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Jeff Gerth’s Undisclosed Dissemination of Russian Intelligence Product

In his CJR series claiming the NYT and WaPo botched coverage of the Russian investigation, Jeff Gerth makes a great show of transparency, with the same disclosure statement appended to each installment of his 23,000-word series.

But the statements hide the most important details, given Gerth’s project (and his past history tilting at Hillary Clinton’s windmills and other real estate investments). For example, when he says he “helped ProPublica decide whether to collaborate with a book that was critical of the Clintons’ involvement with Russia; the arrangement didn’t happen,” he doesn’t explain whether that book was Clinton Cash, a piece of political oppo research written by Steve Bannon associate Peter Schweitzer that has a structurally similar position, in the 2016 election, as the Steele dossier does. When he says that he “approached [the NYT] on my own about the Clinton family foundation,” but “expressed disappointment to one of the Times reporters about the final result,” he’s engaged in press criticism about his own work, without disclosing which work that is (in his series he otherwise discusses this story about Clinton Cash and the Foundation). When he discloses that he wrote about Clinton at ProPublica, he does not explicitly describe a story he wrote using emails stolen by Guccifer 1.0, Marcel Lazar, putting him at the forefront of the relentless reporting on Hillary based on stolen documents.

There’s nothing, per se, wrong with writing about those things.

Where it becomes a problem, however, is in the way Gerth approaches his project, purportedly an attempt to decide why, after the 2016 election, trust in media nose-dived. Even beyond limiting his project to just the NYT and WaPo – or rather, claiming to; as I showed, he ignored great swaths of the most important work from both – Gerth simply assumes that the thing that damaged press credibility in 2016 was coverage of the Russian investigation, and not any of the other closely linked politicized investigations into one or another of the candidates, including the ones he played a role in.

There have been at least six investigations, at least four criminal, of events tied to the 2016 election:

The investigation into Hillary Clinton’s server that arose partly out of the Benghazi investigation and partly as a result of a hack of Sidney Blumenthal
An investigation of the Clinton Foundation, predicated in part by oppo research from Steve Bannon associate Peter Schweitzer, an investigation which leaked in the weeks leading up to the election and which was staffed by an FBI team that included a pro-Trump agent running an informant targeting the Foundation
The investigation into two strands of Russia’s influence operation – a hack-and-leak and a social media campaign – which ultimately merged, in part, with Crossfire Hurricane, under Robert Mueller
The UNSUB investigation, named Crossfire Hurricane, that attempted to learn which Trump aide got a tip that Russia would intervene to help beat Hillary; this investigation became the Mueller investigation
A review by US Attorney John Huber of Uranium One allegations against Hillary
The Durham investigation that Bill Barr would initiate, with no evidence that a crime had been committed, into the initiation of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation

That should provide the opportunity to apply a consistent approach to covering the investigations, particularly for someone lecturing others about press standards. But it would require including the Clinton server and Clinton Foundation coverage – coverage including Gerth’s own – somewhere besides the disclosures section. It would require reviewing documentation showing the Trump team’s plotting to find Hillary’s deleted emails – including consideration of plans to reach out to hostile intelligence services to do so.

And it would require reviewing Trump’s efforts to optimize the release of the files stolen by Russian hackers, something that Mark Meadows, in describing allegations that the Trump campaign might be “benefitting from Hillary Clinton emails,” said would be “collusion.” George Papadopoulos himself told Stefan Halper that “reaching out to wiki leaks or whoever it is … to tell them please work with us, collaborate,” as Stone undeniably attempted, would be “a form of treason.” Yet Gerth doesn’t consider whether the media’s relentless focus on the emails stolen from the Democrats, and not the investigation into that theft, drove at least part of the ensuing distrust in the media.

Along with avoiding those issues, Gerth ignores many of the materials released as part of the Mueller investigation (and most of the materials released in two Congressional investigations), and instead draws on materials released in the investigation into the Russian investigation, whether by Congress or as part of Durham’s two failed prosecutions. That is his fact-set: not the underlying “collusion” (adopting Meadows’ measure), not the investigation itself, but the effort to weaponize the investigation.

That’s how Gerth comes up with this statement of the scope of what he includes in “Russiagate.”

By 2016, as Trump’s political viability grew and he voiced admiration for Russia’s “strong leader,” Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and publicly promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia. The media would eventually play a role in all that, but at the outset, reporters viewed Trump and his candidacy as a sideshow.

When he first raises it, Gerth doesn’t date the timing of this claimed effort.

That’s important because Gerth obscures the public reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia, barely addresses the reliable open source research Fusion was doing on the topic (which was the part of the project taken over after Paul Singer stopped paying), and completely leaves out Trump efforts that were underway already by then.

For example, Gerth made much of a June 17, 2016 WaPo story, on which Tom Hamburger had the lead byline, which described Trump’s business pursuits in Russia, including his ties with Aras Agalarov. It was a remarkable story, particularly when you consider WaPo focused on Trump’s ties with Agalarov just 8 days after Agalarov arranged the June 9 meeting, promising “high level and sensitive information … that is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Gerth raises no questions about the accuracy of the report – indeed, much of it has since been confirmed by the Russia investigation. Rather, he notes that Hamburger, “was a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had worked with [Glenn] Simpson; the two were friends, according to Simpson’s book,” as if any association with Fusion would taint otherwise solid reporting.

But WaPo’s story came out before the first of Steele’s dossier reports, and Gerth himself distinguished between the “records on Trump’s business dealings and associates, some with Russia ties,” that Fusion collected via open source and the dossier (Gerth falsely suggests that Fusion stopped its open source research after the Democrats started paying). If Hamburger had an assist from Fusion, he would have been relying on their accurate work.

Gerth also doesn’t mention, at all, that WaPo reported on Carter Page’s comments in Moscow on July 7, 12 days before the first dossier report on Page’s trip.

Gerth focuses closely on Josh Rogin’s critique of the treatment of the RNC platform regarding Ukraine, but presents no evidence that Hillary seeded the critique or that Hillary’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, should have doubted it before he focused attention on it (the best pre-Mueller Report debunking of Rogin’s claims about the platform came from Byron York, but not until November 2017). Much of this early reporting was organic, and even assuming the Hamburger story relied on Fusion research and that research was conducted after the Democrats started paying, it would be little different from the Schweitzer efforts about which Gerth is almost silent.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign was already pursuing emails – both the 30,000 emails from Hillary’s server she had deleted, and whatever emails became available from the Russian hack of Democratic targets. For example, GOP Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen BCCed Mike Flynn on a pitch to journalist Catherine Herridge on May 24 promising stories about Hillary emails found on the dark web. Ledeen sent Flynn more information on June 16, which he called, “amazing!” Per Flynn’s testimony to the FBI, Ledeen’s pursuit, which continued up to the election, included travel by others overseas in search of emails purportedly hosted in Eastern Europe.

Rick Gates testified that Roger Stone claimed to have knowledge, prior to Julian Assange’s public announcement on June 12, that WikiLeaks had Hillary’s 30,000 deleted emails. He claimed that in a call on June 15, Stone said he was in touch with Guccifer 2.0, the persona alleged to be set up by Russian intelligence officers. He explained that when Stone asked for contact information for Jared Kushner that same day, Stone intended to debrief Jared and another campaign aide about the DNC’s announcement they’d been hacked. Gates testified at Stone’s trial that the campaign thought the hack of the DNC would give the campaign “a leg up.” Even accounting for uncertainty about which efforts were an attempt to get the deleted Hillary emails and which were an attempt to optimize the hacked emails, Stone’s efforts easily meet the definition of “collusion” – seeking to benefit from the stolen emails – that Mark Meadows adopted in 2018.

And the drumbeat coverage of Hillary’s server was part of what set up the later WikiLeaks releases. That’s a press coverage issue – a matter that undoubtedly led to frustration among many with the press, but not one that Gerth, who wrote an early article in the unrelenting mass of coverage, chose to mention.

Gerth’s efforts to pitch the Russian investigation as uniquely corrupt get more problematic once he tries to date the purported Hillary “conspiracy theory” that Trump’s campaign – which had already accepted a meeting promising help from Russia – did have ties to Russia.

In coverage of the initial release of the stolen DNC emails, Gerth makes much of the fact that Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch traveled to the 2016 DNC convention a few hours away in Philly, though he doesn’t describe a single thing they did there.

At the end of July, the DNC held its nominating convention in Philadelphia. In attendance were legions of journalists, as well as Simpson and Fritsch. On the eve of the events, the hacked emails from the DNC were dumped, angering supporters of Bernie Sanders, who saw confirmation in the messages of their fears that the committee had favored Hillary.

The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”

Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later. [my emphasis]

But, just as John Durham did, Gerth treats the release of emails on the most important day of Hillary’s campaign – stolen by Russia – as merely “not helpful,” rather than an unprecedented attack on the country and democracy and a presidential candidate. (Gerth, based primarily on the public uncertainty about how WikiLeaks got the emails, claims elsewhere the attribution of the hack to Russia, “is far from definitive,” an opinion which CJR presents while ignoring virtually all of the evidence, not to mention a 2016 NYT Pulitzer-winning story presenting what the hack looked like to the Democrats). And rather than focusing on Hillary as the victim of a hack-and-leak — something reflected in documents released in the Michael Sussmann trial that Gerth elsewhere relies on but ignores here — Gerth instead describes being targeted by a hack-and-leak operation as an opportunity to “promot[e] the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators.”

Even at this level, Gerth’s description is astounding. He cites Jennifer Palmieri, writing in 2017, claiming she later confirmed this was all just about “promoting the Russia narrative.” But Palmieri’s “did not succeed” comment was not just or even primarily about Trump’s encouragement of the operation, it was about accountability for Russia, a topic the importance of which would have been reinforced had Gerth reviewed more of the 2016 NYT stories that won a Pulitzer prize. Indeed, Palmieri described how, “the sheer spectacle of Trump” distracted from Russia’s influence operation, a worthy topic for a 23,000-word narrative trying to understand the press coverage of 2016, and one that might better explain Trump’s always-contradictory claims in press conferences than Gerth’s far less convincing explanations.

Gerth’s misrepresentation about Palmieri’s 2017 piece is all the more important given how his sloppiness soon turns to malpractice. The Brennan briefing he cites (bolded above), one of Gerth’s primary pieces of proof that Hillary promoted a secret “conspiracy theory” and one that falls far short of his claim that she was claiming “a secret alliance between Trump and Russia,” comes from a document released by John Ratcliffe in September 2020, as part of Trump’s effort (with Bill Barr) to weaponize the Russian investigation before the election.

When that document was released, I noted that its distribution represented the same unmasking of identities in intelligence reports that had provoked Republican complaints for three years – something that itself probably merited more press coverage. Gerth, however, uses it to suggest that any attempt by Hillary to impose a cost on Trump for exploiting Russian interference – something the Mueller Report concluded he did – was itself scandalous. “[T]he Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” the Mueller Report concluded in the same sentence that stopped short of alleging a conspiracy.

There’s no scandal there. Trump did exploit Hillary’s woes, and had already been doing so, for more than a month, by the time of Brennan’s briefing. It was, per documents released as part of the Mueller investigation and the SSCI Report, a key campaign focus. To suggest Hillary’s efforts to exploit Trump’s goading of the Russians was more sinister than it was, Gerth misstates what the briefing said. “[V]ilify[ing] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services” becomes, in Gerth’s earlier translation of it, “promot[ing] an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia.” Brennan’s briefing didn’t say Hillary was planning to claim there was an alliance between Trump and Russia.

Worse still, Gerth hides a critical detail about that document. When Ratcliffe shared it with Lindsey Graham in 2020, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence did so with a warning: The document was a Russian intelligence report, and even four years later, the Intelligence Community still didn’t know how reliable it was.

The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.

Gerth makes no mention of the warning. None. He simply parrots a Russian intelligence product of uncertain reliability without notice that it is one.

During Ratcliffe’s confirmation to become Trump’s top spook, the press laid out how Ratcliffe misrepresented his background to get elected. Yet Gerth, in the middle of a 23,000 word screed lecturing other journalists they need to be more transparent, fails to match even Ratcliffe’s standard for disclosure. He doesn’t reveal that one of his only pieces of evidence to support his thesis is a Russian intelligence product that the IC would not verify.

I asked CJR editor Kyle Pope twice whether the outlet should have disclosed this, first in my general list of questions, then in a specific follow-up.

Finally, you did not answer this question.

Do you believe your treatment of the John Brennan briefing should have revealed the briefing was based on a Russian intelligence document? Do you believe you should have noted the John Ratcliffe warning that, “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication”? Is there a reason you’re certain the date was July 26 when it’s not clear whether it says 26 or 28?

Is it your view that CJR owes its readers neither notice that it is relying on a Russian intelligence report for its interpretations about Hillary Clinton’s motives nor reveal that the IC would not vouch for the accuracy of that report?

I got no answer.

Compare that with Gerth’s incomplete treatment of Trump’s actions at the time. In the passage immediately following one where he misrepresents Palmieri’s column and then relies on a Russian intelligence product to describe Hillary’s intent, he accuses the press of misrepresenting Trump’s intent in their coverage of the statement, “Russia if you’re listening.”

Trump, unaware of any plan to tie him to the Kremlin, pumped life into the sputtering Russia narrative. Asked about the DNC hacks by reporters at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort on July 27, he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” The quip was picked up everywhere. Clinton national-security aide Jake Sullivan quickly seized on the remarks, calling them “a national-security issue.” The comment became a major exhibit over the next several years for those who believed Trump had an untoward relationship with Russia. Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began to fade into the background.

Hope Hicks, Trump’s press aide, later testified to Congress that she told Trump some in the media were taking his statement “quite literally” but that she believed it was “a joke.”

I asked Trump what he meant. “If you look at the whole tape,” he said in an interview, “it is obvious that it was being said sarcastically,” a point he made at the time.

I reviewed the tape. After several minutes of repeated questions about Russia, Trump’s facial demeanor evolved, to what seemed like his TV entertainer mode; that’s when, in response to a final Russia question, he said the widely quoted words. Then, appearing to be playful, he said the leakers “would probably be rewarded mightily by the press” if they found Clinton’s long-lost emails, because they contained “some beauties.” Trump, after talking with Hicks that day in Florida, sought to control the damage by tweeting that whoever had Clinton’s deleted emails “should share them with the FBI.”

Before I get into Gerth’s backflips to diminish damning aspects of Trump’s press conference, let me address his claim that, “Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began to fade into the background.” First, though this is his second reference to what he claims is real Russian baggage on Hillary’s part, Gerth never subjects the claim of baggage to his own standard, which is that, short of a charged criminal conspiracy, such allegations are merely a “conspiracy theory.” He never mentions that these allegations were part of the Clinton Foundation investigation (itself significantly predicated on the Clinton Cash narrative and according to the DOJ IG Report, investigated by a pro-Trump FBI agent), a subsequent review done by a Trump US Attorney, and even reviewed by the Durham investigation. Three different DOJ investigations made nothing of these allegations, yet Gerth treats them as more worthy of press coverage than the Russian ties that Trump’s aides lied to the FBI to cover up.

Worse still, Gerth’s claim is factually wrong. In precisely this period, the NYPost rolled out another Peter Schweitzer product, again crafted in close coordination with soon-to-be Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, alleging improprieties pertaining to Russia, this time focused on John Podesta. The narrative had been in the works since March, even before the Russian hack of Hillary’s campaign manager. A 2017 Berkman Center report on the press and propaganda in the 2016 election showed that coverage of the topic spiked through much of August.

As it laid out, the later spike in attention – the one Gerth says doesn’t exist – milked the earlier coverage by the NYT for credibility, coverage that Gerth might or might not have had a hand in.

As the Trump campaign sought to resurface the Clinton Foundation allegations, that early 2015 New York Times story became the second most shared story about the Clinton Foundation on Facebook in August 2016.

Gerth’s omission of this spike in attention is not just a factual error, it’s a fatal error for someone claiming to write about the Russian investigation. That’s because the packaging of these allegations was a central part of Mueller’s investigation into Stone’s alleged request that Jerome Corsi help him craft a cover story in the days after he predicted it would soon be John Podesta’s time in a barrel, in a period when Stone was pitching both Manafort and then Bannon on a way to win dirty.

And to the extent Stone was trying to cover something up, it would have been efforts to optimize the WikiLeaks releases, efforts that preceded the date of the Brennan briefing. The date of the briefing is uncertain (Gerth agrees with Ratcliffe’s reading that it took place on July 26, not July 28, though Brennan’s handwriting and a redaction obscure that), but one way or another, the briefing took place after Manafort ordered Rick Gates to ask Roger Stone to pursue more emails (though Gerth doesn’t mention that) and after Stone instructed Corsi to check with Julian Assange about them (something else Gerth doesn’t mention). It comes days before Stone sent Trump pro-Russian tweets that, he claimed, Trump had requested (they had spoken for ten minutes the night he sent them). It comes in the same time period, according to a Paul Manafort interview with the FBI, when, “Stone told Manafort that there would be a WikiLeaks drop of emails with Podesta, and that Podesta would be ‘in the barrel’ and Manafort would be vindicated.” It’s not me or Hillary Clinton saying that, or – worse! – the NYT. It’s Stone’s life-long friend and Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

Based on his review of Trump’s facial expression, Gerth seems to credit Hope Hicks and Trump’s suggestion that his comment, inviting Russia to go get more Hillary emails, was just a joke. (Gerth doesn’t mention that Russian hackers swarmed a new Hillary target hours later.) But that should not matter! Even if that’s all this was, a presidential candidate, making light of the fact that his opponent was the victim of a serious crime, no matter the culprit, that should be taboo in political campaigns.

And even though Gerth insists, here and in his coverage of Trump’s Lester Holt and Helsinki comments, that Trump’s damning seemingly pro-Russian comments would look less damning if journalists simply consulted the full context, he doesn’t do that himself.

He doesn’t mention that in the same presser Trump made two more damning comments, which would also be a key focus of the Russian investigation. “We’ll be looking” at recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, said Trump. And he claimed he had already “decided not to do” any of the real estate deals he had considered in Russia (a claim belied by Michael Cohen’s later cooperation and therefore Trump’s most damning lie to Mueller).

Both of these comments were important details in continuing suspicion about Trump. Indeed, Trump’s false claim about real estate deals is critical in understanding why the Michael Cohen allegations in the dossier might be deliberate disinformation, designed to exploit the fact that Russia knew Trump had lied to cover up an election-year contact that Cohen had with the Kremlin. And Trump’s disavowal of ongoing business pursuits was one of the reasons, records from the Michael Sussmann case made clear, that researchers who discovered an anomaly tying a Trump marketing server to Russia’s Alfa Bank latched onto the anomaly. These statements in Trump’s presser were central to what came next, regardless of what facial expression Trump adopted when saying them. But Gerth simply doesn’t mention them, choosing instead to blame much of what followed on a deliberate campaign by Hillary and her aides.

That’s how Gerth crafts his narrative about a Hillary conspiracy theory: ignoring several damning statements – one provably false – that Trump made as well as the efforts Trump’s rat-fucker took to pursue stolen emails that preceded the Brennan briefing. He then rewrites a Russian intelligence product to claim Hillary was affirmatively manufacturing an alliance, when all the Russians said is that she was trying to gin up a scandal about clearly scandalous behavior. And he does so – in a piece lecturing other journalists that they need to be more transparent – without describing either that he’s parroting a Russian line or that the IC won’t vouch for the reliability of the Russian line he’s parroting.

Links

CJR’s Error at Word 18

The Blind Spots of CJR’s “Russiagate” [sic] Narrative

Jeff Gerth’s Undisclosed Dissemination of Russian Intelligence Product

Jeff Gerth Declares No There, Where He Never Checked

“Wink:” Where Jeff Gerth’s “No There, There” in the Russian Investigation Went

My own disclosure statement

An attempted reconstruction of the articles Gerth includes in his inquiry

A list of the questions I sent to CJR

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CJR’s Error at Word 18

It took just 18 words into a 23,000-word series complaining about journalistic mistakes in the coverage of the investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia before Jeff Gerth made his first error.

And I’m spotting him the use of “collusion” at word 12.

Columbia Journalism Review published the series, in four parts, last week.

Gerth claimed that, “The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019,” when Mueller testified to Congress.

There are multiple ways you might measure the end of the inquiry — on March 22, 2019 when Mueller delivered his report to Bill Barr; on May 29, 2019 when Mueller closed up shop the moment his team secured Andrew Miller’s grand jury testimony; on November 15, 2019, when a jury convicted Roger Stone; or the still undisclosed date when an ongoing investigation into whether Stone conspired to hack with Russia ended (a September 2018 warrant to Twitter seeking evidence of conspiracy, hacking, and Foreign Agent crimes, which was originally sealed in its entirety to hide from Stone the full scope of the investigation into him, was still largely sealed in April 2020).

None of those events happened in July 2019.

Gerth appears not to know about the ongoing investigation into Stone. He doesn’t mention it. He barely mentions Stone at all, just 205 words out of 23,000, or less than 1% of the entire series.

Trump also commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, a Trump associate, who was convicted on false-statement and obstruction charges related to his efforts in 2016 to serve as an intermediary between the campaign and WikiLeaks. Mueller “failed to resolve” the question of whether Stone had “directly communicated” with Julian Assange, the site’s founder, before the election, according to the Times.

In 2020, the 966-page report by the Senate intelligence panel went a little further. It said that WikiLeaks “very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort” when it acquired and made public in 2016 emails from the DNC. A few months after the report was released, new information surfaced showing why the special counsel, with greater investigative powers than the Senate panel, couldn’t bring a case. The newly unredacted documents were obtained by BuzzFeed, via a Freedom of Information Act request. The Mueller team, the documents show, determined that while Russian hacking efforts were underway at the time of the releases by WikiLeaks in July 2016, “the Office did not develop sufficient admissible evidence that WikiLeaks knew of—or even was willfully blind to—that fact.” The Senate report also suggests Stone had greater involvement with the dissemination of hacked material released by WikiLeaks.

And those 205 words include mention of the WikiLeaks disclosure that came out in the same FOIA release that disclosed the referral of a conspiracy investigation involving Stone, so unlike other journalists who don’t know about the once-ongoing investigation into Stone (which is virtually all of them), Gerth should know about the Stone detail. He explicitly cites the FOIA release that first confirmed it.

On the one hand, this is an obscure detail, one few besides me have reported. On the other hand, the fact that DOJ was continuing to investigate Roger Stone for conspiring with Russia at such time as Barr was loudly and inaccurately making claims about the Mueller investigation is not only a critical detail for someone assessing the press coverage of the investigation, but it also undermines the entire premise of Gerth’s series.

Gerth seems to think that the fact that Mueller didn’t charge conspiracy has some bearing on the merit of reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller did prove, via three guilty pleas, a judge’s order, and a jury verdict, that Trump’s foreign policy advisor, his National Security Adviser, his personal lawyer, his campaign manager, and his rat-fucker were lying to hide their ties to the Russian operation, which Gerth only mentions serially over the course of the piece. But because Mueller developed evidence of, but did not charge, a conspiracy, Gerth treats the abundant inappropriate ties between Trump’s team and the Russian operation as a conspiracy theory invented by Hillary Clinton.

And for that reason, along with the suffocating number of other errors and misrepresentations, this series is more a symptom of what Gerth claims to combat, the degree to which coverage of the Russian investigation has been swamped by tribalist takes that only serve to increase polarization, rather than the cure he fancifully imagines he is offering. Indeed, I made the effort to wade through Gerth’s interminable series in significant part because it is such a delightful exemplar of everything “Russiagate,” that frenzy of screen-cap driven claims about a complex investigation chased by self-imagined contrarians who weren’t actually engaged in journalism. It replicates so many of the claims, and in some cases, the legal and factual errors that “Russiagate” propagandists have, that my list of questions for CJR might serve as a source document for others to understand what’s in the actual record.

CJR, when asked about the error at word 18, claimed it is not one. “On what basis did you say the inquiry into Trump and Russia ended in July 2019?” I asked.

CJR editor Kyle Pope responded with word games, then a claim that the piece had fairly represented Mueller’s testimony.

The story did not say that. It reads, “The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.”

It didn’t say the inquiry into “Trump and Russia ended,” it said the inquiry “into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia.” It also said Mueller “essentially” said “no” to that line of inquiry. That’s a fair characterization of his testimony.

Never mind that’s not a “fair characterization of his testimony.” Mueller did agree with Ken Buck that there was insufficient evidence to charge Trump with conspiracy.

BUCK: OK. You recommended declining prosecution of President Trump and anyone associated with his campaign because there was insufficient evidence to convict for a charge of conspiracy with Russian interference in the 2016 election. Is that fair?

MUELLER:That’s fair.

He also stated that not charging a conspiracy doesn’t mean the investigation didn’t find evidence of one (elsewhere, Gerth conflates not charging someone, like Carter Page, with not “turn[ing] up evidence for any possible charges”).

[Peter] WELCH: But making that decision does not mean your investigation failed to turn up evidence of conspiracy.

MUELLER: Absolutely correct.

But Mueller spent a great deal of time explaining that “collusion” is not a crime, that conspiracy and “collusion” weren’t even the same in a colloquial sense.

[Doug] COLLINS:In the colloquial context, known public context, collusion — collusion and conspiracy are essentially synonymous terms, correct?

MUELLER: No.

See? I was being generous for spotting Gerth with his error at word 12!

Mueller specifically stated Trump could be charged with obstruction after he left office.

BUCK: You believe that he committed — you could charge the president of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office.

MUELLER:Yes.

BUCK:Ethically, under the ethical standards.

MUELLER: Well I am — I’m not certain because I haven’t looked at the ethical standards, but the OLC opinion says that the prosecutor while he cannot bring a charge against a sitting president, nonetheless continue the investigation to see if there are any other person to might be drawn into the conspiracy. [Note, other outlets transcribed this response differently, cleaning it up somewhat.]

Mueller likewise made clear that Christopher Steele was beyond his purview (unbeknownst to the public, Barr had already appointed John Durham to conduct the investigation that resulted in the embarrassing acquittal of Igor Danchenko forty months later).

MUELLER: Let me back up a second if I could and say as I’ve said earlier, with regard to Steele, that’s beyond my purview.

In one of his few deviations from short answers, Mueller affirmatively offered up that the counterintelligence investigation necessitated by Mike Flynn’s lies was continuing.

[Raja] KRISHNAMOORTHI: For example, you successfully charged former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn of lying to federal agents about this conversations with Russian officials, correct?

MUELLER: Correct.

KRISHNAMOORTHI: Since it was outside the purview of your investigation your report did not address how Flynn’s false statements could pose a national security risk because the Russians knew the falsity of those statements, right?

MUELLER: I cannot get in to that, mainly because there are many elements of the FBI that are looking at different aspects of that issue.

KRISHNAMOORTHI: Currently?

MUELLER: Currently.

Mueller also agreed that his report did not address whether Trump’s lies about the Trump Tower deal (something Gerth downplays in his own series) created a counterintelligence risk.

KRISHNAMOORTHI: Thank you. As you noted in Volume Two of your report, Donald Trump repeated five times in one press conference, Mr. Mueller in 2016 “I have nothing to do with Russia.”

Of course Michael Cohen said Donald Trump was not being truthful, because at this time Trump was attempting to build Trump Tower Moscow. Your report does not address whether Donald Trump was compromised in any way because of any potential false statements that he made about Trump Tower Moscow, correct?

MUELLER: I think that’s right — I think that’s right.

Not only was Gerth’s claim about “collusion” a totally inaccurate representation of Mueller’s testimony, but the date of the testimony did not mark, in any way, one of several known milestones of the legal investigation. Mueller’s testimony only marks the end if you’re treating a legal investigation, with those obvious legal milestones, as instead some kind of figure of speech. A narrative.

When I pointed all this out, Pope still stood by his word games about the claim.

I’ll let my earlier note stand.

This is more than just a quibble about word choice. Gerth and Pope have adopted a key rhetorical move of the “Russiagate” project they claim to be assessing.

In an editor’s note explaining CJR’s unapologetic adoption of the term,“Russiagate,” Kyle Pope described it as if it is a specific, well-recognized narrative.

No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate. The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers. [my emphasis]

Somehow, a great number of “totemic moments,” such as the Seth Rich fiasco or the VIPs claims about the exfiltration of DNC documents, never get included in the “Russiagate” project. And that’s important, because by defining “Russiagate” as a narrative, Gerth and Pope walk into the project assuming not that reporting arose from actual facts, but instead was manufactured. In fact, Gerth even blames Hillary for unrelated reporting about things Donald Trump did. This is an attempt to prove Hillary wrong, not an attempt to assess the reporting on a serious criminal investigation.

Perhaps because of that, Gerth suggests – like many “Russiagate” proponents – that the press may only assert a role in political accountability with regards to Trump’s actions on Russia if the inquiry in question first meets a narrow legal measure, the charging of one crime, conspiracy.

That totally upends the way accountability must work in a democracy, in which a lot of behavior must be subject to critique by the media but may not be a prosecutable crime.

This series made me think seriously about a more generalized collapse, as the pace of politicized criminal investigations has accelerated since the days Gerth was hyping Whitewater, of those distinctions: an awareness on the part of the press which stories were about political accountability and which were legally accurate journalism covering a criminal investigation. The coverage of the three separate investigations of classified documents at Trump, Biden, and Mike Pence’s homes are being covered by journalists from different beats, which drives at least some of the uneven and at times inaccurate coverage.

But the linguistic games adopted by “Russiagate” advocates – and by Trump, as a defense plan – which treated “collusion” as “conspiracy” and dismissed everything Trump did that was not charged as conspiracy, disserved the public. Those word games conflate political accountability with legal accountability. Indeed, it flipped those things, suggesting that short of a crime, the public and the press had no business to demand political accountability for really scandalous behavior from Trump.

These word games are a perfectly fine hobby for angry men posting screen caps on Twitter and they worked spectacularly well to distract from Trump’s own actions. But they deliberately serve to obfuscate, an approach that should have no place in journalism and media criticism. As we’ll see, that sloppiness carried over, on Gerth’s part, to virtually all aspects of his project.

That’s why I’ve spent far too long unpacking it: the failures of his project show the failures of “Russiagate” – the blind spots it adopts, the ethical lapses, and even the factual mistakes. In addition to a post on each of these topics, I’ve included three related documents as well:

My own disclosure statement, which explains my own fraught role in the Russian investigation but also demonstrates that one can engage in the critique Gerth claims was missing from the Russian investigation, without adopting the “Russiagate” excesses
An attempted reconstruction of the articles Gerth includes in his inquiry, which helps to show the articles he chose to ignore (fixed this link)
A list of the questions I sent to CJR

Links

CJR’s Error at Word 18

The Blind Spots of CJR’s “Russiagate” [sic] Narrative

Jeff Gerth’s Undisclosed Dissemination of Russian Intelligence Product

Jeff Gerth Declares No There, Where He Never Checked

“Wink:” Where Jeff Gerth’s “No There, There” in the Russian Investigation Went

My own disclosure statement

An attempted reconstruction of the articles Gerth includes in his inquiry

A list of the questions I sent to CJR

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Billy B and Johnny D Drank Whiskey before the Special Counsel Appointment

January 27, 2023/191 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

I’ll have more to say about the NYT piece on the corrupt Durham investigation, though probably not till next week. But many people are commenting about how close Billy Barr was to Durham, as depicted by the way they sipped whiskey together.

While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.

In some ways, they were an odd match. Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut. Administrations of both parties had assigned him to investigate potential official wrongdoing, like allegations of corrupt ties between mafia informants and F.B.I. agents, and the C.I.A.’s torture of terrorism detainees and destruction of evidence.

By contrast, the vocal and domineering Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.

But the two shared a worldview: They are both Catholic conservatives and Republicans, born two months apart in 1950. As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.

It is true that Special Counsels, under the regulations, are supposed to have more independence from the Attorney General than this.

But keep in mind that 17 months of whiskey sipping happened before Barr made Durham Special Counsel.

And Barr intervened this closely in many of the other investigations he orchestrated. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sipped whiskey with Scott Brady and Jeffrey Jensen, when they were conducting corrupt projects (accepting Russian-tied dirt on Joe Biden and undermining the Mike Flynn case, respectively) for him, as well.

The timing is significant in another way.

As NYT describes, when Billy and Johnny went to Italy chasing George Papadopoulos’ conspiracy theories, the Italians instead shared alarming information about suspected financial crimes with the two men. Rather than providing the tip to a normal investigator, Barr instead had Durham chase it down.

On one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials — while denying any role in setting off the Russia investigation — unexpectedly offered a potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry, the people said.

Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.

But in October 2019, a garbled echo became public. The Times reported that Mr. Durham’s administrative review of the Russia inquiry had evolved to include a criminal investigation, while saying it was not clear what the suspected crime was. Citing their own sources, many other news outlets confirmed the development.

The news reports, however, were all framed around the erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation must mean Mr. Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening.

By description, this tip too appears to precede the time when Durham was appointed Special Counsel. That’s important because, with every other investigation into Trump, Barr attempted to ensure it was shut down during the summer of 2020. If Barr succeeded here, too, then it would mean that it would not fall into the scope of Durham’s Special Counsel activities.

That’s important, because Durham is, by regulation, required to write a report about his prosecution and declination decisions. If Durham wants to see his report made public, we should fairly expect to see this criminal tip on Trump included.

There are a lot of questions about why Durham remains at DOJ. But one potential reasons is that Lisa Monaco believes his report could be a worthwhile thing: basically a long list of conspiracy theories that Barr had Durham chase that turned out to be conspiracy theories.

And this story may put some pressure on DOJ to make sure that happens.

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No, Charles McGonigal Likely Isn’t Responsible for that Part of the Russian Investigation You Hate

January 24, 2023/74 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Everyone — whether from a left, right, or frothy perspective — has seized on the arrest of former FBI Special Agent in Charge Charles McGonigal to assume he was responsible for something they don’t like about the Russian investigation: the leaks (attributed to but not exclusively from SDNY) about the Clinton Foundation investigation; the problems on the Carter Page applications and vetting of the Steele dossier; the tanking of the Alfa Bank allegations; some later sabotage of the Mueller investigation.

There’s no reason to believe he was primarily responsible for most of that, and good reason to believe he was not. But he was in a place where he could have tampered in other really serious cases. So I want to lay out what his timeline is, with some comment on how it intersects with key investigations.

Here’s an excerpt from the bio sent out with the October 4, 2016 announcement of his promotion to SAC in NY Field Office.

FBI Director James B. Comey has named Charles McGonigal as the special agent in charge of the Counterintelligence Division for the New York Field Office. Mr. McGonigal most recently served as the section chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section at FBI Headquarters.

[snip]

In 2014, Mr. McGonigal was promoted to assistant special agent in charge of the Baltimore Field Office’s cyber, counterintelligence, counterespionage, and counterproliferation programs.

[snip]

McGonigal will assume this new role at the end of October.

This 2016 promotion would have put him in New York too late to be a key 2016 leaker; the damage to Hillary had already been done by the time he would have arrived in New York.

He should have had a role in the Alfa Bank investigation, which included both a cyber and a counterintelligence component, though the latter was in Chicago. But his name did not show up (in unredacted form, anyway) in the Michael Sussmann files. Plus, we know what bolloxed that investigation: two cyber agents, Nate Batty and Scott Hellman, who decided the anomaly was nothing even before they had looked at all the data, then kept telling the counterintelligence investigators that too.

McGonigal was in the loop on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. He had a hand in forwarding the tip from the Australians to DC headquarters. And he was in the vicinity of the Carter Page investigation after it got moved back to New York in January 2017 (in which context he shows up in communications with Jennifer Boone). But at least per the Horowitz Report, he wasn’t a key player.

Because McGonigal was tangential to the above matters — including the successful effort, aided by Sussmann and Rodney Joffe — to kill the early NYT story on the Alfa Bank allegations, he’s probably not the most important player in the October 2016 NYT story every Democrat hates (though his expertise could have made him a source for several of the journalists involved).

He likely was involved in coordination in the early parts of the investigation into the DNC hack (which was investigated in Pittsburgh and San Francisco), including a decision not to open an investigation on Roger Stone, and there were steps not taken in those early days that probably should have been. Perhaps McGonigal is to blame for the fact that, when Jeannie Rhee asked for a briefing on the investigation into the hack-and-leak in 2017, nothing had been done. Ultimately, it did get done though. He was no longer in a position to interfere with the investigation during the key part of it in 2018 (though he likely knew important details about it).

One thing that’s absolutely certain, though: He was in a position to sabotage investigations into Oleg Deripaska, and with him, Paul Manafort. And he would have greatly facilitated Deripaska’s campaign to undermine the Russian investigation with disinformation, which continued beyond 2018. Just as one measure of timing, Deripaska’s column in the Daily Caller was at the beginning of the time when Shestkov was reaching out to McGonigal.

The materials on the SDNY indictment pertaining to Deripaska make it clear that he had accessed sanctions packages pertaining to Deripaska before he left the FBI in 2018.

As SAC, McGonigal supervised and participated in investigations of Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. Among other things, in 2018, McGONIGAL, while acting as SAC, received and reviewed a then-classified list of Russian oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin who would be considered for sanctions to be imposed as a result of Russia’s 2014 conflict with Ukraine.

He appears to have leaked that information with the daughter of Agent 1 (believed to be Yevgenyi Fokin).

An NYPD Sergeant assigned to brief Agent-1’s daughter subsequently reported the event to the NYPD and FBI, because, among other reasons, Agent-1’s daughter claimed to have an unusually close relationship to “an FBI agent” who had given her access to confidential FBI files, and it was unusual for a college student to receive such special treatment from the NYPD and FBI.

It seems likely, then, Manafort got visibility onto what the FBI knew about him. And he got it around the same time Konstantin Kilimnik was included in a conspiracy indictment with Paul Manafort in June 2018. He almost certainly got it before the Mueller investigation was over, which hypothetically could have influenced or facilitated Manafort’s effort to thwart DOJ’s investigation.

I have reason to suspect that people associated with McGonigal, if not he himself, have seeded disinformation about Deripaska-related investigations.

McGonigal’s tie to Deripaska and the trajectory of his career would have put him in a position to tamper in other investigations. As noted above, he moved from Baltimore (overseeing matters involving the NSA during years when the materials that would be leaked as part of the Shadow Brokers operation were stolen), to a cyber/CI role in DC, to NYC. The overt acts described in his two indictments (SDNY, DC) only start in 2017, which would suggest he may not have sold out until then.

Except there’s a problem with that: The first overt act in the DC indictment is him asking for money. So it’s not clear when he got started.

August 2017: McGonigal first asks Albanian for money.

September 7, 2017: McGonigal travels to Albania.

October 5, 2017: McGonigal receives $80,000 in a parked car from the Albanian.

November 18, 2017: McGonigal conducts an interview in Vienna with the Albanian acting as translator; the FBI has no record of the interview. Then McGonigal flies to Albania and discusses business with the same witness.

November 25, 2017: McGonigal predicates an investigation into the lobbyist for a rival Albanian politician.

February 28, 2018: McGonigal formally opens investigation into rival Albanian relying on witnesses whose expenses were paid by his source.

March 4, 2018: McGonigal dines with Prime Minister of Albania.

April 27, 2018: McGonigal pitched by two people in Germany to get involved in Bosnian affairs, facilitates an introduction to US Ambassador to UN.

June to August 2018: McGonigal sets up arrangement whereby Bosnian-tied pharma company would pay Albanian $500K to broker UN ties.

Spring-Summer 2018: At Sergey Shestakov’s request, McGonigal sets up Deripaska’s agent’s daughter with an NYPD internship.

September 2018: McGonigal retires from the FBI.

There are a number of key investigations, including some in which Deripaska had tangential interest, on which McGonigal would have had complete visibility. Their compromise would present a grave threat to the country.

They’re not the ones left, right, and frothers are most concerned about though.

Given how DOJ has charged these two indictments (and given the charges they have yet to file), I suspect they will try to get McGonigal to plead to one side and cooperate in the other — in part to unpack everything he did before and after he left the FBI. But even if they do, they’re not going to tell us what he was up to.

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Kash Patel Wants the Insurrection Protection Committee to Investigate Why Robert Hur Tried to Protect Past Ongoing Investigations

January 13, 2023/28 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Informants, January 6 Insurrection, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Matt Taibbi (aka MattyDickPics) and Kash Patel are whining about the Nunes Memo again.

As you’ll recall, in the first year of the Trump Administration, Patel wrote a misleading memo for Devin Nunes purporting that the entire Russian investigation stemmed from the Steele dossier. When the Carter Page IG Report and FISA applications were released, it became clear how Patel spun the facts. In this post I cataloged what both Nunes and Adam Schiff, in his counterpart to the Nunes memo, got wrong.

But it’s not the Nunes Memo itself that Taibbi and Patel are whining about. They’re complaining about the circumstances of its release five years ago.

Taibbi made it the subject of his latest Twitter Files propaganda thread and related Substack — the latter of which, astoundingly, says the public has to rely on the attributions of cloud companies, something Taibbi has always refused to do when discussing the GRU attribution of the 2016 hacks targeting Democratic targets. “It’s over, you nitwits. It’s time to stow the Mueller votive candles, cop to the coverage pileup created by years of errors, and start the reconciliation process,” Taibbi says, in appealing to precisely the kind of evidence he himself has refused to credit for more than six years. I dealt with both in this thread, but the important takeaway is that Taibbi doesn’t even manage to get facts that both the Daily Beast and I were able to cover in real time, including the fact that Republicans, too, were making unsupported claims based on the Dashboard’s reporting and Russian trolls were part of — just not the biggest part — of the campaign.

[A] knowledgeable source says that Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo. There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

In short, according to this source, who would not speak to The Daily Beast for attribution, the retweets are coming from inside the country.

The source pointed to influential American users on the right, including Donald Trump Jr., with his 2.49 million followers, pushing the hashtag forward. It’s become a favorite of far-right Republican congressmen, including Steve King, who claimed the still-secret memo shows the FBI was behaving “worse than Watergate” in one viral tweet. Mark Meadows called it an “absolutely shocking” display of “FISA abuses,” referring to a counterintelligence process.

Rules of Engagement

There are reasons for skepticism about both the source’s claim and Alliance for Securing Democracy’s contrary findings.

Russian influence accounts did, in fact, send an outsize number of tweets about #ReleaseTheMemo—simply not enough for those accounts to reach the top of Twitter’s internal analysis.

Meanwhile, Kash Patel is outraged that Merrick Garland picked Robert Hur as Special Counsel to investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents because, when and after serving as a top aide to Rod Rosenstein in the early days of the Russian investigation, he opposed release of the memo.

This guy Hur needs to be the first one subpoenaed by the new Special Select Committee under Jim Jordan’s authority on the weaponization of government and do you want to know why? Because Hur — we have the receipts, Steve, and we’re going to release them later — was sending communications to the Justice Department and Rod Rosenstein’s crew arguing against the release of the Nunes memo. Saying that it would bastardize and destroy the United States national security apparatus. This guy is a swamp monster of the Tier One level, he’s a government gangster, he’s now in charge of the continued crime scene cover-up, which is why the first congressional subpoena that has to go out for the weaponization of government subcommittee is against Hur.

Remember, this committee was modified during the period when key insurrectionists were refusing to vote for Kevin McCarthy to include language authorizing the committee to investigate why the Executive Branch is permitted to conduct criminal investigations of US citizens.

the expansive role of article II authority vested in the executive branch to collect information on or otherwise investigate citizens of the United States, including ongoing criminal investigations;

It may be the intent to interfere in ongoing investigations into people like Scott Perry and Paul Gosar (who changed their votes on McCarthy later in the week, as these changes were being made) and Jordan (who will have great leeway to direct the direction of this committee). But Jordan may be surprised when he discovers that Merrick Garland will enforce the long-standing DOJ policies about providing Congress access to ongoing investigations that Jeff Sessions and Matt Whitaker and Bill Barr did not. Indeed, some precedents from the Russia investigation legally prohibit the sharing of this information with Congress.

But Kash’s complaint (back atcha with the rap gangsta alliteration, Kash!) is a bellybutton moment in which he attempts to villainize Hur’s past commitment to those long-standing DOJ (and intelligence community, including the NSA that conduct much FISA surveillance) policies. Consider the things the memo revealed, many of which had never before been released publicly.

Details about the dates and approvals for four FISA orders
Financial details involving private individuals, including US citizens
Contents of the FISA memo (but not their true context)
A reference to a Mike Isikoff article that appeared in the Carter Page applications; Kash was outraged when his own public article was included in the warrant affidavit targeting Trump
Details from a Confidential Human Source file
Misrepresentations about both Bruce Ohr and his spouse, the latter of whom was a private citizen whose work was shared with the FBI as part of the effort to vet the dossier
Direct communications with the President-elect the likes of which Trump claimed were covered by Executive Privilege in the Mueller investigation
False claims about the texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that are currently the subject of two Privacy Act lawsuits; even aside from the privacy implications, at the time it was virtually unprecedented for texts between FBI officials to be released, even in criminal discovery (and many of these released, including some misrepresented in the memo, pertained to work matters unrelated to the Russian investigation)

In other words, Kash Patel wants to investigate Hur’s comments, made either at the time he was the key overseer of the Mueller investigation or during a transition period as he awaited confirmation to be US Attorney, advocating that DOJ protect informants, FISA materials, details about private citizens, and work texts between FBI officials.

The very first thing Kash wants the Insurrection Protection Committee to investigate is why, five years ago, a senior DOJ official advocated following long-standing DOJ policy.

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Matty Taibbi’s Dick Pics

December 3, 2022/104 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Apparently, Elon Musk decided that the best person to disclose what he promised would show, “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter” was Matt Taibbi, someone who — by his own admission (an admission on which he has apparently flip-flopped) — apologized for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because he was, “so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take [the] possibility [of Russian invasion] seriously enough.”

Reverse chauvinism, Taibbi called it.

Taibbi’s own apologies for Russia didn’t just start with the Russian imperialism and war crimes, however.

He was long a critic of what he called “RussiaGate” based on the tried and true tactic of treating the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank allegations — and not the legal verdicts that confirmed Trump’s National Security Advisor, campaign manager, Coffee Boy, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker all lied to hide the true nature of their Russian ties — as the primary substance of the case. Taibbi scolded others about shoddy reporting even while he adhered to the Single Server fallacy that not only assumed all the hacked material came from just one server, but ignored the hack of Amazon Web Services content and abundant other evidence attributing the hacks to Russia from other cloud companies. Then there was the time Taibbi tried to smack down on claims that Maria Butina used sex to entice targets, in which he made error after error, all without allowing his false claims to be disrupted by consulting the actual primary sources.

That’s the guy Elmo decided would be a credible voice to tell us what happened with the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” story.

That matters because, as Andy Stepanian explained last night, Twitter had advance warning of a Russian information operation targeting Hunter Biden during the summer of 2020, months before the release of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

Matt Taibbi is either woefully misinformed about this or cynically lying. How do I know? Because I attended two meetings with Twitter representatives in July and August 2020 wherein the Hunter Biden story was discussed within the larger framework of election integrity.

Matt Taibbi’s analysis has myriad problems but the biggest problem is his failure to underscore what initially prompted twitter staff to designate the content in the Post story as “stolen” or “hacked” material. This came from conversations with law enforcement in summer of 2020.

During the election integrity meetings I was present for little was known about how the material would eventually be published. I recall one spokesperson suggesting the Hunter Biden content may publish via “something like wordpress” or “wikileaks-styled” website.

This is the contact with FBI that Twitter and Facebook had about Hunter Biden in 2020, not any immediate response to the Post story. It’s almost certainly what Mark Zuckerberg was referring to in a Joe Rogan interview that has been misrepresented in the aftermath.

Taibbi, the self-described reverse chauvinist, describes any Hunter Biden-specific warnings as general — mentioning neither Hunter Biden nor Russia — and omits the timing.

Perhaps Elmo didn’t give Taibbi this important earlier context. Perhaps it’s Elmo’s fault that his hand-picked Russian apologist left out the specific details of the warning — that they included Hunter Biden and preceded the NYPost story by months — that are necessary context to the stupid decisions Twitter made. But the silence about those details is anything but “what really happened.”

And note Taibbi’s conclusion: There was no government involvement in the laptop story.

Assuming Taibbi were a credible reporter, that should end it. Game over.

Stupid moderation decisions, but not stupid moderation decisions done as a result of pressure from the government.

Taibbi has debunked the conspiracy theory the frothy right has been chasing for months.

Curiously, Taibbi concludes there was no government interference in the story even while he showed proof of a government surrogate pressuring Twitter about its (stupid) moderation decisions on the laptop story.

Taibbi was so deep in his conspiracy theories he didn’t realize that that — a surrogate of the sitting President demanding that Twitter give his campaign advance notice of their content moderation decisions — is closer to a First Amendment violation than suppressing the Post story, no matter how stupid Twitter’s decision was. To be clear: it’s not a First Amendment violation, but kudos to Taibbi for getting closer than all the frothy Republicans have to finding proof of inappropriate pressure.

It came from Trump.

In fact, Taibbi admits that Twitter was honoring requests from the White House, as well as the private entity of the Joe Biden campaign, for takedowns using the content moderation tools.

Taibbi claims that he’s concerned about First Amendment implications of the government pressuring Twitter about content. And then … he ignores the evidence he presents about (what is probably shorthand for) the Trump White House pressuring Twitter about content. Let’s see those specifics, Matty!

Or rather he excuses it, using the old charade of campaign donations which show what a small portion of Twitter employees spend.

And Taibbi’s other claims of bias are just as problematic. In one Tweet, Tweet 30, Taibbi claims that Ro Khanna was the only Democratic official he could find that expressed concern about the Post takedown.

Three Tweets later, Tweet 33, Taibbi describes an emailed report from a research firm polling the response of congressional offices, including Democrat Judy Chu’s, describing that both Democrats, plural, and Republicans “were angry,” which sure seems like Taibbi missed at least one Democrat besides Khanna expressing concern.

Ro Khanna, incidentally, was the leading recipient of donations from Twitter employees in 2022, almost 10% of the total, so to the extent Twitter employees disproportionately donate to Democrats, they’re funding Taibbi’s chosen voice of the First Amendment problems with Twitter’s decision.

The most telling part of Taibbi’s screed, however, is his complaint that when private entity “the Biden team” asked for some take-downs, Twitter obliged.

What Taibbi is complaining about is the way in which Twitter, the entity, always proved most responsive to high level requests.

He seems to think that damns pre-Elmo Twitter, when if anything, Elmo’s moderation decisions have far more dramatically reflected the whims of those with personal access, starting with Andy Ngo, who has personally gotten a bunch of anti-fascists banned from Twitter. If you have a problem with arbitrary, personalized moderation decisions, Elmo is the last guy you should be fronting for.

But there’s an even bigger problem with Taibbi’s smoking gun, the primary evidence he presents that the Biden crowd got special treatment of any kind.

As numerous people have laid out — most notably Free Beacon reporter Andrew Kerr — a number of these takedown requests were of dick pics and other personal porn, a celebrity kind of revenge porn. Others were of Hunter Biden smoking crack — at least a violation of law. But none so far identified pertain to allegations of influence peddling.

Tabbi’s smoking gun amounts to takedown requests of stolen dick pics, precisely the kind of thing that content moderation should be responsive to.

“Handled,” Elmo responded with glee about proof that his predecessors had seen fit to remove leaked porn and dick pics.

That Matty Taibbi, of all people!, would shift subjects, after debunking the conspiracy theory of government pressure that started all this, to dick pics is fairly stunning. That’s because Taibbi is famously thin-skinned when people on Twitter talk about his own — unlike the Hunter Biden pictures, voluntarily exposed — dick exploits from when he lived in Russia. Every time someone on Twitter discusses what a misogynist slime Taibbi was in his Moscow days, he, suspected sock-puppets, and a few persistent Taibbi defenders show up to complain that people on Twitter are talking about what Taibbi did with his dick while under the influence overseas (or to claim it was all, even the misogynistic language, make-believe).

Taibbi was always a poor choice for an exposé based on primary sources.

But Taibbi is a particularly bad surrogate for Elmo to pick to complain about the takedowns of stolen dick pics.

Yet that, in episode one of what Elmo and Taibbi promise will be a series, is the best they’ve got.

“Handled.”

Update: Matty Dick Pics wouldn’t tell his subscribers what conditions he had to agree to to peddle Elmo’s complaints about dick pics.

What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

Update: Tim Miller shreds the whole fiasco.

While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.

Now if you are one of the normals—someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about—then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.

Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.

I truly, truly wish I were joking.

[snip]

Right-wing commentator Buck Sexton (real name), said this was a “bright red line violation” and that Biden should be IMPEACHED for it. Rep. James Comer (R-TN) was on Fox promising that everyone at Twitter involved with this would be brought before the House Oversight committee. Rep. Billy Long retweeted several MAGA influencers praising Elon for, among other things, “exposing corruption at the highest levels of society” (Projection Alert). Meanwhile Kari Lake hype man Pizzagate Jack Posobiec declared this the “biggest story in modern presidential election history,” claimed that “we can never go back to the country we were before this moment,” and donned this “a digital insurrection.”

In reality, all they really had was a digital erection.

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Judge Sanctions Alina Habba for Misrepresenting Igor Danchenko Indictment

November 11, 2022/55 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

There are a number of reasons why Judge Donald Middlebrook sanctioned Alina Habba and Peter Ticktin for the frivolous claims they made against Chuck Dolan in the omnibus lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and a bunch of other people.

In reverse order, Middlebrook found that the lawsuit was filed for improper purpose: to advance a political grievance.

Every claim was frivolous, most barred by settled, well-established existing law. These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims. This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.

[snip]

The rule of law is undermined by the toxic combination of political fundraising with legal fees paid by political action committees, reckless and factually untrue statements by lawyers at rallies and in the media, and efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory.

He ruled that it’s not RICO, it’s never RICO (or any of the other conspiracies Habba alleged, either).

In the RICO count of the Amended Complaint, Plaintiff realleged the previous 619 paragraphs, and it was a mystery who he intended to sue. In the caption to Count II, he named 22 defendants but in the prayer for relief for that count 28 were named. Added were HF ACC, Inc., the DNC Services Corporations, James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe. (Am. Compl. ¶ 633). Whoever he intended to sue, Plaintiff alleged that each of them “knew about and agreed to facilitate the Enterprise’s scheme to harm the Plaintiff’s political career, tarnish his electability, and undermine his ability to effectively govern as the President of the United States . . . . ” (Am. Compl. ¶ 627).

The RICO conspiracy claims were entirely conclusory. Moreover, there is no standing to bring a RICO conspiracy claim unless injury resulted from violation of a substantive provision of RICO.

Of greatest interest to me, however, to substantiate a finding that the lawsuit’s allegations against Chuck Dolan lacked any reasonable factual basis, Judge Middlebrook laid out how Habba misrepresented the Igor Danchenko indictment to include Dolan in her conspiracy theories. Middlebrook focused closely on Habba’s claims that the pee tape allegation in the Steele dossier “was derived from Dolan.” He rejected Habba’s defense of the allegations against Dolan by pointing to stuff she left out.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers claim “nearly all” of the allegations against Mr. Dolan were sourced directly from the Indictment brought against Igor Danchenko by special counsel John Durham. (DE 270-2 at 6). But this is simply not so. As was the practice throughout the Amended Complaint, Plaintiff cherry-picked portions which supported his narrative while ignoring those that undermined or contradicted it.1 Mr. Trump’s lawyers persisted in this misrepresentation after being warned by the sanctions motion, and they doubled down on this falsehood in their response to the motion.

[snip]

Even more telling are the portions of the Indictment ignored by Plaintiff. The Indictment alleges that Mr. Dolan and others were planning a business conference to be held in Moscow on behalf of businessmen seeking to explore investments in Russia. (DE 270-2 ¶ 21). Mr. Danchenko was introduced to Mr. Dolan in connection with business activities. (Id. ¶ 18).

Significantly the Indictment alleges two other facts relevant to and, if true, fatal to Plaintiff’s claim of conspiracy.

According to [Mr. Dolan], individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign did not direct, and were not aware of, the aforementioned meetings and activities with Danchenko and other Russian nationals.

***

According to [Mr. Dolan], he [Mr. Dolan] was not aware at the time of the specifics of Danchenko’s ‘project against Trump,’ or that Danchenko’s reporting would be provided to the FBI.

And with regard to the allegation about sexual activity, the Indictment alleges that Mr. Dolan and another individual were given a tour of a Moscow hotel in June 2016, told that Mr. Trump had previously stayed in the Presidential suite, and according to both Mr. Dolan and the other individual, the staff member who gave the tour did not mention any sexual or salacious activity. (Id. ¶¶ 60-61). The Indictment does not allege that the information concerning sexual activity was provided by Mr. Dolan.

The May 31, 2022 warning letter told the Trump lawyers that Mr. Dolan had been questioned by the FBI on multiple occasions, that the Danchenko Indictment detailed his contacts with Mr. Danchenko but did not indicate he “discussed any sexual rumors with Mr. Danchenko — because he did not.” (DE 268-1 at 2). The Indictment confirms that Mr. Dolan spoke to the FBI, and not only was he not charged with any falsehood, but his statements are included within the Indictment. The Indictment contradicts rather than supports Plaintiff’s allegations against Mr. Dolan. Far from being “sourced directly” and cited “word-for-word,” (DE 270 at 5), Plaintiff’s use of the Indictment is nothing short of a deliberate disregard of the truth or falsity of their claims. This is a textbook example of sanctionable conduct under Rule 11.

Rather than express any regret, Plaintiff doubled down on his claims: “Plaintiff’s allegation that Defendant was the source of the salacious sexual activity rumor has a legitimate factual basis and is based upon a well-reasoned theory that may well be proven correct during the [Office of Special Counsel’s] upcoming trial of Danchenko.” (DE 270 at 10).

It was never to be. In the Danchenko trial, Mr. Dolan was called as a witness by the government about matters unrelated to the Ritz Carlton rumors. The government never alleged that Mr. Dolan was a source for the Ritz Carlton story. See Order, United States v. Igor Y. Danchenko, Case No. 21-cr-00245-AJT at 5 (Oct. 4, 2022). And Mr. Danchenko was ultimately acquitted by the jury.

1 The “sourced directly” claim is untrue. For example, the Indictment says: “In or about April 2016, Danchenko and [Mr. Dolan] engaged in discussions regarding potential business collaboration between PR Firm-1 and UK Investigative Firm-1 on issues related to Russia.” (DE 270-2 ¶ 23). The Amended Complaint, however, states: “In late April 2016 Danchenko began having discussions with Dolan about a potential business collaboration between Orbis Ltd. and Kglobal to create a ‘dossier’ to smear Donald J. Trump and to disseminate the false accusations to the media.” (Am. Compl. ¶ 96(c)).

The order as a whole generated a lot of attention on the failed birdsite. But there was no self-awareness that the exercise that Habba engaged in with respect to Dolan and the Danchenko prosecution was similar to what a number of journalists (and a great number of right wingers and other frothers) themselves did, when the Danchenko indictment was rolled out last year.

For example, here’s what the WaPo claimed in a still-uncorrected report last year:

Durham says Danchenko [1] made up a conversation [2] he claimed was the source of one of the dossier’s most salacious claims, that Trump paid prostitutes at a Moscow hotel room to urinate on a bed in which President Barack Obama had once slept. The dossier also suggested Russian intelligence agencies had secretly recorded that event as potential blackmail material. Trump has denied any such encounter.

The indictment [3] suggests that story came from Dolan, who in June 2016 toured a suite at a hotel in Moscow that was once occupied by Trump. According to the indictment, Danchenko [4] falsely told Steele and the FBI that the information came from the president of the U.S. Russian-American Chamber of Commerce at the time.

All four of the above claims are not supported by the indictment, much less Danchenko’s published interviews with the FBI, which attributed the pee tape claim to someone else — though it is definitely the case that Durham encouraged such unsupported inferences.

Jonathan Swan condensed the same kinds of claims that Habba just got sanctioned for in one tweet.

Just one “rumor” was attributed to Dolan in the Danchenko indictment, the most provably true one (because it came from media coverage), and one about which — as the trial established — the FBI never once asked Danchenko, in significant part because it had nothing to do with Russia.

And while Middlebrook notes that Danchenko was acquitted, he doesn’t note that Judge Anthony Trenga dismissed the single Dolan count because the allegedly false statement Danchenko made about Dolan was “literally true.” That should not have been a surprising judgment. I noted problems with that charge exactly a year ago, when I catalogued all the sloppy reporting on the Danchenko indictment.

Middlebrook’s order makes for great reading. It’s fun to laugh at Habba getting called out.

But it should bring some reflection from the journalists who made the same kind of logical jumps that Habba did, but who cannot be sanctioned for professional failures.

Middlebrook may not be done. The other defendants have asked for sanctions, as well (though without doing the same preparation in advance to ask for Rule 11 sanctions). So Donald Trump’s lawyers may yet have the privilege of paying Peter Strzok and Hillary Clinton for the privilege of having sued them.

Update: Corrected Middlebrook’s name.

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Bill Barr Complains that His Special Counsel Was Unable to Match Robert Mueller’s Record of Success

October 21, 2022/64 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Even before the Igor Danchenko trial, Billy Barr declared victory in defeat — arguing that if John Durham could just “fill in a lot of the blanks as to what was really happening,” the inevitable acquittal would still give Durham an opportunity to spin fairy tales about what Durham imagines happened.

“What these cases show is that these are difficult cases to win,” Barr said. “There’s a reason it takes so long, and you have to build up the evidence because at the end of the day, you’re going before these juries that aren’t going to be disposed to side with the people they view as supporting Trump.”

Danchenko is slated to go on trial next month on charges of lying to the FBI about the Steele dossier, for which he was the main source. The dossier claimed that Trump and members of his campaign and company had established extensive ties to the Russian government and had colluded during the 2016 election.

The trial is widely expected to be the final criminal prosecution from Durham’s investigation before he submits a report of his findings to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

But despite Durham’s limited success in the courtroom, Barr defended the investigation he ordered, saying the courtroom was allowing Durham to establish a record of what had occurred with the so-called Russiagate investigation.

“I think Durham got out a lot of important facts that fill in a lot of the blanks as to what was really happening,” Barr said. “My expectation is … the Danchenko trial will also allow for a lot of this story to be told, whether or not he’s ultimately convicted. I hope he’s convicted, but if he isn’t, I still think it provides an avenue to tell the story of what happened.”

Like an obedient puppy, Durham did use the trial as an opportunity to get extraneous details into the public record. On top of the $1 million dollar offer that Brian Auten said, vaguely, Christopher Steele might have gotten if he had corroborated the dosser — which has been treated like an FBI attempt to bribe a source for dirt on Trump and as the most exonerating possible detail, rather than an effort to investigate a real threat to the country — Durham went out of his way to give the full names of people at various meetings so Carter Page and Donald Trump can add them to lawsuits.

Mind you, along the way, the trial also revealed the FBI’s own assessment of Danchenko’s cooperation, which contributed to 25 investigations and which Barr burned to a crisp by exposing him, with Lindsey Graham’s help, as a source in 2020.

Q. And you were concerned, in July of 2020, when you became aware that Attorney General Barr was going to release a redacted version of Mr. Danchenko’s interview in January of 2017?

A. Yes.

Q. You were upset about that?

A. I was.

Q. You found out about that during a telephone conference, right?

A. I did.

Q. And you disagreed with that decision?

A. I did.

Q. The OIG had already completed a report on that investigation, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. And you thought that the release of that document was dangerous?

A. Yes.

Q. You even wrote up a memo of that phone call you were on in July of 2020 where you learned that they were going to publish a redacted version of his interview, correct?

A. I did.

[snip]

Q. And within an hour of Mr. Danchenko’s January interview being released to the senate judiciary committee, the senate judiciary committee, I won’t say who, released it to the public?

A. They did.

[snip]

Q. So, Agent Helson, you wrote in October of 2020 that from 2017 until present day, Mr. Danchenko had provided information on at least 25 FBI investigations assigned to at least six field offices?

A. Correct.

Q. In addition, he aided the United States Government by introducing the United States Government to a sub-source who had provided additional information separate to his report, correct?

A. Correct.

[snip]

Q. And it’s noted that he — his reporting contributed to at least 25 active FBI investigations.

[snip]

Q. In July of 2020 his identity became public after the release of the redacted version of his interview in January of 2017. Since that public disclosure, he has received threatening messages via social media and email. It’s resulted in significant damage to his reputation from false and baseless claims aimed to undermine his credibility. Those are your words, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. The Washington Field Office had assessed that this will have negative ramifications with respect to his ability to provide for his family via personal income for the foreseeable future, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. And while the FBI cannot promise complete anonymity to anyone who provides information, his identity became public only after the decision was made to release the redacted version of his interview, correct?

A. Correct.

Q. As a result of that act, his ability to continue to provide information viable to the FBI is diminished as is his ability to provide financial support to his family.

After the trial, Barr has been spending time on Fox News declaring — as much of the frothy right has — that this record, of how he deliberately harmed national security for revenge, exposed the corruption of what Barr calls “Russiagate,” the moniker frothers use to distract from the real substance of the Russian investigation.

I was disappointed, obviously. I think they did a good job prosecuting the case. Their ability to put evidence on, in a very difficult case, was limited by some rulings, and they weren’t able to get access to some witnesses overseas. So it was a tough — it was a tough case, so this should show people that it’s hard to win these cases, and sometimes it takes time to … to achieve justice. But as people say — I think Andy McCarthy said — the real public interest being served here was exposing the full extent of the corruption that was involved in Russiagate [sic] and the abuse by the FBI in that whole episode. And I think Durham is going to get a report out that’s gonna lay out all the facts.

Barr and everyone else are pointing to the exposures they and Durham made to justify their actions because they didn’t have evidence to support their claims.

Barr is whining that getting false statements convictions is hard. But Robert Mueller was able to prove that:

Alex Van der Zwaan lied to cover up his efforts, in conjunction with Konstantin Kilimnik and Rick Gates, to cover up Manafort’s effort to spin Ukraine’s politicized Yulia Tymoshenko prosecution during the 2016 election
George Papadopoulos lied to cover up his advance knowledge of the Russian effort to help Trump
Mike Flynn lied to cover up his back channel calls with Sergei Kislyak to undermine Obama Administration policy (and also that he was a paid agent of Turkey during the campaign)
Michael Cohen lied to hide the secret negotiations he had directly with the Kremlin about an impossibly lucrative real estate deal
Paul Manafort conspired to cover up a front organization he set up with Konstantin Kilimnik and (at a preponderance of the evidence standard) lied to cover up his August 2016 meeting with Kilimnik
Roger Stone lied and intimidated Randy Credico to cover up his real back channel to the Russian operation

I mean, Robert Mueller had no problem getting convictions, whether from guilty pleas, jury verdicts, or (in the case of Manafort’s lies about the August 2, 2016 meeting) a judge’s ruling.

One reason he had no problem was that these defendants were generally guilty of a lot more than just lying. It’s a lot easier to get Flynn to admit he lied about his back channel discussions with the Russian Ambassador, after all, when he was also on the hook for secretly being an agent of Turkey. It’s lot easier to get Papadopoulos to admit he lied about his advance warning of the Russian operation when he’s trying to stave off foreign agent charges tied to Israel. It’s a lot easier to get a jury verdict against Stone when he spent months plotting out his lies with multiple people on emails.

Mueller wasn’t able to get false statement verdicts from everyone, mind you. For example, because Steve Bannon and Erik Prince deleted their texts from early January 2017, Mueller did not charge them for false statements made to cover up meetings to set up a back channel with UAE and Russia. That’s one lesson that Durham should have taken to heart: Absent the mobile app records from Sergei Millian and Igor Danchenko, he had no way of knowing whether Millian called Danchenko on July 26, 2016.

That’s not the only evidentiary complaint Barr makes here. He’s complaining that Durham was unable to get hearsay admitted against Danchenko. He’s angry that Durham was not permitted to introduce Millian’s wild Twitter boasts as evidence without requiring Millian to show up and make those claims under oath. And he’s complaining that Durham wasn’t able to introduce his pee tape conspiracies without charging it.

But the most alarming of the former Attorney General’s statements — before and after the trial — embrace the notion that it is a proper goal of failed prosecutions to expose information that does not rise to the level of criminality.

As I’ll show in a follow-up, the Durham fiasco is part of a piece of Barr’s larger actions, both his other failed prosecutions — most notably, that of Greg Craig — but also his efforts to undo the convictions for which there was no reasonable doubt of guilt.

It’s not enough to talk about Durham’s unprecedented failure … it’s not enough to note that Durham and his prosecutors repeatedly failed to take basic investigative steps before embracing and charging conspiracy theories that juries didn’t buy … it’s not enough to note how, in an attempt to prove those conspiracy theories, Durham and his prosecutors and abused the prosecutorial system.

Durham’s entire project is a continuation of Barr’s unprecedented politicization of DOJ, one that not only places Republicans attempting to secretly work for hostile nations above the law, but that has made the country far less safe in many other ways.

It’s not just Durham prosecuted two men without any real hope of winning conviction, all to expose things that aren’t crimes. It’s that Billy Barr hired him to do just that.

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John Durham Avenged Warrants Targeting Carter Page by Getting a Warrant Targeting Sergei Millian

October 19, 2022/9 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

In both his opening and closing statements, John Durham prosecutor Michael Keilty described the materiality of the alleged lies Igor Danchenko told the FBI about Sergei Millian by pointing to the role the Steele report on Millian played in getting FISA warrants targeting Carter Page.

The evidence in this trial will show that the Steele dossier would cause the FBI to engage in troubling conduct that would ultimately result in the extended surveillance of the United States citizens. And the defendant’s lies played a role in that surveillance.

[snip]

So let’s now talk about why the defendant’s lies matter. The defendant’s lies about Sergei Millian mattered because the information he allegedly received from Millian ended up in a FISA warrant against a U.S. citizen, one of the most intrusive tools the FBI has at its disposal. The FBI gets to listen to your calls and read your emails. It’s a really significant thing.

You heard Brian Auten testify that that Millian information — alleged Millian information was contained in every single FISA application on four different occasions. The FBI surveilled a U.S. citizen for nearly a year based on those lies.

Even accepting the problems of the FISA warrants, the claim never made any sense.

According to the trial record, Danchenko’s information didn’t end up in FISA applications. Language Christopher Steele wrote based on Danchenko’s information did. Danchenko claimed that Steele had exaggerated it, and even after interviewing Steele twice, the FBI believed Danchenko.

Keilty was accusing Danchenko of doing something that — no one has contested — that Steele did, not Danchenko.

Plus, two of the alleged lies took place after the FBI had ceased surveilling Page, in October and November 2017. Even if Danchenko did lie, it would defy the laws of physics to blame those alleged lies for surveillance that ended in September.

Crazier still, one reason why DOJ retroactively withdrew the probable cause claims for the last two FISA orders on Page, obtained in April and June 2017, is because FBI didn’t integrate the warnings Danchenko gave them about the report in the applications. Danchenko is the last person you should blame for the FISA surveillance of Page. He claims he didn’t even know the reports were being shared with the FBI!

The obvious problems with this claim have not stopped stupid propagandists like Margot Cleveland from repeating the nonsensical claim.

It all the weirder, though, when you consider that John Durham was himself responsible for obtaining senseless search warrants against two American citizens.

First, there are the warrants Durham served to obtain Chuck Dolan’s communication, as Stuart Sears had Dolan explain on cross examination.

Q You’re aware, Mr. Dolan, aren’t you, that the government was investigating you at some point?

A Yes.

Q You’re aware that they issued search warrants and subpoenas for your email communications?

A Yes.

Q You’re aware that they issued subpoenas for your phone records?

A Yes.

Q Your work email records?

A Yes.

Q Your Facebook records?

A Yes.

As Sears had Dolan explain, those warrants yielded nothing to refute his claim never to have “talked” to Danchenko about anything that appeared in the dossier.

Q And I think you have already testified to this, but even knowing everything that the government has done to look into you, it’s still your testimony today that you’ve never talked to Mr. Danchenko about anything that ended up in the dossier, correct?

A Correct.

Last Friday, in dismissing the single count pertaining to Dolan, Judge Trenga ruled that any evidence these warrants targeting Dolan yielded did not prove a crime.

And Durham also obtained warrants targeting Sergei Millian — one of his purported victims! — who at least in 2016 had dual citizenship. Durham had his case agent, Ryan James, describe all the surveillance Durham did of Millian.

Q With respect to those documents, tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury whether you personally have been involved in sorting through those records.

A Yes, I have.

Q Travel records, the travel records relating to Sergei Millian was brought to the jury’s attention. Who obtained those records?

A Our team did.

[snip]

Q The jury has heard testimony relating to a number of telephone numbers involved with a fellow by the name of Sergei Millian. Would you tell the jury, sir, whether or not you have any knowledge about records and information being retrieved concerning Sergei Millian.

A Our team requested legal process on some of his numbers that we’ve identified that belong to him.

Q When you say legal process, just so the jurors have an understanding of that, what kind of legal process would typically be involved in getting those records?

A In this particular case, subpoenas.

Q All right. And in addition to subpoenas, do you know if Facebook records and the like were retrieved using the leal process?

A Yes.

Q And what kind of legal process was used to obtain those records?

A Those would be via search warrants.

Even more than the Facebook warrant, Durham’s collection of Millian’s travel records — all the way through current day! — are probably more intrusive on Millian’s privacy.

Q Now, let me start, if I might then. With regard to the records in this matter, you’ve told the jurors that among those records that you obtained were travel records for Sergei Millian, correct?

A Yes.

Q And with respect to Millian’s travel records, how would you describe them? Were they plentiful or there was one or two? What’s your best recollection as to Millian’s travel records?

A I would say he frequently comes in and out of this country.

Q Based on your review of all the travel records, has he been in the country anytime recently?

A No.

It’s too early to say whether any of these records included evidence of a crime. After all, DOJ’s KleptoCapture complaint against Elena Branson shows that one of Millian’s colleagues at the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce viewed the requirement to register under FARA as a “problem” way back in 2013.

But according to an EDVA jury, any evidence the warrants and subpoenas targeting Millian obtained did not prove Danchenko committed a crime.

Durham unpacked the digital lives of two American citizens, plus Danchenko, partly through search warrants that he attacked Mueller’s investigators for not obtaining.

And unless the evidence obtained ends up being used to show that Millian was an illegal foreign agent of Russia, that evidence did not provide that anyone committed a crime.

The right wing is defending John Durham today because he avenged an American who was unfairly targeted by a warrant. And along the way, they seem to have missed that Durham himself obtained a bunch of apparently pointless search warrants targeting American citizens, including Trump fan Sergei Millian.

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Judge Aileen Cannon Risked the Safety of the Country to Protect Two Probably Public Letters

October 19, 2022/15 Comments/in 2020 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Leak Investigations, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

There’s a detail from yesterday’s Raymond Dearie hearing that I’ve seen no other journalist cover: that filter team attorney Anthony Lacosta described sending a public link of this document to Trump attorney Jim Trusty on September 30.

If it’ll help the parties, I sent email to Trusty on 9/30 that sent a copy of letter at issue. I sent link, they appear to be the same, all that’s missing is signature.

We know from the privilege inventory that was accidentally docketed that it’s an 11-page letter from then Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz to Robert Mueller.

Lacosta mentioned that the letter had been published. That must mean the letter is this one, published by the NYT on June 2,2018 (here’s the text for those who can’t access the NYT).

As I noted weeks ago, this document from the same inventory also is almost certainly a letter released publicly years ago, too.

Harold Bornstein, who was then Trump’s personal physician, released a one-page letter dated September 13, 2016 as part of Trump’s campaign for President.

In other words, two of the documents that Judge Aileen Cannon pointed to in order to claim that Trump was suffering a grave harm that justified enjoining an ongoing criminal investigation into some of the most sensitive documents in US government have probably been public for years. Indeed, the Bornstein letter was released by Trump himself.

Here’s how the government described the harm Judge Cannon caused to the United States by enjoining DOJ’s access to these documents in their appeal to the 11th Circuit.

a. The government has a “demonstrated, specific need” for the records bearing classification markings

The government’s need for the records bearing classification markings is overwhelming. It is investigating potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), which prohibits the unauthorized retention of national defense information. These records are not merely evidence of possible violations of that law. They are the very objects of the offense and are essential for any potential criminal case premised on the unlawful retention of the materials. Likewise, these records may constitute evidence of potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 2071, which prohibits concealment or removal of government records.

The records bearing classification markings may also constitute evidence of potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 1519, prohibiting obstruction of a federal investigation. As described above, on May 11, 2022, Plaintiff’s counsel was served with a grand-jury subpoena for “[a]ny and all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings.” DE.48-1:11. In response, Plaintiff’s counsel produced an envelope containing 37 documents bearing classification markings, see MJ-DE.125:20-21, and Plaintiff’s custodian of records certified that “a diligent search was conducted of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Florida” and that “[a]ny and all responsive documents accompany this certification,” DE.48-1:16. As evidenced by the government’s subsequent execution of the search warrant, all responsive documents did not in fact accompany that certification: more than 100 additional documents bearing classification markings were recovered from Plaintiff’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Those documents may therefore constitute evidence of obstruction of justice.

The government’s compelling need for these records is not limited to their potential use as evidence of crimes. As explained in the stay proceedings, the government has an urgent need to use these records in conducting a classification review, assessing the potential risk to national security that would result if they were disclosed, assessing whether or to what extent they may have been accessed without authorization, and assessing whether any other classified records might still be missing. The district court itself acknowledged the importance of the government’s classification review and national security risk assessment. DE.64:22-23. The government has further explained, including through a sworn declaration by the Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, why those functions are inextricably linked to its criminal investigation. DE.69-1:3-5. For example, the government may need to use the contents of these records to conduct witness interviews or to discern whether there are patterns in the types of records that were retained. The stay panel correctly concluded that a prohibition against using the records for such purposes would cause not only harm, but “irreparable harm.” Trump, 2022 WL 4366684, at *12; see also id. at *11. Plaintiff has never substantiated any interest that could possibly outweigh these compelling governmental needs, and none exists.

b. The government has a “demonstrated, specific need” for the remaining seized records The government also has a “demonstrated, specific need” for the seized unclassified records. The FBI recovered these records in a judicially authorized search based on a finding of probable cause of violations of multiple criminal statutes. The government sought and obtained permission from the magistrate judge to search Plaintiff’s office and any storage rooms, MJ-DE.125:37, and to seize, inter alia, “[a]ny physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes,” MJ-DE.125:38. The magistrate judge thus necessarily concluded that there was probable cause to believe those items constitute “evidence of a crime” or “contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed.” Fed. R. Crim. P. 41(c)(1), (2); see MJ-DE.57:3.

That is for good reason. As an initial matter, the unclassified records may constitute evidence of potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 2071, which prohibits “conceal[ing]” or “remov[ing]” government records. Moreover, unclassified records that were stored in the same boxes as records bearing classification markings or that were stored in adjacent boxes may provide important evidence as to elements of 18 U.S.C. § 793. First, the contents of the unclassified records could establish ownership or possession of the box or group of boxes in which the records bearing classification markings were stored. For example, if Plaintiff’s personal papers were intermingled with records bearing classification markings, those personal papers could demonstrate possession or control by Plaintiff.

Second, the dates on unclassified records may prove highly probative in the government’s investigation. For example, if any records comingled with the records bearing classification markings post-date Plaintiff’s term of office, that could establish that these materials continued to be accessed after Plaintiff left the White House. Third, the government may need to use unclassified records to conduct witness interviews and corroborate information. For example, if a witness were to recall seeing a document bearing classification markings next to a specific unclassified document (e.g., a photograph), the government could ascertain the witness’s credibility and potentially corroborate the witness’s statement by reviewing both documents.

In short, the unclassified records that were stored collectively with records bearing classification markings may identify who was responsible for the unauthorized retention of these records, the relevant time periods in which records were created or accessed, and who may have accessed or seen them. [my emphasis]

The government needs to figure out whether Trump’s negligence caused any compromise of highly sensitive documents.

But Judge Cannon decided that letters Trump released to impress voters are more important.

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Jeff Gerth’s Undisclosed Dissemination of Russian Intelligence Product

Links

CJR’s Error at Word 18

Links

Billy B and Johnny D Drank Whiskey before the Special Counsel Appointment

No, Charles McGonigal Likely Isn’t Responsible for that Part of the Russian Investigation You Hate

Kash Patel Wants the Insurrection Protection Committee to Investigate Why Robert Hur Tried to Protect Past Ongoing Investigations

Matty Taibbi’s Dick Pics

Judge Sanctions Alina Habba for Misrepresenting Igor Danchenko Indictment

Bill Barr Complains that His Special Counsel Was Unable to Match Robert Mueller’s Record of Success

John Durham Avenged Warrants Targeting Carter Page by Getting a Warrant Targeting Sergei Millian

Judge Aileen Cannon Risked the Safety of the Country to Protect Two Probably Public Letters

Interesting links

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