In His House Judiciary Committee Testimony, John Durham Confessed that Michael Horowitz Was Right

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Given all the discussion of Trump ordering prosecutors to go after his political enemies, I want to go back — way back — to comment on something John Durham said at his House Judiciary Committee testimony in June.

Adam Schiff observed that Durham violated DOJ policy when, in December 2019, he publicly disagreed with the conclusion DOJ’s Inspector General had made in the Carter Page investigation.

Schiff: Mr. Durham, DOJ policy provides that you don’t speak about a pending investigation, and yet you did, didn’t you?

Durham: Um, I’m not exactly sure what–

Schiff: When the Inspector General issued a report saying that the investigation was properly predicated, you spoke out, in violation of Department of Justice, Department of Justice policy, to criticze the Inspector General’s conclusions, didn’t you?

Durham: I issued a public statement. I didn’t do it anonymously, I didn’t do it through third persons, there were —

Schiff: Nonetheless, you violated Department policy by issuing a statement while your investigation was ongoing, didn’t you?

Durham: I don’t know that. If I did, then I did. But I was not aware that I was violating some policy.

Schiff: And you also sought to get the Inspector General to change his conclusion, did you not, when he was concluding that the investigation was properly predicated. Did you privately seek to intervene to change that conclusion?

Durham: This is outside the scope of the report but if you want to go there, we asked the Inspector General to take a look at the intelligence that’s included in the classified appendix that you looked at, and said that that ought to affect portions of his report.

The classified appendix, recall, pertained to what Durham called the “Clinton Plan,” details Dutch intelligence found in purportedly hacked materials at GRU. That included documents purportedly stolen from a top Hillary Foreign Policy Advisor, on which a Russian intelligence product based a claim that,

Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

From that allegation, Durham appears to have simply made up out of thin air a claim that Hillary planned to fabricate things to tie Trump to Russia, rather than just point to him begging Russia to hack the United States.

First, the Clinton Plan intelligence itself and on its face arguably suggested that private actors affiliated with the Clinton campaign were seeking in 2016 to promote a false or exaggerated narrative to the public and to U.S. government agencies about Trump’s possible ties to Russia. [my emphasis]

In another exchange with Schiff at the hearing, Durham professed to be utterly ignorant of all the things confirmed in the Mueller investigation that provided abundant reason to tie Trump to Russia. There was no need to invent anything.

In any case, what Durham revealed in his testimony is that he shared this information with Michael Horowitz, expecting it would change his mind about the predication of Crossfire Hurricane.

That’s not all that surprising. After all, Durham described as the first mandate of his investigation to determine whether any personnel at the FBI violated federal law by not fully considering potential Russian disinformation before opening an investigation into Trump.

[D]id the FBI properly consider other highly significant intelligence it received at virtually the same time as that used to predicate Crossfire Hurricane, but which related not to the Trump campaign, but rather to a purported Clinton campaign plan “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” which might have shed light on some of the Russia information the FBI was receiving from third parties, including the Steele Dossier, the Alfa Bank allegations and confidential human source (“CHS”) reporting? If not, were any provable federal crimes committed in failing to do so?

To put it bluntly, Bill Barr told John Durham to figure out whether he could charge Peter Strzok (and presumably, Jim Comey and Bill Priestap) for not letting a Russian intelligence report dictate American investigative decisions. And either in an attempt to preempt Horowitz’ conclusion that the investigation was legally predicated or in an attempt to stave off any determination on criminality, Durham pitched him on this theory before publicly attacking his conclusion.

And Durham did so even though — accepting all his conspiracy theories about inventing false claims about Trump were true — that theory never made sense. As Phil Bump (one, two) and Dan Friedman showed when the report came out, Hillary’s concerns about Trump couldn’t have been the cause of the investigation into Trump. By the time (a Russian intelligence product claimed) that Hillary approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia on July 26, 2016, the events that would lead FBI to open an investigation were already in place. Here’s Friedman:

This isn’t just false. It would require time travel. Durham himself confirms that the FBI launched its investigation into Trump and Russia based on events that occurred months prior to Clinton’s alleged July 26 approval of the plan. In April 2016, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, met with a professor with Kremlin ties, who informed him that Russia “had obtained ‘dirt’ on…Clinton in the form of thousands of emails,” as Robert Mueller’s final report noted.  A week later, according to Mueller, Papadopoulos “suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release” of damaging material. When hacked Democratic emails were indeed published—by WikiLeaks on July 22—this foreign diplomat alerted US officials about what Papadopoulos had said. The FBI quickly launched an official investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties in response to that tip, Durham notes, while arguing they should have begun only a “preliminary investigation.”

It was the same Russian hack, not Hillary Clinton, that drove media attention, even before the documents were leaked to the public.

There’s another problem with telling Horowitz that his Clinton conspiracy theory should have changed Horowitz’ conclusions. At the earliest, analysts and Priestap only became aware of the intelligence (though probably without Durham’s spin on it) on September 2, well after the opening of Crossfire Hurricane.

When interviewed by the Office, Auten recalled that on September 2, 2016 – approximately ten days after Headquarters Analyst-2’s email – the official responsible for overseeing the Fusion Cell briefed Auten, Moffa, and other FBI personnel at FBI Headquarters regarding the Clinton Plan intelligence. 411 Auten did not recall any FBI “operational” personnel (i.e., Crossfire Hurricane Agents) being present at the meeting. 412 The official verbally briefed the individuals regarding information that the CIA planned to send to the FBI in a written investigative referral, including the Clinton Plan intelligence information. 413

[snip]

Separate and apart from this meeting, FBI records reflect that by no later than that same date (September 2, 2016), then-FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Bill Priestap was also aware of the specifics of the Clinton Plan intelligence as evidenced by his hand-written notes from an early morning meeting with Moffa, DAD Dina Corsi and Acting AD for Cyber Eric Sporre. 415

And despite looking for four years, Durham never confirmed that CIA’s formal referral memo got shared with Peter Strzok, to whom it was addressed.

In spite of never acquiring such proof, not even after four years of searching, recently confirmed Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Nora Dannehy has confirmed that Barr pushed Durham to release an interim report on those claims. NYT described that plan this way:

By summer 2020, with Election Day approaching, Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Durham to draft a potential interim report centered on the Clinton campaign and F.B.I. gullibility or willful blindness.

On Sept. 10, 2020, Ms. Dannehy discovered that other members of the team had written a draft report that Mr. Durham had not told her about, according to people briefed on their ensuing argument.

Ms. Dannehy erupted, according to people familiar with the matter. She told Mr. Durham that no report should be issued before the investigation was complete and especially not just before an election — and denounced the draft for taking disputed information at face value. She sent colleagues a memo detailing those concerns and resigned.

By that point, Durham hadn’t yet interviewed Priestap and others who might inform him of what they actually learned.

From the start, Durham was pursuing this conspiracy theory. He tried to forestall the damning but inconvenient conclusions of the Horowitz report to sustain his conspiracy theory. And he tried to interfere with the 2020 election with his physics-defying conspiracy theory.

Bill Barr didn’t just order John Durham to investigate Hillary Clinton and all the FBI agents who had deigned to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. He did so based on a conspiracy theory rooted in Russian intelligence.

DOJ Refuses to Let Trump Disavow His Mob

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In three different ways in their responses to Trump’s motions to dismiss submitted yesterday, Jack Smith’s prosecutors emphasized that Trump should be subject to the same standards — and legal precedents — as the mob he sicced on the Capitol.

One pertains to the appellate precedents already set in the application of 18 USC 1512(c)(2). DOJ cited both January 6 precedents — Fischer and Robertson — to lay out that interrupting the vote certification to secure the presidency for oneself would be evidence of corrupt intent.

The alternatives include “using independently unlawful, felonious means,” id. at *9, and acting with a “corrupt purpose,” id. at *11, which includes acting “with an intent to procure an unlawful benefit,” Fischer, 64 F.4th at 352 (Walker, J., concurring) (quotation marks omitted), such as “secur[ing] . . . the presidency,” and acting dishonestly, Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States, 544 U.S. 696, 706- 07 (2005); see Robertson, 2023 WL 6932346, at *12 (noting that “dishonesty” or “seeking a benefit for oneself or another” is not necessary but “may be sufficient to prove corrupt intent”).

Then, in response to Trump’s claim of selective prosecution (based off two stories — the famous Carol Leonnig one and a much earlier NYT one, both by journalists who did little other coverage of the larger January 6 investigation) — DOJ pointed to all the other similarly situated Jan6ers who not only were prosecuted, but whose claims of selective prosecution or prosecution for speech failed.

The passage cited to:

  • Carl Nichols’ opinion that Garret Miller’s role in interrupting the peaceful transfer of power distinguished him from Portland rioters.
  • Trevor McFadden’s opinion that, because January 6 posed a greater threat than the Portland riots, David Judd could not argue he was being prosecuted more severely than they had been for setting off a firecracker in The Tunnel.
  • James Boasberg’s opinion that judge’s son Aaron Mostofsky, was not being prosecuted because he wore animal pelts to January 6, but because he obstructed the vote certification.
  • John Bates’ opinion that the threat to government officials and employees, as well as the objective of obstructing the vote certification, could warrant harsher charges against retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Larry Brock, who brought zip ties onto the floor of the Senate.
  • John Bates’ opinion that Zeeker Bozell, was not being prosecuted for his political views but for “the destructive acts he allegedly took to disrupt the January 6 Certification.”
  • Royce Lamberth’s findings of fact that it didn’t matter that, even if Alan. Hostetter sincerely believed–which it appears he did–that the election was fraudulent, that President Trump was the rightful winner, and that public officials committed treason, as a former police chief, he still must have known it was unlawful to vindicate that perceived injustice by engaging in mob violence to obstruct Congress.”
  • Amy Berman Jackson’s opinion dismissing Danny Rodriguez’ claim that he was being prosecuted for his “sincerely held political belief that the 2020 presidential election was not fairly decided,” noting that it was his criminal conduct, including tasing Michael Fanone.
  • Amit Mehta’s argument that Stewart Rhodes and his co-conspirators were charged of more in their seditious conspiracy indictment than simply calling on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

This list includes four GOP appointed judges, including his two Trumpiest appointments (one a former Clarence Thomas clerk), it includes the scion of a prominent Republican family and several people who invaded the Senate, it includes two of the defendants whose actions prosecutors showed were the most directly tied to Trump’s speech. And it includes an Oath Keeper convicted of sedition.

That section describing January 6 defendants whose First Amendment claims have already failed included a cross-citation to DOJ’s response on the motion to strike. Over the course of that filing, DOJ provided still more precedents from Trump’s mob, about the collective action of the mob, that they argue should apply to him too:

“The sheer numbers of individuals making up the mob that marched on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—without stopping at the fencing or the barricades or the police lines or the chemical spray and other crowd control tools deployed by law enforcement—had the effect of overwhelming law enforcement officers attempting to secure the Capitol, with the direct consequence of creating a catastrophic security risk requiring the evacuation of lawmakers, staff, and press representatives legitimately gathered inside the Capitol building that day to conduct, facilitate, and observe the certification of the Electoral College vote count and triggering a lengthy delay before this constitutionally-mandated proceeding could resume.”

  • James Boasberg’s opinion that Sara Carpenter could not exclude evidence of the effect on the vote certification because, “the weighty probative value of evidence that broadly depicts what happened on January 6 outweighs any potential prejudice or cumulativeness.”
  • James Boasberg’s opinion, again finding that such general evidence can come in to prove what Bradley Bennett obstructed.
  • Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s opinion that evidence about context could come in at Danean MacAndrew’s trial because “the size of the crowd, political leaders, and false allegations of voter fraud and election interference” … “bear on Defendant’s mental state at the time of the charged offenses.”
  • Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s opinion repeating her MacAndrew ruling that the government could present evidence of the collective action of the mob in Anthony Alfred Griffith’s trial.

The response to Trump’s motion to strike did more: It hung Trump’s mob on him. It called Trump out for disavowing his mob in an attempt to wipe away a critical part of the indictment.

[P]ublicly, the defendant has promoted and extolled the events of that day. While the violent attack was ongoing, the defendant told rioters that they were “very special” and that “we love you.” In the years since, he has championed rioters as “great patriots” and proclaimed January 6 “a beautiful day.” In this case, though, the defendant seeks to distance himself, moving to strike allegations in the indictment related to “the actions at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.” ECF No. 115 at 1. The Court should recognize the defendant’s motion for what it is: a meritless effort to evade the indictment’s clear allegations that the defendant is responsible for the events at the Capitol on January 6.

It debunked Trump’s claim that he is not charged with being responsible for January 6.

The defendant’s motion is premised on the disingenuous claim that he is not charged with “responsibility for the actions at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.” ECF No. 115 at 1. But the indictment clearly alleges, and the Government will prove at trial, that the defendant bears such responsibility.

And, as I predicted would happen, DOJ committed to prove that Trump obstructed the vote certification — and nearly got Mike Pence killed — in significant part, with his mob.

Ultimately, the defendant’s three conspiracies culminated and converged when, on January 6, the defendant attempted to obstruct and prevent the congressional certification at the Capitol. One of the ways that the defendant did so, as alleged in the indictment, was to direct an angry crowd of his supporters to the Capitol and to continue to stoke their anger while they were rioting and obstructing the certification.

At trial, the Government will prove these allegations with evidence that the defendant’s supporters took obstructive actions at the Capitol at the defendant’s direction and on his behalf. This evidence will include video evidence demonstrating that on the morning of January 6, the defendant encouraged the crowd to go to the Capitol throughout his speech, giving the earliest such instruction roughly 15 minutes into his remarks; testimony, video, photographic, and geolocation evidence establishing that many of the defendant’s supporters responded to his direction and moved from his speech at the Ellipse to the Capitol; and testimony, video, and photographic evidence that specific individuals who were at the Ellipse when the defendant exhorted them to “fight” at the Capitol then violently attacked law enforcement and breached the Capitol.

The indictment also alleges, and the Government will prove at trial, that the defendant used the angry crowd at the Capitol as a tool in his pressure campaign on the Vice President and to obstruct the congressional certification. Through testimony and video evidence, the Government will establish that rioters were singularly focused on entering the Capitol building, and once inside sought out where lawmakers were conducting the certification proceeding and where the electoral votes were being counted. And in particular, the Government will establish through testimony and video evidence that after the defendant repeatedly and publicly pressured and attacked the Vice President, the rioting crowd at the Capitol turned their anger toward the Vice President when they learned he would not halt the certification, asking where the Vice President was and chanting that they would hang him. [my emphasis]

DOJ’s commitment to prove this echoes moves it has taken during past prosecutions — the evidence of Trump’s effect on defendants has already been introduced in plea hearings or at trial.

DOJ has been preparing to prove this for a very, very long time.

Meanwhile they’ve been collecting receipts of all the times that Trump has owned this mob since — including receipts from the Waco rally kicking off his current presidential run.

The Government will further establish the defendant’s criminal intent by showing that, in the years since January 6, despite his knowledge of the violent actions at the Capitol, the defendant has publicly praised and defended rioters and their conduct. There is a robust public record of how rioters’ actions at the Capitol on January 6 were extraordinarily violent and destructive, including attacks on law enforcement officers with flag poles, tasers, bear spray, and stolen riot shields and batons. One officer who was dragged into the crowd endured a brutal beating while members of the crowd reportedly yelled, “Kill him with his own gun!” Terrified lawmakers and staff hid in various places inside the building, and many were evacuated. Despite this, the defendant has never wavered in his support of January 6 offenders. For instance, the Government will introduce at trial the defendant’s own statements in the years since January 6 proclaiming it “a beautiful day” and calling rioters “patriots,” many of whom he “plan[s] to pardon.”2 The Government will also introduce evidence of the defendant’s public support for and association with the “January 6 Choir,” a group of particularly violent January 6 defendants detained at the District of Columbia jail. 3 The defendant’s decision to repeatedly stand behind January 6 rioters and their cause is relevant to the jury’s determination of whether he intended the actions at the Capitol that day.

3 The defendant began a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, on March 25, 2023, by playing a recording of the Star-Spangled Banner by the January 6 Choir. Of the January 6 Choir, the defendant told the crowd, “[O]ur people love those people, they love those people.” See C-SPAN at 2:44, https://www.c-span.org/video/?526860-1/president-trump-holds-rally-waco-texas. The January 6 Choir includes defendants who assaulted law enforcement officers on January 6 and one who used chemical spray on a Capitol Police officer who died the next day. See Washington Post, Behind Trump’s Musical Tribute to Some of the Most Violent Jan. 6 Rioters (May 7, 2023), https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2023/trump-j6-prison-choir/.

In an attempt to avoid the fate hundreds of them have already faced, Trump attempted to disavow his mobsters.

DOJ intends to prove that Trump was very much a part of the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6 and almost got his Vice President killed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The latter, Brady said, was,

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

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

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

The Democratic staffer interjected, “Okay.”

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

Scott Brady’s misreading of discrete words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q Got it.

A when we do that.

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

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

A No. I mean subsequent comments.

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

A Yes.

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

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

The high risk of deposing Scott Brady

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Correct.

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

A That’s correct

Q Okay.

A yes.

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

A Correct.

Q Okay.

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

Q Right.

A or “Zlochevsky.”

Q Understood.

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

December 2019.

Remember that date.

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

Spying on the twin investigations

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

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

He also quizzed the investigators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A That’s right.

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

A Some limited steps. Correct.

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

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

[snip]

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

A Correct.

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

A Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do not answer” about the vetting

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Lelling. No. Do not answer.

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

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

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

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

Q. Okay. I’m asking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Lelling. This is a blurry line, a

Q. Understood.

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

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

Mr. Lelling. Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

A Just limited to the 1023?

Q Well, let’s start with that.

A Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Correct.

[snip]

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

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

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

A Yes.

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

A No, I don’t believe we did.

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

A I don’t believe I was, no.

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

A I don’t believe so.

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

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

A Correct.

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

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

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

A Correct. To my knowledge, yes

Q Okay.

A that’s correct.

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

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

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

[snip]

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

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

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

The things Rudy didn’t tell Scott Brady

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

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

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

A Yes, I do recall it.

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

A That’s right.

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

A Correct.

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

A Yes, it definitely did.

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

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

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

A Yes.

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

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

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

A Oh, sure.

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

A Uhhuh.

Q Okay.

A Yes.

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

A I don’t know.

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

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

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

From the email, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Yes

Q And why is that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Lelling. Correct.

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

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

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

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

Mr. Lelling. Don’t answer that.

Q Oh, you are not going to answer?

Mr. Lelling. I instruct him not to answer.

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

Mr. Lelling. Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

A Yes.

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

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

Q Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The possible quid pro quo behind Republicans’ favorite impeachment evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Comer Finally Finds Evidence Supporting Impeachment — of Donald Trump

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

The letter was first reported by NBC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[snip]

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

[snip]

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which means that when Lowell refers in his letter to,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. The Gag Order reflects forbidden viewpoint discrimination.

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

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

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

[snip]

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

[snip]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gary Shapley’s Handlers Revisit Past Leak Investigations into Chuck Grassley’s Staff

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According to a press release on the website for Empower Oversight–the group handling Gary Shapley’s now-debunked media tour–Empower’s founder, Jason Foster, was the subject of an FBI subpoena to Google in 2017.

Google first alerted Foster to the September 12, 2017 subpoena on October 19, 2023. That’s one of the reasons I find this FOIA so interesting. The notice came more than six years after the subpoena, suggesting FBI likely continued to investigate someone tied to the investigation for at least a year longer than statutes of limitation would normally extend.

Empower seems to suggest there’s a tie between the subpoena and one served on Google pertaining to Kash Patel’s personal email two months later, on November 20, 2017, as does Margot “Federalist Faceplant” Cleveland in this propaganda piece reporting on the subpoenas. While Empower says that this subpoena asked for information on other staffers, it only cites Kash to substantiate its claim that other staffers had also gotten notice of a past subpoena (Cleveland does report that a HPSCI staffer was also included).

Empower Oversight has information indicating that the other accounts listed in the subpoena belonged to other staffers, both Republicans and Democrats, for U.S. House and Senate committees also engaged in oversight investigations of the Justice Department at the time pursuant to their authorities under the U.S. Constitution.

[snip]

Other former staffers have publicly referenced receiving similar notices, including former U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (“HPSCI”) staffer Kashyap Patel.

They’re from the same grand jury (16-3). But they not only have different file numbers, but the one on Kash’s subpoena — that is, the later subpoena, by two months — has a lower file number, 2017R01887, as compared to 2017R01896.

Kash is suing roughly the same people over his subpoena as Empower is FOIAing: Empower is asking about former DC US Attorney Jessie Liu, Rod Rosenstein, his one-time Principal Associate Robert Hur (currently the Special Counsel investigating Joe Biden’s classified documents), and Ed O’Callaghan, who replaced Hur, along with then DOJ Spox Sarah Isgur. Kash is suing Liu, Rosenstein, Hur, and O’Callahan, plus FBI Director Chris Wray and the two AUSAs behind the subpoena.

There are problems with both of their target sets. For example, Liu wasn’t even sworn in as US Attorney until September 25, 2017 — after the Foster subpoena (though before the Kash one). So Empower’s suggestion that Liu had some influence on the subpoena on him is nonsense. Rosenstein wasn’t sworn in until April 26, 2017, almost five months after the request for conversations with the press starts.

Similarly, Ed O’Callaghan, whom Kash describes as, “the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General for Mr. Rosenstein at the time in question,” didn’t move from the National Security Division to Rosenstein’s office until April 2018, after Hur was confirmed as US Attorney for Maryland and long after both the subpoena implicating Kash and his blow-up with Rosenstein. Though if these were really sensitive leak investigations, NSD may have had a role in them. (Empower includes NSD within its FOIA.)

Those details don’t seem to matter for their projects: both men appear to be using the subpoenas as an excuse to settle scores.

Kash, ever the conspiracy theorist, brought a Bivens claim insinuating that Rosenstein and others violated Kash’s Fourth Amendment rights because DOJ served a subpoena — something not requiring probable cause under the Fourth Amendment — to obtain the subscriber information for a list of around 14 identifiers, of which his personal email was just one. There’s nothing on the face of the subpoena to suggest that DOJ knew his email was tied to someone who was a Congressional staffer at the time of the subpoena (though again, Federalist Faceplant seems to know at least one other person listed was a staffer). In fact, the subpoena asked for contact information going back to April 2016, a year before Kash moved from DOJ to HPSCI, so it could have pertained to a leak internal to DOJ.

Nevertheless, Kash spins a tale where the November 2017 subpoena is in some way connected with what he claims is Rosenstein’s threat, over a month later, to subpoena HPSCI staffers.

5. The illegitimate grounds for the subpoena were made clear when, shortly after the FBI and DOJ previewed what would become the “Nunes Memo,” which outlined significant issues with FBI’s and the DOJ’s manner of opening and conducting the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (“DAG Rosenstein”) threatened to subpoena the records of the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee staff, including Mr. Patel, during a closed-door meeting about producing documents requested by the Committee for their investigation into DOJ’s and the FBI’s, its subagency, conduct in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

6. The Department of Justice attempted to defend against the allegation of this threat to Legislative Branch employees, but admitted, at a minimum, that DAG Rosenstein did threaten to subpoena records of Congressional staff in contempt proceedings over the DOJ’s noncompliance with multiple subpoenas. Regardless, this characterization was disputed by multiple Committee staffers, and the matter was referred to the House General Counsel and Speaker of the House as a threat to subpoena records of staffers to halt their investigation.

7. DAG Rosenstein made this threat in January of 2018, approximately one month after his Department of Justice had already subpoenaed Mr. Patel’s email records from Google. This confrontation establishes that DAG Rosenstein and other Defendants were searching for a reason to subpoena Mr. Patel’s official accounts as well as the personal ones that DOJ was already improperly pursuing.

Contrary to Kash’s claim, DOJ didn’t concede Rosenstein threatened to subpoena the HPSCI records. According to a Fox News article Kash himself cites in his suit, DOJ said that Rosenstein was advising staffers to retain their emails so he could use them to defend against any accusation of contempt. Though Rosenstein did threaten to ask the House General Counsel to investigate Kash and whoever else was involved.

A DOJ official told Fox News that Rosenstein “never threatened anyone in the room with a criminal investigation.” The official said the department and bureau officials in the room “are all quite clear that the characterization of events laid out here is false,” adding that Rosenstein was responding to a threat of contempt.

“The Deputy Attorney General was making the point—after being threatened with contempt — that as an American citizen charged with the offense of contempt of Congress, he would have the right to defend himself, including requesting production of relevant emails and text messages and calling them as witnesses to demonstrate that their allegations are false,” the official said. “That is why he put them on notice to retain relevant emails and text messages, and he hopes they did so. (We have no process to obtain such records without congressional approval.)”

Further, the official said that when Rosenstein returns to the United States from a work trip, “he will request that the House General counsel conduct an internal investigation of these Congressional staffers’ conduct.”

This all seems like a retroactive attempt to politicize the investigation into some contact Kash had, potentially even before he joined HPSCI with a lawsuit claiming a violation of the Fourth Amendment under Bivens for a subpoena for toll records that a former DOJ prosecutor, especially, should know are not entitled to any expectation of privacy.

Foster’s claim, which is only a FOIA, not a lawsuit, is a bit less ridiculous (so long as you ignore his demand for communications involving Liu before she started as US Attorney and Rosenstein before he was DAG).

He seems certain that the subpoena for his phone (which he says was used by his spouse) pertained to a leak investigation. He’s filing it to find out if Rosenstein’s office ever got the same scrutiny in leak investigations that (he seems sure) some Congressional staffers got in 2017.

It begs the question of whether DOJ was equally zealous in seeking the communication records of its own employees with access to any leaked information.

[snip]

(5) All communications exchanged between members of the press and DAG Rosenstein, Robert Hur, Edward O’Callaghan, Sarah Isgur, aka Sarah Isgur Flores, and/or Jessie Liu for the period from December 1, 2016 to September 26, 2017, regarding (a) communications between Michael Flynn and Sergey Kislyak, (b) Carter Page, (c) Joe Pientka, (d) Bill Priestap, (e) congressional oversight requests, (f) Senator Charles Grassley, (g) Jason Foster, and/or (h) the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

(6)All grand jury subpoenas issued for personal communications of DAG Rosenstein, Robert Hur, Edward O’Callaghan, and/or Jessie Liu between May 1, 2017 and May 1, 2018.

(7) All communications exchanged between the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the National Security Division, the Deputy Attorney General’s Office and/or the FBI and Verizon between March 15, 2016, and the present regarding obtaining communications data associated with devices that Verizon serviced for U.S. House Representatives or U.S. Senate. [my emphasis]

The time range of the Foster subpoena, December 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017, covers the period of the known leaks about Mike Flynn and Carter Page — the former, especially, one of the leaks Republicans have never stopped bitching because it wasn’t charged. Yet here, a key Republican is complaining there was “no legitimate predicate” in investigating people who were briefed on information that subsequently got leaked.

There appears to have been an extensive and far-reaching effort to use grand jury subpoenas and perhaps other means to gather the personal communications records of innocent congressional staffers and their families with little or no legitimate predicate.

Empower’s mention of Carter Page also situates the subpoena temporally. The subpoena that included a number associated with Foster was served in precisely the same time period that — the Statement of the Offense and sentencing memo for James Wolfe case show — FBI was investigating the leak of the Carter Page FISA. DOJ opened that investigation in April 2017. They had shown enough probable cause against Wolfe to obtain a warrant to covertly image his cell phone by October 2017. No one complained that Wolfe was prosecuted for his presumed role in leaking some of these stories, and his prosecution alone shows that the subpoena had predicate.

Foster may have other specific stories in mind too: In addition to the leaked stories about Flynn undermining US foreign policy with the Russian Ambassador, the FOIA asks about other Russian investigation stories, including Joe Pientka, whose role in briefing Mike Flynn Grassley made into a personal crusade.

Curiously, the Steele dossier is not on here, even though that was another personal crusade of Chuck Grassley.

All that said, the timeline included in the FOIA is broader than that. Here’s how the various timelines overlap, or don’t:

  • Scope of Foster subpoena: December 1, 2016 through May 1, 2017
  • Rosenstein sworn in as DAG: April 26, 2017
  • Date of Foster subpoena: September 12, 2017
  • Jessie Liu sworn in as US Attorney: September 25, 2017
  • Scope of Foster’s FOIA for DAG communications with the press: December 1, 2016 through September 26, 2017
  • Date of Kash subpoena: November 20, 2017
  • Scope of Kash subpoena: May 1, 2016 through November 20, 2017
  • Scope of Foster’s FOIA for grand jury subpoenas targeting DAG: May 1, 2017 through May 1, 2018
  • Scope of Foster’s FOIA for Verizon records of Congressional staffers March 15, 2016 through October 24, 2023

Foster is FOIAing Rosenstein’s office, first, for conversations with the press — including about him — starting on December 1, 2016, before Trump was inaugurated and months before Rosenstein was sworn in on April 26, 2017. He is FOIAing conversations with the press that continue through the day after Liu was sworn in September 2017, still months before O’Callaghan was part of DAG.

Then he’s asking for any grand jury subpoenas (which he knows would be protected under grand jury secrecy rules and so won’t get) from the end date of the subpoena targeting him, after which point both the Flynn and Page investigations were underway, until May 1, 2018 — still four months before Legistorm shows Foster leaving his SJC job on September 4, 2018, but perhaps not coincidentally ending before the time when the Mueller investigation started to more closely probe fellow SJC staffer Barbara Ledeen’s role in Mike Flynn’s 2016 rat-fucking and two weeks shy of an interview when Mueller asked Flynn about Ledeen’s investigation of the investigation. A September 17, 2018 interview asked very specific questions about people leaking claimed details of the investigation to Flynn, as well as Flynn’s contacts with unidentified Congressional staffers.

Again, this request is a test about whether Rosenstein’s office was targeted for leaks, but the leaks that Foster suggest this subpoena pertains to — Mike Flynn’s contacts with Sergey Kislyak and Carter Page’s FISA — happened before any of these people were in DAG. Foster seems interested in leaks about leak investigations, not the leaks themselves.

It’s the final bullet I find the most interesting though. None of the subpoenas he raises in his FOIA — not the subpoena of Kash’s personal email, not the subpoena of his own Google voice phone, and not the subpoena to Apple targeting HPSCI members — target official phone records. But Foster FOIAs for official records as well: All communications between DC USAO, NSD, DAG, and FBI with Verizon — communications that might be something other than a grand jury subpoena — about obtaining phone records for the Congressional devices serviced by Verizon. He’s asking for a much broader period of time, too: March 15, 2016 — early enough to include the start date of Kash’s subpoena, but also to include some of Barbara Ledeen’s rat-fucking with Mike Flynn — through the present, late enough to include any contacts in which Chuck Grassley staffers used their official devices to share information about the Hunter Biden investigation with the press.

This last request is not about Rosenstein; Rosenstein was only DAG for two of the seven and a half years covered by this part of the FOIA.

This FOIA is, on its face, totally uncontroversial (though it attempts to do with a FOIA what DOJ IG is already doing, which it notes). It purports to test whether Rod Rosenstein exempted his own top deputies from the kind of investigative scrutiny to which Rosenstein — always a leak hawk — subjected Congressional staffers. Hell, I’m fairly certain Rosenstein and his top deputies were key undisclosed sources for a bunch of bullshit comments (though most of them were false, and therefore not criminal leaks). Some of those anonymous comments were to the same stable of journalists who also happen to serve as mouthpieces for Chuck Grassley propaganda (and as such, Foster may have specific reason to believe that Rosenstein teed up journalists’ questions to or about him).

And the FOIA for contacts with Verizon gets at important separation of powers issues: under what terms the Executive Branch can investigate the official business of the Legislative Branch, including times when the Legislative Branch is screaming for investigations into leaks that probably (and provably, in the case of Carter Page) include Legislative Branch staffers.

But it also serves as a fishing expedition, by the entity that championed the now debunked claims of Gary Shapley, into potential investigations into transparent ongoing efforts by Chuck Grassley to release details of criminal investigations in the guise of oversight.

In a meeting agenda sent September 3, 2020, Joseph Ziegler included the Senate investigation led by Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson among topics for discussion.

No later than December 2020, a document shared by Empower Oversight client Gary Shapley reveals, the IRS agents running this investigation cared more about catering to demands from Congress, including from Chuck Grassley, than preserving the investigation.

The USAO and FBI received congressional inquiries concerning this investigation and have repeatedly ignored their requests, openly mocking the members of congress who made the request.

Another document shared by Empower Oversight client Gary Shapley shows that, in May 2021, the IRS agents running the investigation continued to be aware of — and interested in catering to — requests from Congress.

The USAO and FBI received congressional inquiries concerning this investigation and it’s believed they have ignored their requests.

A document released by Empower Oversight client Gary Shapley reflecting a January 6, 2023 call with IRS’ Deputy Field Officer Michael Batdorf alerting him — among other things — that he expected the Delaware US Attorney to make “nefarious” allegations against him, also recorded that by the time, two days after he notified IRS and DOJ IG Inspectors General he was seeking formal whistleblower status which happens to have happened on the day the GOP took the House, his attorney had already, “participated in calls and/or meetings” with “the Congressional Judiciary committees.”

DFO asked about the process and Shapley responded that the Congressional Judiciary committees, OSC, IRS OGC and TIGTA have been notified and have participated in calls and/or meetings with my counsel.

Yet when one of Shapley’s attorneys, Mark Lytle, formally contacted the Chairs and Ranking Members of those same “Congressional Judiciary committees,” the Chairs and Ranking Members of the relevant finance committees, along with Chuck Grassley on April 19, 2023, he did not treat those contacts with the judiciary committees as protected disclosures. The letter mentions that Grassley is a member of the Finance Committee, but doesn’t mention that Grassley is a member and former Chair of the Judiciary Committee.

That was the first moment, publicly at least, that Empower Oversight client Gary Shapley sought protection to share IRS protected information with Congress. That is, even according to Lytle, if Shapley shared any IRS protected information — to say nothing of grand jury protected information — prior to that, by the plain terms of his letter it was not under a grant of protection.

A month after Gary Shapley’s claims — facilitated by Empower Oversight — were soundly debunked by his own documentation and his colleagues, Empower Oversight filed a FOIA that would, among other things, attempt to learn whether the FBI was conducting any investigation of leaks to the press from Chuck Grassley’s staffers, covering the period in 2016 when a Chuck Grassley staffer attempted to reach out to hostile intelligence services to find dirt on Hillary Clinton, the period when a Grassley staffer was seeding press stories — some that were fabrications — about the Russian investigation, and the period of time when those investigating Hunter Biden were more solicitous of requests from members of Congress like Chuck Grassley than they were in protecting the ongoing investigation.

Trump Is Going Through the Motions to Dismiss until He Resumes the Presidency

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One of the reasons I suspect that Trump-leaning Republicans replaced Kevin McCarthy with a key player in Trump’s last attempted coup is because Trump shows no signs of any plan to try to win his Federal criminal trials.

For some time, it has appeared (to me at least) that he has approached these cases with the belief that if he can use them as a campaign prop with which to get reelected, then he can simply pardon himself or remain President indefinitely to beat the Federal rap. That’s one of the reasons, I think, why he is treating many of his DC court filings as stunts, especially his extensive fundraising and messaging campaign around the gag order.

Delay, disinform, then dismiss.

I get that. I expected that. Yet, I still expected him to present the best legal case he could as insurance in case winning or stealing the election and self-pardoning doesn’t work.

He has lawyers capable of making very competent legal arguments.

So I’m frankly shocked by how inadequate his Motions to Dismiss have been. I wrote them up here and made this nifty table summarizing the arguments.

This is not just a legal observation — though some of his purportedly legal arguments, most notably his selective prosecution motion — are legally shitty. Don’t take my word for it: take Carissa Byrne Hessick’s expert opinion, who says, “his motion is embarrassingly awful & should clearly be denied under current law.”

This is not just a legal observation. Partly, it’s box-ticking one. As I show below, Trump isn’t even addressing all the allegations against him.

As DOJ noted in the response to Trump’s MTD for Absolute Immunity, Trump totally misrepresented the indictment. As DOJ laid out, the indictment consists of four charges — three of them, conspiracy charges (18 USC 371, 1512(k), and 241). For each of those charges, DOJ alleged that Trump used five means of pursuing that conspiracy, laid out as five bullet points in the indictment. Those five bullets read:

a. The Defendant and co-conspirators used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate election results and change electoral votes for the Defendant’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., to electoral votes for the Defendant. That is, on the pretext of baseless fraud claims, the Defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors in favor of the Defendant. [state]

b. The Defendant and co-conspirators organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), attempting to mimic the procedures that the legitimate electors were supposed to follow under the Constitution and other federal and state laws. This included causing the fraudulent electors to meet on the day appointed by federal law on which legitimate electors were to gather and cast their votes; cast fraudulent votes for the Defendant; and sign certificates falsely representing that they were legitimate electors. Some fraudulent electors were tricked into participating based on the understanding that their votes would be used only if the Defendant succeeded in outcome-determinative lawsuits within their state, which the Defendant never did. The Defendant and co-conspirators then caused these fraudulent electors to transmit their false certificates to the Vice President and other government officials to be counted at the certification proceeding on January 6. [fake electors]

c. The Defendant and co-conspirators attempted to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations and to send a letter to the targeted states that falsely claimed that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have impacted the election outcome; that sought to advance the Defendant’s fraudulent elector plan by using the Justice Department’s authority to falsely present the fraudulent electors as a valid alternative to the legitimate electors; and that urged, on behalf of the Justice Department, the targeted states’ legislatures to convene to create the opportunity to choose the fraudulent electors over the legitimate electors. [Jeffrey Clark]

d. The Defendant and co-conspirators attempted to enlist the Vice President to use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results. First, using knowingly false claims of election fraud, the Defendant and co-conspirators attempted to convince the Vice President to use the Defendant’s fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes, or send legitimate electoral votes to state legislatures for review rather than counting them. When that failed, on the morning of January 6, the Defendant and co-conspirators repeated knowingly false claims of election fraud to gathered supporters, falsely told them that the Vice President had the authority to and might alter the election results, and directed them to the Capitol to obstruct the certification proceeding and exert pressure on the Vice President to take the fraudulent actions he had previously refused. [PenceCard]

e. After it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the Vice President would not fraudulently alter the election results, a large and angry crowd–including many individuals whom the Defendant had deceived into believing the Vice President could and might change the election results–violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding. As violence ensued, the Defendant and co-conspirators exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims. [mob] [red brackets my own]

Here’s how DOJ described the indictment in their response to Trump’s Absolutely Immunity filing.

A grand jury charged the defendant in a four-count indictment. ECF No. 1. The defendant moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that he “is absolutely immune from prosecution.” Mot. 1. When considering a motion to dismiss, the Court must view the indictment “as a whole[,] and the allegations must be accepted as true.” United States v. Weeks, 636 F. Supp. 3d 117, 120 (D.D.C. 2022) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Count One, which charges a conspiracy to defraud the United States, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371, alleges that the defendant, then a candidate seeking re-election to the presidency, conspired with, among others, several individuals outside the Executive Branch to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted, and certified.” ECF No. 1 at ¶¶ 1, 7, 8. The indictment further alleges that the defendant aimed at accomplishing the conspiracy’s objectives in five ways: [state] using deceit toward state officials to subvert the legitimate election results in those states, id. at ¶¶ 13-52; [fake electors] using deceit to organize fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states, and cause them to send false certificates to Congress, id. at ¶¶ 53-69; [Jeffrey Clark] leveraging the Department of Justice to use deceit to get state officials to replace the legitimate electoral slate with electors who would cast their votes for the defendant, id. at ¶¶ 70-85; [PenceCard] attempting to enlist the Vice President to fraudulently alter the election results during the certification proceeding on January 6, 2021, and directing supporters to the Capitol to obstruct the proceeding, id. at ¶¶ 86-105; and [mob] exploiting the violence and chaos that transpired at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, id. at ¶¶ 106-124. Counts Two and Three, which incorporate allegations from Count One, charge conspiracy and substantive violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) for corruptly obstructing the certification of the presidential election results on January 6, 2021. Id. at ¶¶ 125-28. Count Four, which likewise incorporates the allegations from Count One, alleges that the defendant conspired to violate one or more person’s constitutional right to vote and have one’s vote counted. Id. at ¶¶ 129-30. [red brackets my own]

Get used to this paragraph: you’re going to see some version of it in the response to many if not all of the MTDs submitted last week.

To address the charges, you need to explain why each of those five means don’t substantiate, either alone or in combination, the elements of the offense of the charges. Effectively, Trump has to show how these five means don’t prove the three different ways they have been charged criminally.

One reason you have to address the alleged means of conspiracy is that First Amendment protected activities, if they are part of a conspiracy, may be included as overt acts in that conspiracy. Scores of January 6 defendants have already made the same First Amendment argument Trump is, including some members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who, like Trump, didn’t breach the Capitol. But if DOJ can prove speech was part of a conspiracy, that speech can come in as evidence of that conspiracy. Trump’s MTD on Constitutional Grounds, for example, which is substantially the same argument about the First Amendment that has already failed for other Jan6ers, names each of the crimes alleged.

These points are not in dispute. Nonetheless, in an astonishing display of doublethink, the prosecution simultaneously claims that President Trump—simply by speaking his mind and petitioning for a redress of grievances—also somehow conspired to “defraud the United States,” “oppress rights,” and “obstruct an official proceeding.” Id. at ¶ 5–6, 125–130.

Then, purportedly citing to the five bullets that describe the means, he spins the five means as giving voice to concerns about election integrity, not his unlawful goal of trying to invalidate the votes of 81 million Biden voters.

As the indictment itself alleges, President Trump gave voice to these concerns and demanded that politicians in a position to restore integrity to our elections not just talk about the problem, but investigate and resolve it. See id. at ¶ 10(a) (state legislators and election officials) act) [sic]; ¶ 10(b) (Vice President and other government officials); ¶ 10(c) (state officials); ¶ 10(d) (vice president); ¶ 10(e) (members of Congress).

This passage replaces the instrumentality alleged with the targets of what Trump calls persuasion. Trump correctly describes one target of the state means (but not the coercion involved). But then he spins the creation of fraudulent documents as, instead, an attempt to persuade Mike Pence. He redefines the hijacking of DOJ in order to make a seemingly authoritative false statement as an attempt to persuade state officials (long after the involvement of state officials was concluded). He describes efforts to get Pence to violate the law as instead an attempt to persuade him. And he calls a violent mob threatening to assassinate members of Congress as, instead, an attempt to persuade those members.

Trump is a con man. And his First Amendment argument is a breathtaking claim that the means he uses to sustain his con — including fraud and coercion backed by violence — are merely free speech.

To some degree, this quick sleight of hand doesn’t matter: In the discussion of the First Amendment that follows, he never returns to address the charges against him. As a result, Trump’s First Amendment argument is sloppy fluff compared to the First Amendment January 6 challenges that have gone before and will be before the DC Circuit by the time Trump goes to trial.

Having at least acknowledged the existence of all five “means” bullet points in his MTD on Constitutional Grounds (even if he redefined them as targets of persuasion), the section of Trump’s MTD on Statutory Grounds addressing 371 pretends the indictment names just three means, not five.

As relevant here, the indictment alleges three types of conduct that supposedly involved making a false statement: (1) claims that the 2020 Presidential election was rigged or tainted by fraud or other irregularities, made both in public and in communications with public officials; [state] (2) organizing and submitting contingent slates of electors to the President of the U.S. Senate and the Archivist of the United States; [fake electors] and (3) making public claims about the scope of the Vice President’s legal authority with respect to the election certification. [PenceCard] [red brackets my own]

Trump doesn’t even pretend to address two of the five means alleged involve a conspiracy to defraud the government: the Jeffrey Clark and mob means. In the sections addressing 1512 and 241, Trump never revisits those other two means (or, in any specificity, the three he does include).

And that’s how, in the section on 1512 (an area where he could, but does not, piggyback on two years of determined work from other January 6 defense attorneys, including several who are members of his larger defense team), he claims he did nothing that could have obstructed the official proceeding — the January 6 vote certification — that he never even identifies.

As discussed above, lobbying members of Congress and state officials to act in a certain way when they conduct an official proceeding does not “obstruct” or “impede” that official proceeding. Nothing about lobbying Congress to act a certain way “places an obstacle” or “impediments,” “hinders … from action,” “gets in the way of the progress of,” “holds up,” or “blocks” Congress from acting. See id. at 1132, 1159. On the contrary, lobbying Congress to act in a certain way presupposes that Congress will conduct an official proceeding, and it seeks to persuade Congress to act in a certain way during that official proceeding. That is the antithesis of “obstructing” or “impeding” the proceeding.

Think about that! If Trump bothered to mention the vote certification, he would literally be claiming that he had absolutely nothing to do with its interruption on January 6, 2021. Nothing.

Even the illegal order to Pence, clearly identified as item 3 in Trump’s 371 section and a primary focus of both Judge David Carter’s opinion finding it likely this did amount to obstruction and the January 6 Report, is gone here. Jeffrey Clark never gets put back in. Most importantly, the obvious means of sending thousands of angry Trump supporters, many armed, to Congress to chase lawmakers out of their chambers remains absent from Trump’s discussion.

This is why (as I noted earlier) I think Trump is simply trying to make his incitement of actual mobsters go away with the Motion to Strike. His legal arguments ignore the incitement of the mob entirely, even after his recusal stunt introduced evidence of someone convicted under 1512, Robert Palmer, who said he committed crimes “at the behest” of Trump, even after his gag fight introduced evidence of a Jan6er stalking Obama immediately after Trump sent him.

To the extent that Trump’s MTDs don’t result in the wholesale dismissal of his indictment (and DOJ argued that by allegedly conspiring with five people outside of government, most of the allegations against Trump couldn’t be treated as official acts even if he did win the Absolute Immunity argument) Trump’s failure to address some of the means he allegedly used will lead to the failure of these efforts.

With the exception of the MTDs for Absolute Immunity (arguing that as a former President Trump, can’t be charged for things he did as President) and Selective Prosecution, these MTDs don’t attempt to argue that the entire indictment should be dismissed. And where in some cases he could make compelling arguments — I think the Jeffrey Clark means, for example, is particularly prone to legal challenge, though Trump barely addresses it — so long as you leave one of the means intact, you won’t succeed in dismissing the indictment.

In practice, the scope of what Trump actually addresses in his MTDs looks something like this:

Not only doesn’t Trump ever address the indictment as alleged (DOJ notes that a Motion to Dismiss must accept the facts alleged as true), but in none of these MTDs does he address all the means alleged. The only place he fully deals with the Jeffrey Clark allegation (which, again, I think is the most susceptible to legal challenge) is in the Absolute Immunity filing that is weak for other reasons. The only place he deals with the mob means is in the Motion to Strike, his legal effort to sweep his role in the violence all under the rug.

If his effort to do that — to remove the descriptions of his own role in the violence from the indictment with his Motion to Strike — fails, then that means alleged in the indictment will survive no matter what else happens.

To be sure, these MTDs have no bearing on whether he’ll ultimately be successful. Trump doesn’t need any of these MTDs to succeed to be acquitted. There will be a contentious fight about admissible evidence and arguments, where this First Amendment argument will be even more contentiously argued than it is here. The fight over advice of counsel arguments has already started, And ultimately he only needs to find one MAGAt willing to ignore all evidence to keep on a jury.

But the big gaps in Trump’s MTD arguments, to say nothing of the way he spins having his campaign submit fraudulent documents to NARA and Congress, seem to reflect points where even his lawyers recognize his case is so weak they just won’t bother — they’ll just try to sweep it all under the rug some other way, like that Motion to Strike.

Again, even if this goes to trial in March as currently scheduled, Trump needs only persuade one voter. If he can use these court filings as a means to delay that trial and as campaign props to win the election, these weak points won’t matter.

Update: Corrected trial date, which is scheduled to start on March 4, per Sean Sullivan.

Hunter Biden[‘s “Laptop”] Goes to SCOTUS: How Judge Doughty Helped China and Iran Attack the US

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Hunter Biden is going to SCOTUS!!!

Or rather, the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” is.

Last Friday, SCOTUS granted a stay and certiori for DOJ’s appeal of the Missouri v. Biden case, a right wing lawsuit claiming that the government has forced social media companies to “censor” right wingers (Terry Doughty opinion; 5th Circuit Opinion). While much of the lawsuit focuses on efforts, including those starting under a guy named Trump, to help social media companies limit COVID-related disinformation (Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is the lead appellant), a key part of the claim that the government has coerced social media companies pertains to the FBI.

The Fifth Circuit opinion upholding parts of Judge Doughty’s opinion admitted that, “we cannot say that the FBI’s messages were plainly threatening in tone or manner” but suggested nevertheless that they “’might be inherently coercive if sent by . . . [a] law enforcement officer’” anyway.

Because the people pushing this suit, including now-Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt and now-Louisiana Governor-elect Jeff Landry, are nuts, the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” has come to embody that coercion. The Fifth Circuit adopted that focus (and several inaccurate claims about it) as well. And, in turn, Sam Alito included that focus, citing the Fifth Circuit, in his snotty dissent.

This case began when two States, Missouri and Louisiana, and various private parties filed suit alleging that popular social media companies had either blocked their use of the companies’ platforms or had downgraded their posts on a host of controversial subjects, including “the COVID–19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Id., at *1. According to the plaintiffs, Federal Government officials “were the ones pulling the strings,” that is, these officials “‘coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them].’”

This argument, as currently framed, is about whether Judge Doughty properly enjoined the FBI from certain kinds of contacts with social media companies because of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

The Injunction

The injunction on the FBI, imposed largely because of right wing beliefs about the “Hunter Biden” “laptop,” may also explain why three Republican justices granted cert. The prohibition on certain kind of FBI contacts with social media companies may be among the most urgent injury the US government faces under the injunction. That’s partly because Judge Doughty specifically enjoined Elvis Chan, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of cybersecurity investigations out of San Francisco, and so a key person involved in preventing and responding to cyberattacks targeting or using the infrastructure of social media companies located in Silicon Valley.

Alito’s dissent claims that DOJ only cared about Joe Biden’s bully pulpit, which is not included in the injunction. But in its appeal, DOJ noted that, as written, the injunction might lead the FBI to hesitate before alerting social media companies to potentially harmful content.

And given the court’s suggestion that any request from a law-enforcement agency is inherently coercive, see id. at 232a233a, the FBI would likewise need to tread carefully in its interactions with social-media companies, potentially eschewing communications that protect national security, public safety, or the security of federal elections. For example, particularly in the early stages of an investigation, law-enforcement officials may be uncertain whether a social-media post involves unprotected criminal activity (such as a true threat). But the injunction leaves them guessing what quantum of certainty they must possess before they can inform social-media companies about the post, potentially leading to disastrous delays.

To be sure, Judge Doughty’s injunction included a bunch of carve outs that, right wingers like Alito claim, ensures their efforts to force Twitter to publish Hunter Biden’s dick pics don’t make the country less safe. The carve outs are:

(1) informing social-media companies of postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies;

(2) contacting and/or notifying social-media companies of national security threats, extortion, or other threats posted on its platform;

(3) contacting and/or notifying social-media companies about criminal efforts to suppress voting, to provide illegal campaign contributions, of cyber-attacks against election infrastructure, or foreign attempts to influence elections;

(4) informing social-media companies of threats that threaten the public safety or security of the United States;

(5) exercising permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern;

(6) informing social-media companies of postings intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures;

(7) informing or communicating with social-media companies in an effort to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity;

(8) communicating with social-media companies about deleting, removing, suppressing, or reducing posts on social-media platforms that are not protected free speech by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. [my emphasis]

The carve outs — to the extent that they apply to the FBI, as most by definition do — actually demonstrate the problem with this ruling (and may explain the stakes of the focus on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop”).

Five kinds of interaction with social media

To see why, it’s useful to understand what the plaintiffs actually complained about (which largely tracks Matt Taibbi’s misrepresentations in his Twitter Files propaganda), which are shown in the unshaded rows in the table below.

CISA

First, there’s the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency. It was set up within DHS specifically to provide an alternative to the FBI, a non-law enforcement agency that could help protect critical infrastructure, including elections, from cyber as well as brick-and-mortar threats. In addition to its efforts to combat disinformation about elections, for example, CISA has also helped some states harden their election systems against hacking attempts, run active shooter drills with election officials, and helped state election officials recover after natural disasters.

As part of its election role, though, CISA aspired to provide authoritative information to election partners (including social media companies) about both intentional and unintentional incorrect information about elections. The example former CISA Director Chris Krebs provided to the January 6 Committee was an Iranian campaign, active in the days after the Hunter Biden story, to pose as members of the Proud Boys and intimidate people of color not to vote. But in the same way that CISA would help protect pipelines against international or domestic attackers, CISA would track and provide official debunking to incorrect information from both international and domestic sources. Republicans especially hate CISA because Krebs affirmed that the 2020 election had been conducted securely (after which Trump summarily fired him by Tweet). But they also object to the “switchboarding” role that CISA has served, getting reports on incorrect information (which of course could include domestic actors) from election officials, along with corrections, and sharing them with social media companies.

At first, the Fifth Circuit reversed Doughty’s injunction on CISA, but then arbitrarily added them back in, a flaky move that may have contributed to SCOTUS’ decision to review the Fifth Circuit’s actions.

Election Command Post

Then there’s the intervention that might be the most controversial, but which in this litigation got replaced by the right wing obsession with the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.” In the days immediately preceding the 2020 election, FBI agents passed on social media identifiers that misstated the time, place, or means of voting. Per the testimony of Agent Chan, these had been vetted by Public Integrity lawyers at Bill Barr’s DOJ and deemed to be “criminal in nature.” This is the primary instance where the FBI shared information about US persons that might be taken down. It’s also a use case that Matt Taibbi wildly misrepresented, both as to the genesis of the data and the potential existence of ongoing criminal investigations into the activity. And it’s one instance where, under Doughty’s carve out #6, you could see the FBI hesitating before sharing: because while the identifiers in question did mislead about “voting requirements and procedures,” the FBI would’t be able to establish intent without more work (including more intrusive legal process on the accounts). So there’d be no way for the FBI to flag these accounts until it had done more work to determine intent, after which the damage would have been done. This should be where discussions at SCOTUS focus. But they’re not. Instead, Alito is talking about the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

FITF: Strategic and Tactical

Finally, there is the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, now led by Laura Dehmlow (the other FBI official specifically enjoined; in 2020 she was the Unit Chief of the Chinese group at FITF). FITF aims to combat malign foreign influence operations, defined as efforts by foreign actors, hiding their foreign identity, to target those inside the US. While such efforts can target elections, they can also be part of traditional espionage and hacking efforts or attempts by authoritarian governments to crack down on US-based dissidents.

FITF interacts (or did, before the injunction) with social media companies in two ways. They hold general meetings — often attended by Chan and Dehmlow — to discuss general tips and techniques about foreign actors, what they called “strategic” information sharing. And they hold one-on-one meetings with social media platforms to discuss specific activity on their platforms — what the FBI calls “tactical.” The leading source of such tactical information, per Dehmlow’s testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, is “another government agency,” often classified information downgraded to share with partners, though Chan described that FBI agents involved in specific counterintelligence or criminal investigations might also share information.

We know that the plaintiffs in this lawsuit misrepresented this sharing. In addition to general descriptions of this information sharing from depositions, we have rather specific evidence about the subject of these FITF briefings in 2020. LinkedIn emails that Doughty claims to rely on, for example, show that the August 2020 agenda for the FITF meeting covered the Internet Research Agency — the Internet trolls that Republicans like to claim were the only way Russia has interfered in elections — but also described a Russian software and influence campaign targeting Ukraine. It shows a specific briefing on APT31, which Mandiant describes as, “a China-nexus cyber espionage actor focused on obtaining information that can provide the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises with political, economic, and military advantages.” That briefing also covered Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea.

While the September 2020 briefing reviewed a fake right wing news site run by IRA (the FBI had just targeted a similar left wing fake news site as well), it discussed three things pertaining to Iran: some influence campaign (as noted, in October CISA would share details of a very sophisticated campaign in 2020 hijacking Proud Boy identities to discourage voters of color), a recent indictment of hackers with ties to IRGC who had targeted (among other things) an American satellite company, and a toolset of some Iranian hackers.

The agenda for the October meeting was not as detailed as the August and. September ones, but a follow-up shows that one item pertained to a Global (meaning something other than Chinese or Russian) campaign targeting Trump, Republicans, and Biden.

This is the kind of information sharing that Judge Doughty’s injunction threatens to end: efforts (among other things) to prevent Iranian and Chinese hacking of US technology companies.

While the subjects of FITF briefing might include Americans — such as the freelancers paid by the IRA’s fake news site or the Trump associates, like Roger Stone and Hannity, who engaged with fake IRA Twitter accounts — they are targeted at selectors that the FBI has “high confidence” are foreigners pretending to be American.

Criminal Process

Thanks to Matt Taibbi’s propaganda, right wingers have completely ignored the role of criminal process in all this, even though Agent Chan repeatedly described in his deposition that, “The majority of my role is dealing with cyber investigations.” There is clear overlap between the things right wingers complain about and known criminal investigations. As I have noted, for example, right in the middle of the 2020 pre-election period, DOJ rolled out a GRU indictment which included the 2017 hack-and-leak operation targeting Emmanuel Macron, in which key members of the far right, including Jack Posobiec, were involved.

Chan described several times that his team not only investigated part of the 2016 hack, but still had an active investigation into those actors. That’s important not only because he would have firsthand knowledge of the kinds of attribution social media companies (and Google and Microsoft) had in 2016, but for another reason: On October 19, 2020, DOJ indicted a bunch of GRU hackers, including one charged in the 2016 hack-and-leak campaign, for a variety of additional hacks, including the hack-and-leak targeting Emmanuel Macron. The Macron campaign, specifically, included both Google and Twitter components. So in the very same weeks when — right wingers complain — Elvis Chan was in close contact with Twitter about the ongoing election, he or his subordinates were likely working with prosecutors in Pittsburgh on an indictment implicating both Google and Twitter.

Emmanuel Macron is not mentioned in the Chan deposition.

The investigation into Douglass Mackey, for intentional disinformation targeting Blacks and Latinos regarding the means of voting, would have been active in this period as well. Those disinformation efforts were substantially orchestrated in Twitter DM threads.

While Agent Chan likely had no involvement in the Mackey case, he has investigated GRU for years, so likely would have been aware of the investigative steps leading up to the 2020 indictment. The press release for that indictment specifically commended the cooperation of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in the investigation.

In other words, not only did FBI provide notice of disinformation from US persons pertaining to content vetted by DOJ attorneys as potential crimes, but some of the contacts FBI had with Twitter in the period would involve far right wing involvement with actual crimes.

Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon and FITF

The right wing has focused on FITF rather than other aspects of their complaint because, at an FITF briefing with Twitter shortly after the NYPost story on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop,” someone at Twitter asked about it and an FBI person present said, “the laptop is real,” and then, in a briefing with Facebook, someone asked about it and Dehmlow responded “no comment.” Based on that exchange (and three erroneous details), Judge Doughty finds great fault with the FBI.

The FBI’s failure to alert social-media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, and not mere Russian disinformation, is particularly troubling. The FBI had the laptop in their possession since December 2019 and had warned social-media companies to look out for a “hack and dump” operation by the Russians prior to the 2020 election. Even after Facebook specifically asked whether the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, Dehmlow of the FBI refused to comment, resulting in the social-media companies’suppression of the story. As a result, millions of U.S. citizens did not hear the story prior to the November 3, 2020 election. Additionally, the FBI was included in Industry meetings and bilateral meetings, received and forwarded alleged misinformation to social-media companies, and actually mislead [sic] social-media companies in regard to the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Court finds this evidence demonstrative of significant encouragement by the FBI Defendants.

On top of the three errors Doughty makes (which I’ll get to), there are several problems here. First, confirming that the FBI knew the laptop was real, as the FBI did, was a privacy violation! Hunter Biden is the one who has complaint for the disclosure of an ongoing criminal investigation (which is, according to Agent Chan, why Dehmlow responded no comment to the Facebook question), not the right wing.

More importantly, based on what is publicly known, Hunter Biden would normally not be included FITF briefing. He’s a US citizen. While several of his international relationships (with Burisma, with Romania, and with CEFC) were being investigated as potential FARA violations in 2020 and after, with the important exception of a slight delay in Burisma’s announcement of his appointment in 2014, Hunter’s ties to such entities were not covert. Nor is there any allegation he disseminated false information about those entities online, especially on Facebook and Twitter. CEFC might have been the subject of FITF focus, but more for its covert role in recruiting James Woolsey.

One person who might be included in FITF briefings in summer 2020, though, is Guo Wengui. Unlike Hunter Biden, he’s not a US citizen; he is (or was, before his indictment in March) present in the US as an asylum seeker. And as public reports from July 2020 described, the source of funding for his propaganda efforts was under FBI investigation, precisely the kind of covert relationship of interest to FITF. That reporting suggested that Guo might secretly be funded by the Chinese state to track Chinese dissidents, something Dehmlow has explicitly included within FITF’s mandate. In a filing in the current investigation against Guo, SDNY has pointed to evidence obtained in a more recent search of Guo’s property pertaining to a 2018 meeting between the UAE and China. In other words, in 2020, the FBI was actively investigating whether China and/or the Emirates funded propaganda put out by Guo, with Steve Bannon’s involvement, precisely the kind of secret foreign backing of influence campaigns that FITF focuses on. So while Hunter Biden shouldn’t have come up as a subject of FITF briefing, Bannon’s partnership with Guo might have.

We don’t know whether that happened. But one person whose propaganda campaign definitely was a subject of FITF briefing is Andrii Derkach. Between the August and September face-to-face meetings, on September 10, 2020, a Unit Chief (presumably the Russian Unit Chief) at FITF  sent a link to LinkedIn noting Treasury’s sanctioning of Derkach, explaining, “just want to let you know about someone we have discussed in previous briefings.” Obviously, the link was public, as was a WaPo story that same day tying Derkach to Rudy’s efforts to push criminal investigations related to Joe Biden. But the FBI sent the link, referencing back to prior discussions, to flag it for LinkedIn.

In other words, the far right is complaining that the FBI didn’t offer up details about an ongoing criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, but they’ve never complained that the FBI didn’t offer up details about a national security investigation into Steve Bannon’s propaganda partner (one who, subsequent reporting has confirmed, played a key role in altering and disseminating Hunter Biden dick pics). Nor have they complained that FBI didn’t offer up details about the counterintelligence investigation into the alleged Russian agent conducting an influence operation targeting Rudy at this meeting. Rudy and Bannon were named in the NYPost story in question, yet the right wing isn’t wailing that the FBI didn’t describe ongoing FBI investigations, investigations directly relevant to the mission of FITF, in the briefing after its release.

Doughty’s Three Errors

Which brings us, finally, to three errors that Doughty makes — at least one of which is already before SCOTUS — in sustaining his complaint that the FBI must be enjoined because they didn’t offer up more information about a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden.

First, in his opinion written in July, Doughty points to Yoel Roth’s 2020 FEC testimony, which is where Roth first explained that Twitter took down the initial NYPost link under its hack-and-leak policy.

(10) Yoel Roth (“Roth”), the then-Head of Site Integrity at Twitter, provided a formal declaration on December 17, 2020, to the Federal Election Commission containing a contemporaneous account of the “hack-leak-operations” at the meetings between the FBI, other natural-security agencies, and social-media platforms.405 Roth’s declaration stated:

Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security. During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected “hack-and-leak” operations by state actors might occur during the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social-media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed through 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden. 406 [emphasis original]

In his testimony, Agent Chan disputed the notion that that the FBI suggested a hack-and-leak would involve Hunter Biden, because Joe Biden’s son had not come up in meetings before the NYPost story he attended.

[I]n my estimation, we never discussed Hunter Biden specifically with Twitter. And so the way I read that is that there are hack-and-leak operations, and then at the time — at the time I believe he flagged one of the potential current events that were happening ahead of the elections.

That’s consistent with what Roth has said since, in House Oversight Testimony, clarifying that he heard the rumors about a hack-and-leak involving Hunter Biden from other social media companies, not the FBI.

I think it actually should have been two separate sentences. It is true that in meetings between industry and law enforcement, law enforcement discussed the possibility of a hack and leak campaign in the lead up to the election. And in one of those meetings, it was discussed, I believe, by another company that there was a possibility that that hack and leak could relate to Hunter Biden and Burisma. I don’t believe that perspective was shared by law enforcement. They didn’t endorse it. They didn’t provide that information in that.

But Doughty nevertheless relies on the outdated misinterpretation to blame the FBI for Twitter’s conclusions.

As noted, there’s no mention of one reason why this conclusion would be sound — the public reporting on Andrii Derkach, which was part of FITF briefing. Nor is there mention of the GRU hack of Burisma reported by a Silicon Valley InfoSec company earlier that year.

This lawsuit has thrived even after Agent Chan debunked one conspiracy theory about the social media’s throttling of the NYPost story, the false assumption that the FBI affirmatively told Twitter and Facebook that a hack-and-leak would involve Hunter Biden.

It has done so, in part, because of a truly bizarre — and erroneous — complaint from Doughty: That Chan and others at the FBI and CISA warned social media companies of hack-and-leak campaigns, like the GRU one of Macron indicted just days after the NYPost Hunter Biden story October 2020. Social media companies took the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” story down, the logic goes, because the FBI coerced them to change their moderation policies to prohibit publication of hacked materials.

In Doughty’s version, the social media companies responded to this pressure in 2020, just in time to use it to justify taking down the NYPost story.

Social-media platforms updated their policies in 2020 to provide that posting “hacked materials” would violate their policies. According to Chan, the impetus for these changes was the repeated concern about a 2016-style “hack-and-leak” operation.402 Although Chan denies that the FBI urged the social-media platforms to change their policies on hacked material, Chan did admit that the FBI repeatedly asked the social-media companies whether they had changed their policies with regard to hacked materials403 because the FBI wanted to know what the companies would do if they received such materials.404 [my emphasis]

In the Fifth Circuit’s telling, that change seems to date to 2022, two years after the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” story.

For example, right before the 2022 congressional election, the FBI tipped the platforms off to “hack and dump” operations from “statesponsored actors” that would spread misinformation through their sites. In another instance, they alerted the platforms to the activities and locations of “Russian troll farms.” The FBI apparently acquired this information from ongoing investigations.

Per their operations, the FBI monitored the platforms’ moderation policies, and asked for detailed assessments during their regular meetings. The platforms apparently changed their moderation policies in response to the FBI’s debriefs. For example, some platforms changed their “terms of service” to be able to tackle content that was tied to hacking operations. [my emphasis]

In fact, the Fifth Circuit builds most of its claim of FBI coercion on this change in terms of service (again, seemingly in 2022), which it ties to content take downs, the sole potential hack-and-leak example of which is that first article on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

Fourth, the platforms clearly perceived the FBI’s messages as threats. For example, right before the 2022 congressional election, the FBI warned the platforms of “hack and dump” operations from “state-sponsored actors” that would spread misinformation through their sites. In doing so, the FBI officials leaned into their inherent authority. So, the platforms reacted as expected—by taking down content, including posts and accounts that originated from the United States, in direct compliance with the request. Considering the above, we conclude that the FBI coerced the platforms into moderating content. But, the FBI’s endeavors did not stop there.

We also find that the FBI likely significantly encouraged the platforms to moderate content by entangling itself in the platforms’ decision-making processes. Blum, 457 U.S. at 1008. For example, several platforms “adjusted” their moderation policies to capture “hack-and-leak” content after the FBI asked them to do so (and followed up on that request). Consequently, when the platforms subsequently moderated content that violated their newly modified terms of service (e.g., the results of hack-and-leaks), they did not do so via independent standards.

It’s a crazy enough argument on its face (especially the Fifth Circuit’s suggestion that a change in 2022 led to the throttling of a 2020 story). But it also gets the timing — and therefore the cause-and-effect — wrong. The actual change to Twitter’s policy, for example, was in March 2019, based off discussions before that. Either FBI planned their malicious coercion long before they got the laptop from JPMI, or the claim is utterly nonsensical.

DOJ called out this error in its SCOTUS response.

Similarly, respondents’ claim that the platforms “updated their policies in 2020” with respect to “‘hacked materials,’” such as “‘the laptop story,’” “after the FBI’s ‘impetus,’” Opp. 17, 19 (brackets and citations omitted), cannot be squared with the platforms’ own testimony that their actions with respect to the “laptop story” were based on policies adopted in 2018, C.A. ROA 18,498-18,499, 18,505.

In other words, the main claim that the Fifth Circuit made about coercion — which, again, was ultimately a claim about coercing social media companies to do something that prevented one story from going viral — got the timing and therefore any possible causality wrong.

Finally, there’s the source of Doughty’s claim of animus on the part of the FBI, his claim that they deliberately withheld information that (he imagines) would have led Facebook and Twitter to act differently.

The mention of “hack-and-leak” operations involving Hunter Biden is significant because the FBI previously received Hunter Biden’s laptop on December 9, 2019, and knew that the later-released story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was not Russian disinformation. 408

Doughty bases this claim on a November 2, 2022 Miranda Devine (!!!) column. The column is, predictably, riddled with debunked propaganda, including the shoddy Intercept piece that kicked off this campaign, the lawsuit itself (making it a self-licking ice cream cone), and a preview of John Paul Mac Isaac’s then unpublished book (though not the line where an FBI agent told JPMI’s father, “You may be in possession of something you don’t own”).

The paragraph from which Doughty bases his claim that FBI “knew that the later-released story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was not Russian disinformation” appears to be this one:

We know the FBI at the time was spying on Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud with a covert surveillance warrant. Therefore, it had access to his emails in August 2020 from computer store whistleblower John Paul Mac Isaac and to my text messages discussing when The Post would publish the story. It sure looks as if the FBI deliberately pre-censored a legitimate story for a political aim.

Of course, the paragraph doesn’t mention Russian disinformation, nor does JPMI’s role in the process rule out Russian disinformation (a point I laid out here).

Plus, the paragraph is factually wrong. Per failed redactions in a Lev Parnas filing and other filings in that Special Master docket, FBI obtained a warrant Rudy’s iCloud account and emails on November 4, 2019, before John Paul Mac Isaac was subpoenaed by the FBI, and nine months before JPMI reached out to Rudy. Rudy’s phones were seized with an April 21, 2021 warrant, long after the controversy in question (though at least several of those phones were corrupted). While it’s certainly likely that DOJ obtained a second warrant for Rudy’s emails after that, it would not have happened in 2020. In other words, there is no known legal process that obtained Rudy’s emails that would have included JPMI’s emails to him before the NYPost story came out.

Plus, JPMI’s emails to Rudy would only be in the scope of the known warrant against Rudy … if the laptop were part of a Ukranian effort to deal dirt to cause legal problems for Joe Biden and his family.

Devine may base her claim, at least in part, elsewhere. Her column also alludes to the disgruntled FBI agents who attacked Tim Thibault.

This year, whistleblowers have come forward to finger various FBI employees engaged in the cover-up. Timothy Thibault, the recently retired assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington, DC, field office, was the agency point man to manage Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s business partner who went to the FBI with evidence of the Biden influence-peddling operation. Thibault allegedly ordered the investigation closed and has refused to cooperate with GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee.

This, too, is false. Thibault’s House Judiciary Committee interview reveals that his only involvement with the Tony Bobulinski interview was to address Bobulinski’s request to turn over just some of the material on some of his devices.

But Devine’s reliance on such disgruntled agents is interesting for another reason: because they are likely disgruntled at least partly because of warnings against the involvement of Steve Bannon associate Peter Schweizer in the Hunter Biden investigation. The disgruntled agents falsely claimed, elsewhere, that Thibault, on his own, shut down Schweizer as a source. Yet according to Thibault’s testimony, he did so only after two warnings. First, the lead FBI agent on the Hunter investigative team told Thibault that getting contents of the laptop from Schweizer, which they had already gotten, “could cause problems when you get to prosecution … and [] open doors for defense attorneys.” And shortly thereafter — so temporally in the same time period as the first NYPost story — FITF raised concerns about the Bannon associate. A week after the NYPost story, around October 21, FITF provided Thibault a classified briefing (from which they excluded the line FBI agents, in part because the daughter of one was posting related content on Daily Caller). That briefing described more context about FITF’s concerns.

In spite of all the obvious problems with Devine’s propaganda, it formed a key part of Doughty’s claim that FBI coercion, rather than an independent series of decisions about hosting potentially stolen content, resulted in the throttling of the first NYPost story.

And based on that shoddy case — based on the feverish conspiracy theories about the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” sustained by Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry and Miranda Devine — Judge Doughty made it significantly riskier for Agent Chan and others to work with social media companies to do things like prevent Iranian hacks of US satellite companies.

Buried in DOJ’s Absolute Immunity Response, a Comment on Trump’s Suspected Zenith Crimes

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Earlier this month, Trump’s DC team filed a motion to dismiss his January 6 indictment based on a claim of absolute immunity, an argument that Presidents cannot be prosecuted for things they did while President.

To get a sense of how shoddy Trump’s argument was, you need only compare the number of citations to these cases:

  • Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which found Presidents had absolute immunity against civil lawsuits for things that fall within their official duties
  • US v. Nixon, which found that the same President who had absolute immunity from civil suit could not use Executive Privilege to withhold evidence from a criminal prosecution
  • Trump v. Vance, which held that Trump, while still President, was not immune from a criminal subpoena
  • Thompson v. Trump, in which SCOTUS upheld a DC Circuit Opinion that upheld a Tanya Chutkan opinion that the events of January 6 overcame any Executive Privilege claim Trump might make to withhold documents from Congress, a far higher bar than withholding them from the FBI

Trump’s absolute immunity claim was a shoddy argument, but you never know what this SCOTUS would rubber stamp, even considering its cert denial in Thompson v. Trump and questions about whether Clarence Thomas (who did not recuse in that case, but did in John Eastman’s appeal of a crime-fraud ruling against him) would be shamed into recusing in this one.

Shoddy argument and all, there was never going to be a way to carry out the first-ever prosecution of a former President without defeating an absolute immunity claim.

In general, DOJ’s response is much more adequate than Trump’s motion to the task of laying out one side of an argument that will ultimately be decided by a very partisan Supreme Court. But it is written as the first response in what will be, whatever the outcome, a historic ruling.

Before it spends ten pages addressing Trump’s application of Nixon v. Fitzgerald, it spends ten pages laying out the constitutional framework in question. In a section addressing Trump’s claim that his impeachment acquittal on January 6 charges meant he could not be charged for related crimes, DOJ notes that Trump argued at the time, that as a former President, the Senate no longer had jurisdiction to hold an impeachment trial. Then it cites the many Republican Senators who used that stance to justify their own acquittal votes. It notes that the Nixon pardon and the Clinton settlement both presumed potential exposure to prosecution once they became former Presidents.

Out of necessity, the Fitzgerald section adopts an analogy from that precedent to this one: In the same way that Fitzgerald likened the President to prosecutors and judges who enjoy immunity for their official acts, Fitzgerald did not immunize those same prosecutors and judges from other crimes. At a time of increased focus on undeclared gifts that Clarence Thomas has accepted from people with matters before the court and after a Sam Alito interview — with someone who has matters before the court — in which he claimed separation of powers prohibited Congress from weighing in on SCOTUS ethics, DOJ cited the 11th Circuit opinion holding that then-Judge Alcee Hastings could be prosecuted. That is, whatever the outcome of this dispute, it may have implications for judges just as it will for Presidents.

Only after those lengthy sections does DOJ get into the specifics of this case, arguing:

  • By misrepresenting the indictment in a bid to repackage it as acts that fit within the President’s official duties, Trump has not treated the allegations as true, as Motions To Dismiss must do
  • Trump’s use of the Take Care Clause to claim the President’s official duties extend to Congress and the states is not backed by statute
  • Because Trump is accused of conspiring with people outside of the government — unsurprisingly, DOJ ignores the Jeffrey Clark allegations in this passage (CC4), but while it invokes Rudy Giuliani (CC1), John Eastman (CC2), Kenneth Chesebro (CC5), and Boris Epshteyn (CC6), it is curiously silent about the allegations pertaining to Sidney Powell (CC3) — the case as a whole should not be dismissed

In total, DOJ’s more specific arguments take up just six pages of the response. I fear it does not do as much as it could do in distinguishing between the role of President and political candidate, something that will come before SCOTUS — and could get there first — in the civil suits against Trump.

And its commentary on Trump’s attempt to use the Take Care Clause to extend the President’s authority into areas reserved to the states and Congress is, in my opinion, too cursory.

The principal case on which the defendant relies (Mot. 35-36, 38, 43-44) for his expansive conception of the Take Care Clause, In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890), cannot bear the weight of his arguments. In Neagle, the Supreme Court held that the Take Care Clause authorized the appointment of a deputy marshal to protect a Supreme Court Justice while traveling on circuit even in the absence of congressional authorization. Id. at 67-68; see Logan v. United States, 144 U.S. 263, 294 (1892) (describing Neagle’s holding); Youngstown Sheet & Tube, 343 U.S. at 661 n.3 (Clark, J., concurring) (same). Before reaching that conclusion, the Court in Neagle posed as a rhetorical question—which the defendant cites several times (Mot. 35, 38, 43, 44)—whether the president’s duty under the Take Care Clause is “limited to the enforcement of acts of congress or of treaties of the United States according to their express terms; or does it include the rights, duties, and obligations growing out of the constitution itself, our international relations, and all the protection implied by the nature of the government under the constitution?” 135 U.S. at 64. From the undisputed proposition that the president’s powers under Article II are not limited only to laws and treaties, it does not follow, as the defendant seems to imply, that every “right, duty, or obligation[]” under the Constitution is necessarily coterminous with the president’s powers under the Take Care Clause. Under that theory, for example, the president could superintend Congress’s constitutional obligation to keep a journal of its proceedings, U.S. Const. art. I, § 5, cl. 3, or the judiciary’s duty to adjudicate cases and controversies, U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 1.

The 11th Circuit and then SCOTUS will be facing a similar, albeit better argued, Take Care Clause argument when they review Mark Meadows’ bid to remove his Georgia prosecution. You’d think DOJ could do better — or at the very least note that Trump abdicated all premise of upholding the Take Care Clause during a crucial 187 minutes when his mob was attacking the Capitol.

All that said, I’m as interested in this response for the associated arguments — the seemingly hypothetical ones — such as the one (already noted) that in weighing this argument, the Supreme Court may also have to consider, again, whether they themselves are immune from prosecution for bribery.

It’s not just Clarence Thomas whose actions this fight could implicate.

In two places, DOJ uses hypotheticals to talk about other Presidential actions that might be crimes, rather than focus on the specifics of the case before Judge Chutkan.

For example, DOJ points to the possibility that a President might trade a pardon — a thing of value — as part of a quid pro quo to obtain false testimony or prevent true testimony.

For example, where a statute prohibits engaging in certain conduct for a corrupt purpose, the statute’s mens rea requirement tends to align, rather than conflict, with the president’s Article II duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” U.S. Const. art. II, § 3, which would weigh heavily against the need for immunity. To illustrate, although the president’s power to grant pardons is exclusive and not subject to congressional regulation, see United States v. Klein, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 128, 147-48 (1872), criminal immunity should not shield the corrupt use of a presidential pardon—which plainly constitutes “anything of value” for purposes of the federal bribery statute, see 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)(3)—to induce another person to testify falsely or not to testify at all in a judicial, congressional, or agency proceeding.

Less than five years ago, of course, Roger Stone was telegraphing that prosecutors had offered him leniency if he would testify about dozens of conversations that he had with Trump during the 2016 election. Less than five years ago, the newly cooperative Sidney Powell first asked Trump to hold off on pardoning Mike Flynn, only to welcome a Trump pardon of Flynn while Powell and Flynn plotted ways to steal the election. Less than five years ago, Trump gave a last minute pardon to Steve Bannon, who currently faces four months of prison time because he refused to testify to Congress.

I’m not saying DOJ will revisit these pardons, all of which fit squarely within such a quid pro quo description. I’m noting that if the argument as a whole survives, this part of it may also survive.

The same is true of an even splashier passage. A paragraph describing the implications of Trump’s claim to absolute immunity lays out what some commentators have taken as hyperbolic scenarios of presidential corruption.

The implications of the defendant’s unbounded immunity theory are startling. It would grant absolute immunity from criminal prosecution to a president who accepts a bribe in exchange for a lucrative government contract for a family member; a president who instructs his FBI Director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a president who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a president who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary. After all, in each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy—and his felonious purposes and motives, as the defendant repeatedly insists, would be completely irrelevant and could never even be aired at trial. In addition to the profoundly troubling implications for the rule of law and the inconsistency with the fundamental principle that no man is above the law, that novel approach to immunity in the criminal context, as explained above, has no basis in law or history.

These seemingly extreme cases of crimes a President might commit, crimes that everyone should agree would face prosecution, include (these are out of order):

  • A President ordering the National Guard to murder his critics
  • A President ordering an FBI agent to plant evidence on his political enemy
  • A bribe paid in exchange for a family member getting a lucrative contract
  • A President selling nuclear secrets to America’s adversaries

Like the pardon discussion above, these hypotheticals — as Commander-in-Chief, with the conduct of foreign policy, with the treatment of classified materials — invoke actions where DOJ typically argues that the President is at the zenith of his power.

We have no reason to believe that Trump ordered the National Guard, specifically, to murder his critics. But we do know that on January 3, 2021, Trump proposed calling out 10,000 members of the National Guard to “protect” his people and facilitate his own march on the Capitol.

And he just cut me off, and he goes, well, we should call in the National Guard.

And then I think it was Max who said something to the effect of, Well, we should only call in the Guard if we expect a problem. And then the President says, no, we should call in the Guard so that there aren’t – so that there isn’t a problem. You know, we need to make sure people are protected.

And he said – he looked over at Max, and I don’t know if somebody was standing behind him or not. He just looked the other way from me and says, you know,  want to call in 10,000 National Guard. And then  opened my folder and wrote down 10,000 National Guard, closed my folder again.

We know that days later Mark Meadows believed the Guard would be present and Proud Boy Charles Donohoe seemed to expect such protection.

Similarly, we don’t know of a specific instance where Trump ordered an FBI agent to plant information on his political enemy. But we do know that as part of a Bill Barr-directed effort to reverse the Mike Flynn prosecution in 2020, misleading dates got added to the notes of Trump’s political enemies, Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe.

Days after those misleading dates were made public via Sidney Powell, Trump used the misleading dates in a packaged debate attack on Joe Biden.

President Donald J. Trump: (01:02:22)
We’ve caught them all. We’ve got it all on tape. We’ve caught them all. And by the way, you gave the idea for the Logan Act against General Flynn. You better take a look at that, because we caught you in a sense, and President Obama was sitting in the office.

We know of no instance where Trump accepted a bribe in response to which a family member got a US government contract. We do, however, know of an instance where the Trump Administration gave the Saudis something of value — at the least, cover for the execution of Jamal Khashoggi — which everyone seems to believe has a tie to Jared’s lucrative $2 billion contract with the Saudi government.

As to selling nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary? Well, we know Trump had some number of nuclear secrets in his gaudy bathroom and then in his leatherbound box. We have no fucking clue what happened to the secrets that Walt Nauta allegedly withheld from Evan Corcoran’s review that got flown to Bedminster just before a Saudi golf tournament, never to be seen again.

All of which is to say that these edge cases — examples of Presidential misconduct that some commentators have treated as strictly hypothetical — all have near analogues in Trump’s record.

This response is a response about a very specific indictment, an indictment that describes actions Trump took as a candidate, often with those outside government, in ways that usurped the authorities reserved to states and Congress.

But in several points in the filing, DOJ invites review of other potential crimes, crimes conducted at the zenith of Presidential power, but crimes that may — must — otherwise be illegal, if no man is above the law.

Release the Kraken: Sidney Powell Pleading Guilty

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Sidney Powell is pleading guilty to six counts of conspiring to interfere with election administration in Fulton County. These will be misdemeanors treated under the First Offender Act. She will be sentenced to six years of probation.

She is required to testify against any and all co-defendants in the case.

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