In a piece describing that Jack Smith has substantially completed his investigation into stolen documents, WSJ reported Trump’s associates believed that the former President would be indicted and were already making plans to profit off him being charged with one or more federal crimes.

Some of Trump’s close associates are bracing for his indictment and anticipate being able to fundraise off a prosecution, people in the former president’s circle said, as clashes within the Trump legal team have led to the departure of a key lawyer.

Hours after WSJ reported that Trump was going to try to profit off being a criminal suspect, he posted a letter, with just one substantive paragraph, on Truth Social. Aside from the letterhead and signatures from Jim Trusty and John Rowley, it was indistinguishable from Trump’s other grievance-farming on his failing social media platform, claiming that,

Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter, or the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly. No President of the United States has ever, in the history of the country, been baselessly investigated in such an outrageous and unlawful fashion.

Then it asked for a meeting with the recused Attorney General to discuss the “ongoing injustice being perpetrated by your Special Counsel.”

It copied unnamed members of Congress, the last thing a letter seriously asking for dialogue with the Attorney General would do.

It’s a campaign stunt, not a letter designed to request a meeting about potential upcoming indictment(s). In fact, just days ago, Tim Parlatore explained that he quit because Boris Epshteyn would not permit him to engage in that kind of discussion professionally.

Nevertheless, multiple news outlets decided to treat this letter as a serious bid for discussion with the recused Attorney General. In ABC’s case, it falsely claimed that the letter “present[ed] arguments” that Trump should not be charged in the stolen documents case, citing “sources familiar with the matter.”

The letter, though thin on details, presents arguments that Trump should not be charged in the investigation related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

In other words, rather than convey to ABC’s readers what the document actually says — which is nothing more than a claim Trump is being treated unfairly, a claim that is easy to debunk — its reporters called up Trump’s lawyers and transcribed what they claimed the letter said, or perhaps simply parroted their cover for releasing a letter better designed to raise money and sow violence, rather than just reporting what the letter actually did say.

Because “sources familiar” told them so, ABC reported the letter said something it did not. 2 + 2 = 5.

Jim Trusty used to work at DOJ. He knows how to write such a letter. He did not. But ABC nevertheless claimed that he and John Rowley did.

2 + 2 = 5.

As the two journalists described how the letter was something that it wasn’t on Twitter, one of them — Alex Mallin — likened it to Trump’s purported request to speak with Garland last August, just before Garland publicly spoke about the search on Trump’s beach resort.

He didn’t mention that Trump’s comment came after Trump’s false claims of victimhood led a Trump supporter and January 6 participant to attempt to breach the Cincinnati FBI office. He didn’t mention that that earlier outreach sure looked like an implicit threat.

I really get the inclination to treat Trump’s response to being caught stealing classified documents as if it is a normal legal proceeding. I get the inclination to pretend everything is normal.

But that doesn’t justify describing the plain content of the letter as something it’s not.

The letter is a fundraising vehicle. It’s an attempt to discredit rule of law. It’s probably an attempt to sow violence again. Claiming it is something else because sources you’ve granted anonymity said it is is not journalism.

Back in November, Devlin Barrett (along with WaPo’s Trump-whisperer, Josh Dawsey) published a column claiming investigators had found nothing to suggest that Trump was trying to monetize the documents he stole.

That review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump’s possession, these people said. FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property, these people said.

I mocked Devlin’s credulity at the time. His story was utterly inconsistent with — and made no mention of — several details we (or I) already knew about the documents. It also showed no consideration of the value that the already-described documents would have for Trump’s business partners, the Saudis.

As Devlin Barrett’s sources would have it, a man whose business ties to the Saudis include a $2 billion investment in his son-in-law, a golf partnership of undisclosed value, and a new hotel development in Oman would have no business interest in stealing highly sensitive documents describing Iran’s missile systems.

The story was transparently an attempt by someone to prematurely cement an investigative conclusion, almost a month before the stay on DOJ’s access to the unclassified documents seized last August was lifted. Just two days later, Trump announced his bid for another Presidential term, and two days after that, Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, someone who had no partisan stake in issuing premature exoneration for Trump.

Yesterday, as the NYT published a second substantive story about Jack Smith’s subpoena for information about Trump’s business deals, Devlin published a perfunctory one. Even before he describes the subpoena, Devlin reports a single source concluding, as his sources concluded last November, “nothing to see here.”

But the inquiry produced little that wasn’t already publicly known, this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation.

Prosecutors sought information on any real estate and development deals reached in China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, the person said.

The Trump Organization’s public website lists only one deal in that time frame in one of those countries, Oman, and that deal was done after Trump left the White House.

Devlin’s story notes his earlier report, but not how wildly it conflicted with even the events known at the time, emphasizing China not Iran.

The Washington Post reported last year that while the classified documents included sensitive information about U.S. intelligence-gathering aimed at China, among other subjects, investigators did not see an obvious financial motive in the type of documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

NYT’s more substantive story on this inquiry expresses far less certainty than Devlin’s single attributed source about what the subpoena obtained, much less what Smith already had to support this line of inquiry.

The Trump Organization swore off any foreign deals while he was in the White House, and the only such deal Mr. Trump is known to have made since then was with a Saudi-based real estate company to license its name to a housing, hotel and golf complex that will be built in Oman. He struck that deal last fall just before announcing his third presidential campaign.

The push by Mr. Smith’s prosecutors to gain insight into the former president’s foreign business was part of a subpoena — previously reported by The New York Times — that was sent to the Trump Organization and sought records related to Mr. Trump’s dealings with a Saudi-backed golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of his golf clubs. (Mr. Trump’s arrangement with LIV Golf was reached well after he removed documents from the White House.)

Collectively, the subpoena’s demand for records related to the golf venture and other foreign ventures since 2017 suggests that Mr. Smith is exploring whether there is any connection between Mr. Trump’s deal-making abroad and the classified documents he took with him when he left office.

It is unclear what material the Trump Organization has turned over in response to the subpoena or whether Mr. Smith has obtained any separate evidence supporting that theory.

Neither story describes whether the subpoena listed which crimes are under investigation. On that topic, the NYT, as part of boilerplate, repeats the same thing I do when I make boilerplate recitations of the crimes under investigation: 18 USC 793(e), refusing to return classified documents, and 18 USC 1519, obstruction of the efforts to get those classified documents back.

While establishing a motive for why Mr. Trump kept hold of certain documents could be helpful to Mr. Smith, it would not necessarily be required in proving that Mr. Trump willfully maintained possession of national defense secrets or that he obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to get the materials back. Those two potential crimes have long been at the heart of the government’s documents investigation.

Devlin uses similar boilerplate.

The Mar-a-Lago investigation has centered on two potential crimes — possible obstruction for not complying with the subpoena, and possible mishandling of national security secrets for keeping classified documents in an unauthorized location

We are — all of us, myself included — forgetting the third statute included on the search warrant that once seemed a mere backstop to the others, 18 USC 2071, intentionally removing government documents. That statute, which once upon a time might have been used as the crime to which Trump could plead down in a plea agreement, carries only a three year max sentence. But along with that sentence, it disqualifies someone convicted of it from holding public office, something that would be challenged constitutionally following any jury verdict but which would be waived under any plea deal.

Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.

I’ve always believed (as have experts I trust) that this would be a particularly hard crime with which to charge a former President, largely because a President has legal access to these documents until noon on January 20. But asking about business deals Trump might have been pursuing while in the presidency, all the way back to 2017, might provide evidence of intent that predates the actual removal of the documents.

And learning about Trump’s business deals with, especially, the Saudis, might develop evidence for 18 USC 794, the far more serious crime of providing intelligence to help a foreign government.

Let me caution, I still think it exceedingly unlikely that Smith is pursuing 794 charges against Trump for stealing documents and then selling them to the Saudis, to be paid in the form of golf tournaments and branding deals in Oman. Please don’t take from my mention of this that I’m predicting Smith is going to Go There. Rather, I suspect Smith is thinking of a package of potential charges that would give Trump an option to plead down quietly, one sufficiently ugly to make Republican politicians not want to join him in his fight. I’m merely stating that taking documents and refusing to give them back — which is the currently known lead charge in this investigation– is a dramatically different fact set than taking them and sharing them with a foreign government that pays you a lot of money, especially one that subsequently engaged in multiple actions — keeping gas prices high during the election and chumming up to China — that seem to have surprised the US intelligence community, as if some intelligence visibility had gone dark before those happened.

But let me go back to Devlin’s source’s certainty that there’s nothing to see there. It’s an odd claim to make given the number of other gaps in understanding that seem to exist in the understanding of those not directly participating in the investigation.

The story where NYT first broke the Trump business deal subpoena described at least five different subpoenas to Trump Org (though way down at the bottom of the story, it describes “numerous” subpoenas):

1. The subpoena including the golf deal and — we now learn — all business deals Trump has chased since 2017
2. A subpoena to Trump Organization seeking additional surveillance footage
3. A subpoena to “the software company that handles all of the surveillance footage for the Trump Organization, including at Mar-a-Lago”
4. First, a subpoena to Matthew Calamari, Jr.
5. Then, a subpoena to Matthew Calamari, Sr.

Matthew Sr., at least, would have visibility on business deals with the Saudis and others. But all the reports on the two interviews with the Calamaris suggest they were focused, instead, on why Walt Nauta contacted them after DOJ first subpoenaed surveillance footage.

To resolve the issue about the gaps in the surveillance footage, the special counsel last week subpoenaed Matthew Calamari Sr, the Trump Organization’s security chief who became its chief operating officer, and his son Matthew Calamari Jr, the director of corporate security.

Both Calamaris testified to the federal grand jury in Washington on Thursday, and were questioned in part on a text message that Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, had sent them around the time that the justice department last year asked for the surveillance footage, one of the people said.

The text message is understood to involve Nauta asking Matthew Calamari Sr to call him back about the justice department’s request, one of the people said – initially a point of confusion for the justice department, which appears to have thought the text was to Calamari Jr.

Most reporters assume the gaps DOJ is trying to close pertain to Nauta’s own actions in advance of Evan Corcoran’s search of the storage closet. I’m not sure. That’s because DOJ got sufficient visibility from what they did receive to list the storage closet, Trump’s office, and Trump’s residence in the search warrant supporting the August search of Mar-a-Lago. They got sufficient visibility to lead Nauta to revise his testimony afterwards. That’s why I emphasized in my last post on this that DOJ asked for five months of surveillance video, predating the day, by eight days, that Trump sent boxes to NARA in January 2022. The gaps in question might have shown other people, not Nauta, entering the storage closet, or have shown Nauta entering at times entirely removed from the date of the subpoena. If — strictly hypothetically — those gaps coincided with business meetings with foreigners at Mar-a-Lago, it would be a flashing siren saying, “look here for the good stuff.” It might also explain why Nauta immediately reached out to Calamari about the video, if he knew some of that video would show things that were far more damning than the mere attempt to obstruct a subpoena response.

If Nauta had involvement in earlier sketchy activities, predating the subpoena, it might explain why — as Hugo Lowell reported — Nauta fairly obviously attempted to monitor Evan Corcoran’s own search.

The notes described how Corcoran told Nauta about the subpoena before he started looking for classified documents because Corcoran needed him to unlock the storage room – which prosecutors have taken as a sign that Nauta was closely involved at essentially every step of the search.

Corcoran then described how Nauta had offered to help him go through the boxes, which he declined and told Nauta he should stay outside. But going through around 60 boxes in the storage room took longer than expected, and the search ended up lasting several days.

The notes also suggested to prosecutors that there were times when the storage room might have been left unattended while the search for classified documents was ongoing, one of the people said, such as when Corcoran needed to take a break and walked out to the pool area nearby.

One more thing that might explain prosecutors’ concerns about gaps in the surveillance footage is if they coincided with the times when Corcoran had left the room unattended.

Yet every time someone writes about Nauta, they include language that might come from the vicinity of Stanley Woodward, the lawyer that Nauta shares with Kash Patel (as well as Peter Navarro and convicted seditionist Kelly Meggs and his wife), suggesting that it was a mistake not to immunize Nauta, as DOJ did with Kash, because it has prevented them from substantiating an obstruction case. The version of this in the NYT — which reflects the kind of internal DOJ dissent that WaPo has reported regarding a push to adopt a more cooperative stance in advance of the search — is especially unpersuasive.

Last fall, prosecutors faced a critical decision after investigators felt Mr. Nauta had misled them. To gain Mr. Nauta’s cooperation, prosecutors could have used a carrot and negotiated with his lawyers, explaining that Mr. Nauta would face no legal consequences as long as he gave a thorough version of what had gone on behind closed doors at the property.

Or the prosecutors could have used a stick and wielded the specter of criminal charges to push — or even frighten — Mr. Nauta into telling them what they wanted to know.

The prosecutors went with the stick, telling Mr. Nauta’s lawyers that he was under investigation and they were considering charging him with a crime.

The move backfired, as Mr. Nauta’s lawyers more or less cut off communication with the government. The decision to take an aggressive posture toward Mr. Nauta prompted internal concerns within the Justice Department. Some investigators believed that top prosecutors, including Jay Bratt, the head of the counterespionage section of the national security division at the Justice Department, had mishandled Mr. Nauta and cut off a chance to win his voluntary cooperation.

More than six months later, prosecutors have still not charged Mr. Nauta or reached out to him to renew their conversation. Having gotten little from him as a witness, they are still seeking information from other witnesses about the movement of the boxes.

If being misled by Nauta led prosecutors to look more closely at the larger timeline of the missing surveillance video, only to find suspect ties to the Saudis, it was in no way a mistake. On the contrary, Woodward’s own decisions would have directly led to intensified scrutiny  of his client (as his decisions similarly are, in the effort to get Navarro to turn over Presidential Records Act documents).

And there’s something that is routinely missed in all of this coverage. The Guardian’s Lowell rightly suggests that because Trump didn’t directly tell Corcoran to search only the storage closet, it might present challenges to an obstruction case. But Trump’s choice to use Nauta as an obvious gatekeeper makes it far easier to charge Nauta with 18 USC 793(g), conspiring to hoard classified documents. So the observation that DOJ hasn’t chosen to charge Nauta with just false statements in the interim six months should in no way be taken as solace by Nauta, because what has happened in the interim puts him at risk of charges that carry a ten year sentence for each document in question rather than the few months he might face for lying to the FBI.

Nauta’s not the only one who might insulate Trump from obstruction charges but expose all of them to greater Espionage Act danger.

Witness the evolution of how Tim Parlatore described Boris Epshteyn’s role in the investigation. In March, Parlatore described that, until such time as Boris started being treated as a target, his access to people “inside the palace gates” was useful.

Mr. Epshteyn’s legal role with Mr. Trump, while less often focused on gritty legal details, has been to try to serve as a gatekeeper between the lawyers on the front lines and the former president, who is said to sometimes roll his eyes at the frequency of Mr. Epshteyn’s calls but picks up the phone.

“Boris has access to information and a network that is useful to us,” said one of the team’s lawyers, Timothy Parlatore, whom Mr. Epshteyn hired. “It’s good to have someone who’s a lawyer who is also inside the palace gates.”

Mr. Parlatore suggested that he was not worried that Mr. Epshteyn, like a substantial number of other Trump lawyers, had become at least tangentially embroiled in some of the same investigations on which he was helping to defend Mr. Trump.

“Absent any solid indication that Boris is a target here, I don’t think it affects us,” Mr. Parlatore said.

But in the wake of Parlatore’s departure from Trump’s legal team a week ago, he went on Paula Reid’s show (on whose show he had earlier told an utterly ridiculous story about Trump using classified folders to block a light by the side of his bed) and lambasted Boris as an impediment to communication between Trump and his lawyers.

Boris Epshteyn [] had really done everything he could to try to block us [the lawyers], to prevent us from doing what we could to defend the President, and ultimately it got to a point where — it’s difficult enough fighting against DOJ and, in this case, Special Counsel, but when you also have people within the tent that are also trying to undermine you, block you, and really make it so that I can’t do what I know that I know that I need to do as a lawyer, and when I’m getting in the fights like that, that’s detracting from what is necessary to defend the client and ultimately was not in the client’s best interest, so I made the decision to withdraw.

[snip]

He served as kind of a filter to prevent us from getting information to the client and getting information from the client. In my opinion, he was not very honest with us or with the client on certain things. There were certain things — like the searches that he had attempted to interfere with, and then more recently, as we’re coming down to the end of this investigation where Jack Smith and ultimately Merrick Garland is going to make a decision as to what to do – as we put together our defense strategy to help educate Merrick Garland as to how best to handle this matter, he was preventing us from engaging in that strategy. [my emphasis]

At one level, this publicity stunt appears to be an attempt to persuade Trump that he should fire Boris. WaPo’s coverage of this clash describes that Parlatore’s public appearance followed what seems to have been a “he goes or we go” meeting with Trump a week ago (though Jim Trusty, at least thus far, has not chosen to follow Parlatore).

Before this weekend’s public feud, members of Trump’s legal team tried to settle the conflict quietly. Parlatore and another lawyer for Trump, James Trusty, recently traveled to Florida to advise Trump that he needed to remove Epshteyn from the document case and the 2020 election case, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private deliberations. Smith, the special counsel, is tasked with investigating both cases.

[snip]

Trump did not appear to take Parlatore and Trusty’s advice, as Epshteyn remained in his role as a key legal adviser and coordinator to Trump.

Parlatore has said he’d be willing to return if Boris were gone.

At another level, Parlatore seems to be getting out while the getting is good, shortly before any charges are filed, so he’s not stuck defending an uncooperative client who won’t pay his bills. (Update: WSJ reports that the investigation is all but done and some associates are prepping for Trump to be charged.) The publicity stunt gives him the first say on who is responsible for what comes next, too. If Trump gets charged, Tim Parlatore didn’t fuck up, Boris did.

The publicity stunt, with its claim that Boris lied to both him and Trump, may also be an attempt to insulate Trump. As such it may be little different than the ridiculous folder-on-the-bedside-light story.

But Parlatore’s response to Reid’s follow-up on Parlatore’s claim that Boris interfered with searches may be more than that.

Reid: What searches are those?

Parlatore: This is the searches at Bedminster, um, initially. There was a lot of pushback from him where he didn’t want us doing the search and we had to, eventually, overcome him.

Reid: Why didn’t he want you to do the search?

Parlatore: I don’t know.

Trump’s lawyer do not know — never have! — why Boris was so reluctant to allow a search of the property to which Trump flew to host a Saudi golf tournament directly after failing to comply with a subpoena.

Immediately after that exchange, Reid invited Parlatore to clarify that when he testified to the grand jury in December, he did so in lieu of any custodian of records for the searches done on Mar-a-Lago. Parlatore clarified he did not testify in response to a subpoena and on several occasions, when he offered to come back and clarify, prosecutors declined his generous offer.

Reid then gave him an opportunity to explain why the claims Parlatore made to Congress (which conflicted with known facts and which Epshteyn declined to sign) didn’t fundamentally conflict with the insta-declassification story Boris has told. Parlatore left me convinced that everyone is lying, meaning by choosing to retain Boris over Parlatore, Trump is just picking which lie he finds more convenient.

Nevertheless, Parlatore got his story out. He got to describe how the story he planned to tell Merrick Garland doesn’t conflict with the currently operative declassification story and more importantly, that if his December testimony to the grand jury was incomplete in any way, it’s all Boris’ fault.

Parlatore said, midway between his testimony and now, that if Boris started looking like a target, he might be in trouble. But in the wake of a two day interview between Boris and Smith’s attorneys and in the wake of subpoenas that raise increased questions about why Boris may have tried to prevent any search of the property at which Trump hosted the Saudis immediately after Trump blew off a subpoena, Parlatore took to the TV and offered his defense. If Jack Smith finds the Bedminster obstruction interesting enough, Parlatore may well have earned himself a subpoena.

The belated, convenient description of Boris as a filter rather than worthwhile access “inside the palace gates” is particularly interesting given WaPo’s description about what kind of advice Boris gave, in lieu of legal advice.

Epshteyn, a lawyer, had helped guide communications for Trump’s campaign and the White House.

According to the source, Parlatore and Trusty argued that the lawyers needed to focus on protecting Trump legally, not politically.

A source close to the Trump campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose the team’s private thinking defended Epshteyn and said he is focused on protecting Trump from a variety of angles, whether it’s legal, political or related to the media.

Parlatore imagines he was trying to defend Trump legally. Boris thinks he’s defending Trump from a “variety of angles,” one of which is politics. That’s consistent with how Boris billed his time, which until after the August search he billed as political consulting. But it also suggests Boris was not just a gap in Parlatore’s knowledge, but also a gap in any privilege claims Trump can make over the others.

If Trump’s own ex-lawyer says that Boris was lying to both sides about what went on there’s a big gap in anyone’s knowledge — at least outside the team that has been investigating for a year.

Plus there’s all the stuff — even beyond the evidence collected in this investigation that DOJ would have obtained about these particular documents — that DOJ already knows.

During the Mueller investigation, for example, DOJ spent some time investigating how Trump shared highly classified Israeli intelligence with Russia just days after he fired Jim Comey. That includes the way in which White House staffers altered the MemCon of that meeting (much as, years later, the White House would alter the MemCon of Trump’s perfect phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy). That particular leak of classified information did not violate US law, because as President, Trump could declassify it. But it is precedent for Trump sharing the secrets of America and its allies with foreign countries that have helped him.

More directly on point, DOJ has abundant evidence regarding Trump’s approval of Tom Barrack’s efforts to tailor US policy to serve the Emirates and, secondarily, the Saudis, including to treat Mohammed bin Salman with full diplomatic status. On Barrack’s request, during the course of discovery, DOJ obtained a great deal of information from other agencies about Trump’s policy towards the Gulf Kingdoms. DOJ’s prosecution of Barrack ended in failure. But what it showed is that from the very start, the guy who got Paul Manafort hired did so knowing he could use it to promise to shape US policy to the Emirates’ interests. Like sharing classified information with Russia in 2017, Trump’s choice to shape US policy to serve the Emiratis and Saudis is not illegal. It’s only after he left the presidency where a quid pro quo could be important.

Unless, of course, such business discussions started earlier.

Again, I want to emphasize that I’m not saying Jack Smith is about to indict Trump for selling US secrets to the Saudis. But investigative developments reported out in the last several weeks have suggested that this investigation may not be the obstruction investigation everyone is treating it as.

Instead, Jack Smith may get to obstruction via a conspiracy to hoard classified documents.

Update: Corrected date on NARA document return.

To support a supplemental bid to keep Jack Teixeira jailed pre-trial, prosecutors provided proof that on three instances, the young enlisted man had been caught improperly accessing classified information. Even after formal warnings on September 15 and October 27, 2022, on January 30 of this year, a female Master Sergeant observed Teixeira “viewing content that was not related to his primary duty.”

Days later, amid a discussion of “fed cars sneaking around,” Teixeira fantasized about making an “assassination van.”

Nevertheless, even after three chances to stop all this, Teixeira was still actively stealing classified information for over a month after that, and as an earlier filing laid out, he offered to take requests about “happenings that pertain to your country” after that.

TEIXEIRA: Like to thank everyone who came to the thread about the current event, going on and participated and listen to me, cover set event since it’s beginning, I was very happy and willing and enthusiastic to have covered this event for the past year and share with all of you something that not many people get to see something very few people in fact, get to see, but despite all of this, I’ve decided to stop with the updates

TEIXEIRA: If you guys do you want happenings that pertain to your country or events or politics or whatever you can DM me and I can tell you what I have, but it’s going to always be a brief summary

TEIXEIRA: I can’t promise, speed or prompt response, but I will respond to you eventually so offers on the table. If you want to take it until then I’ll still be sticking around here still be posting shit, so not going anywhere don’t worry about that.

I suspect the non-response to these three incidents may be one reason the Commanding Officers of this base have been temporarily suspended and the entire unit stripped of its intelligence mission.

But the more important supplement for Teixeira’s ultimate fate may be this exchange from November 15.

Teixeira: I remember reading that on a TS network

…

Teixeira: I work in airforce intel

…

User: Would have been nice

User: If you alerted us that a drone was heading to crash in the middle of a suburb of our capital?

Teixeira: We did

Teixeira: Just not that simple

User: Official government statement was nobody said shit

User: And nobody saw it

Teixeira: Yeah I expect that to be the official statement

Teixeira: My gov would have done the same downplay strategy

User: What is a ts network

Teixeira: Top secret

…

Teixeira: Like SCI noforn, hcs

…

User: What is being said now about this loose ukrainian missile?

Teixeira: I mean I’m hoping to get back to work in the next week rn I have covid

Teixeira: When I do get back however I will let u know

This exchange may be a response to this incident from the same day, when a Ukrainian air defense missile attempting to shoot down an incoming Russian attack went astray and killed two Poles (though Przewodów is nowhere near Warsaw).

If that’s right, by extrapolation this interlocutor must be have been presenting as a Pole. After Teixeira stated that he worked in Air Force intel with access to a Top Secret network, his interlocutor elicited information, challenged Teixeira’s response, then probed how much access Teixeira really had. Teixeira responded by telling someone presenting as a citizen of a NATO ally that he had access to compartmented information and HUMINT. Then the supposed Pole asked for more information.

And Teixeira agreed to get it for him.

Perhaps this presumed Pole was just shooting the shit in a gamer chat room. Or perhaps this guy was something else, someone with the training to know how to coax someone into greater and greater compromise.

Perhaps there were others in the chat room who saw all this go down and exploited the situation accordingly.

This filing, as the earlier one also did, specifies that these chats do not reflect the full extent of Special Agent Luke Church’s knowledge of the situation.

The interactions described above do not reflect all my knowledge on this matter or all relevant, inculpatory, or violent messages that I observed. They are instead offered to provide the Court with representative sample of certain messages attributable to TEIXEIRA.

Church might well be withholding the full context of these exchanges, too, perhaps withholding what happened after Teixeira went back to work after recovering from COVID.

Thus far, DOJ’s filings speak just of the existing charges against Teixeira, 18 USC 793(b) and (d). But this willful sharing of HUMINT with foreigners soliciting it — whether they really are citizens of a NATO ally or something else — gets a closer to espionage, an 18 USC 794 violation of the sort that can carry life imprisonment.

Update: dc-turtle suggests the drone could have been in Croatia, not Poland (which I’ve added to the title). It would still amount to Teixeira sharing information with someone presenting as a citizen of a NATO ally.

There’s a detail that may provide important context to new reporting from CNN and NYT about Jack Smith’s pursuit of more information about the surveillance video obtained from Mar-a-Lago. Both pieces report that Smith recently obtained the testimony of Mathew Calamari Jr., the head of security for Trump Org , and Sr., the Chief Operating Officer for Trump’s company (the latter of whom was included in Alvin Bragg’s investigation of the company).

Both outlets describe how that testimony is linked to an investigation into Walt Nauta, whom (per NYT) DOJ chose to investigate rather than seek further cooperation after he gave incomplete testimony last summer and fall. Both describe those subpoenas in the context of a larger effort, absent cooperation from Nauta, to understand the surveillance footage obtained in response to a June 24, 2022 subpoena. From NYT:

[P]rosecutors appear to be trying to fill in some gaps in their knowledge about the movement of the boxes, created in part by their handling of another potentially key witness, Mr. Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta. Prosecutors believe Mr. Nauta has failed to provide them with a full and accurate account of his role in any movement of boxes containing the classified documents.

[snip]

Prosecutors have also issued several subpoenas to Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, seeking additional surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago, his residence and private club in Florida, people with knowledge of the matter said. While the footage could shed light on the movement of the boxes, prosecutors have questioned a number of witnesses about gaps in the footage, one of the people said.

But hoping to understand why some of the footage from the storage camera appears to be missing or unavailable — and whether that was a technological issue or something else — the prosecutors subpoenaed the software company that handles all of the surveillance footage for the Trump Organization, including at Mar-a-Lago.

Remember that Trump originally claimed he was subpoenaed on June 22, only to have Beryl Howell correct that claim. Such inconsistencies — such as whether Jay Bratt sent Evan Corcoran a note asking him to put a lock on the storage room, or informing it that it did not comply with CFR requirements for storing classified materials — have often reflected a stupid Trump cover story.

Among the things under investigation, per CNN, is a text message Nauta sent Calamari Sr. after DOJ first subpoenaed surveillance footage from Trump Organization.

The Calamaris are among several witnesses expected to testify in Smith’s investigation on Thursday, sources said. Prosecutors have previously brought in lower-level Trump employees for questioning about the surveillance footage, including how it may have been handled in response to the subpoena for it and if it could have been tampered with, two sources told CNN this week.

Investigators also have previously asked about a text message from Nauta to Calamari Sr. and subsequent conversations about the surveillance footage, according to two of the sources. The Justice Department questioned Nauta months ago about the handling of the boxes, and he told the FBI about being directed by Trump, CNN previously reported.

[Update] The Guardian reports that Nauta asked Calamari Sr. to call him about the DOJ subpoena.

Both Calamaris testified to the federal grand jury in Washington on Thursday, and were questioned in part on a text message that Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, had sent them around the time that the justice department last year asked for the surveillance footage, one of the people said.

The text message is understood to involve Nauta asking Matthew Calamari Sr to call him back about the justice department’s request, one of the people said – initially a point of confusion for the justice department, which appears to have thought the text was to Calamari Jr.

DOJ likely would never have learned of this text message if Nauta had fully cooperated last summer. But they learned about it, and partly as a result, men who know Trump’s most cherished secrets had to testify before a grand jury.

Trump was at his Irish property this week, tentatively scheduled to stay overnight last night, but he left Ireland yesterday, around 12:30 ET, falsely claiming he was doing so to testify in his rape trial. Learning details of the testimony from the Calamaris is a more likely explanation than the rape trial, but with as many investigations as there are into Trump, it could be anything.

One thing coverage of the stolen documents investigation doesn’t emphasize enough, though, is that 18 USC 793 has a conspiracy clause. Anyone — like Nauta, and potentially even the Calamaris — who conspires with someone else to hoard classified documents is exposed to the same punishment — ten years per document — as the guy refusing to give those documents back.

Plopped in the middle of the NYT story, with little explanation, is a reference to the Trump Org’s ties to the Saudi LIV golf tournament.

One of the previously unreported subpoenas to the Trump Organization sought records pertaining to Mr. Trump’s dealings with a Saudi-backed professional golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of Mr. Trump’s golf resorts.

It is unclear what bearing Mr. Trump’s relationship with LIV Golf has on the broader investigation, but it suggests that the prosecutors are examining certain elements of Mr. Trump’s family business.

Back to inconsistencies between the DOJ and Trump story: Another discrepancy in the stories DOJ and Trump have told is whether or not Trump greeted Jay Bratt on June 3 at Mar-a-Lago. But no one contests that Trump went from there — that very same day! — to Bedminster, where he was hosting the Saudis, who not only are paying him an undisclosed amount for the golf tournaments, but who have funded a project in Oman and gave Trump’s son-in-law $2 billion to mismanage. When investigators directed by Tim Parlatore searched Bedminster for documents last year, they found none.

When I think about the way Trump went from that subpoena response stunt to Bedminster, I can’t help but think of the way the Biden Administration was blindsided by Saudi involvement in China’s effort to normalize relations between the Kingdom and Iran. That’s the kind of surprise that might reflect some surveillance had gone dark.

Here’s something to remember about the video, though. DOJ asked for over five months of surveillance footage, starting on January 10, 2022.

The subpoena was served on counsel on June 24 2022 directed to the Custodian of Records for the Trump Organization, and sought:

Any and all surveillance records videos images, photographs, and/or CCTV from internal cameras located on ground floor (basement) [redacted second location] on the Mar-a-Lago property located at 1100 S Ocean Blvd. Palm Beach, FL 33480 from the time period of January 10, 2022 to present.

And DOJ seems to have asked for surveillance video from two locations: outside the storage room, and somewhere else.  That second location might explain the redacted parts of the search warrant affidavit that provided explanations for why DOJ thought Trump might have documents stored in his residence or his office.

More importantly, the subpoena starts eight days before NARA took possession of 15 boxes of documents and covers over five months. That is, if Trump Org had fully complied (and not everyone keeps surveillance footage that long), DOJ would have surveillance footage covering at least two curation processes: the one in January that resulted in Trump only returning 15 boxes of documents, and the one in June, deciding which 38 documents to return and which to retain.

But absent gaps, that surveillance footage would also show something else: any other people, besides Walt Nauta and the maintenance guy who helped him move boxes, walking in and out of that storage room.

As both CNN and NYT report, there are gaps.

DOJ got enough information from those videos to know that, sometime after DOJ sent a subpoena on May 11, Nauta moved boxes out of the storage room. They may have video showing him moving the boxes back sometime after June 3. That’s what they used to get the August search warrant in the first place. But as noted, DOJ provided some reason to believe that documents might be found in Trump’s office or residence, which might reflect a second surveillance angle.

All of which leaves open the possibility that DOJ thinks something else may have happened during those surveillance footage gaps, other than Nauta walking in and out of the storage room.

As noted in this post, I started to write short summaries of where the three main investigations into Trump stand, but they turned into posts. So I’m posting them serially.

In my post on the Georgia investigation, I noted that, as charging decisions have drawn near, Republicans in Georgia have started turning on each other. That’s worthwhile background for Jack Smith’s twin investigations.

That’s particularly true given the report that Boris Epshteyn met for two days with January 6 prosecutors on April 20 and 21, a report that has not yet been followed by any readout of what transpired, as well as the April 4 DC Circuit decision not to stay January 6 testimony from Mark Meadows and others, which similarly has not been matched by any report that Trump’s Chief of Staff has testified.

I’m not saying either man — both of whom are key players in both Jack Smith investigations — flipped. Both are dumbly loyal.

I’m saying that Smith is likely at the same point Willis is: trying to secure key witnesses for an eventual prosecution. Witnesses in a federal investigation might bank on Trump’s ability to beat Biden in 2024 and start pardoning people before they do serious prison time. If not, they might start seeking a deal. The single most useful thing about putting both Trump investigations under Smith is that he can leverage someone’s legal exposure in one part of the investigation to coerce their cooperation in another part where they’re crucial witnesses.

Epshteyn, for example, was the gatekeeper for the obstruction under investigation in the stolen documents case, as well as lawyers like Alina Habba who inexplicably testified in the documents case. But he’s also significantly exposed in the January 6 conspiracy. Plus, DOJ is currently investigating the cryptocurrency scam he and Steve Bannon used to dupe Trump supporters. He’s dumbly loyal. He’s also got a whole lot of criminal exposure.

From what we know of the stolen documents investigation, Smith has focused on three of the main questions he needs to answer for a charging decision:

• Obstruction (18 USC 1519): What happened in advance and after June 3, 2022 that resulted in Trump’s non-compliance with the May 11 subpoena. Who ordered and who knew about it?
• Espionage Act (18 USC 793): Are there classified documents that Trump deliberately hoarded about which prosecutors could tell compelling stories that would not, also, result in more damage to national security if declassified for trial?
• Deliberate removal (18 USC 2071): To what degree did Trump deliberately curate classified documents he wanted to take? Were there documents that his advisors persuaded him should not be declassified that he took when he left anyway? I think this is the least likely charge, unless there’s evidence that Trump stole stuff he had not managed to convince others to release publicly while President.

But there’s another question that may be just as important as the evidence to support the charges, and may elicit quite a debate within DOJ: venue. The easiest way to overcome all the difficulties with charging a former President with 793 would be to charge his retention of documents after the time when:

1. The Archives had explained that retaining them was unlawful under the Presidential Records Act
2. Both the Archives and DOJ had asked for them back
3. Jay Bratt had informed him (through Evan Corcoran) that they were being stored improperly

That is, if he were to charge 793, Smith would likely charge for actions trump took between May and August of last year, at Mar-a-Lago. So (while some smart lawyers disagree) there would be at least a fair argument that it would have to be charged in SDFL.

Ideally any charges against a former President would be strong enough to convince a South Florida jury, but the possibility of Aileen Cannon presiding over such a trial would be daunting. Plus, judges in DC have far more experience dealing with cases involving classified information than most other districts other than EDVA.

Whereas, if Smith were to charge only obstruction, venue in DC is not a stretch at all.

The letter Trump’s lawyers sent to Mike Turner makes clear they believe (or hope) Trump will be charged only with obstruction. Their defense right now is that the Archives never should have referred the 15 boxes of classified records to the FBI (never mind that NARA did the same with Joe Biden), and therefore DOJ should never have issued the subpoena he blew off.

This defense has the advantage of playing to Republican voters who can easily be persuaded that Biden is being treated differently than Trump. That Trump’s lawyers have adopted it may suggest they believe that a President’s unfettered ability to declassify secrets would make 793 charges more difficult.

It would, normally! But DOJ has, at least, laid the groundwork to do just that. Much of what has been perceived as delay really consists of the Archives and DOJ working through each of the reasonable approaches past Presidents, as well as Biden and Mike Pence have adopted to classified documents. But ultimately the subpoena created the conditions in which prosecutors could easily prove the elements of the offense of a 793 charge: that he (1a) refused to give back (2) national defense information (3) in unsecure conditions (1b) after someone asked him to give it back.

Not only are Trump’s attorneys wildly ill-suited to an Espionage case, but as they admit in the letter, they haven’t reviewed the classified documents Trump retained. If, as some of the questions reportedly asked of witnesses seems to have suggested, Trump tried to curate classified documents for his own personal revenge, then it may make 793 charges more compelling.

And some of the last witnesses Smith brought in on this case, even after Evan Corcoran seemingly finalized evidentiary testimony on April 4, were the men who had declassified — but also, in some cases, declined to declassify — documents of unprecedented sensitivity for Trump, often in pursuit of revenge.

There’s one other matter that likely poses a challenge as Smith decides whether to charge this case: the challenge of getting any remaining documents back. Beryl Howell never gave DOJ the contempt ruling they wanted to use to compel Trump’s lawyers to retrieve remaining documents. Another way of doing so would be to conduct a coordinated search at the moment of a defendant’s arrest. But that would require a dramatically different kind of arrest than we expect to see.

Note that Trump has plans to visit his Irish golf resort this week.

Links

Where the Trump Investigations Stand: Georgia

Where the Trump Investigations Stand: Stolen Documents

Where the Trump Investigations Stand: The January 6 Conspiracies

Yesterday, four Trump lawyers sent House Intelligence Chair Mike Turner a really risky letter. CNN first reported on the letter.

Boris Epshteyn, who had allegedly been leading Trump’s defense in that investigation, did not sign the letter.

The letter responds to the news that Turner and other Gang of 8 members have recently been given access to the documents found at Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence’s properties.

We understand that DOJ is making the documents marked classified available for your review, and this letter provides the Committee with information that we suspect DOJ has not disclosed to it.

It doesn’t cite its source of information about those reviews, which is one way to obscure that the Gang of 8 actually began to get such access by April 11, two weeks ago.

Since Mike Turner and other Gang of 8 members started reviewing the documents, two things have happened.

First, Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign, without waiting on Special Counsel Robert Hur to report the results of his investigation into Biden for mishandling classified information.

And, about a month after Evan Corcoran testified in a crime-fraud excepted appearance before the grand jury, Boris Epshteyn spent two days last week chatting with Jack Smith’s prosecutors. (Like Epshteyn, Corcoran did not sign this letter, but that’s because his partners forced him to recuse from the investigation after he testified.) Even though Epshteyn has been a likely source for a lot of the press reports on the various investigations into which he has or had visibility, I’m not aware of any report describing his testimony, much less why he testified without any report of a subpoena.

Contemplate the significance of the first item — Biden’s reelection announcement — as you consider the purported point of the letter. Donald Trump — the guy who won the presidency with non-stop chants of “Lock her up!” in 2016 — claims to think that an investigation analogous to the one that targeted Hillary Clinton in 2015 to 2016 is improper.

A legislative solution by Congress is required to prevent the DOJ from continuing to conduct ham-handed criminal investigations of matters that are inherently not criminal.

[snip]

What is consistent in all three of these cases is that the document handling procedures in the White House are flawed and DOJ is not the appropriate agency to conduct investigations pertaining to the mishandling or spillage of classified material.

Conclusion

The solution to these issues is not a misguided, politically infected, and severely botched criminal investigation, but rather a legislative solution. DOJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate. Armed with the appropriate knowledge, we respectfully suggest that your Committee hold hearings and make legislative changes to:

1. Correct classified document handling procedures in the White House;

2. Standardize document handling and storage procedures for Presidents and Vice Presidents when they leave office; and

3. Formalize procedures for investigations into the mishandling or spillage of classified material, to prevent future situations where DOJ is inappropriately assigned to conduct an investigation.

President Trump’s legal team would be happy to meet with you or your staff to assist in any way necessary to address these issues. Please know that despite the differences in the cases, we do not believe that any of these three matters should be handled by DOJ as a criminal case. Rather, the stakeholders to these matters should set aside political differences and work together to remediate this issue and help to enhance our national security in the process. [my emphasis]

Donald Trump is asking Congress to intervene to halt not just into the investigation into him — and make no mistake, that is what he’s doing. But he’s also asking Congress to halt the investigation into his opponent!

Having won the presidency in 2016 by demanding the investigation into Hillary be more punitive, he’s now asking Congress to halt the investigation into Joe Biden.

Having won the presidency in 2016 by succeeding in highlighting Hillary’s negligence for mishandling classified information, Trump now wants to forego the opportunity to pursue the same approach in 2024.

At the very least, that’s a pretty good sign that he and his lawyers don’t believe their own claims that the known facts about Biden’s mishandling of classified information are worse than the known facts about Trump’s.

4 Of course, we also recently learned from media reports that President Biden possessed
marked documents in a “personal” folder at the Penn-Biden Center – strong evidence
that he intentionally possessed then after he or someone else secretly removed them,
from the Senate SCIF at least 14 years earlier when he was the Senator from Delaware.
We also now know that after DOJ learned about President Biden’s possession of
classified documents at the Penn-Biden Center, it allowed his personal attorneys to
search for and collect documents from his residence in Delaware making the specific
locations of the documents in the residence difficult, and perhaps impossible, to
determine. And, it has since been publicly reported that there could be even more
classified documents in the 1,850 boxes that Mr. Biden shipped to the University of
Delaware in 2012. https://www.cnn.com/2-23/02/15/politics/biden-delawaresearch/index.html. DOJ’s reaction to all of this is stunningly different from how it
responded to President Trump’s offer of cooperation regarding the boxes stored at Mara-Largo. [sic: Trump’s lawyers misspell Mar-a-Lago in several different ways in the letter]

[snip]

When documents were found in President Joseph Biden’s Penn-Biden Center office, despite clear indicators that his violations were more likely the result of willful misconduct, DOJ treated him very differently by forgoing any attempts at manufacturing conflict, while implicitly approving the spoliation of evidence.

The applicable criminal statute prohibits “willful retention” of national defense information, not mere possession. See 18 U.S. § 793 (e). To prove willful retention, a prosecutor must first establish that the possession was knowing. Despite media spin to the contrary, this is the key element that distinguishes President Trump’s retention of documents from that by President Biden. Evidence of knowing possession can be readily inferred from the length of time that President Biden possessed the marked documents since leaving office and the fact that they were moved and stored at multiple locations. In comparison, the materials found at Mar-a-Lago were still stored in the same GSA boxes in which they left the White House, untouched in the relatively short time since the end of President Trump’s term. Perhaps the most damning fact for President Biden is that he possessed marked documents from his time in the Senate—a body that maintains all marked documents in a SCIF, unlike the White House. Further, as you are no doubt aware and as mentioned earlier in this letter, media reports have indicated that classified documents were contained in a folder labeled “personal,”8 which is much more powerful evidence of knowing retention than documents being randomly dispersed into boxes by moving teams.

8 See, e.g., Jamie Gangel et al., “Exclusive: U.S. intelligence materials related to Ukraine, Iran and UK found in Biden’s private office, source tells CNN,” CNN (Jan. 10, 2023), https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/10/politics/biden-classified-documents-iran-ukraineunited-kingdom-beau-funeral/index.html.

There is not a chance in hell that Trump would forgo an opportunity to make this race about Biden’s mishandling of classified information if he really believed that Biden’s “violations were more likely the result of willful misconduct.”

Not a chance in hell!

But then, there’s abundant reason to believe that the four lawyers know they’re blowing smoke (to Congress). Heck, I’m so sure of it I think Mark Warner should invite all four of them to give sworn testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

There are the claims this letter makes that conflict with known testimony, such as that Trump didn’t review any of the documents in the boxes ultimately returned to the Archives.

However, due to other demands on his time, President Trump subsequently directed his staff to ship the boxes to NARA without any review by him or his staff.

There are the claims this letter makes that conflict with known details about the case, such as that, because Trump was too busy starting an insurrection, he didn’t have the ability to send his documents to a GSA-leased facility.

When President Trump left office, there was little time to prepare for the outgoing transition from the presidency. Unlike his three predecessors, each of whom had over four years to prepare for their departure upon completion of their second term, President Trump had a much shorter time to wind up his administration. White House staffers and General Service Administration (“GSA”) employees quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida. This was a stark change from the standard preparations made by GSA and National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) for prior administrations. As NARA acknowledged in a Press Statement it issued on October 11, 2022:

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), in accordance with the Presidential Records Act, assumed physical and legal custody of the Presidential records from the administrations of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, when those Presidents left office. NARA securely moved these records to temporary facilities that NARA leased from the General Services Administration (GSA), near the locations of the future Presidential Libraries that former Presidents built for NARA. All such temporary facilities met strict archival and security standards, and have been managed and staffed exclusively by NARA employees.2

Investigators paid by the lead writer of this letter, Tim Parlatore, found two additional documents with classification marks in what is reportedly a GSA-leased facility in Florida.

Lawyers for Donald Trump found at least two items marked classified after an outside team hired by Trump searched a storage unit in West Palm Beach, Fla., used by the former president, according to people familiar with the matter.

[snip]

Emails released by the General Services Administration, which assists former presidents during their transition to private life, show that the government agency helped rent the storage unit at a private facility in West Palm Beach on July 21, 2021. The unit was needed to store items that had been held at an office in Northern Virginia used by Trump staffers in the months just after he left office.

There’s the claim that DOJ dictated the timing of the June 3 document pick-up, when the record shows Evan Corcoran called FBI and told them to come down the next day.

Ultimately, President Trump’s legal team complied with DOJ’s demands, performing as diligent a search as they could by Mr. Bratt’s arbitrary deadline, and submitted a certification that affirmed the same.

And this letter repeats a bullshit claim that Trump’s lawyers have chanted from the start of his attempts to sucker the press: that the only thing Jay Bratt requested after he had seen the storage room at Mar-a-Lago was to put a lock on the facility.

Although Mr. Corcoran told the DOJ representatives that they were not going to go through boxes together that day, he fully expected DOJ to ask to return to Mar-a-Largo and examine all the boxes. Mr. Bratt reinforced this belief when, five days later, he wrote to Mr. Corcoran requesting that an additional lock be placed on the door. The lock was soon installed, and the boxes kept under lock and key in a facility guarded by armed Secret Service agents.

It’s like Tim Parlatore thinks Mike Turner’s staffers are too stupid to review the unsealed affidavit, which reveals that Bratt’s letter says something else entirely: that the storage facility is not a secure facility authorized to store classified documents.

As I previously indicated to you, Mar-a-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information. As such, it appears that since the time classified documents (the ones recently provided and any and all others) were removed from the secure facilities at the White House and moved to Mar-a-Lago on or around January 20, 202 1, they have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an approptiate location. Accordingly, we ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice.

Because the staffers that deal with this document have security clearance they surely want to keep, they’ll undoubtedly know that this is a reference to CFR standards for storage, not a request to add an almost certainly non-compliant lock.

And that’s why I think this letter was ill-advised.

These are just the obvious, affirmatively false things in the letter. There’s a whole bunch more that Trump’s lawyers simply ignore, such as the surveillance video showing Trump’s staffers moving boxes out of the storage facility in advance of the search they’re claiming here was a diligent search or the fact that FBI found 70-some classified documents in the storage facility of which Corcoran had claimed to have done a diligent search.

The only way this document could have the desired effect is if Mike Turner likes being lied to, or is so in the tank that — like Richard Burr before him — he’s willing to risk his own legal exposure to obstruct a criminal investigation.

And that’s assuming Warner didn’t subpoena any or all of these lawyers to repeat these farcical claims to Congress under oath.

All that’s before you consider the asymmetry. Trump’s lawyers — just one of whom (they admit) actually has clearance — acknowledge they have no fucking clue what FBI caught Trump hoarding.

Despite our requests to DOJ, it has refused to tell us whether in its judgment any of the documents remain classified. Similarly, DOJ has refused to allow for inspection of the documents at any time during the last eight months despite the fact that one of our attorneys has sufficient clearance to view the majority of the documents marked as classified.

Mike Turner does know.

Trump’s lawyers claim — or rather confess — that among the files he originally had in his beach resort were call briefings with foreign officials, just like the ones hidden from Congress in the first impeachment.

The vast majority of the placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls.

Again, I can only imagine how stupid Parlatore thinks Turner’s staffers are to confess this.

But even I know that many of the things Trump kept after DOJ subpoenaed them are not similar. Even I know that Trump compiled two classified documents with messages from a pollster, a book author, and a faith leader. And Mike Turner has reviewed these documents and he knows it too. And I know that he knows it.

So unless Mike Turner is totally in the tank for Trump — worse even than Burr was! — this letter risks pissing Turner off.

Last month, before Evan Corcoran was forced to give crime-fraud excepted testimony against Trump and before Boris Epshteyn spent two days chatting with Jack Smith’s prosecutors, Tim Parlatore — lead author of this insulting letter — said the following about Epshteyn’s role in the stolen documents case.

Mr. Epshteyn’s legal role with Mr. Trump, while less often focused on gritty legal details, has been to try to serve as a gatekeeper between the lawyers on the front lines and the former president, who is said to sometimes roll his eyes at the frequency of Mr. Epshteyn’s calls but picks up the phone.

“Boris has access to information and a network that is useful to us,” said one of the team’s lawyers, Timothy Parlatore, whom Mr. Epshteyn hired. “It’s good to have someone who’s a lawyer who is also inside the palace gates.”

Mr. Parlatore suggested that he was not worried that Mr. Epshteyn, like a substantial number of other Trump lawyers, had become at least tangentially embroiled in some of the same investigations on which he was helping to defend Mr. Trump.

“Absent any solid indication that Boris is a target here, I don’t think it affects us,” Mr. Parlatore said.

Neither Corcoran nor Epshteyn signed this letter. It’s not yet clear why Epshteyn didn’t.

And that’s as telling as the embarrassing false claims that it makes.

Just weeks before he provided someone he believed to be a Russian official medical records from five people who had received medical care at Fort Bragg, Jamie Lee Henry told the undercover FBI employee he was speaking to that the Biden Administration hates Russia, in part, because Obama is an effeminate man intimidated by Vladimir Putin. (Henry came out as trans in 2015, but court filings, including from his own lawyer, refer to him with male pronouns, as did his spouse, Anna Gabrielian, in recorded conversations.)

Dr. Henry: We have an ideology too that is very rigid, black and white – a lot of Islamists are, and Christians as well – it creates a lot of violence, and potential violence. And um, you know the way that I am viewing what is going on right now in Ukraine is that the United States is using Ukrainians as a proxy for their own hatred towards Russia. I think the current administration has hatred toward Russia because Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and I think Obama was offended by Putin because Obama is an effeminate man and he is intimidated by the values that Putin has just as many Americans are offended by Trump when he presents himself um and I think it is personality driven partly and a lot of people are dying as a result of people’s arrogance and personality.

Dr. Gabrielian: A lot more people died than needed to. Because of what we…. Um, America has done is prolong the bloodbath.

Dr. Henry: Not only that, you look at what we have done in Libya for instance. Hillary Clinton is very proud of what she has accomplished in Libya which is basically creating anarchy, there is slave trades going on in Libya now. Talk about oil being wasted. Oil being used to support terrorism. It is insane. And she is proud of it. And it is uh . . .

Dr. Gabrielian: I do think we are on the same page

Dr. Henry: At least George W Bush in his recent speech in Texas he had this Freudian slip – “oh and that too”– you know UC: yeah, I heard that too Dr. Henry: It’s like he actually feels guilt. I don’t think Dick Cheney feels any guilt for what he has done. It is very clear from his daughter when given a chance.

Lawyers for Henry and his spouse, Gabrielian, want to prevent the government from introducing these statements at trial.

To be sure, Henry’s statements to the FBI employee recording his alleged motivations for sharing non-public information with Russia included more than stupid hoaxes sustained by right wingers. He’s right about Hillary’s stupid glee about Libya, and he’s right about Iraq. His views on the damage US hegemony can do on the states itself is reasonable (though it lacks the consequent consideration of how much America’s hegemonic position makes American life cheap and easy).

I think the United States… My experience, having been in the military for 22 years, is we instigate a lot. And we are very arrogant and what we think we know and what we can do with the tools that we have. You know, and it has hurt many, many people across the globe. And I don’t see how constitutionally, you know, reading the American constitution and what I’ve sworn to defend, how this hegemony can persist, you know, without dire consequences to our own United States, you know, being suffering.

But as many self-imagined anti-imperialists have — and likely with the help of his spouse, who (Henry told the undercover FBI agent) had had him read Victor Suvorov’s Inside the Aquarium: The Making of a Top Soviet Spy — Henry adopted facially ridiculous claims to justify siding with Russia on its unjustified invasion of Ukraine.

A separate motion from the government, seeking to prevent an entrapment defense, provides far more details on the extent to which Gabrielian, especially, sought out the contact with the person she believed to be a representative of Russia who told her, “My job is to collect information and to pass it on.” If the portrayal of those recordings is accurate, the government likely won’t need the reference to Obama’s imagined effeminacy.

While we don’t yet have Jack Teixeira’s description of his motivation for throwing his life away so he could share classified documents with a bunch of Discord kids, we’re seeing an increasing number of people, possibly including Jareh Dalke (who was arrested the same day as Gabrielian and Henry) decide to leak based on conspiracy theories sown by Trump and others.

That’s not surprising. After all, 1,000 people and counting similarly threw their lives away in response to other conspiracy theories Trump told, conspiracy theories that are, at least, adjacent to the ones claiming that the anger at Russia for 2016 was entirely about Hillary losing the election and not about an effort to protect democracy.

But as the government grapples with the case of Teixeira, it needs to similarly grapple with the salience that conspiracy theories fed by Russia have had on at least a handful of alleged leakers.

In a motion to keep Jack Teixiera jailed, the government provided more details about what an unstable nut they gave access to the US’ most sensitive secrets. While it remains to be seen whether any of Teixeira’s leaks got people killed, the government is lucky he didn’t go postal before he was caught. In high school he was suspended for making racist, violent comments.

In March 2018, while still in high school, the Defendant was suspended when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats.

Last July, he was searching on mass killings in government holdings.

[O]n or around July 30, 2022, TEIXEIRA searched for the following terms: “Ruby Ridge”; “Las Vegas shooting”; Mandalay Bay shooting”; Buffalo tops shooting”; and “Uvalde.”

He fantasized about creating what he called an assassination van.

TEIXEIRA: To make people disappear and shit

TEIXEIRA: I’ve been tempted to buy one and make it an assassination van

User: Speaking of caravan

TEIXEIRA: Set up an ar and sniper blind

And one of his colleagues believed that he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if he ever did go postal.

The same colleague told me that Teixeira was very quiet, but often talked about guns. He also said he believed he would be the first person Teixeira would shoot if Teixeira were to shoot anyone in the workplace.

The Air Force has suspended two commanders of the base where Teixeira worked, which seems like a sound move if there were colleagues worried that a guy with access to TS/SCI information might shoot them.

The commander of the 102nd Intelligence Support Squadron and the detachment commander overseeing administrative support have both been temporarily suspended from their leadership positions and have temporarily lost access to classified systems and information.

In a letter submitted to get a gun permit in 2020, Teixeira claimed that an incident from high school that had previously led to a denial, had been thoroughly investigated as part of his security clearance investigation.

In order to go to Tech School, I needed an adjudicated Top Secret clearance with the Government, which I have now.

The investigation was extremely thorough, and the events that happened on March 27th, 2018 at Dighton Rehoboth High School were discussed. Everything was explained to the investigator about the incident as well as police reports, school letters and any or all documents that were submitted to the investigator that were generated from this event. I was very concerned that my decisions that I made at 16 would haunt my future in serving my country in the military and am glad they did not.

If the fact that he was alarming fellow high school sophomores actually was investigated as part of his clearance process, it raises real questions why he wasn’t booted from the military, much less given clearance.

The package of materials provides more evidence that this leak started as a response to the Russian invasion. A review of Teixeira’s searches showed that many focused on the invasion.

These audit results indicated that TEIXEIRA conducted hundreds of searches on the classified network on a number of subjects, many of which related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

In March he told the server that he was going to stop giving updates on “set event,” which seems to be a reference to the war. At the same time, he offered to respond to requests “about your country.” The government says that the people with whom he shared classified information, “likely included foreign citizens.” If he got requests from foreigners and responded to them, he’ll be facing far more serious charges, on top of the multiple counts of 18 USC 793 he’s already likely to face.

TEIXEIRA: Like to thank everyone who came to the thread about the current event, going on and participated and listen to me, cover set event since it’s beginning, I was very happy and willing and enthusiastic to have covered this event for the past year and share with all of you something that not many people get to see something very few people in fact, get to see, but despite all of this, I’ve decided to stop with the updates

TEIXEIRA: If you guys do you want happenings that pertain to your country or events or politics or whatever you can DM me and I can tell you what I have, but it’s going to always be a brief summary

TEIXEIRA: I can’t promise, speed or prompt response, but I will respond to you eventually so offers on the table. If you want to take it until then I’ll still be sticking around here still be posting shit, so not going anywhere don’t worry about that.

And it’s not clear whether the government will be able to reconstruct why he started leaking classified materials when Russia invaded Ukraine.

When Teixeira was trying to get one of the guys in his server to delete his activity, he focused on February 2022.

TEIXEIRA: Whenever you get this, try to delete all my messages in civil discussions

TEIXEIRA: Especially those not in the thread User: kk

TEIXEIRA: Wait got an idea

TEIXEIRA: Give me an invite

TEIXEIRA: Then ban me and delete all messages

User: alright

User: gave you access

TEIXEIRA: Ok now do it

TEIXEIRA: It should give an option to delete all messages

User: it only goes to past 7 days

TEIXEIRA: Fuck AIr nvm

TEIXEIRA: Just find stuff from Feb 2022 in civil discussion and delete it during your free time

Ultimately, Teixiera deleted the entire server.

In or around April 2023, the server where the Government Information described in Complaint was posted ceased to exist, suggesting that the server administrator—the Defendant— deleted the server in its entirety.

The most alarming detail in the documents submitted is that the record of Teixeira’s searches of government holdings only goes back to February 26, 2022, two days after the Russian invasion started.

On April 17,2023, I observed an audit conducted by a subject matter expert affiliated with u.S. Government Agency 2 for all searches TEIXEIRA conducted across an Intelligence Community-wide system for which U.S. Government Agency 2 acts as a service provider. The audit yielded results dating back to February 26, 2022.

So FBI only got Discord chats going back to November 1 (though it’s unclear whether this reflects a narrow limit from an initial warrant or retention policies by Discord). The server in question was deleted. The logs for government searches stop before the invasion. And Texiera attempted to destroy all his devices.

The FBI will be able to reverse engineer some of these attempts to destroy evidence. But it’s not entirely clear they’ll be able to reconstruct what happened in February 2022 to lead Teixeira to start spilling the nation’s secrets.

According to a discovery response letter sent on April 7, the government had only been able to access one of four laptops it seized from investigative reporter James Gordon Meek’s house when it searched his home for Child Sexual Abuse Material a year ago.

The government has not been able to access evidence item 1B4 and has not relied on any content from that device in its charges against your client. The laptop referenced in the complaint is evidence item 1B6. That item is and has been available for your review at the FBI facility, and a copy of the data was provided for your visit on March 16.

The government did seize four laptops from Mr. Meek. Those items are labeled 1B3, 1B4, 1B5, and 1B6. At this time, the government has only accessed 1B6.

The letter was made available as part of a motion to compel discovery filed last week.

That detail came in response to a question about why, when Meek’s legal team conducted an evidence review at the FBI on March 16, they were not able to access one of the laptops.

During our evidence review at the FBI on March 16, 2023, we were not able to review the contents of the laptop seized from Mr. Meek (item 1B4). Three of the data volumes appeared to still be encrypted. Our expert asked CART Gabriela Mancini about this issue, and Ms. Mancini explained that the laptop had not been “processed.” We noted that the government stated in the complaint affidavit that the FBI recovered 90 CSAM items from the laptop. It is unclear how this was done without processing the laptop.

[snip]

Furthermore, it is my understanding that the government seized a total of four laptop computers. Can you please confirm that 1B4 is a MacBook laptop, and the status of the other seized laptop computers?

These three still unexploited laptops are of some interest given the questions Meek’s (refreshingly competent, given what I’ve become used to from many of the January 6 lawyers) attorney Eugene Gorkhov raised in the MTC about how DOJ treated Meek as a journalist.

Most of the issues in the MTC are just competent lawyering: demanding more details about how the investigation into Meek moved from a DropBox tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to the Virginia State Police to the Arlington County Police to the FBI, and asking for evidence that the leaks to the press detailing aspects of the investigation show bias. Those questions are likely fairly easily explained (or blown off). If they’re not, they’ll provide leverage at trial, if not reason to dismiss the case.

It’s how DOJ treats a journalist when investigating him for suspected crimes entirely unrelated to his journalism that is of interest in this MTC.

Gorokhov describes receiving notice that DOJ used a filter team, both in advance of his April 2022 search and — presumably — in advance of investigating materials obtained with a warrant served on a cloud provider, back in November 2021. But DOJ refused to share the filter protocol.

In its search of the electronic devices seized from Mr. Meek’s residence, the government accessed Mr. Meek’s newsgathering materials, including communications, sensitive confidential sources, and work product. The government stated that it employed filter procedures while carrying out these searches. The discovery materials reference filter team memoranda dated November 24, 2021 and April 22, 2022. The defense has requested copies of these memoranda, Ex. 4 at 6, but the government has refused to provide them, claiming that they are work product and that, in any event, Mr. Meek has no reporter’s privilege because no such privilege exists. Ex. 5 at 5. Mr. Meek has also requested documentation relating to requests to, and approvals by, senior DOJ officials19 in connection with the search warrant applications in this case or any other investigative steps in this case. Ex. 4 at 7. The government has refused to produce this material. Ex. 5 at 5.

Gorokhov asks how that’s consistent with its media policy, particularly given the 2021 report on legal process used with journalists. He suggests Meek shows up twice there — first, in a subpoena approved by the Assistant Attorney General served on a media outlet (presumably ABC) to identify who accessed a particular news article, then Deputy Assistant Attorney General approval under a “suspect exception” before obtaining the first warrant targeting Meek.

Mr. Meek has also requested documentation relating to requests to, and approvals by, senior DOJ officials19 in connection with the search warrant applications in this case or any other investigative steps in this case. Ex. 4 at 7. The government has refused to produce this material. Ex. 5 at 5.

The government’s own policies and actions belie its position that Mr. Meek’s newsgathering materials are entitled to no protection. If this were true, then why did the government claim to implement filter procedures? Additionally, why did the FBI agents at the search ask Mr. Meek to identify devices containing newsgathering materials? The DOJ’s own policies reflect the recognition that newsgathering materials are entitled to protection: “The Department recognizes the important national interest in protecting journalists from compelled disclosure of information revealing their sources, sources they need to apprise the American people of the workings of their Government.” 28 C.F.R. § 50.10(a)(2). To be sure, the DOJ’s policies provide more protection in circumstances where newsgathering activities are the subject of investigation, but the need to protect such information is recognized by the DOJ even in instances where the investigation is unrelated to newsgathering activities. See, e.g., 28 C.F.R. § 50.10(d)(2) (requiring authorization of Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division prior to issuing compulsory process to a member of the media for conduct unrelated to newsgathering); 28 C.F.R. § 50.10(o)(4) (“Members of the Department should consult the Justice Manual for guidance regarding the use of filter protocols to protect newsgathering-related materials that are unrelated to the conduct under investigation.”).

19 See Ex. 6, Annual Report: Department of Justice Use of Certain Law Enforcement Tools to Obtain Information from, or Records of, Members of the News Media; and Questioning, Arresting, or Charging Members of the News Media (Year 2021). The publicly available report indicates that in 2021, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General authorized a search warrant for an online account of a journalist in connection with a child exploitation investigation. The same report also states that “the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division authorized the issuance of a grand jury subpoena to a news media entity in order to obtain IP address information for computers that accessed a particular online news article during a specified narrow timeframe.” The government has provided no records reflecting the latter investigative activity by the FBI, and

I highly doubt that Meek will get anywhere with this challenge for the legal reasons DOJ gave in its reply. There’s no reporter’s privilege, especially not in the Fourth Circuit, and especially not when a reporter has committed the offense at issue.

Your client has no reporter’s privilege in any way relevant to this case. The Fourth Circuit— following the Supreme Court—has declined to recognize a privilege for reporters in criminal proceedings even when the reporter is merely a witness to a crime. See United States v. Sterling, 742 F.3d 482 (4th Cir. 2013) (citing Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972)). There is no basis for the assertion of any such privilege when the reporter has himself committed the criminal offense, and even less so where, as here, the crime is unrelated to his newsgathering activities. That the government voluntarily took steps to shield the case prosecutors from materials related to your client’s newsgathering activities does not create any right or privilege for your client, and there would be no suppression right or remedy available, even supposing that there had been a deviation from the protocols the government elected to impose upon itself. [my emphasis]

But note the reference to “this case.”

As consistent with DOJ’s assurances that they will only rely on one laptop to prove the CSAM case against Meek, the forfeiture language in the indictment applies to just that one laptop.

But given Gorokhov’s language in the MTC, the warrants were written to access everything.

Given that the investigation was purportedly focused on CSAM, which is limited to a “visual depiction” of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, it is not clear why the government sought to have law enforcement agents search the entirety of Mr. Meek’s files.

To be fair, FBI searches everything in CSAM cases, not least because of means that sophisticated users use to hide CSAM.

But it’s an especially apt question given that, the day after the search, the FBI discussed suspicions that Meek had classified documents.

The FBI’s internal documents and communications in the wake of the raid, disclosed to defense counsel only after Mr. Meek was charged, revealed that the government planned to investigate its suspicions that Mr. Meek possessed classified documents.

This is a loophole I pointed out when Merrick Garland first rolled his revised media guidelines. The guidelines offered new protections to reporters obtaining classified materials in the course of newgathering — as Meek would have been.

But it also exempted subjects from the guidelines if they were suspected of a non-newsgathering crime. Like CSAM possession. Or, in the case of Julian Assange, the hacking charge with which he was first charged (I believe the Espionage Act is also exempted, and foreign agents are definitely exempted).

This is, I suspect, an error that Rashida Tlaib made in her letter calling on Merrick Garland to drop the charges against Assange. She suggests that dropping the indictment would be in keeping with Garland’s new policy.

As Attorney General, you have rightly championed freedom of the press and the rule of law in the United States and around the world. Just this past October the Justice Department under your leadership made changes to news media policy guidelines that generally prevent federal prosecutors from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information used in news gathering. We are grateful for these pro-press freedom revisions, and feel strongly that dropping the Justice Department’s indictment against Mr. Assange and halting all efforts to extradite him to the U.S. is in line with these new policies.

Ignoring the possibility that DOJ has made a foreign agent determination with Assange — a very real possibility, in his case, in which case the policy doesn’t apply at all — it still seems that the plain language of the policy suggests once you become an investigative subject for a non-newsgathering crime — hacking in the case of Assange, CSAM possession in Meek’s case — then the application of the policy is uncertain.

As DOJ moves towards a June 20 trial date for Meek on CSAM charges, three of his laptops remain, unexploited, at the FBI. DOJ has said he has no reporter’s privilege interest in the CSAM case and that’s absolutely right. But those three laptops, obtained with a warrant approved on that suspect exception, as well as other reporting materials from the devices they did exploit, still remain in FBI’s custody, obtained with a warrant gotten under the suspect exception.

The charges against Meek are very serious and quite disturbing. But that makes his case a very good test of how Garland’s media policy applies with someone who is a suspect in an awful crime, but also, by any measure, an investigative reporter. DOJ seized, and is holding (in potentially encrypted form) materials and devices that relate to his newsgathering which would otherwise be covered by the news media policy. DOJ has kept these materials from the CSAM team. But after his prosecution, what will become of those materials?

Disclosure: In this post I describe my limited acquaintance with Meek going back to the Libby trial, with more recent interactions in 2018 or 2019.

Timeline

March 11, 2021: NCMEC received tip from Dropbox

June 2021: Virginia State Police served subpoenas on Verizon and Google

N.d.: VSP referred case to Arlington County Police Department

September 7, 2021: Referral from ACPD to FBI

November 24, 2021: Filter team memoranda

April 22, 2022: Filter team memoranda

April 27, 2022: Search

April 28, 2022: FBI email chain stating Meek may be in possession of classified information

October 19, 2022: Rolling Stone reported on search; Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet claims to know search was about CSAM

November 2, 2022: Gorokhov raises leaks with AUSAs

December 19, 2022: Rolling Stone reported “indictment” being prepared

January 31, 2023: Arrest affidavit [warning: exceptionally graphic language]

February 1, 2023: At detention hearing, DOJ incorrectly claimed Meek said his “life was over”

February 20, 2023: Consent motion for extension of indictment

February 24, 2023: Meek discovery letter

March 16, 2023: DOJ response, stating that it does not intend to produce filter team memo

March 30, 2023: Indictment

March 31, 2023: Follow-up discovery letter

April 7, 2023: Government response

April 20, 2023: Motion to compel disclosure

April 21, 2023: Judge Claude Hilton granted complex designation, set June 20 trial date

Back in March, ABC reported that Fani Willis wanted to interview Christina Bobb in the probe of Trump’s attempt to overturn Georgia election results.

Smart commentators on that investigation, like Lawfare’s Anna Bower, suggested that Willis’ team likely had discovered, as they worked their way through the January 6 Committee transcripts released after Willis’ grand jury had expired, that whereas Bobb has always publicly claimed to have nothing to do with efforts to overturn Georgia’s election (she focused on Arizona, Nevada, and, in her J6C interview she belatedly admitted, Michigan), she revealed much later in the interview that she had first met Mark Meadows when she sat in on Trump’s call to Brad Raffensperger.

Bobb’s description of the call is pretty nutty.

Q Did you have any interactions with him in the post-election period?

A I — sorry. My phone is ringing. Okay. Yeah, one. One that I remember was the phone call, the Brad Raffensperger phone call. I was in Meadow’s office with Rudy, I think Katherine [Friess] was there. There may have been one other person there, but we listened in on the call from Meadows’ office.

Q Had you met him before that?

A No. I don’t think so.

Q Do you remember — go ahead. I’m sorry.

A No. I don’t think — I think that was the first time I met him.

Q Do you remember talking to him before that, even if not in person?

A No. I never did.

Q When you gathered for that call, what was his expectations for the call? What was the purpose of that call?

A I think to listen and, you know, be available as needed, but I think the whole point was just to listen.

Q Did he say anything about what the President was or was not going to request or seek by this call?

A No.

Q Do you remember if Mr. Meadows expressed any concerns about having this call?

A No. I don’t think he did, but I don’t remember, but I don’t remember him expressing any concerns.

Q Were you able to hear the call that the President had with Secretary Raffensperger?

A Yes.

Q What happened afterwards, when you were sitting there and, you know, the phone is hung up now?

A Nothing. We chit-chatted and left. It was — it was an unremarkable call.

I know the media has sensationalized it, but none of us thought anything of it. It was just a call and that was it.

Q I mean, the President of the United States asked the Secretary of State to find enough folks to ensure his victory in Georgia. I mean, he used those words, I’m just asking you to find votes.

A That is a gross misrepresentation of the phone call. It was a perfectly fine phone call. If you look at the transcript, he was not asking anything improper. He wasn’t asking him to do anything illegal.

There was a lot of indicators of fraud. That’s what he was talking about. He was not — nobody in the room thought there was anything wrong with the phone call. I think it was perfectly fine.

Nuttier still, after she defended it as a “perfectly fine” call, she explained that she and “at least two dozen” others sat in on it because, “we knew somebody was going to record it [and] release it.”

Q So I understand your perspective, but I did want to ask you that, what you just got to is that after the call, did anybody express any concern, reservation, have any thoughts about what had just happened in that call?

A No. But there were a lot of people on the call. Like there were probably at least two dozen, like there was, you know, half a dozen of us in the room, but then there were other — there were a lot of other people on the call.

We knew somebody was going to record it. We knew somebody was going to release it. We knew the media was going to twist it, which was exactly what happened, but nobody was concerned about it. Our concern was, was it a legitimate phone call and did the President say anything improper. And at the end of the call, we all thought no. Like it was totally fine. There was nothing wrong with it. So we didn’t think anything of it, and we chit-chatted and left.

As she describes it, she and twenty people were on the call as a prophylactic against the outcry when one of those twenty people or someone from Raffensperger’s team released the call to the press.

Bobb also admitted in the interview to witnessing Rudy Giuliani’s call to pressure Rusty Bower to overturn the Arizona vote, and described that she may have been Rudy’s representative on a different fake elector call.

Bobb did a whole lot of witnessing during this period for someone who had never left propaganda outlet OAN during the entire post-election period, when she was also claiming to play a role covered by attorney-client privilege.

That’s an interesting dynamic behind the reason I finally slogged through her transcript, to understand certain questions Jack Smith has been asking about the stolen documents investigation, particularly why Boris Epshteyn asked Bobb to be the gal who certified a declaration she hadn’t written.

It turns out there were at least two details in her J6C transcript that raise interesting questions about her role in the stolen documents case. First, in this April 21, 2022 deposition, Bobb revealed that she had had interactions with Alex Cannon after Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Q How about Alex Cannon?

A At that time, no.

Q You said at that time. Have you interacted with him since January 20, 2021?

A Yes.

Q Unrelated to the events we are talking about today, January 6 and the lead up?

A Yes. Correct.

In reporting on Bobb’s role in the June 3 subpoena response, she claimed to have no prior interaction with Evan Corcoran, who wrote the declaration. But interaction with Cannon would reflect ongoing involvement in purportedly legal matters after the coup attempt.

And consider the kind of lawyering her J6C testimony described her to be (and remember that other witnesses said she played no legal role, but was just involved in communication).

When the committee asked about the mid-December 2020 memo recommending that Trump invoke national security as an excuse to seize the voting machines — which, metadata shows, Bobb authored, and which, the interview revealed, she had not provided in response to a subpoena — she explained that she didn’t really author it. She just went to lunch with Phil Waldron and wrote down what he said. And then emailed what he said back to him.

I started the document, took their notes down, whatever. And then Colonel Waldron asked me to email it to him, which I did. What happened with it from there, I don’t know.

So I don’t know. I’m not sure that this — I don’t know. I don’t know if this is — this looks like what I originated on my computer, but I think it went past whatever I had done, because what I had done, I think — when I say I had done, I started the document. They wanted to work on it. They used my computer to work on it, and then when they were done doing whatever they were doing, said, hey, can you email this.

And I think that’s probably it, but I am not — you know what I mean, like, I don’t know what they changed after it left my computer.

Q Yes.

A But I had some role in initiating something like this in the sense that I had a computer that people wanted to use, and that was it.

As investigators probed this remarkable story, Bobb said Waldron was with someone named Mike but not that Mike, Mike Flynn, because she knows him, and maybe Sidney Powell but she doesn’t know.

Q Okay. All right. So let me unpack some of that. You are with Colonel Waldron. Who else is there?

A It was people that he was working with. I don’t know their names. know there was a guy named Mike. I don’t know his last name. And it was folks that — like it was the machine team folks that, you know, I didn’t really know them.

[snip]

Q What about Sidney Powell?

A She may have been. I don’t know. Like because I gave them my computer, they finished doing whatever they were doing. While they were doing that, I was working from my phone and taking calls, so I would step out and come back in.

So to the extent someone came in and out, I don’t know, you know.

As things progressed, Bobb included details that might explain a Google search from her computer of the statutes invoked, but insisted she “literally just like formatted it.” And provided the title.

Q When you started working on this, or what became this document, were you working with something else as an example? Like did you have another executive order that you used as a model?

A Probably. And I wasn’t — like I probably just found one and put it together, but just so you know, I was not putting — I didn’t do the substance and stuff of this. Like the authorities that they used and all that, I didn’t do that. I just literally just like formatted it.

[snip]

Q And were you typing up from scratch or did you have something else that you were modifying?

A I wasn’t typing it. So the — like I probably — I probably did pull up an executive order just to see like the title, but literally past the title, I did not provide that content.

Q Okay. You gave your computer to Mr. Waldron. Is he the one that was typing on your computer when they were working on this document?

A He did some of it, and then this guy Mike, whoever he was, was doing some of it. I don’t know. It was like they were brainstorming collectively and working. I don’t know.

Q One of the things you mentioned there in the authorities, just past those that you referred to, are National Security Presidential Memoranda 13 and 21.

Did you have anything to do with inserting those?

A No. I had nothing to do with the authorities.

[snip]

Q No. Do you remember Colonel Waldron or Mike or anybody else typing —

A Colonel — I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt you.

Q That’s okay. Do you remember them talking about presidential  memoranda?

A I remember vaguely, like I don’t have a good recollection. I’m going to give you what I think I remember. And I remember it sounded like they wanted to do something intelligence related, and EO 12333 is like the standard intelligence authority.

So I remember thinking that that made sense. And then I remember thinking I have no idea what they are doing with the other stuff. That’s the extent of my memory.

Q Okay. As far as the next paragraph it says, I, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, find that the forensic reports of the Antrim County, Michigan, voting machines released on December 13th — and then it goes on.

Did you have any role in writing this either as a scribe or something that you came 20 up with?

In the middle of a deposition where she turned on attorney-client privilege at will, she described herself here as a “scribe.”

A I definitely didn’t come up with it. I could have been a scribe. I mean, I was — I was a scribe for a lot of things. And, like I said, I started this document.

I don’t — like I’ve also said, I don’t have the information on Dominion voting systems.

So if I physically typed this out, I had to have someone dictate it to me because I don’t have this information.

Q Tell us about the conversations you had with Mike and Colonel Waldron about this. Like what was the purpose of it, as you started to draft and pull up an example —

A I didn’t — I honestly didn’t have a whole lot. They had mentioned that they were brainstorming some type of proposal to see if there was some government action to be taken on machines or whatever. I don’t know a lot about the machines. I don’t have a lot of information on the machines. And I was more curious about the authorities because, you know, I didn’t know what authority they would use to do it.

And the two documents, one being DOD, one being DHS makes sense because I remember, you know, there was posse comitatus issue and they were talking about, you know, like DHS needs to be the lead because the military can’t do it, whatever. I don’t know. I don’t even think I weighed — I do not remember weighing in on anything substantive about this.

And the legal advice? In spite of her awareness that the memo distinguished between DOD and DHS, the agency for which she had only recently been an attorney, she didn’t have anything to do with the shitty legal advice, she says.

Q Okay. So that was going to be my next question. Without disclosing any legal advice you may have provided, were you asked to provide legal advice about this and weigh in from your perspective as a lawyer?

A I don’t think so. No.

[snip]

What do you remember about any discussions related to the appointment of a special counsel in connection with this document?

A I have limited — like I have hazy recollection, but based on the fact that it says “her,” I’m guessing they were probably thinking Sidney would get appointed, but I can’t confirm that.

Q Okay. Do you know why Colonel Waldron wanted Sidney to be appointed as a special counsel?

Q I don’t

[snip]

Q Now, working on their — on your computer, how does it get to that? And I’m sorry if you already said this.

A Yeah, that’s okay. When they were done with it, they gave me my computer back and said — I don’t remember who said it, but it was probably Phil said can you email this to Phil, or can you email this to me. And I sent it to Phil from there, and that was it.

This testimony is positively amazeballs.

And whether there’s a scrap of truth to Bobb’s claim that she, on a topic about which she fancied herself playing a legal role, simply gave her computer to non-lawyers (and maybe Sidney Powell) so they could draft a memo providing advice to the President of the United States, about a topic — national security law — on which she claims some expertise, that she would then blindly email to them without first reviewing, whether there’s a shred of truth to any of this or not, it certainly explains why Boris Epshteyn would think Bobb might be a good candidate to participate in an effort to dupe the FBI as they investigated stolen classified documents. It also may explain why she disclaimed playing a legal role when she testified in October, so she could offer the FBI a similar story about playing the same kind of dumb cut-out for legal advice.

Christina Bobb, in an interview in which she was warned that any lies could be prosecuted as False Statements (though in which she was not placed under oath), told an absolutely fantastic story about how her computer came to write a historically shocking document in the run-up to an insurrection, but she had nothing to do with what her computer wrote.