sure, the piece relies on interviews to confirm that Smith (and his staff) will resign, that only outside decisions could thwart their effort to finish up, that Smith has encouraged those who don’t have to stick around to move on.

It’s this section, which aside from the assertion that most of the classification vetting has already been done, is not attributed to the anonymous sources for the story (but which could rely on background sources), that I find odd.

Justice Department regulations require a special counsel’s report to explain why the prosecutor decided to file the charges they did, and why they decided not to file any other charges they considered.

But like much of Mr. Smith’s work involving Mr. Trump, this step is fraught with both technical and practical challenges that could make the report significantly different — and shorter — from the lengthy tomes produced by other recent special counsels. It also unlikely to contain much in the way of new or revelatory disclosures.

Mr. Smith, who has been the subject of round-the-clock protection after receiving death threats since taking over, has already described much of the evidence and legal theories behind the election obstruction indictment. Since he filed two separate and lengthy indictments last year against Mr. Trump, he has supplemented that record with scores of court filings elaborating on the allegations.

One potential wrinkle for the filing and release of Mr. Smith’s report is that it may have to undergo a careful review by U.S. intelligence agencies for any classified information. That can be a lengthy process. Intelligence agencies took weeks to review Mr. Hur’s report.

But in the case of Mr. Smith’s final report, most of that vetting has already been done, so officials expect that step to take little time.

It correctly describes that Special Counsel regulations require them to report on why they filed particular charges … but also why they didn’t file other charges, their declination decisions, but then suggests we’ve already seen what there is to see.

Jack Smith’s declination decisions are one place where a report might get interesting. Just as one example, the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago listed three suspected crimes: 18 USC 793(e) (retaining national defense information) and 18 USC 1519 (concealing a document to obstruct an investigation), both of which were charged. But it also listed 18 USC 2071 (removal of documents). That crime was not charged, even though the indictment describes that Trump personally oversaw the process of packing up boxes (that a witness described Trump knew) containing classified documents to send to Mar-a-Lago.

In January 2021, as he was preparing to leave the White House, TRUMP and his White House staff, including NAUTA, packed items, including some of TRUMP’s boxes. TRUMP was personally involved in this process. TRUMP caused his boxes, containing hundreds of classified documents, to be transported from the White House to The Mar-a-Lago Club.

Since the warrant was made public, there has been a pretty heated discussion about 2071, not least because Republicans claimed that Smith had considered charging it, which carries a light three year maximum sentence but also disqualifies someone from holding office again, as a way to disqualify Trump from running for President.

There are at least two obvious explanations for why Smith didn’t charge 2071. Perhaps it would be impossible to charge a President under 2071, given that until noon on January 20, 2021, he had authority to do whatever he wanted with those classified documents, sending them off while he was still President. Or perhaps Smith thought he could have charged it, but first needed the testimony of one of the key people involved in the packing process: Walt Nauta.

The reasons behind that prosecutorial decision not to charge Trump for intentionally taking classified documents with him are interesting for another reason. Among the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago that weren’t charged is a “compilation” that mixed communications with “a book author, a religious leader, and a pollster” with some kind of classified information.

This document is a compilation that includes three documents that post-date Plaintiff’s term in office and two classified cover sheets, one SECRET and the other CONFIDENTIAL. Because Plaintiff can only have received the documents bearing classification markings in his capacity as President, the entire mixed document is a Presidential record.

Besides the classified cover sheets, which were inserted by the FBI in lieu of the actual documents, none of the remaining communications in the document are confidential presidential communications that might be subject to a claim of executive privilege. Three communications are from a book author, a religious leader, and a pollster. The first two cannot be characterized as presidential advisers and all three are either dated or by content occurred after Plaintiff’s administration ended. [my emphasis]

These documents are nowhere near as sensitive as the ones actually charged against Trump; prosecutors probably prioritized documents that it would be easy to convince a jury they were “national defense information” for the indictment, an explanation that also may appear in the report. But the compilation of classified information with a pollster’s message also suggest that Trump not only took classified documents home, but he used them as part of his campaign to get elected again (it would be particularly interesting if this document pertained to something like Israel).

And note NYT’s description that “most of that vetting has already been done”? In discovery communications, prosecutors have described that some of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago have since been declassified; for others, prosecutors would have been working on substitutions they might use in case of trial. So for less sensitive documents, prosecutors may be able to describe precisely what Trump took.

Another classified document, classified Secret, found at Mar-a-Lago but not charged is the very first classified document the FBI found, something pertaining to Emmanuel Macron and associated, in some way, with an Executive Grant of Clemency for Roger Stone stashed (unlike all the other pardon packages found in the search) in Trump’s own desk drawer. I’ll admit that, given my understanding of the Stone investigation, I’m particularly interested in this file, but here’s to hoping that prosecutors will satisfy my curiosity about the document.

There are similarly important declination decisions on the January 6 side of the investigation.

The most obvious of those is why Jack Smith never indicted any of the eight people variously treated as co-conspirators: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark (who was removed in the superseding indictment pursuant to SCOTUS’ immunity ruling), Ken Chesebro, Boris Ephsteyn, and — treated as co-conspirators in the immunity brief but not the superseding indictment — Steve Bannon and Mike Roman. It might be as simple as a decision, given the course of the Mueller investigation, to ensure that Trump couldn’t pardon these co-conspirators before charging any of them.

But prosecutors might also explain why Bannon and Roman only belatedly got included as co-conspirators. I have speculated that it may have to do with delays in exploiting the phones of Roman and Epshteyn. If that’s true in the case of Ephsteyn, those delays would likely have arisen from post-hoc privilege claims tied to Epshteyn’s claim to be Trump’s lawyer. And if that is true, it would mean Trump’s nominee for Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, was the one who fought for the delay.

In any case, any discussion of Trump’s co-conspirators may prove useful to the extent that state prosecutors are able to sustain their cases against the co-conspirators.

Finally, though, there is perhaps the most important declination decision: the decision — after Congress impeached Trump and the January 6 Committee referred for prosecution — not to charge 18 USC 2383, inciting insurrection, the single charge that (per SCOTUS’ decision in the Colorado case) could have disqualified Trump from the Presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment. The reasoning here might be fairly prosaic: Perhaps Smith feared precisely the immunity challenge, tied to impeachment acquittal, that Trump launched anyway. Perhaps Smith was not able to substantiate that case until he received evidence and testimony that post-dated the delay John Roberts caused, and so could charge insurrection now, but could not have done so in August 2023, when he first indicted Trump.

If Smith were to explain why he declined that charge, however, he would — as Robert Hur did in his 388-declination report — describe the evidence that would have supported such a charge.

NYT suggests Smith’s report will be short; again, it’s not clear whether that reflects information received on background, or just speculation. Smith has had an eternity to consider the possibility Trump would be elected, and he managed to write up the 165-page immunity brief in the same three weeks he gave himself in asking for an extension until December 2.

Even assuming we’ve already seen the evidence Smith has — Smith’s decision to exclude mention of the Proud Boys and Trump’s January 6 fundraising from the immunity brief suggests there may be stuff we have not seen — the declination decisions, themselves, may provide important answers to questions about whether it ever was possible to disqualify Trump from becoming president again.

And it’s a marker in the sand. The report presumably will, at least, lay out some of the consequences of what John Roberts has wreaked. Republicans won’t care. But that lays out what they own going forward.

Go Stare at the Ocean

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If you follow me on Bluesky (which has really taken off, thanks to the fascists, so consider signing up if you haven’t already), you’ll know that I have been at the ocean in County Clare.

I am staring at the ocean.

If there’s one thing I recommend to you right now, is to take some time, however long you can, to go stare at the ocean. Or the sky. Or a meadow or mountain or river. Or even a swarming city street.

Go stare at something and just stare.

Oh, and also, breathe. If you need to, do something that will help you breathe: yoga, walking, swimming, singing, playing the tuba.

And after you’ve stared for a while, sit down and think about how you’re going to pick yourself back up again. I’m not asking you to pick yourself back up again.

Yet.

Just asking you to make a plan about how you’ll do so.

As Nicholas Grossman explained, authoritarians want you to quit. Figure out how you’ll defy them.

My plan, for example, includes something several other people’s plans do, too: A change in my media diet. I was always planning to change the way I used Xitter after the election; I was deliberately swimming in the toxicity of the site. I may explain why one of these days. But everything — Musk’s juncture with the government, the change in Terms of Service that go into effect tomorrow, the insanity — demand clearer limits on its use, at least for me. I’m also imposing (attempting to self-impose) a budget on my social media time, just like mothers give their children screen time limits. So far, out here by the ocean, I’ve mostly succeeded, though the post-Matt Gaetz insomnia made it tough.

I’ve got a stack of reading that will fill the time — a stack of reading that will help me think about what we can do to fight this. So far, this week, I’ve finished How to Win an Information War, and started Opus, along with a reading list on Viktor Orbán. I’ve been wondering if folks would like to do a periodical book discussion around here?

Trump succeeds when he hijacks attention and rationality. I know that and yet have also succumbed, even while I was trying to persuade others not to be distracted. Figure out what parts of your media diet make you easy to distract. And purge them, to the extent you’re able.

And while you’re changing your media diet, make sure you invest in the outlets that are providing important content, because they’re likely to face new obstacles and even new opportunities. Such as The Onion, buying InfoWars!

I’m also going to try to change the emotions with which I approach this fight. I’m not sure I’m ready to explain that yet — let me go stare at the ocean some more before I try.

But I need to — I think we all need to — target our outrage. There’s plenty to be angry at top Democrats, at each other, for. With some exceptions (like Gaza), most of those things are less important than the reasons to be angry at the fascists.

Make sure you limit your rage and focus it where it belongs. Or better yet, channel that energy.

Something else to consider: first, make a list of those personal habits or new hobbies you’ve been meaning to adopt and lay out some steps to get there. Make sure you have something else to sustain you, for when you can’t stare at the ocean. Do something so often — this week, for me, it is yoga — that makes you feel noticeably stronger. Replace some of the time you’ve been fighting with self care.

And sustain or build your networks. Not just your political networks, the folks with whom you’ve worked to try to elect Kamala Harris or restore reproductive rights. But your other networks, too. Sometimes, after fascists break political networks, it’s the choirs or the knitting clubs where civic discourse can regrow.

The very first thing authoritarians try to break are the networks of civil society, because isolated people are easier to terrify. So make sure yours are as strong as they can be before the wrecking crew comes.

Go stare at the ocean.

Go take the time. Prepare to pick yourself back up again.

Russia Attempts to Collect Its Winnings

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Russia has been engaged in a good deal of dick-wagging with Trump since the election.

After Trump won, Russia did not call to congratulate — at least as far as we know (though Viktor Orbán seems to be Trump’s handler and he did).

Putin did, on Thursday, butter up Trump, calling his response to being shot courageous and claiming interest in a deal.  Putin did what he always does with Trump: he played to his narcissism.

On Friday, though, one of the most popular TV shows in Russia used a different approach (as made available by Julia Davis’ Russian Media Monitor) — airing Melania’s nude photos in the guise of noting that she was years ago photographed with a US seal, as if someone knew she would be First Lady.

 

Monday morning, WaPo published an exclusive claiming that in his first call with Putin, Trump warned Putin not to escalate in Ukraine.

During the call, which Trump took from his resort in Florida, he advised the Russian president not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe, said a person familiar with the call, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The two men discussed the goal of peace on the European continent and Trump expressed an interest in follow-up conversations to discuss “the resolution of Ukraine’s war soon,” one of the people said.

In the aftermath of the claimed call, Russia escalated strikes.

Russia has also deployed 50,000 troops, including some from North Korea, to attempt to expel Ukraine from Kursk.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday Russia has deployed nearly 50,000 troops to Kursk, the southern Russian region where Kyiv launched its surprise counteroffensive in the summer.

Ukrainian troops “continue to hold back” the “nearly 50,000-strong enemy group” in Kursk, Zelensky said in a post on Telegram after receiving a briefing from General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

Kyiv launched its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August, taking by surprise not just Moscow, but also its allies. It said at the time, that the operation was necessary, because Russia had been planning to launch a new attack on Ukraine from the region. It said it was aiming to create a “buffer zone” to prevent future cross-border attacks.

The Kursk offensive, the first ground invasion of Russia by a foreign power since World War II, caught Moscow completely unprepared.

Meanwhile, Russia denied WaPo’s report. There was no call, Putin’s spox said. Putin has no plan to call.

“It is completely untrue. It is pure fiction; it is simply false information,” the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said when asked about the call. “There was no conversation.

“This is the most obvious example of the quality of the information that is being published now, sometimes even in fairly reputable publications.”

Peskov added that Putin had no specific plans to speak to Trump.

Peskov is probably lying. But the US can’t debunk him because (according to WaPo) Trump is, once again, going it alone.

Trump’s initial calls with world leaders are not being conducted with the support of the State Department and U.S. government interpreters. The Trump transition team has yet to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration, a standard procedure for presidential transitions. Trump and his aides are distrustful of career government officials following the leaked transcripts of presidential calls during his first term. “They are just calling [Trump] directly,” one of the people familiar with the calls said.

Later in the day, Nicholay Patrushev implied that Trump had made commitments to get elected — commitments he was obliged to keep.

In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview.

“The election campaign is over,” Patrushev noted. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, “made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.”

“But very often election pledges in the United States can [d]iverge from subsequent actions,” he recalled.

Republican Donald Trump outperformed the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the US elections held on November 5. Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. During the election campaign Trump mentioned his peace-oriented, pragmatic intentions, including in relations with Russia.

Trump is going to be a tool of Russia. In one of his first personnel moves, he humiliatingly killed Mike Pompeo’s bid to be Defense Secretary; Pompeo, like Nikki Haley, supports Ukraine. Reportedly Trump made that decision with the counsel of Don Jr — Trump’s soft-underbelly — and Tucker Carlson.

My guess is their primary concern is when he will do that.

He promised to deliver peace on Day One. Seven days later, he hasn’t delivered, nor said he would. The shape of the capitulation Trump is discussing — basically a freeze of the status quo and a withdrawal of funding for Ukraine — is far less ambitious than what Russia intends, which is to conquer all of Ukraine.

While Trump has appointed white nationalists — Tom Homan and Stephen Miller — to run his mass deportation program, his national security appointments, thus far, were once normal people before they capitulated to Trump: Elise Stefanik at UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz at National Security Adviser, Marco Rubio at Secretary of State, and Kristi Noem at Homeland Security (it’s unclear who thinks will manage the House as it awaits special elections to replace two newly elected members; the GOP will win the majority but with a thinner margin than they had).

But Patrushev is correct: Russia did, overtly, help Trump win, and there may have been far more useful covert assistance we don’t know. Early in the year, they set up yet another attack on Hunter Biden as a way to attack his father. They released a series of videos targeting Harris and manufacturing claims about migrants voting. Those videos likely involved John Mark Dougan, a former Palm Beach sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016. While it’s not yet clear whether bomb threats to Springfield, OH and on voting locations were from Russia, they were routed via a Russian email domain.

A far bigger question is whether the decision by a bunch of tech oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, to support Trump came with the involvement of someone either formally working for or just actin as an epic useful idiot of Russia. Did Trump install JD Vance as part of a deal for support from Elon? And what should we take from all the Russophile nutjobs that Trump plans to install in his administration?

To a great degree, Trump will be opening up his Administration to Russia, and doing so via wildly ignorant or crazy people. Russia will get what it wants under a Trump Administration. It just might take awhile.

So why the dick-wagging?

Probably, Russia is engaging in this game for two reasons. First, while the infusion of North Korean soldiers has helped its cause and it is making advances in Ukraine, it is doing so at great cost. And Ukraine still manages some attacks deeper in Russia.

An average of around 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or injured per day in October — Russia’s worst month for casualties since the beginning of the invasion, according to Britain’s Chief of the Defense Staff Tony Radakin.

“Russia is about to suffer 700,000 people killed or wounded — the enormous pain and suffering that the Russian nation is having to bear because of [President Vladimir] Putin’s ambition,” Radakin told the BBC on November 10.

Moscow does not reveal the number of its war casualties.

Radakin claimed Moscow was spending more than 40 percent of public expenditure on defense and security, putting “an enormous strain” on the country.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed on November 10 that its forces had captured the town of Voltchenka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces have been making advances in recent weeks.

Ukraine launched dozens of drones targeting Moscow, forcing the temporary closure of three of the capital’s airports, Russian officials said on November 10.

With Trump’s victory, Russia is in a strong position, but it faces immediate challenges. So it would prefer, I’m sure, immediate action.

More importantly, Russia has a history with Trump, where he deferred action until he was inaugurated, and then failed to deliver.

Robert Mueller never charged Trump with entering into a quid pro quo in 2016. It may have happened, but would have required the cooperation of people Trump later pardoned to prove it. But Russia had every reason to expect that Trump might end sanctions and recognize Crimea after he was elected with their help the first time. During that transition, Russia did reach out to Trump, first with a congratulatory Putin call, and then with discussions via Mike Flynn.

On December 29, 2016, Flynn reached out to Sergey Kislyak and asked Russia to do no more than match Barack Obama’s sanction, so as not to set off an escalation. At that point, Russia undoubtedly had every expectation they’d see sanctions removed. Instead, over the course of the Administration, more were imposed, with Biden adding an entire new sanctions regime in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

That is, Trump has a history of making commitments to Russia he didn’t deliver, couldn’t deliver after installing grown-ups in his Administration.

So Russia appears to be doing what every other entity that helped Trump get elected is doing, as they try to collect on their support: exerting what levers of pressure they have to get their objectives.

It turns out they likely have more levers of pressure — some of which are more powerful now, before Trump’s win is certified — and larger demands than most of the people who helped Trump get elected.

Trump proved unreliable in 2016. Russia has good reason to want to demand better this time around.

Things the Legacy Media Found Less Important than Joe Biden’s Apostrophe

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If Kamala Harris loses today, America’s media ecosystem will bear a great deal of the blame.

As I’ve said before, part of that is the hermetically sealed Trump propaganda industry, starting with Fox News. About 35% to 40% of American voters live in that world and believe Trump’s false claims of grievance. With Pete Buttigieg leading the way and a bunch of ad buys, Harris cracked that world just enough to elicit squeals about betrayal from Trump.

Part of that is the disinformation industry, led by Elon Musk. As more of America becomes a news desert, voters’ window on the world is often mediated by the algorithms of people, like Musk, who have a stake in debasing reason.

But a big part of it is the legacy media, which has gotten so addicted to horse race that it has lost interest in the reality of politics’ effects on ordinary people’s lives.

In an interview with Margaret Sullivan, Jay Rosen describes how reporters chose to chase Joe Biden’s alleged attack on Trump supporters rather than things that mattered to voters.

“But the horse race is too easy, too available — it has all these advantages,” he said.

How does this play out? This is my example, not Jay’s, but consider how the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with others in national media, gave such huge emphasis last week to the story about Biden’s verbal gaffe in which he used the word “garbage.” (He says he was describing the demonization of Puerto Rican people that was depicted at Trump’s appalling Madison Square Garden rally; others — especially on the right — heard Biden’s words as a description of Trump’s followers.)

If coverage is based around the horse race, this is a big story because it remind people of how Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was damaged after she described some Trump fans as a “basket of deplorables.” And indeed, that’s how they played it — both major newspapers led their home pages with that story, framing it as how Kamala Harris was being forced to distance herself from Biden and how it was giving “grist” to her opponents. Both papers also put the story above the fold on their Thursday front pages.

Huge, in other words. As Greg Sargent of the New Republic put it in a smart X thread: “The news hook is literally that it provided ‘grist’ to Republicans,” and this in effect “outsources the judgment about the newsworthiness of the event to bad-faith actors.” He’s right. It’s also classic false equivalence — as Trump devolves into simulating oral sex with a microphone, there must be something bad to say about Harris’s campaign, right?

If media coverage had been centered around the potential loss of American democracy, or really, anything other than horse race coverage, this Biden screwup wouldn’t have mattered much. Biden’s not the candidate, after all. There’s no actual consequence to this story.

But if your organizing principle is the horse race — neck and neck going into the home stretch! — Harris’s response is a much bigger deal. So the emphasis tells us a lot.

In a piece reminding that Rick Perlstein this childish practice of chasing bogus scandals has a long history — did you know that the press shamed John McCain for fighting back against Karl Rove’s black baby smear? — he also notes that sometimes voters just won’t play along.

Breaking en masse for Kamala Harris, Puerto Ricans just might be the ones who end up confounding that elite media’s desperation to end this race in a photo finish. If they do, they will have proved once and for all that the most malodorous garbage during this campaign was the stuff those elite journalists kept trying to shovel in our face.

Indeed, as Daniel Marans described, some Puerto Rican voters took renewed offense from Trump’s stunt of renting a garbage truck.

Nilsa Vega and Neidel Pacheco of Hellertown, a borough south of Bethlehem, both said they had never voted before, but Hinchcliffe’s remarks were the reason they planned to vote for Harris on Tuesday.

“That hit the spot right there,” Vega said. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, he’s only a comedian.’ It still hurts.”

Pacheco saw Trump’s decision to pose in a garbage truck at a campaign stop in Wisconsin the following day as an additional insult. “If he didn’t have nothing to do with it, what’s he doing in the garbage truck?” Pacheco asked.

Meanwhile, here’s a story about the Syracuse student who got one of the most impactful stories in a key swing district: whether Republicans will cut off job-creating funding from the CHIPS Act.

Back on July 17 — four days before Biden dropped out — I made a list of stories that the press was ignoring by instead focusing on Joe Biden Old. They were:

  • Is Trump a Saudi Foreign Agent?
  • What deals has Trump made with Putin and/or Orbán?
  • What happened to the missing classified documents?

I’d add a few more:

  • What is the state of Trump’s health and is he suffering ongoing symptoms from the shooting attempt?
  • Who are the other business partners and backers behind the various means Trump has established, like Truth Social, to launder payments?

We are hours away from polls closing, and Eric Lipton is one of the few journalists (along with Forbes, which reported on a new loan Trump got in 2016 today) who has shown much curiosity about who actually owns Trump.

We literally don’t know the precise nature of the business relationship between the Saudis and Emiratis — to say nothing of Russia or Egypt — and the Republican candidate for President.

Instead, we know that Republicans were able to bait the press into chasing an apostrophe for several of the last days of this campaign.