Dan Froomkin says reporters should call Jack Teixeira’s release of highly classified documents “theft,” not a leak, distinguishing “public-spirited” leakers from “self-serving … thieves.” Spencer Ackerman muses that Teixeira, “leaked for that most ineffable thing, something nonmaterial but nevertheless hyper-real in the logic of the poster, and particularly the right-wing-chud poster: clout.” Charlie Savage suggests something distinguishes this case, legally, from those of everyone else (among a limited subset) who took classified information. Glenn Greenwald has been all over the map, in one breath calling this, “a bullshit leak, despite some relevant docs, the impact of which has been severely overblown from the start,” but then applauding Tucker Carlson’s focus on the altered casualty numbers in Ukraine and Tucker’s claims that even Fox has factchecked as an example of, “the significant revelations these leaks provide.”

Now he’s just making shit up about WaPo and NYT hunting down Teixeira, shit that a quick reading of the arrest affidavit readily debunks, shit that ignores that WaPo’s source(s) for hundreds of still-unpublished documents, at least, are one or more of the Discord chat kids, to whom WaPo has given source protection (that will be utterly meaningless in the face of the subpoenas already served).

A bunch of people who made their careers because a young, narcissistic IT guy stole a shit-ton of records about which he had little personal expertise — some incredibly important, a great many useful only to America’s adversaries — seem to be uncertain what to make of Jack Teixeira, who, early reports at least suggest, is an even younger narcissistic IT guy who stole a smaller shit-ton of records about which he had even less personal expertise, some newsworthy, some useful primarily to America’s adversaries.

We will likely have the rest of Teixeira’s young life to get a better understanding of why he allegedly did what he did, which may well be very different than what he told the kids in the Discord chat rooms about why he did what he did, who in any case are entirely unreliable narrators. But then, they may be no more unreliable, as narrators, than Greenwald is about Edward Snowden, and for a similar reason: because their identity is wrapped up in a certain narrative about this dude.

Since this age of the leak dump started, journalists have been sustaining self-serving stories about what leak dumps really are.

That Ackerman treats Josh Schulte’s hack-and-dump in the same breath as the leak dumps of Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, calling Teixeira’s leaks, “something different than the Snowden leaks, Manning leaks or, say, the Vault 7 hack,” is a great example of that. At trial, Schulte didn’t so much claim he was a whistleblower as he was a scapegoat, someone the CIA already hated to blame for an embarrassing compromise. But in his second trial, in the course of representing himself, he performed precisely what the government said he was: a narcissistic coder — KingJosh, he called himself — exacting revenge for the escalating personnel problems he caused after his manager moved his desk. “I think you are playing into the government’s theory of the case,” Judge Jesse Furman warned in a sidebar during Schulte’s cross-examination of a former supervisor, “by making clear to the jury that even today you remain aggrieved by you as being mistreated.”

Vault 7 was not a noble leak. It was an epic act of nihilism. A man-boy retaliating because he couldn’t get his way at work.

And except for security researchers in the business of attributing CIA hacks, the Vault 7 files weren’t all that newsworthy, either — though they did give Julian Assange a way to pressure the Trump Administration. Plus, the fate of both the Vault 7 files during the nine months between leak and publication, during a period when Assange was a key part of a Russian influence operation, as well as the Vault 8 source code included in Schulte’s guilty verdict, remains unknown. In a letter attempting to exonerate himself (even while exposing the protected identities of several colleagues), Schulte himself described the value that the source code would have for Russia, particularly during that nine month window before the CIA learned Schulte had hacked them:

So much still unknown, and with potential (yet unconfirmed) link between wikileaks and Russia–Did the Russians have all the tools? How long? It seems very unlikely that an intelligence service would ever leak a nation’s “cyber weapons” as the media calls them. These tools are MUCH more valuable undiscovered by the media or the nation that lost them. Now, you can secretly trace and discover every operation that nation is conducting.

I don’t imagine that these issues were what Ackerman had in mind, when comparing Schulte to Manning and Snowden, but perhaps he should give some thought to why he believes otherwise.

Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is already creating a heroic myth about Teixeira not all that dissimilar from the myths WikiLeaks spun about Schulte that Ackerman appears to still believe.

Maybe, like Chelsea Manning, a struggle with his own demons made Teixeira more apt to leverage classified records to win the adulation of a bunch of teenagers. Or maybe, like Schulte, he really is the racist shithole he sounds like.

Or both.

We may never learn how much damage these leaks did such that we could adequately balance their value against their cost. We will undoubtedly get inflammatory claims from prosecutors if Teixeira is ever sentenced, which may or may not be backed by some damage assessment that will get declassified in a decade or three.

Because it’ll be some time before we really understand this guy, because journalists seem to be struggling to understand how to treat him, I thought it worthwhile to lay out some lessons I have learned from covering leak-dumps for 15 years, lessons that have resulted in a radically different view than the Manichean belief in good dumps or bad dumps others have.

Leak dumps don’t care about all that.

In what follows, I’m not questioning the value of (some) of Snowden’s and Manning’s leaks. I’m saying that some of the people most closely involved haven’t taken a step back, in the decade since, to see what we’ve learned since, including some things these celebrated leakers have in common with what we know, so far, of Teixeira.

It’s worth distinguishing leaks from people knowledgable about what they’re leaking

Those who’ve worked on past leak dumps like to compare the leakers with Daniel Ellsberg, a comparison Ellsberg has welcomed.

But for most, there’s something that clearly distinguishes this later group of leakers: many don’t have expertise on the specific files they’re leaking.

Indeed, several of these leakers obtained new jobs while they were already contemplating leaking (or, in Snowden’s case, long after he had started collecting documents to leak). Several took files entirely unrelated to their jobs.

By comparison, Ellsberg was a PhD who leaked the Rand study he worked on himself.

To the extent that prior leak dumpers leaked files they didn’t have specific reason to want to expose, they often did so out of a generalized malaise, usually stemming from America’s war on terror policies. While I think Manning and Daniel Hale’s reaction to the war on terror was just and righteous, and while Teixeira thus far seems like a badly misguided conspiracy theorist, the type of motivation, a general malaise about American conduct, may not be that dissimilar.

Similarly, Teixeira clearly doesn’t have the knowledge or maturity to make an ethical decision to leak these documents. But it’s not clear some of his predecessors did either.

False claims about authentic documents are still false claims

Over the years, Greenwald and others — most recently #MattyDickPics Taibbi — have completely collapsed the distinction between “true” and “authentic.” There’s a good deal of Snowden reporting, for example, that remains uncorrected. Ackerman even repeated one such error, from the Guardian’s report on PRISM, in his 2021 book — “the NSA could conduct what internal documents described as ‘legally-compelled collection’ from the servers—the exact form of access remains unknown”—of PRISM participants. [my emphasis] This description of getting data directly from tech companies’ servers came from a guy who was overselling the program, effectively a Deep State hypester snookering civil libertarian journalists to buy into his hype.

As Bart Gellman described in his own book, not only was the direct access misleading, but it distracted from the more important policy points of the Section 702 collection.

Companies that had declined to comment in advance, or had said nothing of substance, now issued categorical denials that any U.S. agency had “direct access” to their servers. I scrambled to reconcile those statements with the NSA program manager’s explicit words—repeated twice—in the authoritative PRISM overview. Later that night I found a clue in another document from the Snowden archive. There, in a description of a precursor to PRISM, I found a variation on Rick’s formula. “For Internet content selectors, collection managers sent content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” it said. That sounded as though the U.S. government black box was on company property but might not touch the servers themselves. I updated my story to disclose the conflicting information and the new evidence.

[snip]

The “direct access” question became a big distraction, rightly essential to the companies but not so much to the core questions of public policy.”

The Snowden reporters were under a real time crunch and unbelievable security pressure to report, so have a good excuse, but others don’t.

#MattyDickPics blithely started reporting on Twitter without first bothering to get the least understanding of what he was looking at and he still has never gotten records showing what requests Trump made of Twitter, the only thing close to real censorship in question. Yet because he has some screen caps to wave around, vast swaths of people believe his false claims.

The same is true of the “laptop.” Virtually the entire Republican Party has refused to distinguish between authentic emails on a hard drive allegedly obtained from a Hunter Biden laptop, and the authenticity of the laptop itself, even after people in Rudy’s orbit started altering that hard drive. To say nothing of whether provably authentic emails say what the GOP breathlessly claims they do, which so far, they have not.

As noted, Tucker has already magnified (with Greenwald applauding) two of the false claims about the documents that Teixeira released: the doctored casualty numbers put out by Russia, and misrepresentations about the role of Special Operations forces in Ukraine, which have been debunked by the same Fox News reporter that Tucker tried to get fired one of the previous times she corrected the network’s false claims.

Notably, I think one thing that is contributing to more accurate reporting based on these files is more hesitation from responsible outlets to publish or magnify the files themselves, while still using them as a basis for stories, though as WaPo races to beat its competitors that may be changing.

Documents can serve to distract

And that’s because authentic documents have, from the start of these leak dumps, often served to distract attention from the actual content.

As I noted the other day, FBI’s cooperating troll witness in the Douglass Mackey trial, Microchip, described unashamedly how the trolls ensuring the John Podesta emails would go viral in the last weeks of the 2016 election knew there was no there, there. But they also knew that so long as they could invent some kind of controversy out of them, they could suck the air out of substantive political coverage.

Q What was it about Podesta’s emails that you were sharing?

A That’s a good question.

So Podesta ‘s emails didn’t, in my opinion, have anything in particularly weird or strange about them, but my talent is to make things weird and strange so that there is a controversy. So I would take those emails and spin off other stories about the emails for the sole purpose of disparaging Hillary Clinton.

T[y]ing John Podesta to those emails, coming up with stories that had nothing to do with the emails but, you know, maybe had something to do with conspiracies of the day, and then his reputation would bleed over to Hillary Clinton, and then, because he was working for a campaign, Hillary Clinton would be disparaged.

Q So you’re essentially creating the appearance of some controversy or conspiracy associated with his emails and sharing that far and wide.

A That’s right.

Q Did you believe that what you were tweeting was true?

A No, and I didn’t care.

Q Did you fact- check any of it?

A No.

Q And so what was the ultimate purpose of that? What was your goal?

A To cause as much chaos as possible so that that would bleed over to Hillary Clinton and diminish her chance of winning.

In this model — the exact model adopted by the Twitter Files (and, frankly, virtually all of Trump’s tweets) — the actual documents themselves are just a hook for viral dissemination of the false claims made about the documents, just like most of the Twitter Files are.

Microchip even admitted that disinformation can increase buzz.

Q As you sit here today, back in that time period, did you like to get a rise out of people?

A Sure, yeah.

Q And that’s one of the reasons you posted things on Twitter; correct?

A Correct.

Q Was it your belief back then that disinformation increases buzz? A Um, disinformation sometimes does increase buzz, yes.

The claims about the documents don’t work like truth claims do; instead, they serve to short-circuit rational thought, making it far easier to believe conspiracy theories or intentional disinformation.

We’re seeing some of that now from the disinformation crowd, starting with Tucker and Greenwald.

You can’t always tell who is in a chat room

The Discord kids told WaPo there were “roughly two dozen” active members of the Discord chat room where Teixeira allegedly first released the documents, about half of whom were overseas, including in Ukraine and elsewhere in post-Soviet countries.

Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland.

But the affidavit to search Teixeira’s house says there were twice that many members, approximately 50. WSJ reports that the group was more pro-Russian than the Discord kids have thus far admitted. So while initial reports suggest this was not espionage, it’s far too early to tell either what Teixeira’s motive was or whether he was cultivated by someone else in his server, encouraged to leak certain kinds of documents just as Chelsea Manning was encouraged to seek out certain things over a decade ago.

That’s why I harped on this earlier: I’ve learned, both stuff that’s public and not, about how easily sophisticated actors can manipulate precisely the kinds of people, usually young men, who inhabit these kinds of chat rooms.

Foreign intelligence services have been searching out these opportunities, eliciting both criminal hacking and leaks, for at least a decade.

For example, the LulzSec hackers knew there were Russians in their chat rooms, but didn’t much care. But it might explain why some documents hacked as part of the Syria Leaks that would be particularly damaging to Russia never got published by WikiLeaks, even though multiple sets of the documents were shared with the outlet.

Even the FBI, with subpoena power, may have troubles identifying everyone who participated in a chat room. And if the FBI can’t do it, the teenagers involved likely can’t either. That’s especially true as operational security increases. Which means they may have no idea who they were really talking to, no matter what they tell the WaPo and FBI.

So while Teixeira paid for with this server with his own credit card, it has been shut down long enough that FBI may never be able to figure out who else was in the chat room, much less their real identity. So we may never know what happened before someone decided to ruin their lives by leaking documents with what inevitably will be inadequate operational security.

Which, in the case of Teixeira’s leaks, means we may not know all the people who got advance access to documents months before their publication on Twitter and Telegram alerted the IC about them, to say nothing of whether those people were nudging Teixeira for certain kinds of leaks.

No one controls what happens with dump leaks

Back in 2021, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon and former DOD Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach seemingly confirmed that the files released by Shadow Brokers in 2016 and 2017 were obtained after two NSA employees, Nghia Pho and Hal Martin, brought them home from work; there’s no evidence that Pho, at least, ever tried to share them and no proof Martin did either.

In two separate incidents, employees of an NSA unit that was then known as the Office of Tailored Access Operations—an outfit that conducts the agency’s most sensitive cybersurveillance operations—removed extremely powerful tools from top-secret NSA networks and, incredibly, took them home. Eventually, the Shadow Brokers—a mysterious hacking group with ties to Russian intelligence services—got their hands on some of the NSA tools and released them on the Internet. As one former TAO employee told The Washington Post, these were “the keys to the kingdom”—digital tools that would “undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.”

If that’s right, it means the last most damaging leak to DOD wasn’t intentionally leaked at all, which makes it not dissimilar from the way that Teixeira reportedly intended just to share it with the guys in his Discord server. It was exfiltrated from NSA’s secure servers by employees (in Pho’s case, purportedly for work reasons), then stolen, then released.

In the wake of that discovery, DOJ seems to have started pushing to hold leakers accountable for the unintended consequences of their leaks. In a declaration accompanying Terry Albury’s sentencing, for example, Bill Priestap raised the concern that by loading some of the files onto an Internet-accessible computer, Albury could have made them available to entities he had no intention of sharing them with.

The defendant had placed certain of these materials on a personal computing device that connects to the Internet, which creates additional concerns that the information has been or will be transmitted or acquired by individuals or groups not entitled to receive it.

But it’s a lesson journalists don’t take seriously, except (in most cases) their own operational security. What happened to the source code of CIA hacking tools Schulte took? What happened to the damning files on Russia from the Syria leaks? Did Chelsea Manning envision the State cables she leaked would be shared with someone like Israel Shamir, who reportedly shared them, in turn, with Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in advance — the same kind of advance knowledge that Schulte himself reflected on?

Even the laudable, distinguishing aspect of Snowden’s leaks, that he gave them to journalists to determine what was in the public interest (an approach he abandoned when he described CIA infrastructure in his own book), is a double-edged sword. He made multiple copies of his files — most of which weren’t in the public interest — and handed the files to others, including at least one person, Greenwald, that Snowden knew had started out with epically shitty OpSec. We would never know if someone got some the Snowden files as a result unless, like Shadow Brokers or Teixeira’s leaks, someone started sharing them openly on Telegram.

The damage assessment and the reporting goes on

We are nine days into the public part of this leak and, thanks to WaPo reporters’ success at befriending the Discord kids, WaPo has obtained hundreds of otherwise unpublished documents. In addition to about eight background stories on the leaks and charges against Teixeira, WaPo currently has Discord Leak stories on: Taiwan’s military vulnerability, China’s surveillance balloons, Surveillance on Mexican cartels. There’s nothing that makes WaPo’s reporting more or less credible, more or less honorable, because Teixeira released these to show off to his buddies (if that is why he released them).

The Discord Leaks are a leak dump. They may have more in common with past leak dumps than a lot of past leak dump journalists would like to admit. Importantly, no matter what journalists would like to tell themselves, Teixeira’s motive, if he is the source, will have virtually no impact on the damage he does to US national security or the value those documents offer to the public good, both of which will be driven by the content of the documents and the details of any advance notice adversaries may have gotten.

And legally, Teixeira is going to be treated just like Chelsea Manning and Josh Schulte — which is to say, harshly, unless he decides to flip before prosecutors can build charges on another twenty documents and has information of value to prosecutors. That’s not surprising in the least. But — short of proving he knowingly shared these documents with an agent of a foreign power — nor will it be tied to his motive.

Leak dumps don’t care about motive.

Update: PwnAllTheThings’ analysis of the damage caused by the Discord leaks is worth reading. Along with noting that at least one human source has been put in danger by these leaks (as well as a bunch of SIGINT collection), he describes how these releases could have gotten a bunch of Ukrainians killed.

We don’t know yet if Teixeira wanted lots of Ukrainians to die as a result of his leak. But we definitely know he didn’t care if they did, and they certainly had the potential to cause colossal amounts of death—both military and civilian—in Ukraine, even if that huge potential was never fully realized.

DOJ has unsealed the arrest affidavit for Jack Teixeira.

It describes the following investigative steps (and leaves out the one that Bellingcat got to first):

April 9 [Not described]: Based on conversations with the guys involved, Aric Toler lays out how documents traveled from servers we now know were operated by Teixeira onto WowMao.

April 10: FBI interviews the user who cross-posted a document released by Teixeira (this may be Lucca), who provided information about how Teixeira had first leaked text, then leaked documents, as well as providing basic information about Teixeira.

On or about April 10, 2023, the FBI interviewed a user of Social Media Platform 1 (“User 1”). According to User 1, an individual using a particular username (the “Subject Username”) began posting what appeared to be classified information on Social Media Platform 1 in or about December 2022 on a specific server (“Server 1”) within Social Media Platform 1. According to User 1, the individual using the Subject Username was the administrator of Server 1. User 1 indicated that the purpose of Server 1 was to discuss geopolitical affairs and current and historical wars.

According to User 1, the individual using the Subject Username initially posted the Government Information as paragraphs of text. However, in or around January 2023, the Subject Username began posting photographs of documents on Server 1 that contained what appeared to be classification markings on official U.S. Government documents.

[snip]

User 1 also described to the FBI his interactions with the individual posting under the Subject Username. In the course of those interactions, User 1 learned that the individual posting under the Subject Username called himself “Jack,” appeared to reside in Massachusetts, and claimed that he was in the United States Air National Guard (“USANG”). User 1 described the individual posting under the Subject Username as a white male who was clean-cut in appearance and between 20 and 30 years old.

April 12: Subpoena returns from Discord reveal that Teixeira registered the server in question under his own name, from his mom’s address, which is the same address the Air National Guard had for him.

According to these records, the individual using the Subject Username is the administrator of Server 1, the billing name associated with the Subject Username is “Jack Teixeira,” and the billing address associated with the Subject Username is a specific residence in North Dighton, Massachusetts. Teixeira listed the North Dighton, Massachusetts residence as his primary residence on employment paperwork with the USANG. On April 13, 2023 the FBI arrested TEIXEIRA at that residence in North Dighton, Massachusetts.

April 13: User1 gave a positive ID of Teixeira based on his driver’s license

On April 13, 2023, User 1 also identified TEIXEIRA’s Registry of Motor Vehicles photo from a photo lineup as the individual he knew as “Jack” who had posted Government Information under the Subject Username on Social Media Platform 1.

nd: OGA1 provides log files showing Teixeira printing out the single charged document the day before it got cross-posted.

The Government Document posted on Social Media Platform 1 was accessible to TEIXEIRA by virtue of his employment with USANG. According to a U.S. Government Agency, which has access to logs of certain documents TEIXEIRA accessed, TEIXEIRA accessed the Government Document in February 2023, approximately one day before User 1 reposted the information on the Internet. User 1 told the FBI that the information he reposted was originally posted on Server 1 by the individual using the Subject Username.

nd: OGA2 provides log files showing Teixeira searching for this leak investigation the day the leak was first reported.

In addition, according to a second U.S. Government Agency, which can monitor certain searches conducted on its classified networks, on April 6, 2023, TEIXEIRA used his government computer to search classified intelligence reporting for the word “leak.” The first public reporting regarding the Government Information appeared on or around April 6, 2023. Accordingly, there is reason to believe that TEIXEIRA was searching for classified reporting regarding the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of the identity of the individual who transmitted classified national defense information, to include the Government Document.

Update: Spelling error of Teixeira fixed.

It’s something like 34 paragraphs deep into this WaPo report on how a bunch of documents got shared on a Discord server named “Thug Shaker” before WaPo reveals there was another name for the specific room in which someone who works on a military base shared classified information: bear-vs-pig, an allusion to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The documents were another lesson for younger members in how OG thought the world really worked. The member said OG wasn’t hostile to the U.S. government, and he insisted that he was not working on behalf of any country’s interests. “He is not a Russian operative. He is not a Ukrainian operative,” the member said. The room on the server where he posted the documents was called “bear-vs-pig,” meant to be a snide jab at Russia and Ukraine, and an indication that OG took no sides in the conflict.

Before you get to that detail, the WaPo offers this apocryphal reference to Reality Winner’s leak.

The photographs of printed secret documents now seen by millions may offer clues to the federal agents searching for OG. Reality Winner, who leaked secret National Security Agency documents to the news website the Intercept in 2017, was compromised by secret markings on printouts that helped narrow the search.

There’s no evidence in the search warrant affidavit or detention motion that the FBI had to use the dots on the document Winner printed out. They didn’t need to. She was one of just two people at her workplace who printed out the document, for which she did not have a need to know. She was easy to find using little more than subpoenas, as this dude is likely to be.

But the reference to Winner, someone who leaked a document that alerted Russia to what collection the NSA had on one of Russia’s most elusive hacking groups even though she had no known reason to want to help Russia, is an important reminder that often the best way to recruit someone to leak is via means other than asking them to help a hostile country.

Indeed, even the teenagers interviewed by the WaPo describe, whether they recognize it or not, that “OG” is a narcissist craving for adulation, even if comes from teenagers or people posing as teenagers in a Discord chat room.

The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s.

“He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said.

[snip]

OG was the undisputed leader. The member described him as “strict.” He enforced a “pecking order” and expected the others to read closely the classified information he had shared. When their attention waned, he got angry.

[snip]

The dramatic and yet nonchalant presentation also reminded the group that OG could lay his hands on some of the most closely guarded intelligence in the U.S. government. “If you had classified documents, you’d want to flex at least a little bit, like hey, I’m the big guy,” the member said. “There is a little bit of showing off to friends, but as well as wanting to keep us informed.”

OG is a right wing guy with Top Secret clearance who has been soured by conspiracy theories.

But OG had a dark view of the government. The young member said he spoke of the United States, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community, as a sinister force that sought to suppress its citizens and keep them in the dark. He ranted about “government overreach.”

OG told his online companions that the government hid horrible truths from the public. He claimed, according to the members, that the government knew in advance that a white supremacist intended to go on a shooting rampage at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022. The attack left 10 dead, all of them Black, and wounded three more. OG said federal law enforcement officials let the killings proceed so they could argue for increased funding, a baseless notion that the member said he believes and considers an example of OG’s penetrating insights about the depth of government corruption.

And whether the foreigners in the Discord server had followed OG there or even had elicited these leaks, they surely saw the same thing a bunch of teenagers saw: he would and did leak to feed his own ego and rationalized doing so with claims about the Deep State, the same kind of claims that the former President spreads regularly.

The member estimated that the server hosted people from Europe, Asia and South America. “Just about every walk of life.” Of the roughly 25 active members who had access to the bear-vs-pig channel, about half were located overseas, the member said. The ones who seemed most interested in the classified material claimed to be from mostly “Eastern Bloc and those post-Soviet countries,” he said. “The Ukrainians had interest as well,” which the member chalked up to interest in the war ravaging their homeland.

For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials have eyed gaming platforms as a magnet for spies. Russian intelligence operatives have been suspected of befriending gamers who they believe work for intelligence agencies and encouraging them to divulge classified information, a senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

As WaPo notes, spooks have recognized for some time that gaming platforms and other semi-private chat rooms are havens for spy recruitment.

The easy part of this investigation will be figuring out who OG is. Subpoenas on Discord and even these kids’ call records will identify him. The hard part will be figuring out who the other foreigners in the room were, and whether they enticed OG to leak this stuff or treated it as an auspicious benefit of being there.

This was a room focused on Ukraine and OG was an easy mark. One of the main questions at this point is whether he needed the nudge to leak these or really did so just to impress a bunch of teenagers.

Update: NYT reports that a member of MA’s Air National Guard is the person in the chatroom.

The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said Airman Teixeira might have information relevant to the investigation.

Update: While I was out to dinner, Teixiera was arrested.

Until someone comes up with something better, I’m going to call the leaks of printed out briefing slide decks via social media, described in updated reporting from NYT, WaPo, and Politico, the “Thug Shaker Leaks,” after the Discord server via which, Bellingcat reports, the earliest known instances of the leaks were known to be disseminated.

Bellingcat spoke to members of a separate Discord community who claimed that other images had been posted earlier on yet another, since deleted, server often called “Thug Shaker Central” but which also had several other names at different times. Image files shown to Bellingcat detailed a further document in the same style and formatting of those posted in the WowMao server that was dated to January 13.

[snip]

The Thug Shaker Central server was originally named after its original founder, one member of the server with the username “Vakhi” told Bellingcat. Server administrator duties then passed through various users before a new member took on the responsibility and it went through one of many name changes. Vakhi did not want to name this person but said they were the original source of the leaked documents. According to Vakhi, and two other users who spoke to Bellingcat but declined to be identified by their usernames, the files that were leaked onto WowMao are only the “tip of the iceberg” compared to the quantity of documents posted onto Thug Shaker Central.

[snip]

However, Bellingcat was able to confirm that Vakhi and the other users who spoke to Bellingcat, as well as another who shared documents on the WowMao server, were part of the Thug Shaker server given that they shared member lists with Bellingcat which matched in key details.

Their accounts of the server’s general nature also independently coincided. The name of the Thug Shaker server frequently changed, sometimes to that of a racial slur, and had around 20 active users making up a tight-knit community, members said. Posts and channel listings show that the server’s users were interested in video games, music, Orthodox Christianity, and fandom for the popular YouTuber “Oxide”.

This server was not especially geopolitical in nature, although its users had a staunchly conservative stance on several issues, members told Bellingcat. Racial slurs and racist memes were shared widely.

The leaks first received wide attention last week after some copies were distributed on Twitter and altered versions started circulating on Telegram. Those initial discoveries pertained to Ukraine, but as yesterday’s reporting lays out, there are also documents showing our spying on Israel and South Korea and other partners (though some Israelis, like Yossi Melman, deem the claims about Mossad backing the anti-Netanyahu protests to be a clear sign of disinformation).

I have only reviewed one document and I’m not chasing down the dissemination pattern.

But I wanted to make a few comments. First, this is one of the most damaging theft-and-leak campaign targeting the US Intelligence Community since Julian Assange was arrested four years ago (though there have been campaigns targeting cops and other parts of the NatSec establishment). It feels similar to Assange-adjacent leaks — the kinds of document someone cultivated by claims of the Deep State might be induced to steal with little to no understanding of what they’re taking.

And Bellingcat’s description of the culture of the Discord servers — conservatives with an interest in Orthodox Christianity with a propensity to use racist slurs — sounds like the kind of people who might be cultivated in the wake of Donald Trump. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that DOJ has arrested at least five members of the military who retained access to highly classified documents after the insurrection, including a Navy Reservist who worked at NRO who will be sentenced this week in EDVA for possessing some silencers, and three Marines who had expanded their access to SIGINT after the attack. Perhaps for investigative reasons, DOJ seems to take longer to arrest such people. And those are just the guys who decided to participate in the insurrection. There must be far more where they came from, and their allegiance to Trump may lead them to deliberately undermine US support of Ukraine. To be clear: there’s no hint that any of the known Jan6 defendants used their access to classified information to leak damaging information. They are, however, ready examples of the kind of disgruntled service members who have access to incredibly sensitive intelligence.

I think it’s at least possible that the form of the leaks — pictures of folded up documents with identifiable objects in the background — may be the opposite of what people take them for: opportunistic theft by someone unskilled who just released them on a lark. I think it’s at least possible that the form of the release — images that obscure the flat face of the documents and have background noise. in them — may make it harder for the IC to find them by scan.

And perhaps some of the most salient points about the leaks came from Mick Ryan, who describes not just how much time it’ll take the IC to do damage assessments and try to find the leaker, but notes that this will undermine the trust that the Biden Administration has fostered with allies, particularly Ukraine. A key part of the success in Ukraine thus far has derived from increased intelligence sharing. And this will put a sharp halt to some of that.

So in addition to telling adversaries — the Russians, but also the Iranians and Chinese — about US sources and methods, it will have a detrimental effect on the trust that has been a key part of US support for Ukraine in the last 14 months.

The WaPo, with Devlin Barrett as lead byline and Mar-a-Lago Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey next, has a report describing either new evidence or more evidence of obstruction in the stolen documents case.

Some of it, such as that investigators “now suspect that boxes including classified material were moved from Mar-a-Lago storage area after the subpoena was served,” is not new — not to investigators and not to the public. The version of the search affidavit released on September 14 showed that on June 24 investigators subpoenaed the surveillance footage for the storage room and at least one other, still-redacted location, going back to January 10, 2022, long before subpoena for documents with classification marks was served on May 11. So unless Trump withheld surveillance footage, then DOJ has known since early July 2022 on what specific dates boxes were moved. And a redacted part of the affidavit explains the probable cause the FBI had in August that there might be classified documents in Trump’s residential suite.

In other words, much of what WaPo describes is that DOJ has obtained substantial evidence since August to prove the probable cause suspicions already laid out in their August warrant affidavit. You don’t search the former President’s beach resort without awfully good probable cause, and they were able to show substantial reason to believe that Trump had boxes moved to his residence after he received the May 11 subpoena, where he sorted out some he wanted to keep, eight months ago.

They’ve just gotten a whole lot more proof that they were right, since.

Other parts of the story do describe previously unknown (to us, at least) details, and those may be significantly more important for Trump’s fate. The most intriguing, to me, is that witnesses are being asked about Trump’s obsession with Mark Milley.

Investigators have also asked witnesses if Trump showed a particular interest in material relating to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people familiar with those interviews said. Milley was appointed by Trump but drew scorn and criticism from Trump and his supporters after a series of revelations in books about Milley’s efforts to rein in Trump toward the end of his term. In 2021, Trump repeatedly complained publicly about Milley, calling him an “idiot.”

The people did not say whether investigators specified what material related to Milley they were focused on. The Post could not determine what has led prosecutors to press some witnesses on those specific points or how relevant they may be to the overall picture that Smith’s team is trying to build of Trump’s actions and intent.

Remember that reports on investigations, especially ones that include Mar-a-Lago court reporters, often amount to witnesses attempting to share questions they’ve been asked with other witnesses or lawyers. Trump’s team has no idea what kinds of classified items were seized. This detail suggests that among the classified documents seized are a document or documents pertaining to Milley.

According to Bobs Woodward and Costa in Peril, Milley called China twice in the last months of the Trump administration to reassure his counterpart that the US was not going to attack China without some build-up first.

On Friday, October 30, four days before the election, Chairman Milley examined the latest sensitive intelligence. What he read was alarming: The Chinese believed the United States was going to attack them.

Milley knew it was untrue. But the Chinese were on high alert, and whenever a superpower is on high alert, the risk of war escalates. Asian media reports were filled with rumors and talk of tensions between the two countries over the Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea, where the U.S. Navy routinely sails ships in areas to challenge maritime claims by the Chinese and promote freedom of the seas.

There were suggestions that Trump might want to manufacture a “Wag the Dog” war before the election so he could rally the voters and beat Biden.

[snip]

This was such a moment. While he often put a hold on or stopped various tactical and routine U.S. military exercises that could look provocative to the other side or be misinterpreted, this was not a time for just a hold. He arranged a call with General Li.

Trump was attacking China on the campaign trail at every turn, blaming them for the coronavirus. “I beat this crazy, horrible China virus,” he told Fox News on October 11. Milley knew the Chinese might not know where the politics ended and possible action began.

To give the call with Li a more routine flavor, Milley first raised mundane issues like the staff-to-staff communications and methods for making sure they could always rapidly reach each other.

Finally, getting to the point, Milley said, “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.

“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise. It’s not going to be a bolt out of the blue.

The two Bobs also described how, in the days after January 6, Milley reviewed nuclear launch procedures with senior officers of the National Mission Command Center to make sure he would be in the loop if Trump ordered the use of nukes.

Without providing a reason, Milley said he wanted to go over the procedures and process for launching nuclear weapons.

Only the president could give the order, he said. But then he made clear that he, the chairman of the JCS, must be directly involved. Under current procedure, there was supposed to be a voice conference call on a secure network that would include the secretary of defense, the JCS chairman and lawyers.

“If you get calls,” Milley said, “no matter who they’re from, there’s a process here, there’s a procedure. No matter what you’re told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure. You’ve got to make sure that the right people are on the net.”

If there was any doubt what he was emphasizing, he added, “You just make sure that I’m on this net. “Don’t forget. Just don’t forget.”

He said that his statements applied to any order for military action, not just the use of nuclear weapons. He had to be in the loop.

Since these details about Milley came out, Trump and his frothers have claimed Milley committed treason, in concert with Nancy Pelosi (who had expressed concerns to Milley about the safety of America’s nuclear arsenal).

The attack on Milley is the same kind of manufactured grievance — often cultivated by investigation witness Kash Patel (who was DOD Chief of Staff during the transition) — as the Russian investigation. That other inflated grievance led Trump to compile a dumbass binder of sensitive documents that didn’t substantiate his grievances. If Trump did the same with Milley, either before or after he left office, those documents might include highly sensitive documents, including SIGINT reports about China’s response to Milley’s contacts.

If DOJ were ever to charge Trump for refusing to give back classified documents under 18 USC 793(e), DOJ would select a subset of the documents to charge, probably from among those seized in August. They would pick those that, if declassified for trial, would not do new damage to national security, documents that would allow prosecutors to tell a compelling story at trial. And given WaPo’s report, there’s good reason to think there’s a story they think they could tell about documents that may be part of Trump’s grievance campaign against Milley.

WaPo also described that witnesses are being asked whether Trump shared documents, including a map, with donors.

As investigators piece together what happened in May and June of last year, they have been asking witnesses if Trump showed classified documents, including maps, to political donors, people familiar with those conversations said.

According to the story, communications from Trump’s former Executive Assistant, Molly Michael, have been key for investigators.

[A]uthorities have another category of evidence that they consider particularly helpful as they reconstruct events from last spring: emails and texts of Molly Michael, an assistant to the former president who followed him from the White House to Florida before she eventually left that job last year. Michael’s written communications have provided investigators with a detailed understanding of the day-to-day activity at Mar-a-Lago at critical moments, these people said.

Michael is likely the person in whose desk drawer at least two of the classified documents seized in August were found: the two “compiled” with messages from a pollster, a faith leader, and a book author, the kind of document you would show to donors. That document, which combines two classified documents obtained before Trump left the White House with messages from after he left, is the kind of smoking gun that shows Trump didn’t just hoard documents because of ego (as Barrett reported even after the existence of this document was made public), but because he was putting classified documents to his own personal use. We learned back in November that there was evidence that Trump had used two classified documents in what sounds like a campaign document. Perhaps one of those classified documents was a map (of Israel? of Ukraine?).

Whatever it is, this is the kind of story prosecutors might like to tell at stolen classified document trials, not just because it would show Trump putting the nation’s secrets to his own personal gain and sharing classified documents with people who never had clearance, but because it would be proof that people on Trump’s team knew of and accessed documents after they lost their need to access such documents. This document would go a long way to proving that Trump didn’t just hoard classified documents out of negligence (which is currently the explanation why both Joe Biden and Mike Pence did), but because he wanted to make use of what he took.

Molly Michael is also the person who ordered a more junior aide to make a digital copy of Trump’s schedules from when he was President, an order that led to documents with classification markings being loaded to a laptop and likely to the cloud. That’s another example of the kind of exploitation of classified documents that would make a good story at trial.

It’s also the kind of story that could expose Michael herself to Espionage Act charges, such that she might work hard to minimize her own exposure. And yes, because she was Trump’s Executive Assistant, both at the White House and after he moved back to Mar-a-Lago, she likely can explain a lot about how Trump used documents he took from the White House and brought to Mar-a-Lago, including documents used as part of his political campaigning afterwards.

Without conceding it was incorrect, WaPo notes that in November, after it was already public that Trump had self-interested reason to refuse to return documents, it reported it was all just ego (it now attributes that conclusion entirely to what Trump told his aides, not — as claimed in the first line of last fall’s story — what “Federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe”).

Such alleged conduct could demonstrate Trump’s habits when it came to classified documents, and what may have motivated him to want to keep the papers. The Post has previously reported that Trump told aides he did not want to return documents and other items from his presidency — which by law are supposed to remain in government custody — because he believed they belonged to him.

Even in a story describing prosecutors collecting evidence about at least two stories about classified records that they might tell at a trial, the WaPo remarkably suggests to readers that obstruction is the primary crime being investigated here.

The application for court approval for that search said agents were pursuing evidence of violations of statutes including 18 USC 1519, which makes it a crime to alter, destroy, mutilate or conceal a document or tangible object “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency.”

A key element in most obstruction cases is intent, because to bring such a charge, prosecutors have to be able to show that whatever actions were taken were done to try to hinder or block an investigation. In the Trump case, prosecutors and federal agents are trying to gather any evidence pointing to the motivation for Trump’s actions.

[snip]

Investigators have also amassed evidence indicating that Trump told others to mislead government officials in early 2022, before the subpoena, when the National Archives and Records Administration was working with the Justice Department to try to recover a wide range of papers, many of them not classified, from Trump’s time as president, the people familiar with the investigation said. While such alleged conduct may not constitute a crime, it could serve as evidence of the former president’s intent.

By treating this as only an obstruction investigation, WaPo incorrectly claims that lying to NARA (as opposed to the FBI) could not be part of a crime.

Here’s my attempt to lay out the elements of offense of both crimes — what prosecutors would have to prove at trial (I wrote more about the elements of an 18 USC 793e charge here and here).

To prove obstruction, DOJ would focus on the things of which — WaPo describes — Jack Smith’s team has developed substantial proof. Most conservatively, they would pertain to a grand jury investigation, because that application would be uncontroversial. After DOJ sent Trump a grand jury subpoena (which would be presented at trial as proof that Trump had notice of the grand jury investigation, his knowledge of which Evan Corcoran’s recent testimony would further corroborate), Trump took steps to hide documents and thereby prevent full compliance with that subpoena, and so thwarted a grand jury investigation. That’s your obstruction charge.

DOJ could charge a second act of obstruction tied to NARA’s effort to recover documents as part of its proper administration of the Presidential Records Act. But such an application would be guaranteed to be appealed. So the safer route would be to charge behavior that post-dates Trump’s knowledge of the grand jury investigation (and indeed, WaPo describes a close focus on events that took place starting last May).

But Trump’s longer effort to deceive the government in order to hoard documents is proof of 18 USC 793(e). To prove that, DOJ would need to prove that the government, whether NARA or FBI, told Trump he was not authorized to have documents covered by the Presidential Records Act, a subset of which would include documents with classification marks. They would need to show that Trump had been told about why he needed to protect classified records, which Trump’s former White House counsels and Staff Secretary have described (and documented) doing. For good measure they would show that Jay Bratt affirmatively told Trump that he had been (and, the August search would prove, was still) storing classified documents in places not authorized for such storage.

To prove 18 USC 793(e) at trial, you would need to describe specific documents Trump refused to give back and explain to a jury why they fit the definition of National Defense Information, material that remained closely held that, if released, could do damage to the US. That may be why they’re asking questions about Trump’s obsession with Milley or sharing maps with donors: because it’s part of the story that prosecutors would tell at trial, if they were to charge 18 USC 793.

All of which is to say that WaPo not only reported that DOJ has collected more evidence to prove what DOJ already suspected when they did the search on August 8, but they’ve been collecting information that would go beyond that, to a hypothetical Espionage Act charge.

Charging a former President with violating the Espionage Act is still an awfully big lift, and in the same way that charging obstruction for impeding NARA’s proper administration of the Presidential Records Act would invite an appeal, charging 18 USC 793(e) in DC would invite a challenge on venue (and charging it in Florida would risk spending the next three years fighting Aileen Cannon). But in addition to developing more evidence to prove the suspicions that they already substantiated in August, WaPo describes Jack Smith’s team asking the kinds of questions — about specific documents that might be charged as individual violations of the Espionage Act — that you’d ask before charging it.

Asking whether Trump (or Molly Michael or anyone else from Trump’s PAC) showed donors a classified map in a package also showing polling and a faith leader’s support for Trump’s policy in an attempt to raise money doesn’t get you evidence of obstruction. If the map is classified, though, it gets you proof that Trump not only knew he had classified documents, but had turned to profiting off of them.

That’s not a guarantee they’re going to charge 18 USC 793e. It’s a pretty good sign they’re collecting evidence that might support that charge.

Update: CNN has a much more measured story, describing how Jack Smith’s team is locking in the voluntary testimony they got last summer.

The new details come amid signs the Justice Department is taking steps typical of near the end of an investigation.

The recent investigative activity before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, also includes subpoenaing witnesses in March and April who had previously spoken to investigators, the sources said. While the FBI interviewed many aides and workers at Mar-a-Lago nearly a year ago voluntarily, grand jury appearances are transcribed and under-oath – an indication the prosecutors are locking in witness testimony.

[snip]

The grand jury activity – expected to continue to occur at a frequent clip in the coming weeks – builds upon several known reactions Trump and others around him had to the DOJ’s attempt to reclaim classified records last year, and which prompted the FBI to obtain a judge’s approval to search Mar-a-Lago in August for classified records.

Some of the evidence the DOJ has used to persuade a judge to allow that search is still under seal.

It also notes that Smith is still pursuing how a box including documents with classification marks came to be brought back to Mar-a-Lago after the search.

Since then, the Justice Department has pushed for answers around how a box with classified records ended up in Trump’s office after the FBI search took place.

There is some tie between Donald Trump’s effort — as one of his last acts as President — to declassify a binder of materials from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and his hoarding of still-classified documents that could get him charged under the Espionage Act.

It’s not yet clear what that tie is, though.

On May 5 of last year, Kash Patel offered the declassification effort as an alibi, claiming Trump had declassified a bunch of materials, including not just the Crossfire Hurricane materials, but everything else discovered in boxes returned to NARA in January 2022. Kash’s claim would be included in the search affidavit for Mar-a-Lago and ultimately lead to his compelled testimony in the investigation.

Last fall, at a time when Alex Cannon and Eric Herschmann would have been under some scrutiny for their role in Stefan Passantino’s dubious legal advice to Cassidy Hutchinson, Maggie Haberman told a story in which the Trump lawyers heroically warned Trump about the risks of holding classified documents. That story claimed Trump had offered to swap the documents he did have for the Russian-related documents the former President believed NARA had.

It was around that same time that Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a “hoax” cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted.

Mr. Trump’s aides — recognizing that such a swap would be a non-starter since the government had a clear right to the material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House and the Russia-related documents held by the archives remained marked as classified — never acted on the idea.

The story doesn’t mention Cannon’s role in a fall 2021 inquiry to NARA about the Russian documents. Nor does it say that National Archives General Counsel Gary Stern told Cannon and Justin Clark that NARA had 2,700 undifferentiated documents, but that the binder Trump wanted declassified had been rendered a Federal Record when it got sent back to DOJ.

That’s what NARA told John Solomon on June 23, 2022 — that Trump’s lawyers had requested the binder in fall 2021 — in Stern’s first explanation for why NARA didn’t have the binder.

John, fyi, last fall Justin Clark, another PRA representative of President Trump, also asked us for a copy of this declassified binder. Upon conducting a search, we learned that the binder had been returned to the Department of Justice on January 20, 2021, per the attached memo from Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to the Attorney General, titled “Privacy Act Review of Certain Declassified Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.”

Accordingly, we do not have the binder containing the declassified records. As we explained to Justin, what we were able to locate is a box that contains roughly 2700 undifferentiated pages of documents with varying types of classification and declassification markings, but we could not be certain of the classification status of any of the information in the box. We are therefore obligated under Executive Order 13526 to treat the contents of the box as classified at the TS/SCI level.

Then on August 9 and again on August 10 last year, immediately following the search on Mar-a-Lago, Solomon asked for all correspondence between Cannon and NARA up until days before the search.

Gary, John: My research indicates there may be a new wrinkle to the Russian declassified documents. As part of my authorized access, I would like to see all correspondence between NARA and attorney Alex Cannon between December 2020 and July 31, 2022. I think the information will have significant value to the public regarding current events. Can that be arranged?

[snip]

Checking back on this. It’s time sensitive from a news perspective. Can you accommodate?

Stern, no dummy, likely recognized that this information would not just have news value, but would also have value to those under criminal investigation; he responded with lawyerly caution. As NARA representative for Trump, he explained, Solomon was only entitled to access Presidential records — those that predate January 20, 2021 — and communications between Cannon and NARA post-dated all that. But, Stern helpfully noted, Cannon was cc’ed on the request for the Russian binder.

It’s important to clarify that, as a designated PRA representative of President Trump, you may receive access to the Presidential records of the Trump Administration that have been transferred to NARA, which date from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021.

Alex Cannon has represented President Trump on PRA matters (along with Justin Clark) only since the summer of 2021, principally with respect to the notification and review process in response to special access requests. Accordingly, there would not be any Trump Presidential records between NARA and Alex Cannon.

FYI, in my June 23 email to you (which is below within this email thread), I noted that “last fall Justin Clark, another PRA representative of President Trump, also asked us for a copy of this declassified binder.” Alex Cannon was cc’d on Justin’s request and our response. I am not aware of any other communications that would exist between NARA and Alex about this matter. [my emphasis]

That would be the only communications “about this matter,” seemingly distinguishing the Russian binder from the missing Presidential records.

At the time Maggie was distracting the chattering classes with the swap story, ABC had a very thorough story that revealed some of what Stern had explained to Solomon last year. That story suggests the month-long focus on the Russian binder had led overall compliance with the Presidential Records Act to be lacking. As Hutchinson tells it, it was worse, with 10 to 15 NSC staffers madly copying classified documents in the last days Trump was in office, with two sets of four copies — one still classified, one less sensitive — circulating to who knows where.

The tie between the Russian documents and the documents Trump stole may be no more than the alibi Kash tried to use them as, an attempt to claim that the limited declassification was instead a blanket effort. Perhaps it was also a failed effort to use Kash and Solomon as moles to figure out what NARA got back. Or perhaps some of these materials madly copied at the last moment were among the classified documents Trump took with him. Perhaps some of those materials were among the still-classified documents Trump took and hoarded in a storage closet with a shitty lock.

But that tie is one of the reasons I read the version of the binder released earlier this year in response to a Judicial Watch FOIA closely (release 1, release 2).

That is one dumbass binder. If you’re going to expose yourself and your assistants to Espionage Act prosecution, this is one dumbass document to do so over.

Having reviewed it — even with great familiarity with the unending ability of certain frothers to get ginned up over these things — I cannot believe how many people remain obsessed about this document.

The document, as released to Judicial Watch, is little more than a re-release of a bunch of files that have already been released. Perhaps the only released documents I hadn’t read closely before were memorializations that Andy McCabe wrote of conversations he had in the wake of Jim Comey’s firing with and about Trump, including the one that described Rod Rosenstein offering to wear a wire to meetings at the White House.

And because DOJ subjected the documents to a real Privacy Act review, unlike declassifications effectuated by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe when Kash babysat him as his Chief of Staff, a number of the documents actually are more redacted than previous versions, something that will no doubt be a topic of exciting litigation going forward.

Mark Meadows ordered DOJ to do a Privacy Act review and as a result great swaths of documents were withheld, page after page of b6/b7C exemptions as well as b7D ones to shield confidential information.

Here’s what got released to Judicial Watch, along with links to the previous releases of the documents:

• Request 1: Pending with DOJ
• Tab 2: Christopher Steele 302  [25 withheld]
• Communications about the Steele dossier
• CHS reporting (probably Steele)
• [75 pages withheld]
• CHS reporting (probably Stefan Halper)
• CHS
• Andrew McCabe, Jim Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bill Priestap text and Lync messages, all previously released to Congress
• Request 5: Pending with DOJ
• Request 6: Pending with DOJ
• Flynn 302s (but not equally damning ones from later in 2017)
• [10 pages withheld]
• Andrew McCabe memorialization of conversations with Trump
• [8 pages withheld]
• Bruce Ohr 302s [all but one previously released — also to Judicial Watch! — here]
• Memorialization of Flynn briefing [less redacted version here]
• Request 14 (for Sussmann or other Perkins Coie lawyers): No collection pertaining to Crossfire Hurricane
• Mifsud 302 [previously released here]
• Request 17 (meeting with Ohr and Weissmann): Pending with DOJ
• [95 pages withheld]
• Mike Rogers 302 [previously released here]
• June 29, 2017 Carter Page application [previously released here]

The Bruce Ohr 302s are the only documents that include much newly released materials, mostly reflecting Igor Danchenko’s subsequent public identification. Both the candidate briefing and the Carter Page FISA application include significantly more redaction (and those are not the only interesting new redactions); given the redactions, it doesn’t look like Trump contemplated disseminating any Page material that was sequestered by the FISA Court, which would have been legally problematic no matter what Trump ordered, but references to the sequestration were all redacted.

As noted above as Requests 1, 5, 6, 14, and 17, there were five things Trump asked for that were still pending at DOJ when Trump left office. Two of those are identified: A request for materials on Perkins Coie lawyers, which (DOJ informed Trump) had no tie to Crossfire Hurricane, and a request for details on an August 2016 meeting involving Bruce Ohr, Andrew Weissmann, and one other person “concerning Russia or Trump.”

There were a number of communications between Ohr, Weissmann, and others later in 2016, including communications potentially relating to an effort to flip Dmitry Firtash, as well as October 2016 communications between Ohr and McCabe. But the jumbled timeline of Ohr’s communications has often been used to insinuate that the Crossfire Hurricane team learned of the Steele allegations earlier in the investigation than the September 19 that DOJ IG reflects. In any case, some of these meetings likely touched on Oleg Deripaska and some might touch on the suspected Egyptian donation Trump used to stay in the race past September 2016, not the dossier.

Between other then-pending requests and big chunks of withheld information (I’ve noted the biggest chunks above, but it would be around 300 pages total), there are things I would have expected to see in this binder that are not there. For example, almost none of the material released as part of DOJ’s attempt to undermine the Flynn investigation (links to which are in this post) is included here. Most of that stuff constitutes information that would never normally be released. It was egregiously misrepresented by Barr’s DOJ. Some of the files were altered. If these were requested, I can think of a number of reasons it would take DOJ a while to provide the materials. Even still, though, the materials didn’t persuade Emmet Sullivan to overturn Flynn’s prosecution, and documents left out of this bunch — such as Flynn’s later 302s, including some where he obviously told the same lies he had told in January 2017, would easily rebut any claims Trump might offer with the Flynn documents.

The documentation showing Strzok learning of a Russian intelligence product claiming not very damning things about Hillary is not in here. That, too, is something that would never have been released with a normal DNI not being led around by Kash Patel and it’s one that would take DOJ a good deal of time to clear. But as I laid out here, the report came after Trump had already demonstrably started pursuing files stolen by Russia. By the time Hillary purportedly decided to call out Trump for encouraging the Russian hack, Trump was encouraging the Russian hack.

Given that Mike Rogers’ 302 from the Mueller investigation is included here, you’d expect those of Trump’s other top intelligence officials to be included as well. Dan Coats and Mike Pompeo were interviewed in the weeks after Rogers. Coats’ aide Mike Dempsey and NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett were also interviewed about Trump’s March 2017 effort to get the IC to deny he had a role in Russian interference, as was Trump’s one-time briefer Edward Gistaro (Gistaro was interviewed a second time in 2018, in an interview treated as TS/SCI, which likely pertained to his involvement in briefing at Mar-a-Lago during the transition). Details of these interviews show up in the Mueller Report, and his request only helps to make Trump look more guilty.

It doesn’t include materials released as part of the failed Sussmann and Danchenko prosecutions. But like Barr’s effort to overturn the Flynn prosecution, none of that evidence sustained Trump’s conspiracy theories either. Indeed, during a bench conference in the Danchenko trial, Durham fought hard to keep the substance of the discussions — ostensibly about energy investments — between Sergei Millian and George Papadopoulos starting in July 2016 out of the trial because, “it certainly sounds creepy.” The Sussmann trial showed how justified people were in wondering about Trump’s Russia ties in the wake of his “Russia are you listening” comment. It provided a glimpse of how time-consuming being a victim of a nation-state hack had been for Hillary in 2016. Durham even demonstrated that FBI badly screwed up the Alfa Bank investigation. When subjected to the rules of evidence, none of Trump’s hoax claims hold up.

The point is, nothing in this binder — particularly as released — supports Trump’s claims that the investigation into him wasn’t independently predicated and didn’t lead to really damning information implicating at least five of his top aides and his own son.

Trump keeps trying to collect some set of evidence that will make go away the far more damning ties to Russia that his National Security Advisor, his Coffee Boy, his personal lawyer, his campaign manager, and his rat-fucker all lied to hide. And in this case, it may have led Trump to do something far dumber, to defy a subpoena and hoard highly classified documents.

Which possibility only makes the dumbass Russia binder even more of a dumbass Russian binder.

More than seven months after seemingly threatening to sue the National Archives because Mark Meadows and Donald Trump fucked up their effort to declassify the Russian investigation documents, John Solomon finally did sue on March 21, represented by the America First Legal Foundation — Stephen Miller’s gig.

I’d be shocked if the lawsuit went anywhere.

That’s because NARA General Counsel Gary Stern provided Kash and Solomon with the explanation of what happened with the attempted declassification over and over and over. First, Trump didn’t declassify the documents. He ordered the binder of Crossfire Hurricane documents be sent to the Attorney General, who would implement the final declassifications, then send the document back to the White House.

I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.

Then the next day, January 20, 2021, Mark Meadows sent all that to the Attorney General to conduct a Privacy Act review before releasing anything.

As Stern explained to Kash and Solomon, what remained at the White House at that point was a collection of 2,700 “undifferentiated pages,” a cursory review of which revealed conflicting redactions and some documents lacking the requisite declassification stamp. The stuff that got sent to DOJ was a Federal Record, not a Presidential Record, and by the time Kash and Solomon started this process, it was already being processed as part of a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit (the first two releases in which — one, two — recently came out).

In other words, Trump and Mark Meadows fucked this up. NARA didn’t. Trump did.

The likely futility of the lawsuit notwithstanding, the lawsuit and its timing may have more to do with publicly sharing the correspondence Solomon and Kash Patel had with NARA last year, between the time Trump would have realized he had a legal problem with this stolen classified documents, and the immediate wake of the search that made that legal problem a far bigger problem.

As the correspondence Solomon released with the lawsuit reveals, Evan Corcoran initiated this process, on June 17, 2022, informing Stern that “because of his schedule” on June 17 and 18, he would sign a letter designating Kash and Solomon NARA representatives on June 19, after which the two wanted to immediately (Solomon explained in reply) get access to the Russian documents.

Because of his schedule today and tomorrow, former President Donald J. Trump will sign a letter on Sunday afternoon, June 19, 2022, informing the Acting Archivist of the United States that he has designated Kash Patel and John Solomon (copied) to be his NARA representatives.

I will transmit that letter to the Archivist and you (and John Laster) via email when I receive it.

Kash and John would like to begin work reviewing documents at the Archives on Tuesday, June 21, 2022.

I will leave it to the three of you to work out logistics (and feel free to move me to bcc)

Think about that! By April 29, Corcoran was the guy with whom Stern was coordinating on the FBI request for access to the documents Trump belatedly returned in January 2022. On May 5, Corcoran asked to access what had been returned and on the very same day — the search affidavit notes — Kash claimed that not just the Russian documents had been declassified, but a bunch of other documents had too. On May 11, FBI subpoenaed Trump for remaining classified documents. On June 3, Corcoran provided just a subset of the remaining documents.

And then, two weeks after participating in a shell game to facilitate withholding classified documents, Corcoran contacted Stern to arrange fairly urgent access for Kash and Solomon to the materials he had first asked to access in May.

The guy in charge of staving off criminal exposure for hoarding classified documents is the guy who arranged to have Kash and Solomon made NARA representatives!

And then, Stern noted, he moved Corcoran to “bcc.” That means it’s not clear whether Corcoran remained on bcc or not. We don’t know whether Corcoran, as was his intent, remained part of the rest of this exchange. Which makes the timing of this probably futile lawsuit — the second business day after Beryl Howell ruled that Corcoran must testify and the day before Corcoran was initially due to comply — all the more interesting.

There are other interesting tidbits of the correspondence Solomon includes — most notably Kash’s increasing frustration because he couldn’t name via what agency he retained clearance.

On July 18, for example, Kash wrote an email riddled with typos bitching because Stern did not take, from the letter Patel’s one-time contractor employer sent, as approval to access classified records at NARA.

Actually, that’s only part of the communications your security team and you received. The rest states:

they (NARA) could look up your clearance in DISS or Scattered Castles and your need to know came from working directly for President Trump. Per policy- In order to access anything – you would need a clearance and a need to know. You have both of these based on your position with President Trump.

If you are going to provide a correspondence on this matter and directly site a communication, please do not cut out the important, substantive portion that resolves the matter. As you can see, you can validate my clearance and my need to know is satisfied. The only question that remains is why I am getting poor/incorrect information, and why you haven’t used the data bases to verify my clearance, when that is clearly within your agencies ability (its literally how every agency in government validates said clearances). Again, I expect to be reviewing these records tomorrow since the data bases search to validate my clearance is instantaneous. Direct your security office accordingly and stop blocking my access. Thanks much

Kash

[my emphasis]

Much of this section of the exchange reads like a sloppy attempt to social engineer access. Which makes Kash’s claim that the NSC was a more recent employer of his than ODNI of particular interest.

Thanks for the update, please go to DoD and the NSC at the White House, those being my last employers in govt, they would be best suited to verify my clearance (they would not be held at ODNI) but anyone with access to Scattered Castles can easily verify the clearance and who holds it. Thanks much Kash

It’s not clear how this part of the exchange was resolved. The whole exchange led me to wonder whether Kash had a clearance during his time running DOD at all. But none of this would have amounted to a need to know in any case, notwithstanding what a former employer had said.

There was great urgency in this period to get into the archives, to see what Trump had actually turned over in January 2021. Then the correspondence ended — at least as Solomon has it — on August 17.

Incidentally, the correspondence provides at least some corroboration for my speculation that Kash was disseminating parts of the Carter Page FISA applications that had been sequestered under an order from the FISA court — sequestered, as it happens, by an order from Jeb Boasberg, who just took over as DC’s Chief Judge. It also may explain some curious metadata in the copy of the Mark Meadows order that John Solomon released on July 20, 2022. Solomon’s copy of Meadow’s order showed a creation date of September 27, 2021, but a modification date of June 23, 2022.

June 23 is the first of two times that Stern sent Solomon and Kash a copy of the memo. The modification date likely reflects NARA resending the document.

The September 27, 2021 creation date likely reflects the time when, in fall 2021, NARA first discovered the memo after Justin Clark and Alex Cannon came looking for it.

There’s one more reason this is significant. After receiving (or being described) that Mark Meadows’ memo last fall, Cannon — the guy who repeatedly advised Trump to return the classified documents — would have known the Russian documents were not declassified. But if those got returned as a result, it would mean that any other copies out there, including copies shared with Solomon, would be illegally disseminated classified records.

Update: I’ve updated my stolen documents resource page with some of the dates from Solomon’s lawsuit and caught up to my past posts.

Update: This led me to go back and review the stories John Solomon wrote in the aftermath of the search, which unsurprisingly include numerous bullshit claims.

August 11, 2022: Solomon regurgitates story describing “cooperation” in June, including Secret Service involvement in June 3 meeting and aftermath.

August 22, 2022: JustTheNews posts the text of letter from Debra Steidal Wall to Trump.

Update: Corrected which year Trump returned some documents.

Today marks the calendar start of celebration season for Mr. EW and I; all our big dates are squished into a short period that, this year, might well culminate in the first of several indictments for the former President.

For the US political world, though, today marks crime-fraud exception day, the day that at least one of Trump’s attorneys will be obliged to testify about how Trump lied to his lawyers to try to get away with hoarding stolen classified documents.

Because Evan Corcoran (and possibly Georgia attorney Jennifer Little) will testify today, I thought it a good day to update the list of attorneys who were or have been witnesses or who may be subjects in one or more investigations into Trump.

Since the Stormy Daniels payment may lead to Trump’s first indictment, Michael Cohen gets pride of place at number one on this list, a reminder that for seven years, Trump lawyers have been exposing themselves to legal jeopardy to help him cover things up.

The following lawyers have all — at a minimum — appeared in subpoenas pertinent to one or another of the investigations into Donald Trump, and a surprising number have testified before grand juries, including at least three with (Executive Privilege) waivers. To be clear: Many have no legal exposure themselves, but are instead simply witnesses to the efforts made to keep Trump in line before they were replaced with lawyers who were willing to let Trump do whatever he wanted, legal or no. But some of these lawyers have had legal process served against them, and so may themselves be subjects of one or multiple investigations.

1. Michael Cohen (hush payment): convicted felon whose phones were seized April 9, 2018
2. Rudolph Giuliani (Ukraine, hush payment, Georgia, coup attempt): phones seized in Ukraine investigation April 28, 2021, received subpoena for billing records in fundraising investigation around December 2022
3. John Eastman (Georgia, coup attempt): communications deemed crime-fraud excepted March 28, 2022; phone seized June 22, 2022
4. Boris Epshteyn (stolen documents, coup attempt, Georgia): testified in Georgia grand jury; phone seized in September after which he retroactively claimed to have been doing lawyer stuff
5. Sidney Powell (fraud, coup attempt, Georgia): Subpoenas sent in fraud investigation starting in September 2021; testified before Georgia grand jury; appeared in November subpoena
6. Jeffrey Clark (coup attempt): May 26 warrant for cloud accounts and phone seized June 22, 2022
7. Ken Klukowski (coup attempt): May 26 warrant for cloud accounts
8. Victoria Toensing (Ukraine, coup attempt): Phone seized in Ukraine investigation April 28, 2021, on June and November subpoenas
9. Brad Carver (Georgia and fake elector): phone contents seized June 22
10. Jenna Ellis (coup attempt and Georgia): Rudy’s sidekick, censured by CO Bar for lying serial misrepresentations, on June and November subpoenas
11. Kenneth Cheesbro (fake elector, Georgia): included in June and November subpoenas
12. Evan Corcoran (stolen documents): testified before grand jury in January, testifies under crime-fraud exception on March 24
13. Christina Bobb (coup attempt, Georgia, stolen documents): interviewed in October 2022 and appeared before grand jury in January, belatedly asked for testimony in Georgia
14. Stefan Passantino (coup attempt obstruction and financial): included in November subpoenas, alleged to have discouraged full testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson
15. Tim Parlatore (stolen documents): appeared before grand jury in December 2022
16. Jennifer Little (Georgia and stolen documents): ordered to testify under crime-fraud exception
17. Alina Habba (stolen documents, NYS tax fraud): testified before grand jury in January
18. Bruce Marks (coup attempt): included in November subpoena
19. Cleta Mitchell (coup attempt and Georgia): included in November subpoenas
20. Joshua Findlay (coup attempt): included in June subpoenas
21. Kurt Olsen (coup attempt): included in November subpoenas
22. William Olson (coup attempt): included in November subpoenas
23. Lin Wood (coup attempt): included in November subpoenas
24. Alex Cannon (coup attempt, financial, stolen documents)
25. Eric Herschmann (coup attempt, Georgia, financial, stolen documents)
26. Justin Clark (coup attempt and financial): included June and November subpoenas
27. Joe DiGenova (coup attempt): included in June and November subpoenas
28. Greg Jacob (coup attempt): grand jury appearances, including with Executive Privilege waiver
29. Pat Cipollone (coup attempt): grand jury appearances in summer and — with Executive Privilege waiver — December 2
30. Pat Philbin (coup attempt and stolen documents): grand jury appearances in summer and — with Executive Privilege waiver — December 2
31. Matthew Morgan (coup attempt): included in November subpoenas

Tim Parlatore is the latest addition to this list, based off someone’s decision to reveal Parlatore’s testimony to the stolen documents grand jury in December. As ABC reported, Beryl Howell ordered him to testify after he belatedly revealed that investigators he hired had found four documents with classification marks in a box brought back to Mar-a-Lago after the August 2022 search (he emphasizes that he did so without a subpoena, but this was an effort to stave off a finding of contempt).

The Dec. 22 testimony from attorney Timothy Parlatore was ordered after months of wrangling between Trump’s attorneys and officials in the Justice Department, who had grown increasingly concerned that Trump still continued to hold onto classified documents after more than 100 were discovered in the August 8 search, sources said.

In fact, just days before his testimony, Parlatore revealed to the DOJ and D.C. district court Judge Beryl Howell that a search of Mar-a-Lago conducted by Trump’s legal team on Dec. 15 and 16 had discovered four additional documents with classification markings, according to sources.

[snip]

While Judge Howell declined to hold Trump or his legal team in contempt at a Dec. 9 hearing, sources said, she did order Parlatore to testify on issues surrounding a signed certification he had provided that outlined the results of his team’s searches of locations where records responsive to the DOJ’s original subpoena could be located.

Howell also suggested at the hearing that Trump’s legal team include Mar-a-Lago in their list of locations to be searched again, despite the FBI’s previous court-authorized search of the property months earlier, sources said.

On Dec. 16, following a two-day search of Mar-a-Lago, Parlatore submitted a revised certification that acknowledged the discovery of the four additional documents in a closet near Trump’s office, sources said.

This explanation makes no mention of the classified folder found — presumably during the same search of Mar-a-Lago done at Howell’s suggestion — in Trump’s bedroom. Parlatore, who was brought in to do searches to give the patina of reliability to the earlier subpoena non-compliance, did not voluntarily hand over that folder; instead, DOJ subpoenaed it. In the wake of disclosures about that, Parlatore went on TV and made the ridiculous claim that the former President has nothing better to use to cover up a light on his bedside phone than random folders that once contained classified records, random folders that were not found during the FBI’s August 8 search.

Nor does this explanation mention the laptop with the documents marked classified (now numbered as four) also turned over.

Perhaps the most important detail this Parlatore-friendly story left out, however, is the way Trump’s team fought unsuccessfully to keep the names of the people who did the searches secret. After Howell ordered them to share those names in January, they testified before the grand jury, after Parlatore had already done so.

In this story, seeded the day before Corcoran testifies before the grand jury, that belatedly reveals Parlatore’s testimony before the grand jury, he makes claims of prosecutorial misconduct.

Parlatore, when reached for comment by ABC News, said, “I voluntarily and happily chose to go into the grand jury so that I could present my client’s case to them in the context of our search efforts. During my testimony, it was clear that the government was not acting appropriately and made several improper attempts to pierce privilege and, in my opinion, made several significant misstatements to the jury which I believe constitutes prosecutorial misconduct.”

Had Parlatore really believed something amounted to prosecutorial misconduct, we would have heard about it in December — though that would have required revealing how documents marked as classified got moved back to Mar-a-Lago after the August search. Had Parlatore really believed something amounted to prosecutorial misconduct, he would have said that on TV instead of sharing his bullshit story about covering up the light on a phone.

He didn’t. He didn’t make this claim until the night before Corcoran is set to testify about the adequacy of Mar-a-Lago searches Corcoran did six months before the one Parlatore did.

In between the time Parlatore testified to the grand jury in December and today, though, Parlatore made this bizarre claim about the possibility that Boris Epshteyn, described here as the gatekeeper between Trump and the lawyers, could be a subject of the investigation. (This story, dated March 14, followed the February 12 bullshit claim about the light by the side of the bed by just over a month.)

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.

As I’ve noted, DOJ almost certainly believes that Trump still has classified documents. DOJ almost certainly believes that the searches Parlatore did in November and December not only weren’t adequate, but were proven to be inadequate when his investigators found classified documents that had been moved back to Mar-a-Lago after the initial search.

They tried to obtain those documents by holding lawyers who had attested to searches in contempt back in December. Instead, Beryl Howell made them do more investigation first, culminating in what may be the last order she issued as Chief Judge ordering Corcoran to testify.

One possible outcome of today’s testimony is that someone finally gets held in contempt, someone finally risks jail time until such time as an adequate search of all of Trump’s properties is conducted. And that may be why Tim Parlatore chose this moment to announce his inclusion on the ever-growing lists of Trump lawyers who may be witnesses or may be subjects of his investigations.

Update: Going through old posts and thought I’d link this one from August 23, 2022, where I noted that two of Trump’s lawyers were either witnesses or co-conspirators in the stolen document case. It seemed prescient then, but jeebus, the number turns out to be at least 11 by now.

ABC News reports that among the things Beryl Howell ordered Trump’s lawyer, Evan Corcoran, to turn over were “transcriptions of personal audio recordings” involving his representation of Donald Trump.

Sources added that Howell also ordered Corcoran to hand over a number of records tied to what Howell described as Trump’s alleged “criminal scheme,” echoing prosecutors. Those records include handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal audio recordings.

It also reported that Howell ordered Jennifer Little, an Atlanta attorney who signed a big challenge to Fani Willis’ investigation into Trump’s attempts to cheat in Georgia, to testify further as well.

Sources told ABC News that Howell ordered Little’s testimony as well, with the exception of one of the topics for which she sought to assert attorney-client privilege.

CNN reports that Trump is appealing this decision.

As I noted, Judge Beryl Howell ended her tenure as DC’s Chief Judge yesterday decisively, ruling that Evan Corcoran must testify about topics she has found to be crime-fraud excepted.

By dint of age and tenure, Howell was appointed Chief Judge just in time to preside over the most remarkable set of investigations against a sitting and former President: the Mueller investigation and certain follow-on investigations, the January 6 investigation, and the stolen documents investigation.

And now Jeb Boasberg gets to pick up her work. Like Howell, he’s an Obama appointee; he already did a stint presiding over the FISA Court.

Howell’s decision requiring Corcoran to testify elicited all sorts of superlative language about the import of the decision. I’ll return to the number of other Trump lawyers against whom Howell has already approved legal process. The Corcoran decision really is not that unusual in the twin Jack Smith investigations. Or even in the other grand juries over which Howell has presided.

Indeed, the fruits of a warrant Howell approved on August 1, 2017 as part of an investigation into suspicious payments (especially those from Viktor Vekelselberg) to Michael Cohen’s Essential Consultants’ bank account, will likely yield Donald Trump’s first criminal indictment next week. Referrals of part of the resulting investigation to SDNY led to Cohen’s 2018 prosecution, including on the hush payments scheme. NYC has started making security preparations for Trump’s arrest on the same campaign finance scheme next week.

To repeat: a fairly uncontroversial decision Howell made six years ago — to approve the first of a series of warrants targeting Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen — will have played a part if and when Alvin Bragg indicts Trump next week.

Howell’s colleagues razzed her yesterday about all the secrets she may keep from the past seven years.

Howell seemed to freeze in her seat as the most senior jurist on the court, Judge Paul Friedman, publicly described her still-secret rulings in grand jury-related matters, pointing to press accounts of Howell ruling in favor of Trump in a contempt dispute over his office’s response to a grand jury subpoena for classified records and against Trump on an effort to assert attorney-client privilege in the same probe.

“What fascinating issues!” Friedman declared wryly as Howell remained stone-faced on the dais. “We’d all love to read her opinions, but we can’t,” he said to laughter.

Friedman did note, however, that Howell had issued 100 secret grand jury opinions during her seven-year term.

Another colleague, Judge Tanya Chutkan, also alluded to Howell’s work resolving disputes related to the court’s grand juries over the past seven years.

“There’s so much work Chief Judge Howell has done that we may never know about,” Chutkan said.

In an interview with Zoe Tillman, though, Howell suggested she expects some of it will be unsealed.

Howell said she was still processing the past seven years.

“A lot of my work in the grand jury arena remains under seal, so it is going to be very hard to say what my legacy will be until after some of that work gets unsealed and people are able to evaluate it,” she said.

I expect a good deal of her recent work will be unsealed, in fairly short order.

It bears reminding, though, that Judge Howell attempted to share information about what she had been overseeing in a grand jury with the House Judiciary Committee in 2019. In a 75-page opinion invoking the Federalist papers and defending separation of powers, Howell issued a ruling that should have been uncontroversial: that the House could have grand jury materials in contemplation of impeachment.

In her opinion, Howell cited a number of the things the House might get with grand jury testimony. They included Paul Manafort’s description of how Trump ordered him to chase the documents stolen from Hillary.

Again, the Mueller Report recounts an incident when then-candidate Trump spoke to associates indicating that he may have had advance knowledge of damaging leaks of documents illegally obtained through hacks by the Russians, stating “shortly after WikiLeaks’s July 22, 2016 release of hacked documents, [Manafort] spoke to Trump [redacted]; Manafort recalled that Trump responded that Manafort should [redacted] keep Trump updated. Deputy campaign manager Rick Gates said that . . . Manafort instructed Gates [redacted] status updates on upcoming releases. Around the same time, Gates was with Trump on a trip to an airport [redacted], and shortly after the call ended, Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.” Id. at II-18 (footnotes omitted) (redactions in original, with citation in footnote 27 redacted due to grand jury secrecy).

They included Don Jr’s refusal to testify to the grand jury about the June 9 meeting.

[A] discussion related to the Trump Tower Meeting contains two grand jury redactions: “On July 12, 2017, the Special Counsel’s Office [redacted] Trump Jr. [redacted] related to the June 9 meeting and those who attended the June 9 meeting.” Id. at II-105 (redactions in original).

They included Manafort’s details of his discussions with Konstantin Kilimnik.

The Mueller Report further recounts evidence suggesting that then-candidate Trump may have received advance information about Russia’s interference activities, stating:

Manafort, for his part, told the Office that, shortly after WikiLeaks’s July 22 release, Manafort also spoke with candidate Trump [redacted]. Manafort also [redacted] wanted to be kept apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks and separately told Gates to keep in touch [redacted] about future WikiLeaks releases. According to Gates, by the late summer of 2016, the Trump campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks. [Redacted] while Trump and Gates were driving to LaGuardia Airport. [Redacted], shortly after the call candidate Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.

Id. at I-53–54 (footnotes omitted) (redactions in original, with citation in referenced footnote 206 redacted due to grand jury secrecy).

But Bill Barr’s DOJ, after having challenged the uncontroversial notion that the House should be permitted to receive what was obviously an impeachment referral, appealed to the DC Circuit, lost, and then stalled long enough to outlast Congress. Bill Barr effectively refused to let Congress receive and act on an impeachment referral. But Howell did her constitutionally mandated part.

It’s an action DOJ took during precisely the period when Barr was stalling long enough to outlast Congress that, in my mind, is the biggest secret Howell takes from her tenure: What happened with an investigation into a suspected $10 million donation in September 2016 from an Egyptian-owned bank that allowed Trump to stay in the race when he was running out of funds. Though aspects of the investigation were dribbled out in grand jury unsealings from Howell along the way, CNN first confirmed the Egyptian bank angle in 2020.

For more than three years, federal prosecutors investigated whether money flowing through an Egyptian state-owned bank could have backed millions of dollars Donald Trump donated to his own campaign days before he won the 2016 election, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

The investigation, which both predated and outlasted special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, examined whether there was an illegal foreign campaign contribution. It represents one of the most prolonged efforts by federal investigators to understand the President’s foreign financial ties, and became a significant but hidden part of the special counsel’s pursuits.

The investigation was kept so secret that at one point investigators locked down an entire floor of a federal courthouse in Washington, DC, so Mueller’s team could fight for the Egyptian bank’s records in closed-door court proceedings following a grand jury subpoena. The probe, which closed this summer with no charges filed, has never before been described publicly.

Prosecutors suspected there could be a link between the Egyptian bank and Trump’s campaign contribution, according to several of the sources, but they could never prove a connection.

Shortly after the investigation was killed, Barr went up to Hillsdale College and ranted about prosecuting corruption.

This criminalization of politics is not healthy. The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct — conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment, up to and including being locked away in a cage. These tools are not built to resolve political disputes and it would be a decidedly bad development for us to go the way of third world nations where new administrations routinely prosecute their predecessors for various ill-defined crimes against the state. The political winners ritually prosecuting the political losers is not the stuff of a mature democracy.

The Justice Department abets this culture of criminalization when we are not disciplined about what charges we will bring and what legal theories we will bless. Rather than root out true crimes — while leaving ethically dubious conduct to the voters — our prosecutors have all too often inserted themselves into the political process based on the flimsiest of legal theories. We have seen this time and again, with prosecutors bringing ill-conceived charges against prominent political figures, or launching debilitating investigations that thrust the Justice Department into the middle of the political process and preempt the ability of the people to decide.

This criminalization of politics will only worsen until we change the culture of concocting new legal theories to criminalize all manner of questionable conduct. Smart, ambitious lawyers have sought to amass glory by prosecuting prominent public figures since the Roman Republic. It is utterly unsurprising that prosecutors continue to do so today to the extent the Justice Department’s leaders will permit it.

Even at the time — with the Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort cases — it was clear that Barr was engaged in fairly unprecedented corruption of DOJ to protect Trump. Since then, we’ve learned of more. Most notably, as we await a potential Bragg indictment, Geoffrey Berman described how, after Cohen pled guilty in the hush payment case, Barr not only shut down any investigation of Trump on the charge, but attempted to reverse Cohen’s own prosecution.

While Cohen had pleaded guilty, our office continued to pursue investigations related to other possible campaign finance violations. When Barr took over in February 2019, he not only tried to kill the ongoing investigations but—incredibly—suggested that Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed.

Barr summoned Rob Khuzami in late February to challenge the basis of Cohen’s plea as well as the reasoning behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals. Khuzami was told to cease all investigative work on the campaign finance allegations until the Office of Legal Counsel, an important part of Main Justice, determined there was a legal basis for the campaign finance charges to which Cohen pleaded guilty—and until Barr determined there was a sufficient federal interest in pursuing charges against others.

Barr even attempted to put supervision of the case in the hands of Richard Donoghue, as he did do with the Rudy Giuliani case.

Given that Barr didn’t think Trump should be prosecuted for the Cohen illegal contribution case, there’s no telling what he thought of the suspected Egyptian bank donation. Certainly, he was in complete control of DC USAO at the time, if he wanted to shut down an otherwise viable investigation.

We are, as Howell herself said, likely to know much of what she has been doing for the last two years. But her biggest secret is whether Bill Barr prevented DOJ from fully attempting to learn whether Donald Trump was beholden to Egypt or some other foreign country for the entirety of the time he served as President.