Rat-Fucker Rashomon: Roger Stone’s Mid-Burglary Foreknowledge

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This post showed that the SSCI Report ignored a lot of evidence (laid out in the affidavits) that Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone had specific details — possibly even the John Podesta emails themselves — pertaining to Joule Holdings, which they tried to use to claim he was as corrupt as (!!!) Paul Manafort. This post showed how, rather than actually explaining what the investigation learned about whether, how, and why Stone optimized the release of the Podesta files, the Mueller Report instead gave us a comedy routine starring Jerome Corsi.

Both public reports, then, presented the question, what did the candidate’s rat-fucker know and when did he know it, exclusively in terms of what Stone knew about the Podesta release. Indeed, the SSCI Report treats this as a question exclusively about what Stone knew of WikiLeaks’ plans.

The Committee could not reliably trace the provision of non-public information from WikiLeaks to Stone, and as a result. could not evaluate the full scope of Stone’s non-public knowledge of WikiLeaks’s activities.

The investigation, however, examined evidence Stone knew what was coming much earlier.

Rick Gates testified at Stone’s trial, for example, that Stone was predicting new releases in April and May of 2016. A previously redacted passage from the Mueller Report echoes that testimony.

In debriefings with the Office, former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates said that, before Assange’s June 12 announcement, Gates and Stone had a phone conversation in which Stone said something “big” was coming and had to do with a leak of information. Stone also said to Gates that he thought Assange had Clinton emails.

SSCI reasonably reads those claims to relate to the uproar over Hillary’s “missing” State Department emails.

(U) In the spring of 2016, the Trump Campaign’s opposition research team primarily focused on Clinton’s “missing” emails, and financial contributions to the Clinton Foundation. 1437

1437 (U) FBI, FD-302, Gates 4/10/2018. The Committee assesses that, at this time, the references to Clinton’s “emails” reflected a focus on allegedly missing or deleted.emails from Clinton’s personal server during her tenure as Secretary of State.

But that’s not the only proof that Stone had advance knowledge earlier than August 2016.

There’s also the testimony from Stone aide Andrew Miller, testimony pursued for an entire year and the last bit of work completed by the Mueller team. Miller was subpoenaed for information about what he learned while scheduling Stone’s time at the RNC, the days before the DNC emails dropped. While Miller was subpoenaed for Stone’s trial and kept in DC for days awaiting possible testimony, he never did testify, so we don’t know what he might have said.

Still, Miller’s testimony might reveal that Stone learned of the impending DNC release, by WikiLeaks, days before it happened, as testimony from Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort supports.

All of those earlier claims, however, are presented in terms of what Stone knew about WikiLeaks’ plans. The affidavits tell a very different, albeit inconclusive story.

The FBI believed in 2018 that Stone had foreknowledge of Russia’s plans.

Two affidavits obtained in summer 2018 reveal that FBI had reason to believe that Stone was Googling the names of Russia’s personas, dcleaks and Guccifer 2.0, before they had been publicly unveiled. One of those affidavits described searches occurring starting on May 17, 2016.

93. During the course of its investigation, the FBI has also identified a series of searches that appear to relate to the personas Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, which predate the public unveiling of those two personas. In particular, between May 17, 2016, and June 15, 2016 (prior to the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog), records from Google show that searches were conducted for the terms “dcleaks,” “guccifer,” and ”guccifer june,” from IP addresses within one of two ranges: 172.56.26.0/24, 107.77.216.0/24.3 These IP ranges are assigned to T-Mobile USA, Inc., and AT&T Mobility LLC, respectively, and, according to Google, the searches were all conducted from Florida. On or about June 13, 2018, this Court issued a search warrant for information associated with these searches and, in particular, for the full search histories associated with the CookieIDs that conducted the search. 4 As set forth in the affidavit submitted in support of that search warrant, IP logs obtained from Twitter showed that STONE used multiple IP addresses within the ranges 172.56.26.0/24 and 107.77.216.0/24 to log into his Twitter account @RogerJStoneJr. A Facebook account controlled by STONE also used an IP address within the range 172.56.26.0/24 on or about June 13, 2016, to purchase a Facebook advertisement.

Another affidavit more specifically focused on searches on Guccifer (but not, at least by this description, Guccifer 2.0) on June 15, 2016, before the WordPress site for Guccifer 2.0 was unveiled.

22. During the course of its investigation, the FBI has identified a series of searches that appear to relate to the persona Guccifer 2.0, which predate the public unveiling of that persona. In particular, on or about June 15, 2016 (prior to the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog), records from Google show that searches were conducted for the terms “guccifer” and “guccifer june,” from an IP address within the range 107. 77 .216.0/24. 1 This IP range is assigned to AT&T Mobility LLC, and, according to Google, the searches were all conducted from Florida.

Without seeing the FBI’s forensics, there might be explanations for both these searches. Some journalists, for example, got advance or private alerts on some of this activity, and searches on “Guccifer” in 2016 might be focused on Marcel Lazar, the hacker who first used the moniker Guccifer, who was sentenced in that period.

But in July and August 2018, just as the Mueller team was beginning to pursue the obstruction charges against Stone that focused everyone’s attention on how Stone learned that WikiLeaks was going to release stolen Podesta emails, the FBI had, in hand, data that strongly suggested that Stone, virtually alone in the country, had non-public information about the Russian hack-and-leak campaign in advance.

They believed he had it in May, while Russian hackers were still in the process of stealing the DNC emails.

If FBI were to — if they did — validate those searches (particularly the May search on dcleaks), it would provide independent evidence making it clear Stone’s claims of foreknowledge to Gates weren’t just confused boasts about Hillary’s missing State emails, as the SSCI Report concludes, but instead knowledge of the Russian operation akin to that George Papadopoulos obtained.

If the FBI had proof that Stone knew of the hack-and-leak while the Russians continued hacking, then the drama over whether Randy Credico or Jerome Corsi was Stone’s source would just be theater. Corsi’s August 2, 2016 boasting of foreknowledge of the schedule of upcoming WikiLeaks leaks would be just a distraction.

Roger Stone spoke to Donald Trump at least 13 times in May 2016, a month when (the FBI suspected) the rat-fucker had foreknowledge of the Russian theft of Democratic emails. The Watergate investigation, with far more authority and a successful subpoena of the President, never proved that Richard Nixon had foreknowledge of that burglary. Here, though, the FBI got far closer to that proof.

The movie Rashomon demonstrated that any given narrative tells just one version of events, but that by listening to all available narratives, you might identify gaps and biases that get you closer to the truth.

I’m hoping that principle works even for squalid stories like the investigation into Roger Stone’s cheating in the 2016 election. This series will examine the differences between four stories about Roger Stone’s actions in 2016:

As I noted in the introductory post (which lays out how I generally understand the story each tells), each story has real gaps in one or more of these areas:

My hope is that by identifying these gaps and unpacking what they might say about the choices made in crafting each of these stories, we can get a better understanding of what actually happened — both in 2016 and in the investigations. The gaps will serve as a framework for this series.

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Rat-Fucker Rashomon: Jerome Corsi’s Prescience about the Content of John Podesta’s Emails

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In the previous installment of this series, I showed that rather than describing the conclusions of the Mueller team’s investigation into whether, how, and why Roger Stone optimized the release of the John Podesta emails on October 7, 2016, the Mueller Report instead plopped a comedy routine showing how Jerome Corsi changed his story from minute to minute on the topic.

The choice is all the more interesting given that the affidavits used in the Stone investigation — to say nothing of witness testimony — makes it increasingly certain that Stone got advance notice, and probably advance copies, of the stolen emails that pertained to an attack regarding Podesta’s ties to a company with Russian ties, Joule Holdings, that the frothy right had been chasing for months before mid-August 2016.

Jerome Corsi’s Podesta email was actually about timing

The email that Jerome Corsi sent Roger Stone on August 2, 2016 has been widely misunderstood, including by the SSCI Report.

“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi explained after informing Stone he hadn’t called him back, as Stone requested the day before, because he was in Italy. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct.” This language about timing is what Aaron Zelinsky focused on when introducing the email at Stone’s trial. It’s the language that Jonathan Kravis highlighted in his closing argument. In neither prosecutors’ description of the email do they mention John Podesta (though later in Zelinsky’s opening, he describes that, “Roger Stone promised … a massive amount of hacked emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta” would be dropped on October 7).

Nevertheless this email has been taken as the means by which Corsi informed Stone that the upcoming WikiLeaks dump involved files stolen from John Podesta.

It’s only much later in the email when Corsi says, “Time to let more than Podesta to be exposed as in bed w enemy.” The reference to Podesta would be incomprehensible to Stone if it were his first notice that WikiLeaks was going to drop emails stolen from Hillary’s campaign manager. Moreover, Corsi wouldn’t bury it in the sixth paragraph if it were new news, particularly not given that the right wing oppo researchers Steve Bannon paid, the Government Accountability Institute, had just days earlier released a report that focused on John Podesta. Indeed, it’s even possible that the email doesn’t reflect advance knowledge of the Podesta emails, but was instead a reference to that report.

There’s no reason to believe that the Podesta reference in this email was news to Stone.

Corsi put the new news — that the dumps were coming shortly after he was scheduled to return from Italy on August 12, and then again in October — in the second paragraph. And as some of the affidavits described obliquely — but which did not get mentioned in any of the other three Roger Stone stories — the timing of both those predictions was absolutely correct.

Based on my training, experience, and review of materials in this case, it appears that CORSI’s reference to a “friend in embassy [who] plans 2 more dumps” refers to Julian ASSANGE; the founder of Wikileaks, who resided in Ecuador’s London Embassy in2016. As discussed above, Guccifer released information hacked from the DCCC on August 12,2016 (the date CORSI identified as when he would “return home.”)

FBI Agent Amy Anderson mentions, but does not explain, that Corsi did not correctly predict who would release these files.

Two releases, one from Guccifer and the other from Wikileaks, occurred at the times predicted by CORSI.

In fact, as Raffi Khatchadourian was the first to explain publicly (but as would have been clear to investigators once they obtained the relevant Twitter content), Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks engaged in a series of very theatrical DM conversations with Emma Best over that weekend in August 2016 about whether Best would publish the DCCC emails; even after WikiLeaks convinced Best to hold off so it could have exclusivity, WikiLeaks never did publish any DCCC documents. At the time Corsi learned that “friend in embassy” would have two upcoming drops, WikiLeaks was still demanding exclusivity before it would deliver the first one.

In the August 2 email, then, Corsi provided new news to Stone about what the Russians were planning, but (if the theatrical DMs are to be believed, which they shouldn’t necessarily be) Assange had yet to buy into the plan. That makes Corsi’s description of “the game hackers are now about” all the more intriguing.

There’s no reason to believe, from this email, that Corsi was newly informing Stone that WikiLeaks would eventually dump the Podesta emails. There’s not even any reason to be sure that Corsi informed Stone of that fact and not vice versa. Indeed, the Mueller Report describes that Corsi told Ted Malloch later in August that, “Stone had made a connection to Assange and that the hacked emails of John Podesta would be released prior to Election Day,” not that he himself had. The email is indication (though in no way, by itself, proof, especially given the possibility it referenced the GAI report) that both believed by August 2 that WikiLeaks would drop the Podesta emails. It is not proof that Corsi told Stone of that fact.

Rick Gates and Paul Manafort testified that Stone knew Podesta emails were coming

We can get a lot closer to proof that Stone had advance knowledge of the Podesta drop, though.

First of all, it’s not just Malloch who testified to having conversations about Podesta’s emails in August. According to the SSCI Report, in part of Rick Gates’ October 25, 2018 interview that remains redacted,

Gates recalled Stone advising him, prior to the release of an August 14 article in The New York Times about Paul Manafort’s “secret ledger,” that damaging information was going to be released about Podesta. 1579 Gates understood that Stone was referring to nonpublic information. Gates further recalled later conversations with Stone about how to save Manafort’s role on the Campaign, and that Stone was focused on getting information about John Podesta, but said that Stone did not reveal the “inner workings” of that plan to Gates. 1580

An unredacted part of that 302 — which is likely the continuation of the discussion cited in SSCI — explains,

Gates said there was a strategy to defend Manafort by attacking Podesta. The idea was that Podesta had baggage as well. Gates said it was unfortunate the information did not come out in time to defend Manafort from his ultimate departure from the campaign.

In a September 27, 2018 interview, Manafort provided details of two conversations that he placed in August 2016, one of which provided specific details (which remain redacted, purportedly to protect Podesta’s privacy!) about John Podesta’s alleged ties with Russia.

Manafort was sure he had at least two conversations with Stone prior to the October 7, 2016 leak of John Podesta’s emails.

In the one conversation between Stone and Manafort, Stone told Manafort “you got fucked.” Stone’s comment related to the fact that Manafort had been fired. The conversation was either the day Manafort left the campaign or the day after.

In the other conversation, Stone told Manafort that there would be a WikiLeaks drop of emails with Podesta, and that Podesta would be “in the barrel” and Manafort would be vindicated. Manafort had a clear memory of the moment because of the language Stone used. Stone also said Manafort would be pleased with what came out. It was Manafort’s understanding that WikiLeaks had Podesta’s emails and they were going to show that [redacted] Manafort would be vindicated because he had to leave the campaign for being too pro-Russian, and this would show that Podesta also had links to Russia and would have to leave.

Manafort’s best recollection was the “barrel” conversation was before he got on the boat the week of August 28, 2016.

Roger Stone’s longtime friend Paul Manafort, at a time when he lying to protect key details about what happened in 2016, nevertheless confirmed that Stone had detailed knowledge not just that the Podesta files would drop, but what Russian-based attacks they would make of them.

The government almost certainly has proof Stone and Corsi had advance copies of the Podesta files

More importantly, there’s evidence that Corsi had copies of some of the Podesta emails by August 14, and had pre-written attacks on Podesta already drafted when the files came out in October.

On March 23, 2017, Corsi published what he claimed was an explanation for Stone’s August 21, 2016 “time in the barrel” tweet. In it, he explained that in response to the August 14, 2016 NYT story exposing Paul Manafort’s Ukraine corruption, Corsi started a memo for Stone on Podesta.

On Aug. 14, 2016, I began researching for Roger Stone a memo that I entitled “Podesta.”

On August 15 at 1:33 AM, Stone tweeted about Podesta for the first time ever,

@JohnPodesta makes @PaulManafort look like St. Thomas Aquinas Where is the @NewYorkTimes ?

At 8:16AM on August 15, Corsi texted and then at 8:17 AM Corsi emailed Stone the same message:

Give me a call today if you can. Despite MSM drumroll that HRC is already elected, it’s not over yet. More to come than anyone realizes.

According to the SSCI Report, at 12:14PM on August 15, Corsi and Stone spoke by phone for 24 minutes.

The implication in Corsi’s March 2017 post was that he spent the next two weeks writing the memo that he started on August 14 and that the report reflects “several detailed conversations” Corsi had with Stone.

I completed that memo on Aug. 31, 2016, and is embedded here in its entirety.

Between Aug. 14 and Aug. 31, 2016, Roger Stone and I had several detailed conversations about the Podesta research.

Except that prosecutors obtained several kinds of proof that Corsi only started writing the memo he published in that March 2017 column (which Stone submitted to HPSCI — starting at PDF 39 — as part of his prepared statement) on that same day, on August 31. Corsi started writing it after Stone called him on August 30 and asked him to do so. This would have started to become clear to prosecutors when they first obtained email returns, since Corsi sent a copy of the report to Stone via email. But according to Corsi, prosecutors found forensic evidence to confirm that.

In his book, Corsi even admitted that the document was a cover story that he didn’t start until August 30 (Stone sued Corsi about this claim).

Next, Zelinsky focused on the email Roger Stone sent me on August 30, 2016, asking me to call him. As we discussed earlier, that led me to write a “cover-up memo” for him on John Podesta, suggesting that Roger’s infamous Twitter post about “Podesta’s time in the barrel” was a reference to my research about John and Tony Podesta’s money dealings with Russia. Roger wanted to disguise his tweet, suggesting “Podesta’s time in the barrel” was not a reference to any advanced knowledge Stone may have had from me, when I began telling Stone from Italy in emails dated earlier in August 2016 that I believed Assange had Podesta emails. “We’ve examined your computer Doctor Corsi,” Zelinsky grilled me. “And we know that the next day, August 31, 2016, your birthday, you began at 7:30 a.m. to write that memo for Stone.”

Before returning to Washington to appear before the grand jury, I had taken the time to research the file of my 2016 writing drafts that I had restored to my laptop from the Time Machine. I found that the file that I labeled, “ROGER STONE background PODESTA version 1.0 Aug. 31, 2016” was time-stamped for 12:17 p.m. that day. But I decided not to quibble with Zelinsky, so I agreed. “Then, Doctor Corsi, we find from your computer that the first thing you did was to find a series of open source articles on Podesta and Russia that you could use in writing your memo for Roger Stone,” Zelinsky said, pressing forward. “Is that correct?”

That said, Corsi may well have another report he started on August 14. In his March 2017 piece, Corsi claims that he wrote a series of articles based on that original report, one installment of which Stone would publish under his own name on October 13.

On October 6, 2016, I published in WND.com the first of a series of articles detailing Putin’s financial ties to Clinton and Podesta, based largely on the research contained in the Government Accountability Institute’s report, “From Russia With Money.”

On Oct. 13, 2016, Stone published on his website an article entitled, “Russian Mafia money laundering, the Clinton Foundation and John Podesta.”

A comparison of the two articles will show the extent to which Stone incorporated my research into his analysis.

To the extent that Corsi wrote a series of articles, it would include the following:

In a November 1, 2018 interview, Corsi explained that he had published the October 6 one (as noted, it was based off the earlier GAI/Breitbart attack), in an effort to force Assange to release the Podesta emails.

Corsi published the August 31, 2016 memo on October 6, 2016. At that time, he still held himself out as the connection to WikiLeaks. The trigger for the release of the article was the publication of an article about [Paul] Manafort and [Viktor] Yanukovych. Corsi wanted to counter it with a story about Podesta, but he really wanted to provide stimulus to Assange to release whatever he had on Podesta. Corsi was angry with Assange for not releasing emails on October 4, 2016.

The claim would only make sense (to the extent that Jerome Corsi can ever be said to “make sense”) if Corsi could threaten to pre-empt what WikiLeaks was about to publish: the Podesta file pertaining to Joule Holdings.

As for the October 13 piece Stone adopted as his own, the affidavits targeting Corsi and Stone provided extensive details on how that got published.

First thing in the morning on October 12, Stone wrote Corsi and asked for his “best podesta links.” (The SSCI Report reveals that Stone and Manafort spoke that day, but does not say what time.) Corsi responded that he would send them on Monday — which would have been on October 17. “The remaining stuff on Podesta,” Corsi said, “is complicated.” That seems to comport with Corsi’s later representation he did a series, of which the October 13 one was part. But it also seems to suggest that the remaining stuff was already written at 8:54 AM on October 12.

75. On or about October 8, 2016, STONE messaged CORSI at Target Account 2, “Lunch postponed- have to go see T.” CORSI responded to STONE, “Ok. I understand.” Approximately twenty minutes later, CORSI texted, “Clintons know they will lose a week of Paula Jones media with T attacking Foundation, using Wikileaks Goldman Sachs speech comments, attacking bad job numbers.”

76. On or about Wednesday, October 12, 2016, at approximately 8:17 EDT, STONE emailed CORSI at Target Account 1, asking him to “send me your best podesta links.” STONE emailed CORSI at approximately 8:$$ [sic] EDT, “need your BEST podesta pieces.” CORSI wrote back at approximately 8:54AM EDT, “Ok. Monday. The remaining stuff on Podesta is complicated. Two articles in length. I can give you in raw form the stuff I got in Russian translated but to write it up so it’s easy to understand will take weekend. Your choice?”

77. On or about that same day October 12, 2016, Podesta accused STONE of having advance knowledge of the publication of his emails. At approximately 3:25PM EDT, CORSI, using Target Account 1, emailed STONE with a subject line “Podesta talking points.” Attached to the email was a file labeled, “ROGER STONE podesta talking points Oct 12 2016.docx.” The “talking points” included the statement that “Podesta is at the heart of a Russian-govermnent money laundering operation that benefits financially Podesta personally and the Clintons through the Clinton Foundation.”

78. CORSI followed up several minutes later with another email titled, “Podesta talking points,” with the text “sent a second time just to be sure you got it.” STONE emailed CORSI back via the Hotmail Account, “Got them and used them.”

79. On or about Thursday, October 13, 2016, CORSI, using Target Account 3, emailed STONE: “PODESTA — Joule & ties to RUSSIA MONEY LAUNDERING to CLINTON FOUNDATION.” STONE responded, “Nice but I was hoping for a piece I could post under my by-line since I am the one under attack by Podesta and now Mook.” CORSI wrote back to STONE, “I’ll give you one more -NOBODY YET HAS THIS[:] It looks to me like [redacted–Vekselberg] skimmed maybe billions off Skolkovo – Skolkovo kept their money with Metcombank[.] The Russians launched a criminal investigation[.] [web link] Once [redacted–Vekselberg] had the channel open from Metcombank to Deutsche Bank America to Ban[k] of America’s Clinton Fund account, there’s no telling how much money he laundered, or where it ended up. Nothing in Clinton Foundation audited financials or IRS Form 990s about $$$ received via Russia & Metcombank[.] I’m working on that angle now.” STONE replied, “Ok Give me SOMETHING to post on Podesta since I have now promised it to a dozen MSM reporters[.]”

80. On or about Thursday, October 13, 2016 at approximately 6:30PM EDT, CORSI sent STONE an email with the Subject, “ROGER STONE article RUSSIAN MAFIA STYLE MONEY-LAUNDERING, the CLINTON FOUNDATION, and JOHN PODESTA.” The text stated: “Roger[,] You are free to publish this under your own name.” That same day, STONE posted a blog post with the title, “Russian Mafia money laundering, the Clinton Foundation and John Podesta.” In that post, STONE wrote, “although I have had some back-channel communications with Wikileaks I had no advance notice about the hacking of Mr. Podesta nor I have I ever received documents or data from Wikileaks.” The post then asked, “Just how much money did, a controversial Russian billionaire investor with ties to the Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, launder through Metcombank, a Russian regional bank owned 99 .978 percent by with the money transferred via Deutsche Bank and Trust Company Americas in New York City, with the money ending up in a private bank account in the Bank of America that is operated by the Clinton Foundation?”

81. On or about October 14, 2016, CORSI sent a message using Target Account 2 to STONE, “i’m in NYC. Thinking about writing piece attacking Leer and other women. It’s basically a rewrite of what’s out there. Going through new Wikileaks drop on Podesta.” [my emphasis]

It turns out the post Stone ultimately posted had no links to the WikiLeaks releases it relied on (remember, he asked Corsi for links and pieces), but it does reference a file that had been released on October 11, hours before Corsi seemed to speak of the post as already completed.

Wikileaks emails tie John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, into the money-laundering network with the confirmation Podesta had exercised 75,000 shares out of 100,000 previously undisclosed stock options he was secretly issued by Joule Unlimited, a U.S. corporation that ties back to Vekselberg connected Joule Global Stichting in the Netherlands – a shady entity identified in the Panama Papers as an offshore money-laundering client of the notorious Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

As a clear indication of guilty conscience, the Wikileaks Podesta file further documents that Podesta made a serious effort to keep the transaction from coming to light as evidenced by his decision to transfer 75,000 common shares of Joule Unlimited to Leonidio LLC, another shady shell corporation – this one listed in Salt Lake City at the home apartment of the gentlemen who registered the company.

A parallel post covering the same material posted by Corsi does have links to the emails that support the disposition of the 75,000 shares and other claims made in it. But that one was updated about six hours after it was first posted, and the first Internet Archive capture postdates that update.

Investigators seem to have found some significance, too, in the Metcombank reference that Corsi got and had to translate from Russian, a significance I don’t understand. But Stone dropped part of that attack when he revived the Vekselberg attack to use against Cohen in 2018.

Remember: Investigators would have had the forensics for the documents Corsi and Stone were sending back and forth by email, and probably would have communications about all this between August 14 and August 31, when (according to Corsi), Stone asked him to write a cover story. They would know if the story Stone posted under his own name was drafted before the public release of the emails it relied on.

But even on its face, Corsi’s comments suggest that these documents were a series started by October 6, of which some parts “were remaining” on the morning of October 12, one day after the email it relied on got released. Remember, too, that Corsi claims Stone told him to delete his email (which he did) on October 11, which would hide any knowledge of that WikiLeaks file before it came out.

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates both testified that Roger Stone had a plan, hatched before Paul Manafort resigned on August 19, to save his job by claiming that Podesta was just as bad as Manafort. Manafort even described the specific nature of the Russian-based attack on Podesta they had planned (though Bill Barr’s DOJ redacted it to protect Podesta’s privacy!).

And then, when Roger Stone asked Corsi for “links” as well as “pieces” on October 12, Corsi sent him a document that, by reference, had already been written, one that didn’t have links but that integrated information that wasn’t public until October 11.

That doesn’t prove that Stone and Corsi had those files in mid-August. But it does explain why Stone might have wanted a cover story denying they did after he boasted that it would soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel on August 21.

The movie Rashomon demonstrated that any given narrative tells just one version of events, but that by listening to all available narratives, you might identify gaps and biases that get you closer to the truth.

I’m hoping that principle works even for squalid stories like the investigation into Roger Stone’s cheating in the 2016 election. This series will examine the differences between four stories about Roger Stone’s actions in 2016:

As I noted in the introductory post (which lays out how I generally understand the story each tells), each story has real gaps in one or more of these areas:

My hope is that by identifying these gaps and unpacking what they might say about the choices made in crafting each of these stories, we can get a better understanding of what actually happened — both in 2016 and in the investigations. The gaps will serve as a framework for this series.

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Rat-Fucker Rashomon: Accessing Hollywood Cover-Ups of the Russian Attribution

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The Mueller Report has a section that purports to address whether Trump’s team timed the Podesta email release to drop in such a way as to drown out the Access Hollywood video. After explaining that the stolen emails came out less than an hour after the video, the Mueller Report explains,

The Office investigated whether Roger Stone played any role in WikiLeaks’s dissemination of the Podesta emails at that time.

The very next sentence, however, talks only about Jerome Corsi, suggesting that the investigation into this question lived and died (a maudlin death) with Corsi’s conflicting testimony.

During his first September 2018 interview, Corsi stated that he had refused Stone’s July 25, 2016 request to contact Assange, and that had been the last time they had talked about contacting Assange.

The Mueller Report spends three different paragraphs discussing not Roger Stone’s role, but Jerome Corsi’s shifting explanations on the topic of whether Corsi (but not Stone) had succeeded in getting the Podesta emails released on October 7.

Here’s a sample of that Abbot and Costello routine plopped right in the middle of the Mueller Report:

Corsi gave conflicting accounts of what happened after Stone purportedly informed him about the video. Initially, Corsi told investigators that he had instructed Stone to have WikiLeaks release information to counteract the expected reaction to the video’s release, and that Stone said that was a good idea and would get it done. Later during the same interview, Corsi stated that Stone had told Corsi to have WikiLeaks drop the Podesta emails immediately, and Corsi told Stone he would do it.

This passage relegates the phone records that — the affidavits make clear — had constituted a key part of this prong of the investigation to a footnote, and to add to the comedy routine, even cites a Chuck Ross story that Mueller’s team knew (because they proved as much at trial) aired transparent Stone lies in order to incorporate a Stone denial regarding October 7.

249 Chuck Ross, Jerome Corsi Testified That Roger Stone Sought WikiLeaks’ Help To Rebut ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape, Daily Caller (Nov. 27, 2018) (quoting Stone as claiming that he did not have knowledge of the tape until its publication).

This makes a second time that Ross proved to be a really useful idiot to the Mueller team.

Having laid out how unreliable Corsi is and never directly revealing what they knew about Stone’s actions, the Mueller Report then answers a different question than the one that frames the section, “whether Roger Stone played any role in WikiLeaks’s dissemination of the Podesta emails at that time.” Instead, it answers whether Corsi’s claims to have gotten the early release were credible. They weren’t:

The Office investigated Corsi’s allegations about the events of October 7, 2016 but found little corroboration for his allegations about the day.

The Mueller Report, then, substitutes a comedy routine about Jerome Corsi for a sober discussion revealing what the investigation into this question really examined and actually concluded.

The SSCI Report provides a more nuanced discussion of this question, incorporating some, but not all, of the phone records that investigators were interested in, as well as presumed Stone communications with Trump, book-ending the release, and Corsi’s boasts after the fact that first gave investigators reason to pursue this question.

(U) WikiLeaks did not release anything on October 6. Nevertheless, on October 6, Stone tweeted: “Julian Assange will deliver a devastating expose on Hillary at a time of his choosing. I stand by my prediction. #handcuffs4hillary.”1661 Stone and Credico had five additional calls that day.1662

(U) On the afternoon of October 6, Stone received a call from Keith Schiller’s number. Stone returned the call about 20 minutes later, and spoke-almost certainly to Trump–for six minutes. 1663 The substance of that conversation is not known to the Committee. However, at the time, Stone was focused on the potential for a WikiLeaks release, the Campaign was following WikiLeaks’s announcements, and Trump’s prior call with Stone on September 29, also using Schiller’s phone, related to a WikiLeaks release. Given these facts, it appears quite likely that Stone and Trump spoke about WikiLeaks.

(U) At approximately 4 p.m. on October 7, The Washington Post released the Access Hollywood tape.1664 Witnesses involved in Trump’s debate preparation recalled that the team first heard of the tape about an hour prior to its public release. 1665 According to Jerome Corsi, however, news of the release also made its way to Roger Stone.1666 Corsi and Stone spoke twice that day at length: once at 1:42 p.m. for 18 minutes, and once at 2:18 p.m. for 21 minutes. 1667 Corsi recalled learning from Stone that the Access Hollywood tape would be coming out, and that Stone “[w]anted the Podesta stuff to balance the news cycle” either “right then or at least coincident.”1668 According to Corsi, Stone also told him to have WikiLeaks “drop the Podesta emails immediately.”1669

(U) When the tape later became public, Corsi claimed that he was not surprised by the graphic language because he had already heard it. 1670 Corsi recalled previewing the Access Hollywood tape with conference call participants during one or two calls that day: a WorldNetDaily staff call at 1:08 p.m., or a 2 p.m. call involving Total Banking Solutions that included Malloch. 1671 Corsi remembered telling conference participants that the tape was a problem and to contact Assange. 1672 Corsi then “watched all day to see what Assange would do,” and when the Podesta emails were released, he thought to himself that Malloch “had finally got to Assange.”1673 However, Corsi later told investigators that he did not call Malloch or Stone after the WikiLeaks release to convey this reaction because, in contradiction to his earlier statements, he was “doubtful” that Malloch had succeeded. 1674

(U) Corsi also claimed that he tweeted publicly at WikiLeaks in order to get them to release documents, but no such tweets could be located. 1675 The SCO was unable to identify any conference call participants who recalled getting non-public information about the tape from Corsi that day; the Committee did not seek to confirm those findings. 1676

(U) At approximately 4:32 p.m. on October 7-approximately 32 minutes after the release of the Access Hollywood tape-WikiLeaks released 2,050 emails that the GRU had stolen from John Podesta, repeatedly announcing the leak on Twitter and linking to a searchable archive of the documents. 1677

[snip]

On October 8, Stone messaged Corsi: “Lunch postponed – have to go see T,” referring to Trump. 1681

(U) Corsi said that after the October 7 WikiLeaks release, he and Stone agreed that they deserve.d credit and that.”Trump should reward us.”1682 However, Corsi said that Stone was concerned about having advance information about the Podesta release, and that Stone recruited Corsi to make sure no one knew Stone had advance knowledge of that information. After the October 7 release, Corsi claimed that Stone directed him to delete emails relating to the Podesta information.1683

But a later affidavit — one that was sealed through Stone’s prosecution and therefore something that the Mueller Report would avoid mentioning — reveals that someone Charles Ortel introduced Stone to in August 2016 — I call the person R because incomplete redactions show his or her last name ends in “r” — also had close communication with Stone on the day of the Access Hollywood video drop. Combined and with one key addition, the timeline for that day (so without the probable Trump book-ends the day before and the day after) looks this way [my emphasis]:

11:27 AM, CORSI placed a call to STONE which STONE did not answer.

11:53AM, STONE received a phone call from the Washington Post. The call lasted approximately twenty minutes.

12:33PM, R calls Stone. The call lasted approximately seven minutes.

1:42PM, STONE called CORSI and the two spoke for approximately seventeen minutes.

2:18PM, CORSI called STONE and the two spoke for approximately twenty minutes.

2:38PM, R calls Stone. That call lasted approximately one minute.

3:32PM, DHS releases Joint Statement attributing election interference to and tying WikiLeaks and the GRU cut-outs to Russia.

3:32PM, R FaceTimes Stone. They don’t connect.

4:00PM, the Washington Post published a story regarding the Access Hollywood tape.

4:32PM, WikiLeaks tweets out its first release of emails hacked from John Podesta that focused primarily on materials related to the Clinton Foundation. On or about August 2, 2016, when CORSI emailed STONE on Target Account 1, he wrote “I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”

6:27PM, Ortel sends STONE an email titled, “WikiLeaks – The Podesta Emails” with a link to the newly-released Podesta emails. Approximately ten minutes later, STONE forwarded message to CORSI at Target Account 1 without comment. STONE does not appear to have forwarded the email to any other individual.

“R” may be associated with the Peter Smith effort to find Hillary’s deleted emails. Later affidavits reveal that Stone first obtained ProtonMail (along with Signal) the day he first spoke with this person; other materials show that everyone involved in the Smith effort was required to use ProtonMail.

That said, “R” may be just another person with some kind of tie to WikiLeaks. Another part of this affidavit describes Stone and “R” meeting on October 10, a meeting at which, Stone later seemed to suggest, he met with his Assange source; the affidavit suggests that “R” might fit Stone’s later description of a male who traveled back and forth from the UK. That is, this person, like Credico, may be just another cover story for his true contact.

Including “R’s” contacts with Stone into the timeline, however, suggests another possible reason to explain the timing of the WikiLeaks release. It appears that at the moment DHS dropped what was — at the time — an unprecedented statement attributing the election hacking to the Russian Government and describing, “recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona [to be] consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” “R” tried unsuccessfully to contact Stone via FaceTime.

That presents another possible explanation for the timing, one ignored by many discussing the events of October 7, including the SSCI Report (though I raised it in 2017): that WikiLeaks released the Podesta emails to drown out the attribution announcement. Not only might advance notice of that DHS/ODNI statement be more readily accessible to people in Trump’s orbit (perhaps via Gang of Eight members Devin Nunes or Richard Burr, who were national security advisors to the campaign), but both Russia and WikiLeaks would have a direct stake in swamping the Joint attribution tying WikiLeaks and the stolen emails to Russia.

For what it’s worth, given what I know about both public and private instances of entities playing both sides in this affair, I wouldn’t rule out Russia orchestrating the Access Hollywood leak, either, both to make Trump more desperate and to give the Podesta drop more value as a result.

That doesn’t prove that Stone — with or without Corsi — had any influence on the timing. But a passage of the “R” affidavit repeats a claim that was redacted (to protect an ongoing investigation) earlier in the affidavit. Someone — probably Ted Malloch, whose publicly reported testimony this matches — testified that Corsi claimed credit for the timing in January 2017.

As noted above [redacted] told investigators that in January 2017, CORSI told him that he (CORSI) and STONE were involved in and were aware of the timing and content of the WikiLeaks releases in advance, including the fact that the emails belonged to John Podesta, and CORSI implied, in sum and substance, that STONE was involved in the release of the Podesta emails by WikiLeaks.

None of that confirms anything about the granularity with which Stone affected the timing of the release on October 7. But it does show that, at the time the Mueller team was writing their report and, given both the “R” affidavit redactions and more recent ones, to this day, investigators were and are hiding some of the details they learned about what happened on that day.

Those are the kind of gaps that make narrative analysis interesting.

The movie Rashomon demonstrated that any given narrative tells just one version of events, but that by listening to all available narratives, you might identify gaps and biases that get you closer to the truth.

I’m hoping that principle works even for squalid stories like the investigation into Roger Stone’s cheating in the 2016 election. This series will examine the differences between four stories about Roger Stone’s actions in 2016:

As I noted in the introductory post (which lays out how I generally understand the story each tells), each story has real gaps in one or more of these areas:

My hope is that by identifying these gaps and unpacking what they might say about the choices made in crafting each of these stories, we can get a better understanding of what actually happened — both in 2016 and in the investigations. The gaps will serve as a framework for this series.

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Rat-Fucker Rashomon: Trump’s Direct Line to the Rat-Fucking

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Two months before the Roger Stone trial, prosecutors submitted a list of phone numbers and emails to which both sides had stipulated the users (meaning no witness from the phone company would have to testify to confirm the subscriber ID). The list included four direct lines for Donald Trump, two lines to his assistants, and the phone of his bodyguard, Keith Schiller.

Prosecutors had the ability, then, to lay out Stone and Trump communicating via at least seven different channels at trial.

They didn’t, though.

Ultimately, prosecutors presented specific details about just six to eight conversations between Stone and Trump at the trial:

  1. An unanswered June 14, 2016 call from Stone’s cell to Trump’s home phone
  2. A 2:25 long call on June 14, 2016 from Trump’s cell to Stone’s cell at 9:53PM
  3. A 1:53 long call on June 14, 2016 from Trump’s cell to Stone’s cell at 9:56PM
  4. A 2:37 long call on June 30, 2016 from Stone’s cell to Trump’s cell at 2:20PM
  5. A 5:09 long call on July 31, 2016 from Stone’s cell to Trump’s cell at 9:25PM
  6. A 4:43 long call on July 31, 2016 from Trump’s home phone to Stone’s cell at 9:35PM
  7. A text from Stone to Rick Gates on August 2, 2016 claiming, “Spoke to Trump a cpl of times”
  8. Rick Gates’ testimony about witnessing a Stone call to Trump alerting him that more information would be coming

For all but the last, prosecutors made clear that they were not making claims to know about the content of the calls.

This limited list means prosecutors didn’t even present all the references to Stone discussing WikiLeaks with Trump included in the Mueller Report. For example, they made no mention of the call Michael Cohen claims he witnessed, just days before the DNC emails dropped, predicting they were coming.

To be clear, prosecutors didn’t need to prove that Stone talked to Trump about WikiLeaks at all to win their case, much less include seven communications that don’t definitively prove that Stone and Trump discussed WikiLeaks. All they had to do was prove that Stone talked to the campaign or those close to it. They had Gates and Steve Bannon’s testimony and communications with Paul Manafort and Erik Prince to do that.

Still, the scope of contacts between the two described in the SSCI Report only serves to magnify how much the other stories — the prosecution, definitely, but also the Mueller Report, and, especially, the affidavits — left out. For example, SSCI provides worthwhile context to several of the calls presented at trial. It describes the June 14 and June 30 calls, but also reveals a longer call, placed through Rhona Graff, earlier in the day on June 30. It also describes the many different methods Stone would use to connect with Trump.

On June 14, 2016, only two days after Assange’s interview, the DNC announced that it had been.compromised by Russian government hackers.1462 That, evening, at 9:03 p.m., Stone called Trump at Trump’s home number. 1463 Trump returned Stone) call from his cell phone two times, at 9:53 p.m. and 9:56 p.m.: the calls lasted about two-and-a-half minutes and two minutes, respectively. 1464 The Committee does not know the substance of these conversations, but the pattern and timing of Stone’s calls with Trump and others during this period suggest that the two could have discussed the DNC hack and WikiLeaks.

[snip]

Though the records obtained by the Committee are limited, they show numerous phone calls throughout June and July between Trump and Stone.1480 In addition to the June 14 phone call, Stone received brief calls from a Trump Organization number on June 21 and 28, although these calls did not appear to connect 1481 Shortly after the June 28 call, Stone called Michael Cohen for nine minutes.1482 On June 30 (another day that Guccifer 2.0 posted commentary on line), Stone called Rhona Graff’s line at the Trump Organization for eight minutes. 1483 Later that same day, he traded missed calls with Trump at various numbers, culminating in a four-minute call from Stone to Trump’s direct line. 1484

1464 (U) Ibid. The calls from Trump were made from a blocked number, which the Committee was able to identify as Trump’s based on corresponding information admitted as evidence in the trial against Roger Stone. Trump’s use of a blocked number generally made it difficult for the Committee to identify all of the pertinent contacts between the two. The blocked number was likely Trump’s cell phone; other Trump Org. phones, including Trump’s direct line, appeared in both the Stone and Trump Org. records that the Committee obtained.

[snip]

1480 (U) According to Stone’s cell phone call records and call records from the Trump Organization, in addition to records obtained by the SCO, Trump and Stone had multiple calls in June and July 2016, all before the July 22 release, either between Stone and Trump or Stone and another Trump Organization phone number. See generally AT&T toll records, Roger Stone/Drake Ventures; Trump Corp., Outbound Call Detail, Invoices ofJuly 1, 2016– August 1, 2016 (TRUMPORG_73_000005-8); United States v. Roger Stone, Gov. Ex. 167 (summary chart of Stone/Campaign phone calls). These data points only represent what the Committee could confirm from Stone’s cell phone call records and Trump Organization document productions, as supplemented by information presented by the United States in the trial against Roger Stone. In addition, the Trump Organization used a “trunk line” system, so its records reflected outgoing calls to Roger Stone from a central line, but did not identify the individual or extension making the call and did not include incoming calls at all. See Email, Trump Organization to Committee, April 9, 2019. However, the Committee could infer from witness testimony and contemporaneous communications that calls made by Stone to Trump Org. numbers other than Trump’s direct line generally reflected communications or attempted communications from Stone to Trump. For example, Tom Barrack noted that Trump “was easily accessible” through his assistant, Rhona Graff, “who Roger knew well.” Barrack Tr., p. 45. In addition, multiple witnesses testified that it was commonplace for Trump to make and receive calls on others’ phones, records for which the Committee does not possess. For example, Trump may have tried to hide his communications with Stone from campaign advisors by using others’ phones, such as Keith Schiller’s. Nunberg Tr., p. 73.

1481 (U) Trump Corp., Outbound Call Detail, Invoice of July 1, 2016 (TRUMPORG _ 73 _ 000006).

1482 (U) A. T&T toll record~r Stone/Drake Ventures (ATTSSCI00032); see also AT&T Mobility, Cohen phone records (number ending in- · 1

1483 (U) AT&T toll records, Roger Stone/Drake Ventures (ATTSSCI00033). · ·

1484 (U) See ibid; Trump Corp., Outbound Call Detail, Invoice of July 1, 2016 (TRUMPORG 73 000007); United States v. Stone, Gov. Ex. 148.

Crazier still, SSCI provides a really damning description that — during the key period when Stone was pitching Manafort on what was happening with further releases of stolen documents — Stone was scripting pro-Russian Tweets for the candidate.

(U) On Sunday July 31, at 9:15 p.m., the day after speaking at length with Manafort, Stone called Gates.1550 Ten minutes later, Stone had two phone calls with Trump that lasted over ten minutes. 1551 Stone then emailed Jessica Macchia, one of Trump’s assistants, eight draft tweets for Trump, under the subject line “Tweets Mr. Trump requested last night.”1552 Many of the draft tweets attacked Clinton for her adversarial posture toward Russia and mentioned a new peace deal with Putin, such as “I want a new detente with Russia under Putin.”1553

(U) At 10:45 p.m. that same evening, Stone emailed Corsi again with the subject line “Call me MON[day]” and writing that “Malloch should see Assange.”1554

(U) The next morning, August 1, Stone again spoke twice with Trump. 1555 Stone later informed Gates of these calls. 1556 According to an email that morning from Stone to Macchia, Trump had “asked [Stone] for some other things” that Stone said he was “writing now.”1557

Four days after Trump appeared to ad lib a request for Russia to dump more emails, “Russia are you listening?” thereby acknowledging awareness of a connection between Russia and the released emails that Gates said in testimony might have come from Stone, Trump’s rat-fucker left a digital trail showing himself scripting tweets for Trump to adopt a pro-Russian stance.

SSCI is silent about whether Trump actually used any of those draft tweets, though the three Russian or Ukrainian tweets Trump did post in this period (one, two, three) were clean-up from the “Russia are you listening” comment, suggesting that Trump did not use what Stone drafted (though Stone appears to have posted versions of the tweets to his own Twitter feed).

SSCI also provides compelling evidence that the call Gates witnessed was not — as his trial testimony suggested — in late July, but instead in late September, via Keith Schiller’s phone.

On September 29, a call took place between Stone and Trump while Trump and Gates were on the way to LaGuardia Airport. After the call ended, Trump told Gates that “more releases of damaging information would be coming.”1619 Phone records show that this was not the first phone call between them that day. Trump called Stone three times just before 10:00 a.m. on the morning of September 29, but could not connect.1620 Stone returned the call to a Trump Organization number two hours later, but the call lasted only two minutes. 1621 Then, at approximately 1:40 p.m., Stone received a one-minute call from Keith Schiller’s phone number, which records show originating from East Elmhurst, New York–in proximity to LaGuardia Airport.1622 Stone returned the call to Schiller at 1:51 p.m. for three minutes. 1623 This call matches the conversation between Stone and Trump that Gates remembered.

1619 (U) SCO Report, Vol. I, p. 54; Testimony ofRick Gates, United States v. Stone, p. 946.

1620 (U) See United States v. Stone, Gov. Ex. 148.

1621 (U) AT&T toll records, Roger Stone/Drake Ventures (ATTSSCI00053).

1622 (U) Invoice, Call Detail for Keith Schiller (TRUMPORG_73_000020).

1623 (U) Ibid.; AT&T toll records, Roger Stone/Drake Ventures (ATTSSCI00053).

Prosecutors had all these September 29 call records available in their Stone toll record exhibit at trial, available to introduce had Stone challenged whether the call occurred. So it’s clear they knew when the call happened. But the timing wasn’t important for the story they were telling at trial.

This timing would put the Laguardia call much closer to when the Podesta emails actually did drop, making the call potentially more damning. Especially when you consider the call that SSCI shows Schiller’s phone placed to Stone one day before the Podesta dump, a call not mentioned at trial.

On the afternoon of October 6, Stone received a call from Keith Schiller’s number. Stone returned the call about 20 minutes later, and spoke–almost certainly to Trump–for six minutes. 1663 The substance of that conversation is not known to the Committee. However, at the time, Stone was focused on the potential for a WikiLeaks release, the Campaign was following WikiLeaks’s announcements, and Trump’s prior call with Stone on September 29, also using Schiller’s phone, related to a WikiLeaks release. Given these facts, it appears quite likely that Stone and Trump spoke about WikiLeaks.

1663 (U) Ibid; Trump Org. call records, Keith Schiller (TRUMPORG 73 000021). As noted above, Trump would use Schiller’s phone to make and receive calls, including with Stone, as also illustrated by the September 29 phone calls.

SSCI also includes the last-minute meeting with Trump that Stone told Corsi he had the day after the Podesta dump, the latter of which shows up in affidavits.

Gates also spoke with Stone shortly after the release, and Stone confirmed that this was the information he had said would be coming out. 1680 On October 8, Stone messaged Corsi: “Lunch postponed – have to go see T,” referring to Trump. 1681

1680 (U) Testimony of Rick Gates, United States v. Roger Stone, pp. 946-947. Gates did not recall Stone saying that he had orchestrated the timing of the release, although Stone told Gates that the release would “help.” FBI, FD-302, Gates 10/25/2018. 1681 (U) Affidavit in Support of an Application for a Search Warrant, Case 1:18-sc-02524, July 27, 2018, ,r 66. It is unknown if Stone and Trump in fact met

At the trial, prosecutors presented just a handful of contacts between Stone and Trump in advance of this Podesta dump, leaving out the ones that book-end the release. By placing the October 6 call and the October 8 meeting together, the SSCI Report raises the stakes on Stone’s efforts to get those emails released considerably.

The details in the SSCI Report describing the many different ways Stone spoke by phone to Trump also makes clear that a chart prosecutors introduced at trial, purporting to show how many phone calls occurred between Stone and Trump campaign officials, understated how many happened between Stone and Trump (because they don’t account for ones placed through Schiller).

And that, too, changes the import of all this for the Mueller Report. As I laid out, that story mostly had to explain three things with respect to the Stone story: why Mueller didn’t charge Stone for soliciting illegal campaign donations from a foreigner, why Mueller charged Stone for lying to cover up his calls with Trump and the campaign, and why Trump’s dangle of a pardon to keep Stone lying about all that amounted to obstruction.

The Mueller Report doesn’t lay out these conversations, or others identified publicly.

What it does do, however, is lay out that even dangling a pardon for Stone — much less commuting Stone’s sentence at a time when the rat-fucker was dropping very public reminders about the 29 or 36 calls with Trump he had refused to tell prosecutors about — would amount to obstruction of justice.

On November 20, 2018, the President submitted written answers to questions that had been provided to the Special Counsel’s Office, and the President’s legal team announced that he had done so. Several questions addressed the President’s communications with Stone during the campaign, including “Did Mr. Stone ever discuss WikiLeaks with you or, as far as you were aware, with anyone else associated with the campaign?” And “Did Mr. Stone at any time inform you about contacts he had with WikiLeaks or any intermediary of WikiLeaks, or about forthcoming releases of information?” In his written answers, the President stated: “I spoke by telephone with Roger Stone from time to time during the campaign. I have no recollection of the specifics of any conversations I had with Mr. Stone between June 1, 2016 and November 8, 2016. I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with him, nor do I recall being aware of Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with individuals associated with my campaign, although I was aware that WikiLeaks was the subject of media reporting and campaign-related discussion at the time.

[discussion describing the very limited information included in the report proving that Trump did have such conversations, Trump’s celebration of Stone’s declarations he would never testify against the President, and Stone’s indictment for lying about discussions he had with the campaign]

After making an initial court appearance on January 25, 2019, Stone told reporters, “There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president, nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself. … I will not testify against the President, because I would have to bear false witness.”

That evening, Stone appeared on Fox News and indicated he had knowledge of the President’s answers to this Office’s written questions. When asked if he had spoken to the President about the allegation that he had lied to Congress, Stone said, “I have not” and added, “When the President answered the written interrogatories, he correctly and honestly said Roger and I never discussed this and we never did.”

[snip]

When asked whether he would pardon Stone, the President said, “I have not thought about it. It looks like he’s defending himself very well. But you have to get rid of the Russia witch hunt because it is indeed.”

Trump’s obstruction ties directly to Stone’s own cover-up (and may be why Stone’s own cover-up was an appropriate charge).

But rather than laying out the stakes — rather than laying out precisely what Trump was obstructing with his pardon dangles (and, since then, his clemency for Stone) — the Mueller Report instead just makes clear that the things Stone is hiding on Trump’s behalf are substantive. The SSCI Report, with few tools to get at that substance, provides a glimpse of how substantial it is.

The movie Rashomon demonstrated that any given narrative tells just one version of events, but that by listening to all available narratives, you might identify gaps and biases that get you closer to the truth.

I’m hoping that principle works even for squalid stories like the investigation into Roger Stone’s cheating in the 2016 election. This series will examine the differences between four stories about Roger Stone’s actions in 2016:

As I noted in the introductory post (which lays out how I generally understand the story each tells), each story has real gaps in one or more of these areas:

My hope is that by identifying these gaps and unpacking what they might say about the choices made in crafting each of these stories, we can get a better understanding of what actually happened — both in 2016 and in the investigations. The gaps will serve as a framework for this series.

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Rat-Fucker Rashomon: Four Stories about Roger Stone (Introduction)

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As background for some other things and because I’m a former scholar of narrative, I want to lay out the four different stories that have been told of Roger Stone’s actions in 2016 and after:

One day there might be a fifth story, the investigative records, but those are still so redacted (and the subjects were such committed liars) to be of limited use right now, so while I will integrate them and other public records into this series, I won’t treat them as a separate story.

I observed in this post that a September 2018 affidavit revealed that the Stone indictment and trial were, in part, investigative steps in a larger investigation, an investigation that Bill Barr appears to have since substantially killed. The affidavit asked for (and received) a gag because, it explained, investigators were trying to keep Stone from learning that the investigation into him was broader than he thought.

It does not appear that Stone is currently aware of the full nature and scope of the ongoing FBI investigation. Disclosure of this warrant to Stone could lead him to destroy evidence or notify others who may delete information relevant to the investigation.

Partly, the larger investigation must have been an effort to determine — and if possible, obtain proof beyond a reasonable doubt — of how Stone optimized the release of (at least) the Podesta emails. I think the evidence shows Stone did partly optimize the release, though I also believe doing so served as much to compromise Stone and others as to help Trump get elected. In an unreliable Paul Manafort interview, Trump’s former campaign chair describes a conversation (this may have taken place in spring 2018, during a period when Manafort unconvincingly claims he was not engaged in concocting a cover story with his lifelong buddy) where Stone clarified that he was just a conduit in the process of optimizing the Podesta release, not the decision maker.

Stone said to Manafort that he was not the decision maker or the controller of the information. Stone said he may have had advance knowledge, but he was not the decision maker. Stone was making clear to Manafort that he did not control the emails or make decisions about them. Stone said he received information about the Podesta emails but was a conduit, not someone in a position to get them released.

That’s Stone and Manafort’s less damning explanation, that Stone did have advance knowledge but didn’t control the process! It may also be true, though Stone likely believed he was controlling things in real time, when he was making stupid promises. Being a reckless rat-fucker can make a guy vulnerable to rat-fuckery himself.

I also believe that prosecutors did confirm how Stone got (information on) the emails and what stupid promises he had to make to get them, though not until after Stone was charged in his cover-up and probably not beyond a reasonable doubt. But, likely for a variety of reasons, they never told us that in any of the four stories that have been released about Stone.

So I want to examine what story each of the four narratives tell, because what an author withholds [wink] is always at least as interesting as what storyline the author uses to engage her readers.

The Mueller Report

All these stories are constrained, in part, by their genre.

For example, legally, the Mueller Report fulfills a requirement of the regulation under which Mueller was appointed.

Closing documentation. At the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.

You finish your work, and you tell the Attorney General overseeing your work whom you charged, whom you didn’t, and why. The Mueller Report, consisting of two volumes and some appendices laying out referrals from the investigation itself, therefore had to tell a story to support these decisions:

  • To charge a bunch of IRA trolls but none of the Americans unwittingly cooperating with them
  • To charge a bunch of Russian intelligence officers but not WikiLeaks or Roger Stone (though note that Rod Rosenstein has said the WikiLeaks investigation always remained at EDVA)
  • Not to charge Don Jr and Stone for accepting or soliciting illegal campaign donations from foreigners
  • Not to charge a bunch of Trumpsters for their sleazy influence peddling
  • To charge a bunch of Trumpsters with lying and (in the case of Manafort and Gates) various kinds of financial fraud, but not to charge other Trumpsters for equally obvious lying
  • Effectively (and this is my opinion), to refer Trump to Congress for impeachment
  • To refer a bunch of other matters, ranging from Trumpsters’ financial fraud, George Nader’s child porn (though given the releases from the other day, it’s not clear that’s formally in the report), and a number of counterintelligence matters, for further investigation

That’s not all. Technically, one investigation into someone either close to or Trump himself wasn’t even done at the time Mueller finished. Documents show a campaign finance investigation–AKA bribery–involving a bank owned by a foreign country was ongoing; Bill Barr has recently publicly bitched about the legal theory behind the investigation (one SCOTUS approved) and it has been closed. And, significantly, for the purpose of this series, Mueller had not obtained Stone aide Andrew Miller’s testimony when the Report got written either, though at the minute Miller agreed to testify, Mueller was giving a presser closing up shop, presumably (though not definitely) making Miller’s testimony part of the ongoing investigation related to Stone.

Aside from those two details, the story the Mueller Report has to tell has to explain those prosecutorial decisions. For the sake of this series, then, the story has to tell why Stone wasn’t charged for soliciting illegal campaign donations from WikiLeaks, why he was charged for lying to obscure who his go-between was and whether he had discussed all that with Trump and others on the campaign, and why Trump should be impeached for his promises to pardon Stone (among others) for covering up what really happened in 2016.

Significantly for this story, Stone was not charged because he lied about having a go-between (he lied to Congress to cover up who it was), nor was he charged for any actions he took with his go-between to get advance information. I’m not certain, but such charges may actually not be precluded by double jeopardy; if not, this story may have been written to ensure no double jeopardy attached. In any case, we shouldn’t expect details of his go-between to be fully aired in the report (or encompassed by it), because it was not a prosecutorial decision that needed to be explained.

The timeline of the Stone part of this story starts in early June 2016, and (for the main part of his story) ends the day the Podesta emails got released, October 7, leaving out a bunch of Stone activities that were key prongs of the investigation.

The Stone prosecution

The story told by the Stone prosecution unsurprisingly adopts the same general scope as the Mueller Report.

As noted above, the government took a number of investigative steps in 2018 that they kept secret from Stone, explicitly because they wanted Stone to continue to believe he was only under investigation for his lies about his claims about having a go-between with WikiLeaks. Because of that, I think the story the Stone prosecution told is best understood as a way to use the prosecution to advance a larger investigation, without compromising the rest of it. As such, it makes the way in which prosecutors controlled this narrative all the more interesting. That dual objective — advancing the larger investigation but keeping secrets –meant that prosecutors needed to provide enough detail to win the case — possibly even to get testimony about specific details to achieve other objectives in their investigation — but not disclose details that would give away the rest or require unreliable witnesses.

The Stone prosecutors provided us a handy timeline to show the scope of its story, split into two sections. The first starts with Assange’s promise of additional Hillary files on June 12, 2016 and ends on October 7, 2016.

While Rick Gates did testify that Stone predicted a WikiLeaks drop even before June 12, his testimony focused far more closely on discussions they had in the wake of the June 14 DNC announcement they’d been hacked. So the prosecution left out interesting details about what Stone was up to in spring 2016.

By ending the earlier, election-related timeline on October 7, prosecutors didn’t include a presumed Stone meeting with Trump on October 8 or the evidence that he and Corsi had advance knowledge of certain Podesta files, which became clear around October 13, to say nothing of what happened in the days after the election.

Then, the prosecution adopted a later timeline covering obstruction and witness tampering. It starts on January 6, 2017 and — at least on this timeline — goes through January 28, 2018 (though FBI Agent Michelle Taylor introduced evidence and Randy Credico testified to events that took place after that date).

That’s the scope of the story: an abbreviated version of 2016, starting after Stone first starting claiming to have advance warning of the email dumps, and ending well before things started to get interesting in the lead-up to and aftermath of the election.

A simplified version of the plot this story tells is how Stone used Credico to make sure no one would look too closely at what he had been up to with Corsi.

The SSCI Report

As I said, most of these stories were dictated, in part, by genre and a specific goal. Prosecutors writing the Mueller Report could only tell a story that explained prosecutorial decisions, and in this case, they had an ongoing investigation to protect (which Barr appears to have since substantially killed). Prosecutors scoping the Stone prosecution only had to present enough evidence to get their guilty verdict, and presumably didn’t want to produce evidence that would disclose the secrets they were trying to keep or expose a weakness in an otherwise airtight case. As for the warrants, every affidavit an FBI agent writes notes that they are including only as much as required to show probable cause. With a caveat laid out below, the FBI agents wouldn’t want to include too much for fear of giving defendants reason to challenge the warrants in the future. So the Stone affidavits, like all probable cause affidavits, are an exercise in careful narrative, telling a story but not telling too much.

Thus, the SSCI Report (clocking in at almost 1,000 pages) is the only one of these four stories that even pretends to be revealing all it knows. But it also didn’t try to tell the whole story. It limited the scope of the investigation in various ways (most notably, by refusing to investigate Trump’s financial vulnerabilities to Russia). And over and over again, the SSCI Report pulled punches to avoid concluding that the President is a glaring counterintelligence risk. The imperative of protecting the President (and getting Republican votes in Committee to actually release it) affected the way SSCI told its story in very tangible ways.

Because it is a SSCI Report, this story has a ton of footnotes which are (as they are in most SSCI Reports) a goldmine of detail. But the decision of what to put in the main body of a story and what to relegate to a footnote is also a narrative question.

Importantly, SSCI had outside limitations on its investigation — and therefore its story — that the FBI did not have. Rick Gates, Jerome Corsi, and Paul Manafort largely invoked the Fifth Amendment. Stone refused to testify. SSCI only received a limited subset of Mueller’s 302s, and none pertaining to the GRU investigation. SSCI had limited ability to demand the content of communications. The White House and the Trump Org withheld documents, even some documents they otherwise provided to Mueller. Plus, the version of the report we have is heavily redacted (including much of the discussion about WikiLeaks), sometimes for classified reasons but also sometimes (if you trust Ron Wyden’s additional views) to protect the President. That means we don’t even get the full story SSCI told.

Nevertheless, while SSCI left out parts of the story that the FBI seems to have considered important, the SSCI Report also includes a lot that DOJ and FBI had to have known, but for reasons that likely stem, in part, from the stories they wanted or were obligated to tell, they chose not to disclose. That makes the SSCI Report really useful to identify what must be intentional gaps in the other stories.

Like the Mueller Report (in part because it relied heavily on it), the story that the SSCI Report tells about Stone adopts an uneven timeline, narrowly focusing on Stone’s election season activities even while for others it adopts a broader timeframe. More generally, though, the SSCI Report tells a story about the dangerous counterintelligence threats surrounding the President, while stopping short of fully considering how he is himself a counterintelligence threat.

The warrant affidavits

As noted, FBI warrants deliberately and explicitly try to find a sweet spot, establishing probable cause but not including stuff that either might be challenged later or might give away investigative secrets. That said, Andrew Weissmann’s book reveals that Mueller’s team included more detail than needed in affidavits to provide a road map if they all got fired.

We also realized we could use the courts as a kind of external hard drive to back up our work. The applications for search warrants we filed with the court only had to set out a minimum of facts from which the court could find probable cause—a fairly low standard. But by packing those documents with up-to-date details of our investigation, we could create a separate record of our activities—one that would be deposited securely in the judicial system, beyond the reach of the Department of Justice, the White House, or Congress. (Putting such a substantial record before the court had the added benefit of eliciting quick rulings on our applications and demonstrating that we were not tacking too close to the line in establishing the necessary probable cause.)

The affidavits in the Stone case — written by at least 5 different FBI agents — actually tell two stories: The first is a narrative of how allegations were made and then removed, often for emphasis but also, probably in some cases, because suspicions were answered. The second is an evolving narrative of some of the core pieces of evidence that Stone did have advance notice of the releases, and so may have had legal liability — either as a co-conspirator, or someone who abetted the operation — for the hack-and-leak. It came to double in on itself, investigating Stone’s extensive efforts to thwart the investigation. Near the end of the investigation, that story came to incorporate Foreign Agent charges (though it’s not entirely sure how much Stone, or other people like Assange, are the target of those warrants, and virtually all that story is redacted). I lay out how these two narratives intersect here.

For some of the investigation, the affidavits adopted a timeline starting in June 2015 (when Stone worked on the Trump campaign) and continuing through the election, but ultimately that timeline extended through to the present in 2018 and 2019, ostensibly to support the obstruction investigation.

The gaps

The differences between the stories may be easiest to identify by observing what each leaves out. Each of these stories leaves out some pieces of evidence of one or more of the following:

  • The extent and nature of Stone’s provable interactions about WikiLeaks with Trump: While all of these stories do include evidence that Stone kept Trump apprised of his efforts to optimize the Podesta release, the SSCI Report — completed without Trump’s phone records or those of many others, with a very limited set of witness 302s, and limited power to access evidence of its own — describes damning interactions that none of the other stories do.
  • The extent to which either Corsi or Stone succeeded in dictating the release of the Podesta emails on October 7, 2016 and why: Several stories consider only whether Corsi managed to get WikiLeaks to drown out the Access Hollywood video, without considering whether Stone did.
  • What Stone and Corsi did with advance knowledge that WikiLeaks would release information on John Podesta’s ties with Joule holdings: Manafort’s unreliable testimony (and a bunch of other evidence) seems to confirm that Stone and Corsi had at least advance notice of, if not documents themselves, on Podesta’s ties with Joule Holdings that were later released by WikiLeaks. Only one of these four stories — the affidavits — include this process as a central story line, but it’s one way to show that the rat-fucker and the hoaxster did have advance knowledge (and show what their fevered little brains thought they were doing with it).
  • Proof that Stone had foreknowledge: While much of this is inconclusive, the affidavits make it clear that investigators believed Stone’s knowledge went beyond and long preceded what Corsi obtained in early August 2016. Once you establish that foreknowledge, then all question of Corsi versus Credico is substantially meaningless window-dressing (albeit convenient window dressing if you’re trying to hide a larger investigation).
  • Steve Bannon’s knowledge of and possible participation in Stone’s schemes shortly after he came on as campaign manager: The government almost certainly has grand jury testimony laying this out. But we’ve only seen glimpses of what happened after Stone wrote Bannon and floated a way to win the election the day he came onto the campaign, and not all of these stories were even curious about what happened.
  • Stone’s social media efforts to undermine the Russian attribution: I’m agnostic at this point about the significance of investigators’ focus on Stone’s efforts to undermine the Russian attribution for the operation, but some stories cover it and others ignore it conspicuously.
  • Stone’s extended effort to get a pardon for Julian Assange: It is a fact that Stone pursued a pardon for Julian Assange after Trump won. While it’s not yet proven whether Stone reached out to WikiLeaks on or even before November 9 or waited until days later, several of these stories incorporate details of that effort. Others ignore it.
  • Stone’s interactions with Guccifer 2.0: This story is virtually identical, albeit with additive bits, in three of the four stories. It is — almost — entirely absent from the prosecution.

The Manafort-Stone connection

One other detail to consider as you look at the different stories told here: Not a single one of them treats Manafort and Stone as a unit or a team. Partly this is just convenience. It’s hard to tell a story with two villains, and there is so much dirt on both Manafort and Stone, there’s more than enough material for one story for each. We also know that from the very beginning of the investigation, the Mueller team largely kept these strands separate, a team led by Andrew Weissmann focusing on Manafort and a team led by Jeannie Rhee focusing on Russian outreach (though 302s and other documents show that Rhee definitely participated in both, and Weissmann describes working closely with Rhee in his book).

But Roger Stone played a key role in getting Manafort hired by the Trump campaign. They were friends from way back. They used each other to retain a presence on the campaign after they got booted. Stone made reckless efforts to obtain the Podesta files partly in a bid to save Manafort. So while it’s easy to tell a story that keeps the Manafort corruption and the Stone cheating separate, that may not be the correct cognitive approach to understand what happened.

None of these stories tell the complete story. Most deliberately avoid doing so, and the one that tried, the SSCI Report, stopped short of telling all that’s public and didn’t have access to much that remains secret. Reading them together may point to what really happened.

Links to all posts in the series

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Robert Mueller Insinuates Andrew Weissmann Had Incomplete Information

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I’ve started reading Andrew Weissmann’s book.

I’m sure I’ll have a review of it one day, like I one day will finally do the post explaining why I think Peter Strzok’s book came 6 months or maybe a year too late.

But for the moment, I want to talk about this Robert Mueller comment obliquely pushing back on Weissmann’s book.

Former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III pushed back Tuesday against a prosecutor in his office who says in a tell-all book that investigators should have done more to hold President Trump accountable, suggesting that the account is “based on incomplete information” and asserting that he stands by his decisions in the case.

The rare public statement from Mueller came on the day Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor in the special counsel’s office, released a book alleging that the group did not fully investigate Trump’s financial ties and should have stated explicitly that it believed he obstructed justice.

Although Mueller’s statement did not name Weissmann or the book, “Where Law Ends,” it seemed clearly designed to address some of his complaints — particularly those directed at Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s top deputy, whom Weissmann said was not sufficiently aggressive.

“It is not surprising that members of the Special Counsel’s Office did not always agree, but it is disappointing to hear criticism of our team based on incomplete information,” Mueller said.

Weissmann’s book bills itself as the tell-all from the investigation. But it’s generally not. It’s the tell-all of one-third of the investigation, the Manafort team. The book will tell how they got Rick Gates to flip and thought they got Manafort to cooperate but in the end Manafort just used that as an opportunity to find out what prosecutors knew, so he could report back to Trump. There are interesting details in that. But the interesting details cover just a third of the investigation.

Just as a metric of what I mean, the name Stone shows up 18 times in his book, and a number of those contextualize the rat-fucker’s decades-old relationship with Manafort.

I think Mueller’s comment suggesting that Weissmann had “incomplete information” is particularly salient, given what is public with regards to the obstruction investigation, another third of the investigation.

That’s because the way the Mueller Report is built, it lays out predicate such that when Trump commutes Stone’s sentence or when Trump causes his Attorney General to move Manafort to home confinement or when Trump gets Barr to use throw multiple different flunkies to blow up the Mike Flynn prosecution — all in an effort to get Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn to continue to cover up what really happened in 2016 — that only builds on the obstruction volume. Those efforts become part of a continuing conspiracy to cover all this up. So, short of the increasing likelihood that Trump pardons himself and/or refuses to cede power, the Mueller investigation is preserved, the obstruction charges are preserved. They’re even preserved given Billy Barr’s judgement that the facts, on March 22, 2019 did not yet merit obstruction charges, because after that time, Trump would have done what it was obvious he would do as laid out in Volume II, in fact what Billy Barr said was a crime three times in his confirmation hearing.

The way in which the Mueller Report is drafted, it takes the rule that you cannot charge the President for anything, and preserves the obstruction charges that everyone agrees he should be charged with. It not only does that, but it lays out evidence that if Trump uses his pardon power to reward his flunkies for covering up his actions — something even Billy Barr has said is a crime — then it will amount to completing the criminal act of obstruction. The Mueller Report lays out the evidence why the actions that Trump will eventually take (and to a significant extent, has already taken) amount to a crime.

That’s a still-imperfect solution, given that Congress didn’t do what Mueller seems to have expected (impeach) and given that Trump looks increasingly likely to refuse to leave. It doesn’t negate what Weissmann argues about the rule of law.

But it does make Mueller’s public but oblique rebuke of Weissmann far more interesting.

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The Jeffrey Jensen “Investigation:” Post-It Notes and Other Irregularities

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I noted the other day that Jeffrey Jensen had not asked William Barnett some basic questions (such as the import of Mike Flynn’s lies to the decision to interview Flynn or the names of colleagues who had purportedly joked about “wiping” their phones) that you would expect from a half-serious investigation. That’s ironic, since one of Barnett’s allegations about Mueller’s investigators is that they didn’t ask basic follow-up questions (the public record conflicts with a number of Barnett’s claims about the Mueller investigation).

Given my discovery about differences between two versions of Peter Srtzok’s notes purportedly “discovered” in the Jensen investigation, I want to look more closely at what the Bates stamps and Post-It note practices of the investigation suggest about it. I believe I have put all the documents released under the guise of the Jensen investigation here (though have not finished annotating them). I’ve put what delivery correspondence got released explaining those documents below (I’ve updated these on 9/29).

Both Bates series are labeled SCO documents even when they’re not SCO documents

There are actually two sets of Bates stamps among the exhibits submitted in an effort to blow up the Flynn prosecution.

One series includes Bates stamps DOJSCO700021192-21198 (Joe Pientka and Peter Strzok’s notes from Flynn’s interview), DOJSCO700021201-21205 (Peter Strzok’s July 19, 2017 302). and DOJSCO 700022308-12 (a version of the January 24, 2017 Flynn 302). Here’s what the typeface of that Bates stamp looks like:

These reflect documents turned over to Flynn in discovery before Barr started blowing up the prosecution (see this Strzok 302 and his notes included as part of this exhibit). These were all submitted with the Motion to Dismiss on May 7, 2020. The inclusion of documents with an earlier stamp is not at all nefarious. Indeed, it helps to distinguish three different types of documents submitted with the Motion to Dismiss:

  • Documents already turned over to Flynn, which were submitted accompanying the MTD with their original Bates stamp
  • Documents Sidney Powell had asked for but which Emmet Sullivan rejected as Brady discovery; these have no Bates stamp (though Sullivan has reviewed some of these documents)
  • Documents that were “discovered” as “new” to justify the Motion to Dismiss; they have the later Bates stamp

Here’s an example of the Jensen typeface:

Remember: these weren’t new to the FBI Agents or prosecutors on the team. They were just “new” to Jeffrey Jensen, who was brought in from St. Louis just to provide the documents a virgin birth.

The one “tell” about this Bates stamp is that it incorporates documents that well precede the Mueller investigation, and probably weren’t part of the Mueller investigation, under an SCO stamp.

I guess “BillyBarrBlowsUpBobby3Sticks” would be too obvious.

Bill Priestap’s original notes, with sticky note, has two Bates numbers

Once you get into the Jensen Bates stamp, documents often get submitted over and over. The most remarkable example of that are Bill Priestap’s notes from a January 24, 2017 meeting prior to the Flynn interview. Bates DOJSCO 700023464 was submitted twice (because Flynn’s lawyers screwed up the upload), once as part of Docket #188 and again as part of Docket #190. Then, the exact same document was submitted as DOJSCO 700022702 as part of the Motion to Dismiss.

This is interesting for two reasons. It’s common to find the same document with two different Bates stamp numbers. For example, if four people have received the same email, it may show up in discovery four times, with four different Bates stamps. But that’s more common with electronic files, for obvious reasons.

But this is not multiple digital versions of the same document. Both copies have the same blue sticky note on it, meaning both exhibits were scanned (or were from the same scan).

That wouldn’t be all that weird if the digital exhibits submitted with the Motion to Dismiss had different Bates numbers. But they generally don’t. For example, William Barnett’s draft Closing Communication has Bates stamp DOJ SCO 700023466 in both the exhibit Flynn’s team released on April 30 and the version submitted with the Motion to Dismiss.

The most curious detail of the two instances of the original copy of Priestap’s notes is that the one submitted later, with the Motion to Dismiss, has a much earlier (762 pages) Bates stamp. My eyes are beginning to blur, but I think the one other instance of this involves three documents involving Peter Strzok in advance of the Mike Flynn interview.

The earlier Bates notes might suggest that those select documents from January 23 and 24 were found — perhaps even before Jensen began work — and the disclosure theater in service of the Motion to Dismiss all followed it.

If that’s true, DOJ’s failure to release Priestap’s 302 explaining all this is fairly damning, given that DOJ is suppressing his explanation even while re-releasing the same documents.

DOJ falsely presents annotations as unaltered hand-written notes, misleadingly so with one set of Strzok notes

Which brings me to where I started this rabbit hole: with Jensen’s treatment of hand-written notes. I’ll probably miss something but I think the hand-written notes released by Jensen include:

The interview notes are a different animal (though remember that FBI got the mixed up and no one figured it out for months, possibly until I pointed it out).

Whoever took the Boente notes added a date in real time. That’s likely, though not certain, in the case of Gauhar. Priestap almost certainly dated his own notes (though it’s unclear who put that blue sticky on them).

In the unredacted bits, there is no date on Strzok’s January 25 notes. As noted, the originally released version of Strzok’s notes, which is a scan of the original, has no date (and Jeffrey Jensen provided Sidney Powell a range rather than the obvious date of January 5 for them, so she could make a false claim about Joe Biden).

The copy of Strzok’s March 28, 2017 notes, Bates Stamp 700023501 has the date added. It appears to have been added with a Post-It (annotated in yellow). It also appears that you can see Post-It note tabs (annotated in red) picked up on the copy, some with notes on them.

It appears, then, that someone simply made a copy of the notes without taking them out of a notebook. I have no reason to believe the date is inaccurate, though I am intrigued by the way the redaction obscures what would be the edges of the date Post-It.

The date on Andrew McCabe’s notes, with a Bates stamp 700023502, the next in the series, appears to have been added after the fact by someone other than the person who took the notes. While it has some similarities with the date on the Strzok notes, it doesn’t cross the 7 as one of the two Strzok annotations did, and could easily have been added by whoever filed the notes in real time.

 

Finally, the new version of Strzok’s January 5, 2017 notes, with a Bates stamp 700023503 and so the next in a series, include the added date and some newly unredacted content (inside the red rectangle).

As noted, there is absolutely no doubt that these notes were written on January 5, 2017 (indeed, the newly unredacted details match other versions of this meeting). But after having released an unannotated version of this document, Jensen (or whoever is running this rodeo) decided to release another version that affirmatively misleads about that certainty.

The other instances of these date annotations are not nefarious, as far as I understand it. But pretending there was confusion about the date of these notes served to support an attack on Joe Biden. And rather than clearing all that up, DOJ has done what Kevin Clinesmith faces prison time for having done: alter a record.

It is inaccurate to say these are “Peter Strzok’s hand-written notes” (and, if the McCabe date was added after the fact, those too). Rather, this is a copy of Strzok’s hand-written notes that appear as a page in someone’s investigative notebook, and the date reflects an alteration — not identified to the court — to Strzok’s notes, an alteration that introduces an error.

Let me clear: I don’t think the dates change the investigative significance of these notes. I believe the January 5 notes have zero investigative significance, taken in context. I think the redaction of Brandon Van Grack’s name — if that’s what happened in William Barnett’s 302 — is a far graver example of abuse, because it serves to hide the baselessness of DOJ and Flynn’s complaints.

Rather, all these details reflect what an amateur effort Barr’s effort to blow up Flynn’s prosecution is. These irregularities, while not dramatically affecting the underlying evidentiary claim (excepting Powell’s attack on Joe Biden), suggest that no one is conducting a real investigation that would have to sustain future judicial review. They’re doing nothing except producing propaganda.

April 24: Jocelyn Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

Beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The review by USA EDMO has involved the analysis of reports related to the investigation along with communications and notes by Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) personnel associated with the investigation.

The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March and April 2020 and are provided to you as a result of this ongoing review; additional documents may be forthcoming. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

April 24: Powell submits two documents obtained from Covington & Burling, a Rob Kelner email indicating that C&B has an understanding that Mueller is unlikely to charge Jr, and another letter making it quite clear that Mueller did not make promises.

April 29: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we disclosed by letter dated April 24, 2020, beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March and April 2020, and are provided to you as a result of this ongoing review; additional documents may be forthcoming.1 These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

1 Note that the enclosed spreadsheet (DOJSCO-700023473 – DOJSCO700023475), which contains messages between and among various Bureau personnel, is an index and another detailed version of these messages is forthcoming.

May 5: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

 As we disclosed by letter dated April 24, 2020, beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March, April and May 2020; additional documents may be forthcoming. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

May 18: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we disclosed by letter dated April 24, 2020, beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March, April and May 2020; additional documents may be forthcoming. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

June 23: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed document was obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO during the course of its review. This page of notes was taken by former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. While the page itself is undated; we believe that the notes were taken in early January 2017, possibly between January 3 and January 5. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018; additional documents may be forthcoming.

June 24: Powell accuses Biden of starting the Logan Act investigation based off false date on Strzok notes.

July 7: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. The documents include handwritten notes of former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Tashina Gauhar from a January 25, 2017 meeting (23487-80), notes of former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok from that same meeting (23491-92), an internal DOJ document dated January 30, 2017 (23493-97), and handwritten notes of then Acting Attorney General Dana Boente, dated March 30, 2017 (23498-500). These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018; additional documents may be forthcoming.

September 23: Ballantine sends Powell notice of new exhibits without noticing Judge Sullivan of the correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. The documents include handwritten notes of former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok (23501 & 23503) and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (23502); and internal text messages between FBI analysts who worked on the Flynn matter (23504- 23516).

We are also providing you with additional text messages between former DAD Strzok and Lisa Page (23516-23540). As you know, some of these messages were originally made available to Flynn’s former attorneys on March 13, 2018 through a publicly available link to a Senate webpage. On June 24, 2018, the government provided a link to a second website that contained additional text messages. In an abundance of caution, we are providing you additional text messages in this production; please note that purely personal messages have been deleted from this production.

September 24: Powell files supplement quoting notice.

The documents include handwritten notes of former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok (23501 & 23503) and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (23502); and internal text messages between FBI analysts who worked on the Flynn matter (23504- 23516); . . . additional text messages between former DAD Strzok and Lisa Page (23516-23540).

September 24: Ballantine sends Powell notice of new exhibits without noticing Judge Sullivan of the correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. Attached hereto is a summary of the National Security Letters issued by the FBI (23541-42) and a related email (23543-44).

September 24: Ballantine sends Powell notice of the William Barnett 302 without noticing Judge Sullivan an unclassified version was shared with Flynn’s team.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. On September 17, 2020, United States Attorney Jeffery Jenson conducted an interview of Special Agent William J. Barnett. A copy of the report of that interview is attached to this letter. The government is filing a redacted version of this report of interview as an attachment to its supplemental motion to dismiss tonight.

The unredacted version of the report of interview is covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018, and is designated “sensitive.”

September 27: Ballantine sends Powell notice of new exhibits without noticing Judge Sullivan of the correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. Attached hereto is are notes of three ODAG attorneys, numbered 23559- 23562

September 28: Ballantine files four different notices of discovery correspondence at once (resulting in delayed notification to John Gleeson).

 

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Wherein WikiLeaks Brags about Entertaining a Pardon Dangle from a Suspected Russian Asset and a White Supremacist

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Yesterday, Julian Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson had a statement (which has not been released) read at his extradition hearing describing that she witnessed a meeting between Assange and Dana Rohrabacher on August 15, 2017 (Neo-Nazi Chuck Johnson was also present), where the Congressman said he had a win-win deal to offer: Trump would pardon Julian Assange if Assange would say that the source of the stolen DNC emails was not Russia.

Robinson stated that Assange did not disclose the source. Based on reports, though, she did not appear to deny that Assange had claimed his source was not Russia, which is what Rohrabacher reported at the time.

A lawyer representing the United States did not contest Robinson’s report, agreeing that the offer occurred. But representatives from the US did state that Trump had not agreed to it (which, without access to the exact statement, could mean any thing, but Trump certainly hasn’t pardoned Assange, yet).

Amid a laudable parade of arguments at Assange’s extradition hearing about the Espionage Act and discussions of all the important disclosures associated with the 2010 WikiLeaks releases for which Julian Assange is fighting extradition — including testimony read from German torture victim Khaled al-Masri, one of the first times he has had his say in public — including this statement was a cynical, and I would argue, damning, ploy.

In spite of the frenzy from the US press about the statement, the claim is not new. It was reported immediately by the Daily Caller (I covered that report here). Then Assange tweeted and then released on Facebook a statement asserting that reports from others should not be deemed authoritative. “Only unmediated statements coming directly from me can be considered authoritative.” Rohrabacher issued a statement, in which he promised to divulge what Assange stated to Trump.

Neither explicitly admitted what was obvious, that it was a pardon quid pro quo.

In a follow-up interview with the Daily Caller, Rohrabacher claimed not to remember whether he spoke to anyone at the White House about the meeting. Then, in a follow-up interview with Sean Hannity, Rohrabacher said, “It is my understanding from other parties who are trying to arrange the rendezvous that a rendezvous with myself and the President is being arranged for me to give him the firsthand information from him.” Earlier this year (when WikiLeaks announced that Robinson was going to resuscitate this story), Kim Dot Com released texts describing how he had pushed Trump’s best friend (whom he claimed not to identify) to accept the deal.

Those texts identified the best friend as Sean Hannity, the same guy who hosted Rohrabacher to explain that, “other parties [were] trying to arrange the rendezvous that a rendezvous with myself and the President is being arranged for me to give him the firsthand information from him.”

Ultimately, Chief of Staff John Kelly refused to let the President meet with Rohrabacher, just like he refused other agents of disinformation about the Russian hack to meet with him in the same period.

Mr. Rohrabacher confirmed he spoke to Mr. Kelly this week but declined to discuss the content of their conversation. “I can’t confirm or deny anything about a private conversation at that level,” he said in a brief interview. He declined to elaborate further.

A Trump administration official confirmed Friday that Mr. Rohrabacher spoke to Mr. Kelly about the plan involving Mr. Assange. Mr. Kelly told the congressman that the proposal “was best directed to the intelligence community,” the official said. Mr. Kelly didn’t make the president aware of Mr. Rohrabacher’s message, and Mr. Trump doesn’t know the details of the proposed deal, the official said.

In the call with Mr. Kelly, Mr. Rohrabacher pushed for a meeting between Mr. Assange and a representative of Mr. Trump, preferably someone with direct communication with the president.

On its face, the pardon dangle story proves only that Julian Assange was willing to meet with someone widely presumed to be Russian asset, Dana Rohrabacher, and a far right white nationalist to help float false claims about Russia’s role in getting Trump elected. It also proves that, at the time (when Trump was desperately trying to shut down the investigation into his coordination with Russia in the 2016 election and one after another were giving false prepared statements denying such coordination), the President had a Chief of Staff with the ability to look out after his legal interests.

And while I doubt lawyers for the US will go there, in context, the fact that WikiLeaks’ defense team presented just one of the at least four pardon dangles — including one for which the import of Russian disinformation is more obvious than others — is a testament to the degree to which the true story of those pardon discussions would make WikiLeaks’ compromise by Russia clear.

Here are the known discussions of pardons since WikiLeaks released emails in such a way as to optimize their benefit to getting authoritarian torture fan Donald Trump elected.

  • Starting at least by November 16 (and probably earlier) and lasting at least through January 11, 2018, Roger Stone tried to broker a pardon; according to sworn testimony by Randy Credico, Margaret Kunstler was involved in this effort (and threatening to expose whatever role Kunstler had in the process is one of the ways Stone used to discourage Credico’s testimony).
  • Starting at least by January 12 and continuing until at least March 28, 2017, Adam Waldman — the lawyer that Assange shared with Oleg Deripaska, whom the SSCI Report shows had a central role in the 2016 operation — tried to negotiate a deal via which Assange would provide limited information to mitigate the harm of the Vault 7 leak and DOJ (or if that failed, SSCI) would give him immunity, effectively a pardon. Given WikiLeaks’ history of sharing raw documents with Russia and others, the entrée would have come long after WikiLeaks had had the opportunity to broker the files, which would have helped Russia not only identify CIA’s hacks of Russian computers, but also NOCs working for CIA. (I’ve started to wonder whether the Russian treason case from late 2016 has a tie.) John Solomon — who has spread Deripaska’s propaganda before — even blamed Jim Comey for the compromise that resulted. In short, the offer was far too late to be meaningful, but it was an effort to give Assange impunity for burning the CIA to the ground.
  • From August to October 2017, Rohrabacher pursued his pardon for disinformation deal.
  • Last week, in the guise of defending journalism, Glenn Greenwald went on Tucker Carlson’s show (where a number of people have successfully lobbied for a pardon) and pitched pardons for both Assange and Ed Snowden not, as he claimed, out of any defense of journalism or whistleblowers — both things that Trump affirmatively reviles — but instead because it’s a great way to stick it to the Obama Deep State.

So one pardon pitch immediately after Assange worked with Russia to get Trump elected, another one brokered by Oleg Deripaska’s lawyer, a third pitched by a Congressman widely believed to be a Russian asset, and finally Glenn’s pitch for a pardon as a great way to do damage to the intelligence community.

Not only did Russia figure in all of those pardon dangles, but each was pitched not as a way to honor Assange’s debt to journalism, but instead to serve Russia’s purposes. And for some reason WikiLeaks thinks that raising just one of these — while remaining silent about perhaps the most damning pardon dangle — helps prove its case that Julian Assange is a journalist and not the Russian spy the prosecutors in this case claim to believe he is.

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In at Least One Interview, Paul Manafort Was Not Asked How Stone Planned to Save Trump’s Ass

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At first, Paul Manafort claimed not to remember any August 2016 conversations with Roger Stone about impending WikiLeaks releases. He further speculated that all the interesting conversations about WikiLeaks releases must have happened in September, after he was off the campaign. And then, even in the same interview, he admitted that was wrong.

That’s in no way the most interesting disclosure in a September 27, 2018 Mueller interview with Trump’s campaign manager in the most recent BuzzFeed FOIA response. But given a detail revealed in the Roger Stone trial — not to mention the abundant evidence that Manafort was shading his testimony within the 302 itself — Manafort’s efforts to disclaim any knowledge of what Roger Stone was up to in August 2016 suggests an affirmative attempt to cover up his knowledge of and possibly involvement in Stone’s activities that month.

The partial view offered by a single 302

The 302 was released in the most recent BuzzFeed FOIA release, one that makes fewer redactions than prior ones. The 302 is almost entirely unredacted and focuses closely on Roger Stone. This interview was neither the first interview at which Manafort was asked about Stone, nor is it the only interview released that pertains to Stone. His identifiable interviews pertaining to Stone are:

But in the earlier released 302s, the Stone-related content was redacted either due to Stone’s trial, or because an investigation into Stone remained ongoing on March 2, 2020, with the 6th release, but appears to have ended after Barr intervened in Stone’s case. For example, the released version of the September 13 302 redacts Manafort’s description of a pre-June 12 conversation with Stone where he told Manafort that, “a source close to WikiLeaks had the emails from Clinton’s server;” I’ve collected what appears unredacted from that interview in the SSCI Report here.

In other words, this is the one 302, so far, that shows us what DOJ actually asked Manafort about during the period he pretended to be cooperating in fall 2018 but was in fact lying. We can’t assume this interview is the entirety of what DOJ asked Manafort for several reasons. First, what we can see here is iterative. What starts as one brief mention on September 12, expands on September 13 (one of the only interviews where Manafort is believed to tell the truth), appears unredacted in this September 27 interview. But we might expect the October 1 (and any other interviews where he was asked about Stone) to include more information.

In addition, there is abundant evidence that DOJ is preferentially releasing files where a witness (including but not limited to Steve Bannon, Sam Clovis, and KT McFarland) lied to protect Trump, while keeping later more truthful (and damning) testimony redacted.

More importantly, the only Manafort references to Stone in the Mueller Report are cited to his grand jury testimony (probably on November 2, 2018, but that is redacted):

  • Manafort said Stone told him he was in contact with someone in contact with WikiLeaks. (fn 198)
  • Manafort told Trump Stone had predicted the release, in response to which Trump told him to stay in touch with Stone. (fn 204)
  • Manafort relayed the message to Stone, likely on July 25, 2016. (fn 205)
  • Manafort told Stone he wanted to be kept apprised of developments with WikiLeaks and told Gates to stay in touch with Stone as well. (fn 206)

I suspect Manafort was asked about things in his grand jury appearance that he wasn’t asked about in 302s (which is what happened on other topics Manafort was lying about). That said, just one detail — the date on which Manafort probably relayed Trump’s request that Stone seek out more information on WikiLeaks — appears in the Mueller Report, but not here (though as I’ll show in a follow-up post, the government clearly withheld a great deal of what they knew from the Mueller Report).

Manafort claims Stone didn’t include his life-long friend in his cover-up

Let’s start with the end of the interview. It captures Paul Manafort’s claims not to have coordinated stories with Stone, even while Manafort himself was coordinating stories with everyone else and Stone was coordinating stories too.

Close to the end of the interview, interviewers got Manafort to confirm that he knew, at the time Stone claimed on October 11, 2016 that he had no advance knowledge of the Podesta email release, Stone’s claim was “inconsistent with what he told” Manafort earlier in 2016.

Investigators then proceeded to ask Manafort questions to figure out whether (he would admit whether) Stone had included him in the rat-fucker’s very elaborate cover-up. He did not.

First, they got a general denial.

Manafort and Stone did not have a conversation in which Stone said Manafort should not tell anyone about the timing of the Podesta emails. They did not talk about Stone running away from what Stone told Manafort.

At a time when Manafort was lying wildly about everything else (in significant part to protect Trump), Stone’s lifelong friend claimed that Stone had made less effort to coordinate a cover story with Manafort than he had with Randy Credico, with whom Stone had a far more troubled relationship.

Then investigators asked Manafort (who at this point had been in jail almost four months and whom prosecutors knew had been conducting covert communications from jail) whether he and Stone had spoken about the investigation in the past six months. We know from this affidavit that by May, Stone was frantically calling Andrew Miller and siccing a private investigator on Credico and another witness in an attempt to cover his actions up. But while Manafort admitted that he and Stone had spoken about the investigation, he claimed they had had no conversations about covering up Stone’s advance knowledge of the Podesta dump.

Stone said the Special Counsel’s Office was accusing him of effectively controlling the timing of the leaked Podesta emails. Manafort thought it was some time in May or June that Stone told him the Special Counsel’s office thought he had a role in the Podesta emails. Stone did not expressly remind or tell Manafort what he (Stone) knew about the emails. They did not discuss the fact that Stone did actually have advance knowledge of the Podesta emails.

Again, we’re to believe that at a time Stone was spinning wild cover stories with Jerome Corsi, whom Stone had only known two years, at a time Stone was hiring private investigators to intimidate witnesses to sustain his cover story, Stone wasn’t at the same time including his life-long friend Paul Manafort in his cover-up.

Then, immediately after having claimed he and Stone had no conversation about the Podesta emails, Manafort then described what sounds like an attempt on Stone’s part to minimize what he had done.

Stone said to Manafort that he was not the decision maker or the controller of the information. Stone said he may have had advance knowledge, but he was not the decision maker. Stone was making clear to Manafort that he did not control the emails or make decisions about them. Stone said he received information about the Podesta emails but was a conduit, not someone in a position to get them released.

After providing what was a really damning admission (one that might have some truth to it!), Manafort then disclaimed any useful information by professing to be confused about all of this (something he said about learning in advance about the July 22 dump).

Manafort was confused as to the various people and hacks. Manafort asked Stone to go through the narrative of Assange, Guccifer, the DNC hack, and Seth Rich so that Manafort could understand it.

Stone knew Manafort knew that Stone’s public statements were false, but Stone “confused” Manafort.

Seth Rich was, fundamentally, a cover story that Stone helped perpetuate among right wing propagandists to disclaim his early knowledge that Russia was responsible for the email hacks. Manafort’s claim of confusion might reflect that investigators indicated they knew he was lying. But it effectively is an admission that Stone tried to get Manafort to repeat the cover story Stone had adopted, in parallel with WikiLeaks.

Then Manafort made two more claims that were probably false:

Stone did not advise Manafort to punch back or discredit the Special Counsel’s Office. Stone did not raise any desire to respond to the Special Counsel’s Office investigation by planting media stories.

Manafort was not aware of any attempts on Stone’s part to contact Manafort after Manafort was incarcerated.

Again, we’re to believe that Stone was working with everyone else he knew to push back on Mueller, but did not with Manafort (even while Manafort was having the same kinds of communications with Sean Hannity and others).

Most of the rest of the interview consists of Manafort trying to suggest that Stone had worked with Bannon on the Podesta emails (a claim he made earlier, as I’ll return to), effectively pawning off any coordination Stone did with the campaign to a time after Manafort left it.

Stone did not tell Manafort whether he passed the Podesta email information to anyone else on the campaign or associates with the campaign. Manafort speculated Stone may have passed information to Bannon, since Stone and Bannon had a relationship.

[snip]

Manafort thought Stone gave messaging ideas to Bannon, but did not think Stone was a source of information for Bannon.

Not only does this comment pawn any guilt onto Bannon, but it protects Trump from involvement he had in July and August.

Manafort’s evolving denials of any involvement in Stone’s activities

So that’s how the interview ends, with a Manafort effort to pawn off any guilt onto Bannon even while protecting Trump and others close to him, even after admitting that he and Stone had some conversation where Stone talked him through Assange, Guccifer, DNC, and Seth Rich.

Much earlier in the interview, Manafort confirmed some damning things that other witnesses had only hinted at. Here’s a summary of most of them (I’ll show how Manafort disproved his own claims about the Podesta emails next). Below I’ll show how for each damning admission, Manafort disclaimed substantive three-way coordination between him, Stone, and Trump, some of which he had already admitted to in his September 13 interview.

  1. Late May to early June: He had a conversation with Stone before Julian Assange said on June 12, 2016 WikiLeaks was publishing Hillary’s emails. In late May or early June, Stone said someone had good information that WikiLeaks had access to the emails on Clinton’s servers, which Manafort took to be a self-serving comment.
  2. After June 12: After Assange’s June 12 presser, Trump could and did start incorporating Hillary’s emails into his speeches, based on the premise that “if WikiLeaks had them, it was possible a foreign adversary did too.” Manafort said that Stone did not know what the emails were at that time.
  3. Between June 12 and the release of the DNC emails — a black hole: “Manafort wasn’t really interested until something was released” … “Manafort used Caputo to keep track of Stone, but by around June 15, 2016, Caputo left the campaign” … “Stone ‘went dark’ on WikiLeaks in late June.”
  4. Before July 21: Manafort and Stone had breakfast at the RNC where Stone clearly told Manafort stuff that anticipated the DNC email release, but about which Manafort made lame excuses.
  5. After the July 22 dump: Manafort gives credit to Stone for the release, and Trump tells Manafort that Stone should “stay on top of [the WikiLeaks dump].”
  6. August: While Manafort admits he raised the emails at a Monday Meeting, he claims all the interesting conversations about the emails must have happened after he left.

For each of these fairly damning revelations, Manafort offered logically inconsistent claims that he was out of the loop of any communications Stone had with Trump, as follows.

1 Manafort claims he didn’t tell Trump but would have known if Stone did

Manafort said Stone brought this up because of something Trump had said, but Manafort didn’t share the information with Trump and asked Stone not to tell Trump himself because he wanted to avoid a “fire drill” to go chase the emails down. Manafort considered the possibility Stone told Trump in spite of Manafort’s request he not do so, but claimed he would have known had Stone had done so.

Manafort asked Stone not to convey it to Trump, and Stone agreed. Manafort thought Stone would keep his word, but he was not convinced he would. Manafort did not have any indication whether or not Stone told Trump regardless of Manafort’s request. Manafort did not have a contemporaneous memory that Stone had told Trump about the emails, because he did not recall a conversation with Trump about it back then, which he would have expected if Trump knew.

In his September 13 interview, Manafort had already admitted that he believed Stone would have told Trump anyway because he ”wanted the credit for knowing in advance.”

2 Manafort admits he did talk to Trump after June 12 and suggests indirectly that he served as go-between the two

Even though Manafort had claimed not to have (and not wanted to have) discussed Stone’s predictions prior to Assange’s June 12 presser, Manafort did admit to discussing the emails after Assange’s presser. Manafort explained the difference between before and after Assange’s presser (and the reason why he was willing to discuss it with Trump) this way:

Manafort said there was no real fire drill after June 12, 2016 because the information was already out there. The fire drill would have been if Stone had been the only one saying it and Trump wanted more.

But Manafort then says some things about the conversations with Trump. The easiest way to make them cohere chronologically is if Trump did ask Manafort to find out more. I’ve rearranged Manafort’s claims, numbering the order in which he presented them.

  • Manafort thought he spoke to Trump and said Stone had it right, and that Trump was happy and looked forward to what WikiLeaks had. Trump asked Manafort if Stone knew what was in the emails. [2]
  • Manafort and Stone spoke after the June 12, 2016 article and Manafort said he [Manafort] was looking forward to what came out and also asked Stone whether he knew what Assange had. [1]
  • Manafort believed Stone told him he was working to find out what the emails included. [4]
  • Manafort told [Trump] no [Stone didn’t know what was in the emails] [3]

This may be a minor point, but Manafort’s description is inconsistent with there not being a conversation with Trump before June 12. That’s true because of the way he told Trump “Stone had it right,” reflecting prior knowledge, but also the way he reorders what happened to claim that he didn’t do what he said he had been afraid of having to do before June 12, run a fire drill.

This is the first time of two times that Manafort, in response to a question about whether he talked to someone whose name was redacted about WikiLeaks, he responded that that was “Miller’s” job (both Stephen and Jason were involved in WikiLeaks response and it’s unclear if an earlier redaction makes it clear which one he was talking about). That may be an effort to cover up Jared Kushner’s involvement (at trial, the government introduced evidence that Stone reached out to Kushner, and in the plea breach discussions the government accused Manafort of protecting someone who is almost certainly Kushner).

3 Manafort claims he wasn’t interested, Stone didn’t say anything, and doesn’t address discussions with Trump

Since Manafort claims not to have spoken to Stone about emails in the period when Guccifer 2.0 was releasing material but WikiLeaks was not, he doesn’t address whether he told Trump at all.

Stone “went dark” on WikiLeaks in late June. Manafort initially thought Stone’s advance knowledge was more of a guess.

As the SSCI Report makes clear, however, Manafort had at least six phone conversations that month, including these four:

  • June 4
  • June 12
  • June 20
  • June 23

4 Manafort tells a bullshit story about a breakfast he had that Morgan Pehme caught on tape

Early on in the interview, Manafort disclaimed June interest in emails by saying, “Manafort did not get really interested until something was released, which happened between the two conventions.” In the same paragraph, he is recorded as saying, “at that point [before something was released], Manafort could not rely on Assange.” The comment doesn’t make sense in any case, given that Guccifer 2.0 was releasing emails (which Manafort disclaims by saying they didn’t speak about emails). But in trying to discuss a breakfast captured on video, he virtually concedes Stone gave him detailed information before the DNC dump.

Manafort described a breakfast meeting he and Stone had that (he admits in the interview) had been partly caught on tape by the team making Get Me Roger Stone.

Manafort discussed a breakfast he had with Stone during the RNC, which was visible briefly in the “Get Me Roger Stone” documentary. They discussed convention speeches at that breakfast. Stone also complained about Ted Cruz. They discussed the DNC, because Manafort planned to go and give some speeches during it. WikiLeaks would have come up in that breakfast in reference to what they would be doing and how the campaign would use it. Manafort did not recall whether Stone said he knew when the WikiLeaks information was going to come out. They discussed Clinton’s server, WikiLeaks, and the DNC hack. They focused more on the DNC hack because it had current political value at the time. Manafort summarized the breakfast as a discussion about the DNC hack, when WikiLeaks planned to release the material, Manafort trying to understand the attack lines that would be used during the DNC and in the month of August, and the thematic strategy for the campaign.

Stone “went dark” on WikiLeaks in late June. Manafort initially thought Stone’s advance knowledge was more of a guess. It was not until the information about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz came out that Manafort realized the real value of the information. Stone did not tell Manafort the Wasserman-Schultz information was coming out in advance, but he was pleased when it did. That was the first time Manafort thought Stone’s connection to WikiLeaks was real.

According to emails released at trial, during the spring of 2018 (and well before) Randy Credico and Stone kept coming back to whether or not Morgan Pehme, one of the directors of Get Me Roger Stone, had “folded” or was lying. The film team had outtakes that showed more of what transpired at events they had filmed. So even Credico and Stone seemed worried about what having a film team travel around filming Trump’s rat-fucker might have seen while he was trying to steal the election.

Manafort (who, remember, would go on to disclaim having talked about cover stories with Stone) seems to have been aware of the risk, too.

This explanation from Manafort about this breakfast reveals one reason why. In the same breath as saying that Stone had gone dark in the period between Julian Assange’s June 12 interview and the actual release of the emails, Manafort got caught on film talking about it as an active thing. I have suggested that Stone met someone at the RNC who told him the emails were about to drop at a meeting that Andrew Miller would have scheduled. So it’s possible that this meeting happened in the wake of the one where Stone learned the drop was imminent. Manafort provides explanations that aren’t plausible given his other testimony, and comes close to admitting that the conversation reflected foreknowledge of the July 22 dump, which (as Manafort had already noted) came after the RNC ended.

5 Manafort disclaims any participation in the discussions between Stone and Trump

Manafort’s apparent message about what happened immediately after the DNC dump — which showed up in Stone’s trial as Trump ordering Manafort and Gates to get Stone to find out more — is that both he and Trump compartmentalized any discussions that happened about what came next.

The timeline he describes looks like this (though again, Manafort jumbled it a bit in the telling):

  • Before the weekend (and so either when the emails dropped or before): Manafort told Stone he was impressed and would be using it “the upcoming weekend in Philadelphia” and asked for more information, in response to which Stone did not specify.
  • After the July 22 dump: Manafort talked to Trump first (he would have had to have already spoken with Stone, though).
  • At the end of July 22: a possible different conversation with Trump and Reince Priebus.
  • Later in the weekend, probably July 23: Manafort “raised with” Trump that Stone had predicted it and Trump responded “that Stone should stay on top of it.”
  • July 24: Priebus and Manafort had talking points on the dump.

Then, as part of two paragraphs describing Manafort having a conversation that included the same things as the conversation he had before the weekend with Stone but is portrayed as after July 24, Manafort claims all of this was compartmentalized.

Manafort did not tell Stone specifically that Trump had asked that he stay on top of it. He would have just told him to stay on top of it. Manafort did not way to get into a cycle with Stone where Stone used him as an errand boy to get to Trump.

Manafort did not have any indication Trump heard from Stone directly, but he thought he would have. Trump would not have told Manafort if he was talking to Stone. Trump compartmentalized; it was just the way he was.

Manafort told Stone it was good stuff and to keep him posted, and Stone offered no indication he knew any more specifics.

Effectively, Manafort suggests both that Trump kept things with Stone compartmentalized — it was just the way he was! — which may conflict with his first explanation, that he’d be told of any discussions (in his September 13 testimony, he said he assumed they did speak before the DNC dump). In any case, Manafort also claims to be compartmentalizing himself, withholding from Stone the fact that Trump ordered Manafort to reach out.

I’ll come back to this.

6 Manafort admits certain things happened in August but claims he had no role

The government had two very specific questions for Manafort about August. First, did he speak to Stone about his August 8 speech in which he said there’d be more from WikiLeaks releases (remember, there were a whole series of such claims, but the government apparently only asked about the August 8 one). Manafort claimed he did not.

Manafort and Stone did not discuss Stone’s August 8, 2016 in which he said more was coming from WikiLeaks. Manafort recalled from the press coverage that Stone was confident more was coming in the fall. Stone never told Manafort he was dealing with Assange directly. Manafort assumed Stone had a contact of some sort. Stone’s August 8, 2016 comment was not out of character for Stone.

In other words, Manafort admits knowing about Stone’s comment (either this specific one or generally), but sourced it to the press, not Stone (or Trump). And though he admits that such boasts were normal for Stone, he seems to concede he nevertheless noticed them — in the press.

Investigators also asked Manafort, twice, about how the WikiLeaks releases came up at the Monday Morning meetings involving the family (they obviously had a specific one that occurred in the wake of the DNC release in mind). Over the course of an extended discussion, Manafort does admit it came up but suggests — in spite of the fact that Trump was “fixated on the topic” — that the discussion of Stone’s advance knowledge amounted to little more than, “that sounds like Roger.”

[After a claim that Manafort would later disprove that he had no conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks] Manafort was not certain when the next Monday morning meeting was, but it was either July 31 or August 7, but thought it was probably August 7, 2016. Manafort was sure WikiLeaks was raised and the discussion was about how useful the information was and when they could expect the next dump. Manafort thought it was probably a topic of many conversations. Trump was fixated on it.

[3 paragraphs in which Manafort concedes that someone at RNC was in the loop and claims that any substantive discussions happened after he left and then claims, probably for a second time, that “Miller” (which could be either Jason or Stephen) was in charge of those issues, so Kushner wouldn’t have been)]

The Monday morning family meeting has a two-fold agenda. One they discussed relevant “gossip” for the campaign. [Manafort tells anecdote about Michael Cohen catching Lewandowski leaking.] The meeting also covered scheduling. Manafort would lay out Trump’s travel schedule and they discussed how to integrate the family into events. Manafort said that when WikiLeaks was in the news, it would have been covered in the gossip section of the meeting. He remembered a discussion in which people said the Wasserman-Schultz stuff was helpful because it allowed Trump to say Clinton rigged the election against Bernie Sanders.

Manafort was sure he mentioned in a Monday meeting that Stone predicted the WikiLeaks dump. The reaction was something along the lines of “that sounds like Roger” and wondering about what else was coming. Stone had been putting it out there, but Manafort did not know if the family knew Stone had predicted it in advance.

Family meetings were attended by Manafort, Gates, Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Hope Hicks, and sometimes Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

So Manafort admits being aware that Stone was wandering around claiming to know more was coming and that more was coming came up at a family meeting. These events happened on July 31, at the latest, per his testimony. But then he goes on to claim that he doesn’t remember any conversations in August with Stone about it.

Manafort did not recall any specific conversations in August 2016 with Stone about WikiLeaks.

As he did later in the interview, Manafort (who admitted ongoing ties with the campaign in his September 13 interview) suggested the good stuff happened after he left.

Manafort thought the campaign would have started to more aggressively look for more information from WikiLeaks in late August, and by that time, he was gone.

Poof! On September 27, 2018, at a time when Trump’s former campaign manager was pretending to cooperate, probably in an effort to learn what prosecutors knew and buy a pardon, Paul Manafort claimed that he did not have any memorable conversation with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks in the entire month of August.

Manafort disproves his own claims about August

Manafort then goes on to admit to at least one and probably two conversations that he remembered specifically that pertained to WikiLeaks.

Manafort was sure he had at least two conversations with Stone prior to the October 7, 2016 leak of John Podesta’s emails.

In the one conversation between Stone and Manafort, Stone told Manafort “you got fucked.” Stone’s comment related to the fact that Manafort had been fired. The conversation was either the day Manafort left the campaign or the day after.

In the other conversation, Stone told Manafort that there would be a WikiLeaks drop of emails with Podesta, and that Podesta would be “in the barrel” and Manafort would be vindicated. Manafort had a clear memory of the moment because of the language Stone used. Stone also said Manafort would be pleased with what came out. It was Manafort’s understanding that WikiLeaks had Podesta’s emails and they were going to show that [redacted] Manafort would be vindicated because he had to leave the campaign for being too pro-Russian, and this would show that Podesta also had links to Russia and would have to leave.

Manafort’s best recollection was the “barrel” conversation was before he got on the boat the week of August 28, 2016.

The first of these conversations, of course, may not have to do with Podesta. Except that — coming as it did the day on or the day after he left — it means it’s the around same day, August 15, 2016 that Stone tweeted about Hillary’s campaign manager for the first time ever.

@JohnPodesta makes @PaulManafort look like St. Thomas Aquinas Where is the @NewYorkTimes?

When Manafort got forced out of the campaign, Stone responded publicly in terms of John Podesta, whose emails he already knew WikiLeaks would be dropping.

The second conversation, which in this interview Manafort remembers clearly took place before he got on a yacht the week of August 28 (in the September 13 interview he placed it later), Stone said the same thing he said in his famous Tweet. It’ll soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel. Manafort claims to remember that “time in the barrel” language, but not Stone’s tweet. Manafort’s testimony seems to refute Stone’s cover stories about the tweet (here, Stone specifically describes it in term of just John Podesta). More importantly, Manafort’s testimony included details, a specific description of what Stone knew the Podesta emails to be released more than two months later would include, that would allow us to determine whether — as abundant evident suggests — Stone got advanced notice if not copies of materials relating to Joule Holdings in August 2016.

Except DOJ redacted that detail, which might reveal after 4 years, whether John Podesta’s suspicions that Roger Stone got his emails in advance were correct.

DOJ did so, based on the b6, b7C exemptions, to protect John Podesta’s privacy.

Investigators don’t ask how Stone proposed “to save Trump’s ass”

So Manafort, at first, obscured at least one really damning conversation in August, when Stone told him stuff that Stone would later spend years trying to cover up.

But there is almost certainly another.

Admittedly, Manafort was asked about calls in August, not calls after the DNC drop. So this email boasting of “good shit happening” would not be included.

Nor would the 68 minute phone call they had the next morning, the longest call they had that year.

Records reflect one-minute calls (suggesting no connection) between Stone and Manafort on July 28 and 29.1545 On July 29, Stone messaged Manafort about finding a time for the two of them to communicate, writing that there was “good shit happening.”1546 The back-a~d-forth between Stone and Manafort ultimately culminated in a 68-minute call on July 30, the longest call between the two of which the Committee is aware.1547

But Manafort did respond to an email offering “an idea to save Trump’s ass” by calling Stone. And that was in August.

Stone spoke by phone with Gates that night, and then called Manafort the next morning, but appeared unable to connect. 1559 Shortly after placing that call, Stone emailed Manafort with the subject line “I have an idea” and with the message text “to save Trump’s ass.”1560 Later that morning, Manafort called Stone back, and Stone tried to reach Gates again that afternoon. 1561

At trial, the prosecution included both exchanges among its examples of times Roger Stone contacted people from the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks.

Stone’s lawyers got FBI Agent Michelle Taylor to admit she had no idea what happened after even the first email.

Q. Tab 8, Exhibit 24, this is from Roger Stone to Paul Manafort, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And the date of that?

A. This is an email dated July 29th, 2016.

Q. Do you know when the Republican National Convention occurred in 2016?

A. I do. I may have the dates a little off, but it was before this, July 19th to 21st maybe.

Q. All right, and do you know what, if anything, happened as a result of this email?

A. Do I know what happened as a result of this email?

Q. Yes.

A. No.

In closing, Jonathan Kravis asserted that the context proved this was about WikiLeaks.

On August 3rd, 2016, Stone writes to Manafort: “I have an idea to save Trump’s ass. Call me please.” What is Stone’s idea to save Trump’s ass? It’s to use the information about WikiLeaks releases that he just got from Jerome Corsi. How do know that’s what he had in mind; because that’s exactly what he did. As you just saw, just days after Stone sends this email to Paul Manafort, “I have an idea to save Trump’s ass,” he goes out on TV, on conference calls and starts plotting this information that he’s getting from Corsi: WikiLeaks has more stuff coming out, it’s really bad for Hillary Clinton.

Certainly, the government seems to have confidence that both those calls did pertain to WikiLeaks.

But they didn’t ask that question in a process they had reason to believe would be reported back to Donald Trump.

Paul Manafort’s answers in this interview appear to be a cover story, admitting some damning stuff, all while claiming there weren’t communications — particularly in August — we know there were. Which says Stone and Manafort (and, with the closure of these investigations, Bill Barr) are covering up something even more damning that the specific details of upcoming email dirt on John Podesta they’re withholding to protect John Podesta.

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Catherine Herridge Attempts to Relaunch Bullshit Conspiracies Answered by Peter Strzok’s Book

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I hope to write a post arguing that Peter Strzok’s book came out at least six months too late.

But for the moment, I want to float the possibility that Nora Dannehy — John Durham’s top aide — quit last Friday at least in part because she read parts of Strzok’s book and realized there were really compelling answers to questions that have been floating unasked — and so unanswered — for years.

High-gaslighter Catherine Herridge raises questions already answered about Crossfire Hurricane opening

Yesterday, the Trump Administration’s favorite mouthpiece for Russian investigation conspiracies, Catherine Herridge, got out her high-gaslighter to relaunch complaints about facts that have been public (and explained) for years.

Citing an unnamed “former senior FBI Agent” and repeating the acronym “DIOG” over and over to give her high-gaslighting the patina of news value, she pointed to the fact that Strzok both opened and signed off on the Electronic Communication opening Crossfire Hurricane, then suggested — falsely — that because Loretta Lynch was not briefed no one at DOJ was. It’s pure gaslighting, but useful because it offers a good read on which aspects of Russian investigation conspiracies those feeding the conspiracies feel need to be shored up.

Note, even considering just the ECs opening investigations, Herridge commits the same lapses that former senior FBI Agent Kevin Brock made in this piece. I previously showed how the EC for Mike Flynn addresses the claimed problems. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Herridge’s anonymous former senior FBI Agent is making the same errors I already corrected when former senior FBI Agent Kevin Brock made them in May.

All that said, I take from Herridge’s rant that her sources want to refocus attention on how Crossfire Hurricane was opened.

Peter Strzok never got asked (publicly) about how the investigation got opened

As it happens, that’s a question that Strzok had not publicly addressed in any of his prior testimony.

Strzok was not interviewed by HPSCI.

Strzok was interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee on November 17, 2017. But they don’t appear to have asked Strzok about the investigation itself or much beyond the Steele dossier; all six references to his transcript describe how the FBI vetted the Steele dossier.

Deputy Assistant Director Pete Strzok, at that point the lead for FBI’ s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, told the Committee that his team became aware of the Steele information in September 2016. He said, “We were so compartmented in what we were doing, [the Steele reporting] kind of bounced around a little bit,” also, in part, because [redacted] and Steele did not normally report on counterintelligence matters. 5952 Strzok said that the information was “certainly very much in line with things we were looking at” and “added to the body of knowledge of what we were doing.”5953

Peter Strzok explained that generally the procedure for a “human validation review” is for FBI’ s Directorate of Intelligence to analyze an asset’s entire case file, looking at the reporting history, the circumstances of recruitment, their motivation, and their compensation history.6005 Strzok recalled that the result was “good to continue; that there were not significant concerns, certainly nothing that would indicate that he was compromised or feeding us disinformation or he was a bad asset.”6006 However, Strzok also said that after learning that reporters and Congress had Steele’s information:

[FBI] started looking into why he was assembling [the dossier], who his clients were, what the basis of their interest was, and how they might have used it, and who would know, it was apparent to us that this was not a piece of information simply provided to the FBI in the classic sense of a kind of a confidential source reporting relationship, but that it was all over the place. 6007

[snip]

Strzok said that, starting in September 2016, “there were people, agents and analysts, whose job specifically it was to figure this out and to do that with a sense of urgency.”6021

Strzok was also interviewed in both a closed hearing and an open hearing in the joint House Judiciary and House Oversight investigations into whatever Mark Meadows wanted investigated. The closed hearing addressed how the investigation got opened, but an FBI minder was there to limit how he answered those questions, citing the Mueller investigation. And even there, the questions largely focused on whether Strzok’s political bias drove the opening of the investigation.

Mr. Swalwell. Let me put it this way, Mr. Strzok: Is it fair to say that, aside from the opinions that you expressed to Ms. Page about Mr. Trump, there was a whole mountain of evidence independent of anything you had done that related to actions that were concerning about what the Russians and the Trump campaign were doing?

Ms. Besse. So, Congressman, that may go into sort of the — that will — for Mr. Strzok to answer that question, that goes into the special counsel’s investigation, so I don’t think he can answer that question.

Even more of the questions focused on the decision to reopen the Clinton investigation days before the election.

To the extent that the open hearing, which was a predictable circus, addressed the opening of Crossfire Hurricane at all (again, there was more focus on Clinton), it involved Republicans trying to invent feverish meaning in Strzok’s texts, not worthwhile oversight questions about the bureaucratic details surrounding the opening.

The DOJ IG Report backs the Full Investigation predication but doesn’t explain individual predication

The DOJ IG Report on Carter Page does address how the investigation got opened. It includes a long narrative about the unanimity about the necessity of investigating the Australian tip (though in this section, it does not cite Strzok).

From July 28 to July 31, officials at FBI Headquarters discussed the FFG information and whether it warranted opening a counterintelligence investigation. The Assistant Director (AD) for CD, E.W. “Bill” Priestap, was a central figure in these discussions. According to Priestap, he discussed the matter with then Section Chief of CD’s Counterespionage Section Peter Strzok, as well as the Section Chief of CD’s Counterintelligence Analysis Section I (Intel Section Chief); and with representatives of the FBI’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC), including Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson and a unit chief (OGC Unit Chief) in OGC’s National Security and Cyber Law Branch (NSCLB). Priestap told us that he also discussed the matter with either then Deputy Director (DD) Andrew McCabe or then Executive Assistant Director (EAD) Michael Steinbach, but did not recall discussing the matter with then Director James Comey told the OIG that he did not recall being briefed on the FFG information until after the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened, and that he was not involved in the decision to open the case. McCabe said that although he did not specifically recall meeting with Comey immediately after the FFG information was received, it was “the kind of thing that would have been brought to Director Comey’s attention immediately.” McCabe’s contemporaneous notes reflect that the FFG information, Carter Page, and Manafort, were discussed on July 29, after a regularly scheduled morning meeting of senior FBI leadership with the Director. Although McCabe told us he did not have an independent recollection of this discussion, he told us that, based upon his notes, this discussion likely included the Director. McCabe’s notes reflect only the topic of the discussion and not the substance of what was discussed. McCabe told us that he recalled discussing the FFG information with Priestap, Strzok, then Special Counsel to the Deputy Director Lisa Page, and Comey, sometime before Crossfire Hurricane was opened, and he agreed with opening a counterintelligence investigation based on the FFG information. He told us the decision to open the case was unanimous.

McCabe said the FBI viewed the FFG information in the context of Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections in the years and months prior, as well as the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the DNC hack by a Russian Intelligence Service (RIS). He also said that when the FBI received the FFG information it was a “tipping point” in terms of opening a counterintelligence investigation regarding Russia’s attempts to influence and interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections because not only was there information that Russia was targeting U.S. political institutions, but now the FBI had received an allegation from a trusted partner that there had been some sort of contact between the Russians and the Trump campaign. McCabe said that he did not recall any discussion about whether the FFG information constituted sufficient predication for opening a Full Investigation, as opposed to a Preliminary Investigation, but said that his belief at the time, based on his experience, was that the FFG information was adequate predication. 167

According to Priestap, he authorized opening the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, based upon these discussions. He told us that the FFG information was provided by a trusted source-the FFG–and he therefore felt it “wise to open an investigation to look into” whether someone associated with the Trump campaign may have accepted the reported offer from the Russians. Priestap also told us that the combination of the FFG information and the FBI’s ongoing cyber intrusion investigation of the DNC hacks created a counterintelligence concern that the FBI was “obligated” to investigate. Priestap said that he did not recall any disagreement about the decision to open Crossfire Hurricane, and told us that he was not pressured to open the case.

It includes a discussion explaining why FBI decided against defensive briefings — a key complaint from Republicans. Here’s the explanation Bill Priestap gave.

While the Counterintelligence Division does regularly provide defensive briefings to U.S. government officials or possible soon to be officials, in my experience, we do this when there is no indication, whatsoever, that the person to whom we would brief could be working with the relevant foreign adversary. In other words, we provide defensive briefings when we obtain information indicating a foreign adversary is trying or will try to influence a specific U.S. person, and when there is no indication that the specific U.S. person could be working with the adversary. In regard to the information the [FFG] provided us, we had no indication as to which person in the Trump campaign allegedly received the offer from the Russians. There was no specific U.S. person identified. We also had no indication, whatsoever, that the person affiliated with the Trump campaign had rejected the alleged offer from the Russians. In fact, the information we received indicated that Papadopoulos told the [FFG] he felt confident Mr. Trump would win the election, and Papadopoulos commented that the Clintons had a lot of baggage and that the Trump team had plenty of material to use in its campaign. While Papadopoulos didn’t say where the Trump team had received the “material,” one could reasonably infer that some of the material might have come from the Russians. Had we provided a defensive briefing to someone on the Trump campaign, we would have alerted the campaign to what we were looking into, and, if someone on the campaign was engaged with the Russians, he/she would very likely change his/her tactics and/or otherwise seek to cover-up his/her activities, thereby preventing us from finding the truth. On the other hand, if no one on the Trump campaign was working with the Russians, an investigation could prove that. Because the possibility existed that someone on the Trump campaign could have taken the Russians up on their offer, I thought it wise to open an investigation to look into the situation.

It even explained how, by its read, the investigation met the terms of the DIOG for a Full Investigation.

Under Section 11.B.3 of the AG Guidelines and Section 7 of the DIOG, the FBI may open a Full Investigation if there is an “articulable factual basis” that reasonably indicates one of the following circumstances exists:

  • An activity constituting a federal crime or a threat to the national security has or may have occurred, is or may be occurring, or will or may occur and the investigation may obtain information relating to the activity or the involvement or role of an individual, group, or organization in such activity;
  • An individual, group, organization, entity, information, property, or activity is or may be a target of attack, victimization, acquisition, infiltration, or recruitment in connection with criminal activity in violation of federal law or a threat to the national security and the investigation may obtain information that would help to protect against such activity or threat; or
  • The investigation may obtain foreign intelligence that is responsive to a requirement that the FBI collect positive foreign intelligence-i.e., information relating to the capabilities, intentions, or activities of foreign governments or elements thereof, foreign organizations or foreign persons, or international terrorists.

The DIOG provides examples of information that is sufficient to initiate a Full Investigation, including corroborated information from an intelligence agency stating that an individual is a member of a terrorist group, or a threat to a specific individual or group made on a blog combined with additional information connecting the blogger to a known terrorist group. 45 A Full Investigation may be opened if there is an “articulable factual basis” of possible criminal or national threat activity. When opening a Full Investigation, an FBI employee must certify that an authorized purpose and adequate predication exist; that the investigation is not based solely on the exercise of First Amendment rights or certain characteristics of the subject, such as race, religion, national origin, or ethnicity; and that the investigation is an appropriate use of personnel and financial resources. The factual predication must be documented in an electronic communication (EC) or other form, and the case initiation must be approved by the relevant FBI personnel, which, in most instances, can be a Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) in a field office or at Headquarters. As described in more detail below, if an investigation is designated as a Sensitive Investigative Matter, that designation must appear in the caption or heading of the opening EC, and special approval requirements apply.

Importantly, per Michael Horowitz’s own description of the dispute, this is the topic about which John Durham disagreed. Durham reportedly believed it should have been opened as a Preliminary Investigation — but that would not have changed the investigative techniques available (and there was already a Full Investigation into Carter Page and Paul Manafort).

After first making the same error that Durham did in the Kevin Clinesmith, eleven days after publishing the report, DOJ IG corrected it to note the full implication of Crossfire Hurricane being opened as a counterintelligence investigation, implicating both FARA and 18 USC 951 Foreign Agent charges.

Crossfire Hurricane was opened by CD and was assigned a case number used by the FBI for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), 22 U.S.C. § 611, et seq., and 18 U.S.C. § 951 (Agents of Foreign Governments). 170 As described in Chapter Two, the AG Guidelines recognize that activities subject to investigation as “threats to the national security” may also involve violations or potential violations of federal criminal laws, or may serve important purposes outside the ambit of normal criminal investigation and prosecution by informing national security decisions. Given such potential overlap in subject matter, neither the AG Guidelines nor the DIOG require the FBI to differently label its activities as criminal investigations, national security investigations, or foreign intelligence collections. Rather, the AG Guidelines state that, where an authorized purpose exists, all of the FBI’s legal authorities are available for deployment in all cases to which they apply.

And it provided this short description of why Strzok opened the investigation.

After Priestap authorized the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, Strzok, with input from the OGC Unit Chief, drafted and approved the opening EC. 175 Strzok told us that the case agent normally drafts the opening EC for an investigation, but that Strzok did so for Crossfire Hurricane because a case agent was not yet assigned and there was an immediate need to travel to the European city to interview the FFG officials who had met with Papadopoulos.

Finally, the IG Report provides a description of how the FBI came to open investigations against Trump’s four flunkies, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and — after a few days — Mike Flynn (though in the process, repeats but did not correct the error of calling this a FARA case).

Strzok, the Intel Section Chief, the Supervisory Intelligence Analyst (Supervisory Intel Analyst), and Case Agent 2 told the OIG that, based on this information, the initial investigative objective of Crossfire Hurricane was to determine which individuals associated with the Trump campaign may have been in a position to have received the alleged offer of assistance from Russia.

After conducting preliminary open source and FBI database inquiries, intelligence analysts on the Crossfire Hurricane team identified three individuals–Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn–associated with the Trump campaign with either ties to Russia or a history of travel to Russia. On August 10, 2016, the team opened separate counterintelligence FARA cases on Carter Page, Manafort, and Papadopoulos, under code names assigned by the FBI. On August 16, 2016, a counterintelligence FARA case was opened on Flynn under a code name assigned by the FBI. The opening ECs for all four investigations were drafted by either of the two Special Agents assigned to serve as the Case Agents for the investigation (Case Agent 1 or Case Agent 2) and were approved by Strzok, as required by the DIOG. 178 Each case was designated a SIM because the individual subjects were believed to be “prominent in a domestic political campaign. “179

Obviously, the extended account of how the umbrella investigation and individual targeted ones got opened accounts for Strzok’s testimony, but usually relies on someone else where available. That may be because Horowitz walked into this report with a key goal of assessing whether Strzok took any step arising from political bias, and while he concluded that Strzok could not have taken any act based on bias, he ultimately did not conclude one way or another whether he believed Strzok let his hatred for Trump bias his decisions.

But at first, the account made errors about what FBI was really investigating. And even in the longer discussions about how FBI came to predicate the four individual investigations (which follow the cited passage), it doesn’t really explain how FBI decided to go from the umbrella investigation to individualized targets.

Strzok, UNSUB, and his packed bags

So Strzok’s book, as delayed as I think the publication of it is, is in substantial part the first time he gets to explain these early activities.

In a long discussion about how the case got opened, Strzok talks about the difficulties of a counterintelligence investigation, particularly one where you don’t know whom your subject is, as was the case here.

Another reason for secrecy in the FBI’s counterintelligence work is the fundamentally clandestine nature of what it is investigating. Like my work on the illegals in Boston, counterintelligence work frequently has nothing to do with criminal behavior. An espionage investigation, as the Bureau defines it, involves an alleged violation of law. But pure counterintelligence work is often removed from proving that a crime took place and identifying the perpetrator. It’s gaining an understanding of what a foreign intelligence service is doing, who it targets, the methods it uses, and what the national security implications are.

Making those cases even more complicated, agents often don’t even know the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. They have a term for that: an unknown subject, or UNSUB, which they use when an activity is known but the specific person conducting that activity is not — for instance, when they are aware that Russia is working to undermine our electoral system in concert with a presidential campaign but don’t know exactly who at that campaign Russia might be coordinating with or how many people might be involved.

To understand the challenges of an UNSUB case, consider the following three hypothetical scenarios. In one, a Russian source tells his American handler that, while out drinking at an SVR reunion, he learned that a colleague had just been promoted after a breakthrough recruitment of an American intelligence officer in Bangkok. We don’t know the identity of the recruited American — he or she is an UNSUB. A second scenario: a man and a woman out for a morning run in Washington see a figure toss a package over the fence of the Russian embassy and speed off in a four-door maroon sedan. An UNSUB.

Or consider this third scenario: a young foreign policy adviser to an American presidential campaign boasts to one of our allies that the Russians have offered to help his candidate by releasing damaging information about that candidate’s chief political rival. Who actually received the offer of assistance from the Russians? An UNSUB.

The typical approach to investigating UNSUB cases is to open a case into the broad allegation, an umbrella investigation that encompasses everything the FBI knows. The key to UNSUB investigations is to first build a reliable matrix of every element known about the allegation and then identify the universe of individuals who could fit that matrix. That may sound cut-and-dried, but make no mistake: while the methodology is straightforward, it’s rarely easy to identify the UNSUB.

[snip]

The FFG information about Papadopoulos presented us with a text- book UNSUB case. Who received the alleged offer of assistance from the Russians? Was it Papadopoulos? Perhaps, but not necessarily. We didn’t know about his contacts with Mifsud at the time — all we knew was that he had told the allied government that the Russians had dirt on Clinton and Obama and that they wanted to release it in a way that would help Trump.

So how did we determine who else needed to go into our matrix? And what did we know about the various sources of the information? Papadopoulos had allegedly stated it, but it was relayed by a third party. What did we know about both of them: their motivations, for instance, or the quality of their memories? What were the other ways we could determine whether the allegation was true?

And if it was true, how did we get to the bottom of it?

Having laid out the challenge that lay behind the four predications, Strzok then described the circumstances of the trip (with a big gaping hole in the discussion of meeting with the Australians).

He describes how he went home over the weekend, not knowing whether they would leave immediately or after the weekend. That’s why, he explained, he wrote the EC himself, specifically to have one in place before they flew to London.

I quickly briefed him on the facts and asked him to get a bag ready to go to Europe to do some interviews.

When are we leaving? he asked me.

No idea, I told him. Probably not until Monday, but I want to be ready to go tomorrow.

How long are we going for? he asked.

I don’t know, I admitted. A few days at most. I wasn’t sure if we would get to yes with our counterparts, but our sitting there in Europe would make it harder for them to say no.

I had work to do before we could depart. When I left the office on Friday, I grabbed my assigned take-home laptop, configured to operate at a classified level on our secure network.

[snip]

Sitting in my home office, I opened the work laptop and powered it up. The laptops were balky and wildly overpriced, requiring an arcane multi-step process to connect. They constantly dropped their secure connections. Throughout the D.C. suburbs, FBI agents flew into rages when the laptops quit cold while they were trying to work at home. Chinese or Russian intelligence would have been hard-pressed to develop a more infuriating product. Nevertheless, they let you work away from the office.

After logging in, I pulled up a browser and launched Sentinel, our electronic case file system. Selecting the macro for opening an investigation, I filled in the various fields until I reached the blank box for the case name.

They didn’t leave over the weekend, but they did leave on Monday. When they came back, having heard Alexander Downer’s side of the story (probably along with his aide, with whom Papadopoulos met and drank more with on multiple occasions, but that’s not in the book), it seemed a more credible tip.

And in the interim, analysts had found four possible candidates to be the UNSUB.

I was surprised by the amount of information the analysts had already found. Usually, because initial briefings take place at the very beginning of an investigation, they are short on facts and long on conjecture about all the various avenues we might pursue for information. In this case there were already a lot of facts, and several individuals—not just one—had already cropped up in other cases, in other intelligence collection, in other surveillance activity.
Although I was just hours back from Europe, what I saw was deeply dis- concerting. Though we were in the earliest stages of the investigation, our first examination of intelligence had revealed a wide breadth and volume of connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. It was as if we had gone to search for a few rocks only to find ourselves in a field of boulders.

Within a week the team had highlighted several people who stood out as potentially matching the UNSUB who had received the Russian offer of assistance. As we developed information, each person went into the UNSUB matrix, with tick marks next to the matching descriptors.

All this description is surely not going to satisfy Republicans. Nor was it under oath or to law enforcement officers, as Strzok’s other testimony was.

But it’s a compelling description.

It also adds perspective onto the treatment of Mike Flynn. Until they learned about Papadopoulos’ ties with Joseph Mifsud, they still had no clues about who got the tip. Mike Flynn had been eliminated for lack of evidence — but then he picked up a phone and provided the FBI a whole lot of evidence that he could be the guy.

And unless you believe that receiving a credible tip from a close ally that someone is tampering in an election still three months away doesn’t merit urgency, then the other steps all make sense.

I have no idea if that’s why Catherine Herridge got sent to whip out her high-gaslight again. I have no idea whether Nora Dannehy read these excerpts, and in the process realized both the significance of the error in treating this as a FARA investigation, but also how that changes predication into individual subjects.

But there have long been answers to some of the most basic questions that Republicans have returned to over and over again. It’s just that few of the interim investigations ever asked to get those answers. And the one that did — the DOJ IG Report — never even understood the crimes investigated until after the report got published.

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