The Roger Stone Prosecution Was One Step in an Ongoing Investigation

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I’ve spent the last few days going through the warrants released the other day in detail. This post attempts to summarize what they show about the Stone investigation.

First, understand the scope of this release. According to a filing the government submitted a year ago, they considered the media request to apply to, “warrants to search Stone’s property and facilities [and] other warrants that were executed as part of the same line of investigation” obtained under both Rule 41 and Stored Communication Act.  It does not include warrants from other lines of investigation that happened to yield information on Stone. That said, there is good reason to believe there are either filings that were entirely withheld, or that DOJ’s interpretation of what constitutes the “same line of investigation” is fluid.

In his order to release the files, Judge Christopher Cooper said that the individual redactions hide, “the private information of non-parties, financial information, and non-public information concerning other pending criminal investigations.” In the hearing on the release, the media coalition suggested that people who had testified at Stone’s trial should not be protected under the guise of privacy, and that seems to have been the standard adopted on redactions of names. In general, then, this post assumes that the redaction of names (such as Ted Malloch) protects the privacy of people who did not testify at trial, but the redaction of entire paragraphs (such as 7 paragraphs of boilerplate describing why Malloch was suspected to be involved) was done to protect ongoing investigations. In the list of warrants below, I’ve marked with an asterisk those that — either because they weren’t for Stone’s property or because they didn’t yield evidence relevant to the the obstruction charges he was prosecuted for — were not provided to Stone in discovery; I’ve based that on the list in this order (see footnote 2).

This investigation may well have started as a box-checking exercise, effectively checking whether John Podesta’s allegations that Roger Stone had learned of the hack targeting Hillary’s campaign manager ahead of time. It appears that Mueller’s team slowly came to believe that Roger Stone had gotten advance notice — and possibly advanced possession — of the Podesta email drop. Along the way, it ruled out one after another theory of how he did so.

Two of the most fascinating applications — one pertaining to an Israeli contact and another regarding someone apparently introduced to Stone by Charles Ortel — seem to have fully (the Israeli lead) or partly (the Ortel one) fizzled. (I base that on whether communications described in the affidavits continue to show up in later applications and whether entire paragraphs remain redacted.)

But the government still seems to believe that Stone worked with Corsi and Malloch on these issues. The government is obviously still trying to figure out whether the rat-fuckers and hoaxsters managed to optimize the release of the Podesta emails on October 7, 2016 to drown out the Access Hollywood drop. Mueller’s uncertainty on this point is something explained in redacted sections of the Mueller Report.

Along the way, Mueller developed two side prongs to the investigation: an examination of how Stone used social media to advertise WikiLeaks documents (it’s likely that investigation came to include ads that may have replicated themes being pushed by Russia and may have involved improper collaboration with the campaign), and the obstruction and witness tampering investigation Stone was prosecuted for.

More interesting still, in fall 2018, Mueller’s team started pursuing several leads (including the Ortel one), most of which — if the rule that entirely redacted paragraphs reflect ongoing investigation — continue to be investigated. Indeed, it appears that the prosecution of Stone for obstruction served partly as a means to initiate a prosecution against him, possibly entice him to flip against Trump or others, but perhaps mainly to obtain Stone’s devices in an attempt to get texts from 2016 to 2017 he had deleted, as well as the content of the encrypted communications he had sent using those devices. That is, the search, arrest, and prosecution of Stone appears to have been just one step in an ongoing investigation, an investigation that may be targeting others (including Julian Assange).

Identify the Malloch and Corsi connection (May 2017 to July 2018)

From May (when Mueller’s team first obtained subscriber records on Stone’s Twitter account) until November 2017, the investigation may have been little more than an effort to assess the spat between Stone and John Podesta over Stone’s August 21, 2016 “time in the barrel tweet.” After the team obtained Stone’s Twitter accounts, they moved to obtain the email accounts on which he conducted conversations started on Twitter. In November, Mueller got a warrant for his own team to access Julian Assange’s Twitter accounts (though the government surely already had obtained that). By December, Stone’s email accounts would have led Mueller’s team to believe that Ted Malloch, who was in London, could have been the back channel Stone kept bragging about, and so got his Gmail account. Mueller gagged Google to prevent Malloch from learning that. As a result, Malloch was presumably surprised when he arrived at Logan airport in March and was searched — a search conducted to obtain his phones, partly in an attempt to get to his UK-hosted email.

After Steven Bannon was interviewed in February 2018, Mueller’s team used that to obtain Stone’s Apple account; while not indicated anywhere in these applications, that’s where they would discover Stone and Michael Caputo had responded to a Russian offering dirt on Hillary.

In July, Mueller’s team obtained Jerome Corsi’s email and Apple accounts (there’s no record of them obtaining his Gmail account, but Corsi’s description of Mueller’s knowledge of his August 2016 searches suggests they got it). These affidavits begin to include a 7-page redaction that may indicate ongoing investigation into whether Stone or Corsi optimized the October 7 Podesta email release.

In this phase, the crimes being investigated expanded from just hacking to conspiracy to aiding and abetting. When Mueller got the Assange warrant, he added the illegal  foreign contribution charge (one he declined to prosecute in a long redacted passage of the Mueller Report).

Collect materials on Stone’s overt social media campaigns (August 2018)

On May 18, 2018, Mueller’s team interviewed John Kakanis, who had worked on tech issues for Stone during the election. Afterwards, Mueller’s team obtained a series of warrants to collect the social media campaigns Stone had conducted on issues related to the Russian hack-and-leak. Those warrants included one for several Facebook accounts, a Gmail and Twitter account Stone used for such issues, and a Facebook and Gmail account under the Brazilian name Falo Memo Tio. Stone apparently did not receive the Facebook Falo Memo Tio account, and that warrant included a gag.

Track Stone’s efforts to obstruct the investigation (August 2018)

As Mueller’s team started interviewing people loyal to Stone, they became aware that Stone was communicating with witnesses. In May, Mueller obtained a pen register on Stone’s email accounts, allowing them to track with whom Stone was communicating. An August 3, 2018 warrant describes how investigators used those toll records to track such communications:

  • In the wake of Michael Caputo’s interview, he and Stone communicated via his Hotmail account (this would have been obvious from the story Stone seeded with the WaPo not long after)
  • After FBI Agents approached Andrew Miller, Stone emailed him via Gmail at least 10 times and a over a hundred times after he started challenging his subpoena
  • Stone emailed both Corsi and Credico in May 2018
  • Stone hired a private investigator to conduct a background investigation into someone who had done IT work for him during the campaign and research where he could serve Credico with legal process; in a June 2018 interview, the PI told investigators he and Stone primarily communicated via iPhone text messages

This affidavit included a section (¶¶64-77), based off texts with Credico stored in Stone’s iCloud account and texts published by the media, describing Stone’s threats to Credico.

In response to Stone’s overt efforts to thwart the investigation, Mueller obtained new warrants on Stone’s Hotmail, Gmail, and Apple accounts, which would yield a great deal of evidence for the obstruction and witness tampering charges against Stone. From this point forward, those charges would be included on warrants targeting Stone. In addition, from that point forward, the government appears to have sought to obtain Stone’s communications with those whose testimony he was obstructing (though the names of others besides Credico are redacted).

Starting with the next warrant, affidavits would include a section (¶¶87-89) comparing what Stone had told the House Intelligence Committee with what his own communication records showed, language that would form the backbone for the obstruction indictment.

Investigate the spooky stuff (May to August 2018)

There’s a number of things in these warrants that are difficult to assess. They didn’t show up in Stone’s trial, and it’s unclear whether they were leads that fizzled or reflect far more damning evidence. For example, the Israeli source who kept trying (and ultimately succeeded, once) to use Stone to get a meeting with Donald Trump doesn’t appear to have amounted to much, at least not with respect to the WikiLeaks releases.

A far more intriguing detail is the FBI claim — that lacks details that would be necessary to assess its accuracy — that Stone was searching for details of the Russian operation before those details were made public. The FBI made that claim twice. First, in a July 28, 2018 affidavit, they described that someone conducted searches on dcleaks and “guccifer june” using IP addresses that might be Stone, starting on May 17, 2016. The suggestion is that Stone may have had advance notice of those parts of the Russian operation. But some journalists learned of dcleaks after it got launched in early June and before it got more attention later in the summer. And the original Guccifer, Marcel Lazar, signed a plea agreement in late May 2016. Given Lazar’s claim to have hacked a Hillary server, it’s not unreasonable to think Stone would be researching him. A later warrant discusses someone — who again could be Stone — searching on Guccifer the day that the site would go up, but before it was public.

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

The same rebuttal may be made — that this was about Marcel Lazar and not Guccifer 2.0. But evidence submitted at the trial suggests that Stone started anticipating the June 2016 dump on June 13, not June 15, making the claim more credible.

That July 28 warrant also describes several accounts that look like the FBI suspect Stone of sophisticated operational security. These include:

  • A Gmail account created on July 28, 2016 (right in the thick of Stone’s effort to find out what WikiLeaks had coming next) and used until July 5, 2017
  • A Gmail account created on October 26, 2016 and used until August 8, 2017
  • A Gmail account created on June 27, 2016 and used in conjunction with Craigslist to communicate

The latter effort may suggest some serious OpSec, a way for Stone to communicate publicly without using his own comms.

Finally, there are matching Gmail and Facebook accounts the government obtained warrants for on August 28, 2018. These were old accounts with the Brazilian name Falo Memo Tio. It appears the government was interested in activity on this account from the last four days before the election. They obtained a gag for the Facebook warrant.

Seal warrants investigating an Agent of Foreign Power (August to September 2018)

The government tried to obtain proof that it was Stone doing those searches on Guccifer — as well as evidence about whom he may have met with in early August 2016 when he told Sam Nunberg he had dined with Assange — by obtaining his cell site location for June 14 through November 15 of that year.

Minutes after FBI Agent Andrew Mitchell (who had been the primary affiant on Stone warrants starting in May 2018) obtained that cell site warrant, FBI Agent Patrick Myers obtained a warrant for a mail.com account that Guccifer 2.0 had created on July 23, 2016 and used until October 18, 2016 (the account kept receiving traffic until February 2017). There are several remarkable things about this warrant. While FBI Agents in San Francisco obtained a warrant for it in August 2016, and someone — possibly Mueller’s team — obtained the headers from the account in September 2017, the government had never before obtained a full warrant on the account for the entire span of its activity. So Myers, seven weeks after Mueller released an indictment against the GRU, obtained that information in hopes it would provide more information about how the Guccifer persona had shared files.

The other FBI Agents investigating Stone, to the extent they described such things, were located in either Washington Field Office or FBI Headquarters in DC. Myers, however, was stationed in Pittsburgh, where the investigation into GRU had been moved (they were also working on an indictment for GRU’s hacking of WADA).

Myers’ involvement with Stone extended beyond this curious warrant for Guccifer 2.0’s account. Over the course of the next month, he obtained warrants for:

  1. Stone’s Liquid Web server storing old communications
  2. A Twitter account obtained for redacted reasons
  3. Multiple Twitter accounts obtained for redacted reasons
  4. Multiple Facebook and Instagram accounts obtained for redacted reasons
  5. Multiple Microsoft and Skype accounts obtained for redacted reasons
  6. Multiple Google accounts obtained for redacted reasons
  7. A Twitter account for someone, probably referred by Charles Ortel, whose name ends in R and who traveled back and forth from the UK who Stone suggested, in October 2016, was his intermediary
  8. Multiple Google accounts obtained for redacted reasons

All those warrants, as well as the Guccifer 2.0 account one, included a gag. One of those gag requests — for a warrant for some Twitter accounts — explains,

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

Almost all of the warrants (not the R Apple one or the last Google one, though the R Apple one lists perjury) list FARA and 18 USC 951 (Agent of a Foreign Power) as crimes under investigation somewhere in the warrant, though often only in the gag request. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the FBI was investigating Stone as an Agent of a Foreign Power. The Guccifer 2.0 gag says FBI “is investigating WikiLeaks and others” for the listed crimes.

And those gags say the complexity of the investigation means it may extend more than a year from late September 2018. That is, in September 2018, the government took steps in an investigation they expected to last until around the time that Stone would eventually be tried, in November 2019.

Use the obstruction charges to seize Stone’s phones (January to February 2019)

The existence of those mystery warrants, none of which were provided to Stone in discovery and all but the R Apple one which appear to be ongoing, puts what happened in January 2019 in a very different light. At a time when Bill Barr promised to shut down the Mueller investigation as soon as he was confirmed yet while Mueller was still pursuing Andrew Miller’s testimony, the government obtained warrants to search Stone’s two homes, his office, and three devices seized in those searches (the affiants for those warrants had filed for earlier warrants in the investigation).

Unlike all the other warrants, those 2019 warrants listed only the obstruction, false statements, and witness tampering charges against Stone, largely tracking the indictment against him.

Those warrants emphasize the government’s interest in obtaining texts that might be accessed only via a forensic search of Stone’s phone, including texts sent via Apple, but also Signal, Wickr, and WhatsApp texts, as well as ProtonMail emails.

Which is to say, in the context of the warrants released this week, the prosecution of Roger Stone appears to be just one step in a far more serious investigation, one that may well be ongoing.

The warrants

August 7, 2017: Stone’s Twitter Accounts

This warrant only lists CFAA as the suspected crime, and doesn’t allege that Stone was the suspect in it. It also relies on Stone’s own public comments about DMing with Guccifer 2.0 rather than materials already obtained from the account, just the first of an insane number of instances where Stone’s comments to the press formed the basis for probable cause.

September 11, 2017: Stone’s Hotmail Account

When people DMed Stone, he’d refer them to this Hotmail account for further discussion. This affidavit incorporates DMs to Assange (including the June 10, 2017 one discussing a pardon) obtained with the August 7 warrant. It also describes investigating information to be used in the Republican primary. This warrant extended the timeframe of the Stone investigation back to January 1, 2015.

October 17, 2017: Stone’s Gmail

This warrant builds on emails between Corsi and Stone about getting the WikiLeaks releases — including Stone’s “get to Assange” one — to establish the probable cause to get Stone’s Gmail account. Because Corsi would sometimes discuss Podesta related business via both Stone’s Hotmail and Gmail accounts, Mueller’s team was able to get Stone’s Gmail account. This warrant makes it clear the investigation focused on Corsi and Stone’s evolving attacks against John Podesta (which I’ve covered in real time from early on) from the beginning. It also includes a detail about Malloch — that he made a reference in January 2017 about phishing Podesta — that almost certainly remains in the redacted sections pertaining to Malloch.

*November 6, 2017: WikiLeaks and Assange’s Twitter Accounts

This affidavit uses Assange’s DMs with Stone — including another one about a pardon and migration from the WikiLeaks to the Assange account– as well as his sharing of a password with Don Jr to get Mueller his own copy of the WikiLeaks and Assange Twitter accounts, which the government surely already had. The affidavit includes new details on initial communications between Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, some of which I laid out here. One detail that’s critical is WikiLeaks asked Guccifer 2.0 for Clinton Foundation documents from early on, meaning WikiLeaks and Trump’s people agreed about what they considered the best possible dirt.

*December 19, 2017: Ted Malloch’s Gmail

In addition to extra details about campaign communications (both between Stone and the campaign, and with Malloch and the campaign), this includes details of Turkish dirt Malloch was offering. It reveals that Stone got RNC credentials for Malloch (where, evidence suggests, Stone had meetings where upcoming releases may have been discussed). In addition, because Stone’s order to Corsi to reach out to Malloch is so important, this affidavit has previously unknown details about those days. The affidavit describes Malloch writing Stone on November 13, 2016 while with Jerome Corsi, a detail that may get redacted in subsequent affidavits.

This warrant included a gag on the provider.

This is the first application that introduces Stone, Corsi, and Malloch at the beginning of each affidavit, a practice that would generally continue (though some of these changes reflect different FBI agents writing the affidavit).

March 14, 2018: Two Apple Accounts used by Stone

In February, Steve Bannon was interviewed for two long days. He was asked questions and shared texts with Stone. This application uses some of what he testified about to justify getting Stone’s Apple accounts. Stone had his iCloud account set to full backup, but later warrants would make clear that he had deleted some of his texts from 2016 and 2017. Stone would later blame Sam Nunberg for revealing that he had claimed to have “dined” with Julian Assange while visiting Los Angeles in early August 2016, but this application began to incorporate that email into boilerplate application language (a footnote on what Nunberg told investigators about this is redacted in later warrants).

This application added wire fraud to Stone’s potential charges; it’s not at all clear why.

*March 27, 2018: Malloch’s person and his baggage

This warrant allowed the FBI to search Malloch as he landed in Logan airport. It incorporated details from Malloch’s Gmail obtained in December and was at least in part an effort to get to his UK-based email.

*May 4, 2018: Mystery Israeli Gmail

Over the course of the year, an Israeli exploited a seeming pre-existing relationship with Jerome Corsi to get close to Stone and through him to Trump. The person appeared to offer Stone dirt to save Trump (this story provides some background on potential players). Stone seems to have been reluctant to meet at multiple times, as when he said, in May 2016, “I am uncomfortable meeting without Jerry,” claimed, in June, “to have been poisoned,” in July, came down “with a nasty cold and too ill to travel,” followed later with, “I have pneumonia and may be hospitalized later today,” claimed, “Matters complicated” in August. When, in early November, they tried again, the Israeli deferred claiming, “HAVING a TIA. Early Stroke. … Blury Virson.” These exchanges never show up in later filings, so it’s quite likely Mueller determined they were nothing (or at least, that Stone and Corsi had done nothing wrong) after obtaining the emails. Alternately, a redaction in the affidavit may suggest the Israeli in question got referred and some kind of investigation is ongoing. This warrant included a gag on the provider.

*July 12, 2018: Jerome Corsi’s CSC Holdings, Windstream, and Apple accounts (second version)

This adds language about Russian hacking after the initial compromise (including the September hack of the AWS server). It includes 7 paragraphs of language from after the election that is redacted, possibly because it remains under investigation. This Stone filing describes four of those paragraphs as pertaining to Corsi taking credit for optimizing the Podesta release and Malloch introducing Corsi to Assange after the election (see this post). Some of the redactions (probably the Malloch introduction) repeats the “phishing Podesta” quip. This warrant included a gag on the provider. It limited the scope of the warrant to June 15 through November 10, 2016 and included only CFAA and conspiracy in the crimes being investigated.

July 27, 2018: Roger Stone’s OpSec emails

This warrant obtains the search histories for 3 Gmail accounts Roger Stone set up, possibly for OpSec purposes. They include:

  • Target Account 1 created on July 28, 2016 and used until July 5, 2017
  • Target Account 2 created on October 26, 2016 and used until August 8, 2017
  • Swash Buckler Account created on June 27, 2016 and used to communicate via Craigslist ads

Between May 17, 2016 and June 15, 2016, the affidavit suggests, Stone may have conducted Google searches for DCLeaks and Guccifer (which could be 1 or 2) prior to the publication of the Guccifer 2.0 blog. The FBI connected them to Stone via the IP addresses he used to access Twitter and Facebook, something they would continue to investigate. The affidavit also reveals that Stone deleted the search history for a different Google account between January 18 and July 23, 2016.

August 2, 2018: Roger Stone marketing Facebook accounts

This warrant gets three of Stone’s Facebook accounts, two of which include advertisements pertaining to WikiLeaks or Russia (the description of the third is redacted). Stone used this warrant when signaling to his co-conspirators what was in his warrants, so redacted details are available here. The biggest redaction for an ongoing investigation pertains to whether Corsi and Stone affected the release of the Podesta emails and Malloch offering to set Corsi up with Assange after the election.

August 3, 2018: Renewed warrants for Apple, Hotmail, and Gmail

Partly because the way Stone worked the press and aired the threats he had made against Randy Credico, it became clear he was tampering or comparing notes with witnesses (also including Jerome Corsi, Michael Caputo, and Andrew Miller, as well as one other witness that Stone hired a private investigator to investigate). That gave Mueller the excuse to get new warrants on Stone’s main email and text accounts to get those conversations. This request expanded the focus to include Credico and others (the names of the others are redacted but are likely those with whom Stone was trying to tamper). This warrant also adds obstruction and witness tampering to the crimes being investigated.

August 8: Warrants for a Gmail and Twitter account Stone used for social media campaigns (Twitter)

On May 18, 2018, Mueller’s team interviewed John Kakanis about work he did for Stone during the campaign. He described how Stone conducted social media campaigns — including materials relating to WikiLeaks and the Russian investigation — which both of these accounts played a role in.

August 20, 2018: Warrant for Stone’s cell site information from June 15 to November 15, 2016

Citing the searches probably made by Stone for Guccifer and dcleaks information before those accounts were made public, the government obtained cell site information for the period from the day that the Guccifer 2.0 account first started to a day the week after the election. The affidavit also explained wanting to know if Stone was with the Trump campaign at various times and where he was in Los Angeles when he told Sam Nunberg he had dined with Assange. Note, this affidavit suggests Stone did a Google search on “Guccifer” on June 15, 2016 before the site went up.

*August 20, 2018: Warrant for Guccifer 2.0’s second email account

The same day the government got a warrant to find out where Stone had been when during the election, they got a renewed warrant for one of the email accounts associated with the Guccifer 2.0 site. They had previously gotten everything from that email account in “approximately” August 2016, and then gotten headers for any emails sent in “approximately” September 2017. Getting the full content would give it additional details on any activity with the account between the original warrant — August 2016 — and the final login on October 18, 2016, as well as any email traffic subsequent to that. The stated purpose for obtaining this information was to “assist in identifying additional means by which Guccifer 2.0 shared stolen documents with WikiLeaks and others.” Patrick Myers, an FBI agent located in Pittsburgh (and therefore presumably someone more closely involved in the GRU investigation) obtained this warrant. This warrant included a gag on the provider. Parts of this warrant invoke 18 USC 951 — agent of a foreign power charges — in addition to the other crimes under investigation.

*August 28, 2018: Warrant for Stone’s Falo Memo Tio Facebook account

August 28, 2018: Warrant for Stone’s Falo Memo Gmail account

This incorporates details about Stone’s Facebook accounts used to push the hack-and-leak, found in the earlier August Facebook warrants. It seeks to obtain an old Stone Facebook account that got advertising traffic right before the election. These were Stone-specific warrants that was not turned over in discovery, suggesting it returned nothing pertaining to his prosecution. The Facebook warrant, but not the Gmail one, included a gag on the provider; it also was not included in the warrants provided to Stone in discovery.

August 28, 2018: Warrant for Stone’s rogerstone@mail account

This email account–and the fact that he had been using it to tell his cover story about WikiLeaks–showed up in his Gmail account.

*September 24, 2018: Warrant for Stone’s Liquid Web server

This was a server Stone used to encrypt and back up his data in case the government seized his computers. It was not provided to Stone in discovery so may not have revealed any interesting information. This is the first of these affidavits written by Patrick Myers, an FBI agent located in Pittsburgh.

*September 26, 2018: Mystery Twitter Account

*September 27, 2018: Mystery Facebook and Instagram Accounts

*September 27, 2018: Mystery Microsoft include Skype

*September 27, 2018: Mystery Google

On September 26 and 27, Mueller’s team obtained a bunch of new warrants. All were obtained by Myers, the Pittsburgh FBI agent. All included gags on the provider. Most entirely redact the description of why the FBI needed the accounts, suggesting these investigations are ongoing. They also invoke 951 and FARA in the sealing request.

*September 27, 2018: Mystery Twitter Accounts 2

Like the other warrants obtained on September 27, the explanation for targeting these Twitter accounts is sealed. Like them, Myers obtained the warrant. Like those, it includes a request for sealing that lists 18 USC 951 — acting as an unregistered foreign agent — and FARA. Unlike the other warrants from that day, the justification for sealing this one explains that “It does not appear that Stone is fully aware of the full scope of the ongoing FBI investigation.”

*September 27, 2018: Mystery Apple ends in R

Then there’s another odd September 27 warrant application. Like the other warrants obtained on September 27, Myers wrote the affidavit for this one, and it included a gag. Unlike the others, however, the explanation for targeting this account is not entirely redacted. The affidavit explains that,

  • On August 17, 2016, someone (Charles Ortel?) introduced Stone and R
  • Between that introduction and November 3, 2016, Stone and R were in contact 60 times
  • On October 7, R and Stone spoke during the time between when WaPo alerted him to the Access Hollywood Video and the time it dropped
  • On October 10, R and Stone probably met for pizza on the Upper East Side
  • On October 12, Stone claimed that he had met his intermediary, who traveled back and forth to London, on October 10

The list of information targeted includes an additional name, probably that of Charles Ortel.

*October 5, 2018: Mystery Multiple Googles

Like the September 27 warrants, the explanation for targeting these accounts remains entirely redacted. Like them, the affidavit was written by Myers and sealed under a Kyle Freeny request. Unlike those, however, this one does not list 951 and FARA in the request to seal. This affidavit also does not include the contacts with “R” in the narrative about October 7, suggesting that lead may have fizzled.

January 24, 2019: Stone’s NY property

January 24, 2019: Stone’s FL property

January 24, 2019: Stone’s FL office

February 13, 2019: Three of Stone’s devices

The warrants for the searches in conjunction with Stone’s arrest on January 24 are fairly similar (one agent wrote the one in NY, another did the two in FL), except for the descriptions of the premises, facilitated by how much media Stone has done at these locations.

The affidavits themselves largely track the indictment, though showing where the government had sourced the evidence that ultimately got introduced at evidence at trial. The affidavits add people named in the indictment — Rick Gates, Steve Bannon, and Erik Prince (whose description is redacted) — premised on the import of proving that Stone had lied about telling these people about his purported link to WikiLeaks. As compared to the earlier warrants, these affidavits have a closer focus on the release (and reliance, exclusively, on the Crowdstrike and GRU indictment attribution, which is something Stone litigated and which I may return to).

These warrants make it clear that one of the things the government was doing was searching Stone’s homes for all his electronic devices in hopes of getting texts from 2016 to 2017 he deleted and his encrypted communications, which include:

  • WhatsApp, downloaded on October 5, 2016 to talk to Erik Prince
  • Signal and ProtonMail downloaded on August 18, 2016; Stone used Signal to talk to Margaret Kunstler
  • Wickr downloaded on August 5, 2017

Update: One detail I forgot to add about the 2019 search warrants: They explain that Stone responded to a grand jury subpoena in November 2018 asking for the texts he had with Credico, after he told the press — specifically, Chuck Ross, for a credulous story that spun Stone’s like — that his attorney had them. It’s one of the most hilarious ways that Stone’s blathering to the press hurt him.

Update: One more detail about the 2019 search warrants. The FBI was specifically looking for a “file booklet” recording a meeting Stone had with Trump at Trump Tower during the 2016 election.

60. On or about May 8, 2018, a law enforcement interview of [redacted] was conducted. [redacted] was an employee of Stone’s from approximately June 2016 through approximately December 2016 and resided in Stone’s previous New York apartment for a period of time. [redacted] provided information technology support for Stone but was not formally trained to do so. [redacted] was aware that Stone communicated with Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, and afterward, both in person and by telephone. [redacted] provided information about a meeting at Trump Tower between Trump and Stone during the time [redacted] worked for him, to which Stone carried a “file booklet” with him. Stone told [redacted] the file booklet was important and no one should touch it. [redacted] also said Stone maintained the file booklet in his closet.

61. On or about December 3,2018, law enforcement conducted an interview of an individual (“Person 2”) who previously had a professional relationship with a reporter who provided Person 2 with information about Stone. The reporter relayed to Person 2 that in or around January and February 2016, Stone and Trump were in constant communication and that Stone kept contemporaneous notes of the conversations. Stone’s purpose in keeping notes was to later provide a “post mortem of what went wrong.”

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Republicans OUTRAGED That National Security Threat Was Treated Like National Security Threat

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I’m in the middle of a very deep dive into the Roger Stone files — which show parts of the investigation remain ongoing — so I’m just going to note two developments that will ensure that two of Trump’s criminals avoid prison.

First, Stone has filed for an appeal of Amy Berman Jackson’s order denying him a new trial. Normally, his appeal would be so weak that he’d be required to report while the appeal is heard. But even in normal circumstances, the Bureau of Prison takes a while to assign new prisoners. And in the case of a non-violent 67-year old like Stone, I imagine BOP will wait to make an assignment until their COVID problem abates. They have enough problems with all the vulnerable prisoners in their COVID death traps now, they aren’t in a big rush to put more in there. [Update: Per Ali Dukakis, BOP has indeed told Stone he won’t have to report right away.]

Meanwhile, Sidney Powell has succeeded wildly with her ploy to undermine the prosecution of Mike Flynn in the press, getting both the NYT and WaPo to present her case with little context. Last week and yesterday she got a released a bunch of documents that the government turned over as part of Jeffrey Jensen’s second-guessing of the prosecution. Those files show:

  • There was a discussion about halting an ongoing investigation into Mike Flynn Jr after his dad pled guilty, but there were no promises made (if there had been, it would add two more lies to the sworn lies Mike Flynn told). The emails make it clear that Covington believed the threat of investigation was real.
  • In advance of the interview of Mike Flynn, the FBI discussed how to handle an investigation into why the National Security Advisor had called up Russia and told them not to worry about the punishment for their interference in our election. They brainstormed how to respond to a bunch of questions he didn’t end up asking. They had been planning to give him a warning about false statements; they did not give that warning. They had discussed showing him the transcript that showed he lied; they did not do that.

Neither of those things are very interesting. The first shows the opposite of what Sidney Powell has claimed (that is, no promises about Jr were made). The second shows that they discussed how to handle a sensitive interview before it happened; we knew that. In addition, because those discussions ultimately didn’t govern the investigation, they would not have been pertinent to the interview.

The thing the frothy right is excited about is that Bill Pristap took notes reflecting a discussion what would happen given all the evidence that the National Security Advisor had called up Russia and told them not to worry about the punishment for their interference. The question was whether they wanted to get him to admit his wrongdoing, in which case (they assumed) he’d be fired, or whether he would lie in which case they might have to prosecute him.

The frothy right believes this is proof that Flynn was ambushed in a perjury [false statements] trap, which I guess means they now agree Flynn lied his ass off.

Somewhere, the circumstances have gotten missed. Not only did the FBI discover that Mike Flynn had called up a hostile foreign government and told them not to worry about being punished for tampering in our election. But it was also already public that Mike Flynn may have been secretly working for Turkey while he was claiming to represent Trump’s national security interests. Flynn would go on to testify, under oath and before a grand jury, that indeed, he had been knowingly pursuing a secret deal with Turkey at the time he sat in on Trump’s first national security briefing. The entire time, he testified, he knew that he was really working for Turkey even though he and his firm went to some efforts to hide that fact.

The FBI might be excused for believing that Flynn would be treated according to one of two ways: firing or prosecution. Because they had Flynn on tape calling up a country that had just attacked our own and told them not to worry about being punished. And they had good reason to believe he was still hiding details about having worked for a frenemy government during a period he retained security clearance. In a sane world, when there’s clear evidence the National Security Advisor has done those things, firing or prosecution are the most obvious options.

In Trump’s world — in the world of the entire Republican party, it seems — those aren’t the only two options. In Trump’s world, it is totally natural to keep someone in charge of the entire country’s national security even after he had called up a country that had just attacked us and said no big deal while actively hiding his relationship with another foreign country.

And that is why Mike Flynn likely won’t ever go to prison: because in Trump’s world, the guy who helps out the country that just attacked us is a hero, not a national security threat.

Update: Here’s the next installment of stuff that Powell claims is damning but which proves her conspiracy theories wrong. It shows that on January 4, 2017, FBI was literally in the process of closing the investigation into Flynn (proving they didn’t set him up and assessed him accurately) when they discovered that he had called up Russia and undermined sanctions.

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Cross Filings: NSD Figures Out How Woods Procedures Are Supposed to Work

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JustSecurity has an odd panel on FISA yesterday reviewing the DOJ IG Memo showing that Carter Page’s FISA applications were actually better than average with respect to compliance with Woods Procedures. It includes Andrew McCabe (who signed the last, most problematic, Carter Page application) and Mary McCord (who was involved in the review process for three of the applications, and even told McCabe they needed more information on Christopher Steele before the first one), but it doesn’t disclose their roles in the process. It also doesn’t include defense attorneys among its experts, who might provide more context about problems identified with FISA long before the Page investigation.

I’m particularly interested in McCord’s comments. She likens this to what happened in the wake of Brady v Maryland, and then again in the wake of Ted Stevens’ trial, as prosecutors came to a more proactive view on discovery (she doesn’t explain how prosecutors fucked up so badly on the Stevens case if any cultural change had really happened).

While I applaud McCord for taking a more skeptical view of the Page surveillance at several points (as described in the DOJ IG Report), her focus on Brady and her confidence in cultural change is misplaced, in my opinion.

As bmaz would and has been screaming, Brady isn’t actually the standard here. Franks is. He has argued that the affidavits targeting Page would never have reached the standard under Franks, and thus if Page were treated like any other defendant (of course, he was never charged), these affidavits would have passed muster.

I would respond to bmaz that you’d never even get to a Franks hearing because no defendant has ever gotten review of their application. Now that Ric Grenell has declassified the bulk of Carter Page’s applications, it should be far easier to declassify applications going forward. Liza Goitein included providing review to defendants among her recommendations for reforms next month, but none of the other panelists did.

But all the panelists seem to have missed something that happened at the same time as the memo was released. As I noted in my own review of the MAM, NSD (which McCord led for a key period during which Page was surveilled) has been doing their reviews in such a way as to make the Woods Procedures useless. They were giving FBI Agents four weeks advance notice before conducting a review, which meant they never did what DOJ IG did — see whether the FISA file had the paperwork that under the Woods Procedure it should have.

Before any of these reviews happen, the field offices are told which applications will be reviewed, which gives the case agents a chance to pull together the documentary support for the application.

Thus, prior to the FBI CDC or NSD OI review, field offices are given advance notification of which FISA application(s) will be reviewed and are expected to compile documentary evidence to support the relevant FISA.

If the Woods Procedures were being followed, it should never be the case that the FBI needs to compile documentary evidence before the review; the entire point of it is it ensure the documentary evidence is in the file before any application gets submitted. Once you discover that all the FBI and OI reviews get advance notice, you’re not really reviewing Woods Procedures, it seems to me, you’re reviewing paperwork accuracy.

[snip]

To check the accuracy of the Woods Files, they should with no notice obtain a subset of them, as DOJ IG just did, and see whether the claims in the report are documented in the Woods File, and only after that do their onsite reviews (with notice, to see if there was documentation somewhere that had not been included in the file). That might actually be a better way of identifying where there might be other kinds of problems with the application.

It turns out, on the same day that DOJ IG released their MAM, NSD submitted a FISA filing updating James Boasberg on what they’re doing with reviews.

The panel deals with the DOJ IG Management Advisory Memorandum showing that Carter Page’s applications were in no way unique, with regards to Woods Procedure violations; in fact, his application had fewer Woods Procedure violations, on average, than the 29 applications DOJ IG reviewed. Much of the discussion focuses on

The results (rightly) look really stinky for the FBI. But in fact, the MAM revealed that NSD — McCord’s old department, which thus far had (possibly for jurisdictional reasons) avoided most criticism for FISA — was conducting reviews that made the Woods Files largely useless as an oversight tool (and therefore as a guarantee of accuracy). That’s because Office of Intelligence has been giving FBI Field Offices four weeks advance warning about which files they’re going to review.

DOJ IG describes its finding that these results aren’t being used in better fashion.

(4) FBI and NSD officials we interviewed indicated to us that there were no efforts by the FBI to use existing FBI and NSD oversight mechanisms to perform comprehensive, strategic assessments of the efficacy of the Woods Procedures or FISA accuracy, to include identifying the need for enhancements to training and improvements in the process, or increased accountability measures.

At least given their description, however, I think they’ve found something else. They’ve confirmed that — contrary to DOJ’s description to FISC that,

OI also conducts accuracy reviews of a subset of cases as part of these oversight reviews to ensure compliance with the Woods Procedures and to ensure the accuracy of the facts in the applicable FISA application.

OI is actually only doing the latter part, measuring the accuracy of the facts in an applicable FISA application. To check the accuracy of the Woods Files, they should with no notice obtain a subset of them, as DOJ IG just did, and see whether the claims in the report are documented in the Woods File, and only after that do their onsite reviews (with notice, to see if there was documentation somewhere that had not been included in the file).

As I lay out in a timeline below, DOJ was submitting a response to the FISA Court on April 3, even as DOJ IG was releasing its MAM. In that response (therefore three days before my post), they said they’d stop giving advance notice for the accuracy reviews, which will make Woods Procedures newly useful.

NSD has determined that commencing with accuracy reviews starting after September 30, 2020, it will not inform the FBI field offices undergoing NSD oversight reviews which applications will be subjected to accuracy reviews in advance of those reviews. This date is subject to current operational limitations the coronavirus outbreak is imposing. NSD would not apply this change in practice to accuracy reviews conducted in response to a request to use FISA information in a criminal proceeding, given the need to identify particular information from particular collections that is subject to use. NSD also would not apply this change in practice to completeness reviews ( discussed further below); because of the pre-review coordination that is contemplated for those reviews.

NSD will expect that the relevant FBI field offices have ready, upon NSD’s arrival, the accuracy sub-files for the most recent applications for all FISAs seeking electronic surveillance or physical search. NSD will then, on its arrival, inform the FBI field office of the application(s) that will be subject to an accuracy review. If the case will also be subject to a completeness review, pre-coordination, as detailed below, will be necessary. The Government assesses that implementing this change in practice will encourage case agents in all FISA matters to be more vigilant about applying the accuracy procedures in their day-to-day work.

In addition, although NSD’s accuracy reviews allow NSD to assess individual compliance with the accuracy procedures, NSD’s historical practice has been to allow agents to obtain documentation during a review that may be missing from the accuracy sub-file. NSD only assesses the errors or omissions identified once the agent has been given the opportunity to gather any additional required documentation. While the Government believes that, in order to appropriately assess the accuracy of an application’s content, it should continue to allow agents to gather additional documentation during the accuracy review, it assesses that this historical practice has not allowed for the evaluation of how effective agents have been at complying with the requirement to maintain an accuracy sub-file, complete with all required documentation.

As a result, NSD will tally and report as a part of its accuracy review process all facts for which any documentation, or appropriate documentation, was not a part of the accuracy sub-file at the time the accuracy review commenced. Agents will still be given the opportunity to gather such documentation during or after the accuracy review, so that NSD can assess if the application contains any inaccuracies with respect to the application’s content. NSD will include these additional findings in its summaries of accuracy reviews (discussed herein) and also will include such findings in its biannual reports to the Court regarding its accuracy and completeness review findings. NSD assesses that by implementing this additional metric, it will encourage case agents to be more vigilant about adhering to the FBI’s accuracy· procedures.

It’s rare that a bureaucracy of any sort — much less government, much less part of government that pertains to national security — recognizes that its paperwork isn’t serving the function it is supposed to. But here, even though DOJ IG didn’t make this observation, NSD figured it out and committed to change their processes.

There are more comments about NSD’s review processes that deserve more attention. For example, I said that NSD should start reporting the results of its accuracy (and the new completeness) reviews in its Semiannual FISA Reports (which currently focus only on 702). As part of a seeming effort to rebut Amicus David Kris’ comment that DOJ has the resources to do oversight right, the filing suggested that other oversight obligations take up too much time to dedicate more time to traditional FISA reviews (though NSD did increase attorney resources in OI’s oversight section by 50%).

(U) OI’s Oversight Section, which is responsible for oversight and compliance relating to the IC’s implementation of FISA authorities, currently has approximately 20 attorneys and must rely on assistance from the Operations Section of OI to staff the existing accuracy reviews. Moreover, OI’s Oversight Section conducts oversight of other FISA authorities, including at other IC agencies, and conducts oversight of FBI’s implementation of its Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations. The latter involves conducting onsite National Security Reviews at approximately 15 FBI field offices annually. In addition, OI’s oversight and compliance responsibilities with respect to the IC’s implementation of Section 702 consumes substantial OI resources. 14 Furthermore, the Oversight Section fulfills statutorily-required reporting obligations to Congress on behalf of the Department. These reports, which describe, in detail, the Government’s use of FISA authorities and all identified compliance incidents, run hundreds of pages in the aggregate and most must be completed twice a year. As the Court is aware, the Oversight Section also investigates and reports to the Court all FISA compliance incidents involving IC agencies. Additionally, among other responsibilities, the Oversight Section prepares quarterly reports for the Court to inform the Court about certain Section 702 compliance incidents and provide updates on previously reported Section 702 compliance incidents. The Oversight Section also conducts onsite reviews at multiple IC agencies.

It seems like this process could be more streamlined, though. It also seems like you don’t need attorneys to do all these reviews. Accuracy and completeness are not legal issues, they’re reading issues.

Ultimately, the way to ensure that smart changes by NSD actually have the desired effect is to give any defendant against whom FISA information is used in prosecution review of his or her FISA file. But it remarkable to see that McCord’s successor, John Demers, is actually making the kinds of changes that could make the Woods Files function the way they’ve been supposed to for two decades.

Timeline

  • March 23: FBI Associate Deputy Director of FBI reponds to draft MAM
  • March 27: Associate Deputy Attorney General Brad Weinsheimer responds to draft MAM
  • March 30: DOJ IG completes a Management Advisory Memorandum on it efforts to clean up FISA
  • March 31: DOJ IG publicly releases the MAM
  • April 3: James Boasberg orders the government to report whether errors found in the 29 applications that DOJ IG reviewed are material
  • April 3: DOJ National Security Division submits Response to March 5 order incorporating changes to Woods Procedure reviews
  • April 6: I point out that NSD should change how they do Woods Procedure reviews
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Judge Sullivan Already Ruled that Mike Flynn’s David Ignatius Story Doesn’t Help Him

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When I noted that the John Durham investigation has been investigating the first 10 months of the Russian investigation for 11 months now (and seemed on track to continue for another four months at least), I didn’t include a number of details laid out in this government filing and this NYT story.

The government filing makes it clear that St. Louis US Attorney continues his second-guess review of the investigation into Mike Flynn, three months after he began.

The NYT story describes that, in addition to the DC AUSA on Durham’s team and two prosecutors from Connecticut, he’s also got an SDNY prosecutor.

Mr. Durham is relying on a team of prosecutors, including Nora R. Dannehy and Neeraj Patel, from Connecticut, as well as former and current F.B.I. agents to complete his investigation. Anthony Scarpelli, a top prosecutor from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, was detailed to the team along with a federal prosecutor from Manhattan, Andrew DeFilippis.

Two former F.B.I. agents, Timothy Fuhrman and Jack Eckenrode, are also assisting. An F.B.I. agent who oversaw public corruption in Chicago and served in Ukraine as an assistant legal attaché, Peter Angelini, has also joined Mr. Durham’s team.

Arguably, Durham has more staffers than the investigation he is investigating had.

The NYT story also provides further evidence that Trump’s flunkies have been able to get Durham to chase down each of their grievances on command. Durham has been investigating something lifted out of a Sidney Powell filing — one already rejected by Emmet Sullivan — regarding the source of the leak to David Ignatius which led Mike Flynn to start lying, at first to the press.

Last year, Mr. Durham also started examining the 2017 column by The Post’s David Ignatius, said a person familiar with that line questioning. Mr. Ignatius revealed that Mr. Flynn had spoken in late 2016 with Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, as the Obama administration was about to place sanctions on Russia for its election sabotage.

Mr. Ignatius noted Mr. Flynn’s close contacts with the Russians and suggested that because Mr. Flynn was apparently conducting foreign policy while another administration was in power, he might have violated the Logan Act. The law is an obscure statute that bars private citizens from interfering with diplomatic relations between the United States and foreign governments and is widely considered to be essentially defunct.

The next month, Mr. Flynn resigned after lying to the vice president and other White House officials about the call with Mr. Kislyak. He eventually pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about the nature of his discussions with Mr. Kislyak but later backtracked, asking a federal judge to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea.

Powell asked for this last September as part of an elaborate claim that James Clapper — who, of course, fired Mike Flynn for cause — had it in for Flynn and therefore set him up to be ambushed by the FBI once he became National Security Advisor. In addition to asking for records of calls between Clapper and Ignatius, she asked for all records pertaining to Ignatius.

All FBI 302s or any notes of interviews of David Ignatius or any other reporter regarding the publication of information concerning Mr. Flynn and/or the reporters’ contacts with James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, Michael Kortan, or anyone in the FBI, DNI, DOD, DOJ, or CIA regarding Mr. Flynn.

[snip]

All FBI 302s, notes, memoranda of James Clapper regarding Mr. Flynn, and the cell phone and home phone records of Mr. Clapper and David Ignatius between December 5, 2016, and February 24, 2017.

The NYT reported that KT McFarland also was attributing the dramatically varied stories she told to the FBI to the Ignatius story.

Mr. Ignatius’s column “set off a chain of events that helped lead to the Russia probe,” K.T. McFarland, the former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump, wrote in her recent book, “Revolution: Trump, Washington and ‘We the People.’”

Mr. Durham has reviewed Ms. McFarland’s interviews with F.B.I. investigators in other inquiries, examining what she has said about Mr. Ignatius’s reporting and asked other witnesses about it, according to person familiar with elements of the investigation. She revised her answers to questions from investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, on elements of Mr. Flynn’s talks with Mr. Kislyak but has accused the investigators of trying to ensnare her in “perjury trap.”

Mr. Durham has not questioned Ms. McFarland.

Let’s run with this for a moment, shall we? In addition to criticizing the Obama Administration for not responding more aggressively to the Russian operation and asserting that we needed to find out whether the Russians had fed Christopher Steele disinformation (both assertions Republicans have made), Ignatius revealed that a Senior Government Official told him that Flynn had had multiple conversations with Sergei Kislyak in advance of Russia declining to respond to Obama’s sanctions.

Question 3: What discussions has the Trump team had with Russian officials about future relations? Trump said Wednesday that his relationship with President Vladimir Putin is “an asset, not a liability.” Fair enough, but until he’s president, Trump needs to let Obama manage U.S.-Russia policy.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s choice for national security adviser, cultivates close Russian contacts. He has appeared on Russia Today and received a speaking fee from the cable network, which was described in last week’s unclassified intelligence briefing on Russian hacking as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.”

According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

If the Trump team’s contacts helped discourage the Russians from a counter-retaliation, maybe that’s a good thing. But we ought to know the facts.

Note, contrary to a lot of claims about this story, there’s no indication that the content of the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak got shared (and even just toll records showing the conversations did happen would be enough for a spooked up reporter like Ignatius to ask the question). In addition, the term, “government official,” is often used to hide the identity of members of Congress. It in no way is limited to someone like Clapper.

Nevertheless, let’s assume for the moment Flynn’s allegations are correct and Clapper was the guy who tipped off Ignatius to Flynn’s calls with Kislyak.

Clapper — and virtually all the other people who were part of discussions about this call early on — were Original Classification Authorities. He had just as much authority to declassify the existence of the Flynn calls as Ric Grenell had to declassify the Carter Page applications (arguably more so, since Clapper had obtained and sustained a security clearance on his own right for four decades, with none of the questionable conflicts Grenell has that remain unexamined). Even accepting Flynn’s claim that Clapper did leak the existence of the call, it would not be illegal. There’s an argument that says the intelligence community, with Clapper’s experience that Flynn was unsuited to run DIA and burgeoning questions about what Flynn had done for a frenemy government while serving as Trump’s foreign policy advisor, had to do something about the fact that the NSA designee had secretly worked for another government during the election, was still refusing to come clean about that, and had been caught on a wiretap undermining the official policy of the United States and arguing that Russia should face almost no punishment for interfering in the US election.

Trump would say Obama should simply have warned him. Except Obama did warn him, even before all the details of his work for Turkey had come out. And Trump ignored that warning.

Accepting Flynn’s allegation that Clapper did that (solely for the sake of argument), that would be a fairly quick way to figure out whether Flynn did what he did in contravention of Trump’s desires, something that Trump presumably would have wanted to know.

In response to the story, Flynn ordered his subordinates, including McFarland, to tell a series of lies, lies that conflicted with both what the intelligence community and the Russians knew.

UPDATE: The Trump transition team did not respond Thursday night to a request for comment. But two team members called with information Friday morning. A first Trump official confirmed that Flynn had spoken with Kislyak by phone, but said the calls were before sanctions were announced and didn’t cover that topic. This official later added that Flynn’s initial call was to express condolences to Kislyak after the terrorist killing of the Russian ambassador to Ankara Dec. 19, and that Flynn made a second call Dec. 28 to express condolences for the shoot-down of a Russian plane carrying a choir to Syria. In that second call, Flynn also discussed plans for a Trump-Putin conversation sometime after the inauguration. In addition, a second Trump official said the Dec. 28 call included an invitation from Kislyak for a Trump administration official to visit Kazakhstan for a conference in late January.

That’s not a crime, but insanely stupid from a counterintelligence perspective. Then, when the FBI asked him about it (in a situation that would not become public, in which he could simply have said that the Trump Administration wanted to pursue a different strategy, which would make him stupid but probably not criminal), Flynn continued to lie about it. When McFarland was asked details about the events surrounding the call, she claimed to have no memory of details that she would later unforget; that’s what her perjury trap amounts to: she continued to tell a story she knew Flynn had been fired for.

Which is to say, even if Flynn’s suspicions are true, if Clapper told Ignatius about the existence of calls, it would be (for Clapper) a legal way to try to sort out whether someone hiding damning secrets about two foreign governments was about to be put in charge of US national security.

Nothing about doing so would have changed the fact that Flynn was unsurprised by the FBI to be asked about this, was friendly and relaxed when he met with the FBI, knew it was illegal to lie to the FBI, and nevertheless proceeded to tell an easily identifiable lie.

When rejecting Powell’s request for Clapper and Ignatius’ call record in December, Judge Emmet Sullivan pointed out that even if everything she alleged about Clapper was true, that wouldn’t change that her client lied to the FBI.

Request 35 seeks “[a]ll FBI 302s, notes, memoranda of James Clapper regarding Mr. Flynn, and the cell phone and home phone records of Mr. Clapper and David Ignatius between December 5, 2016, and February 24, 2017.” Id. at 7. The government responds—and the Court agrees—that each request is not relevant to Mr. Flynn’s false statements during his January 24, 2017 FBI interview or to his sentencing. Gov’t’s App. A, ECF No. 122-1 at 2-5. Mr. Flynn fails to make out a Brady claim for the requested information regarding any earlier investigations, the circumstances that led to the January 24, 2017 FBI interview, or the events surrounding his prosecution because Mr. Flynn fails to establish the favorability element. Even assuming, arguendo, that the information regarding the circumstances that led to Mr. Flynn’s January 24, 2017 FBI interview, the events surrounding his prosecution, and any earlier investigations were both exculpatory and suppressed, Mr. Flynn bears the burden of showing a reasonable probability of a different outcome. Strickler, 527 U.S. at 291. “[E]vidence is material only if there is a reasonable probability that, had the evidence been disclosed to the defense, the result of the proceeding would have been different.” Bagley, 473 U.S. at 682 (“A ‘reasonable probability’ is a probability sufficient to undermine confidence in the outcome.”). Mr. Flynn cannot overcome this hurdle.

Mr. Flynn appears to seek this information to: (1) support his claims of government misconduct; and (2) cast doubt on the legal basis for the FBI’s investigation. See Def.’s Reply, ECF No. 133 at 19, 19 n.13, 34-35. Mr. Flynn also asserts, without support, that the Special Counsel’s Office was “manipulating or controlling the press to their advantage to extort the plea.” Def.’s Br., ECF No. 109 at 4. Regardless of Mr. Flynn’s new theories, he pled guilty twice to the crime, and he fails to demonstrate that the disclosure of the requested information would have impacted his decision to plead guilty.

To be sure, Mr. Flynn was aware of the circumstances of the January 24, 2017 interview, and the allegations of misconduct against the FBI officials before he entered his guilty pleas. Sentencing Hr’g Tr., ECF No. 103 at 8-9. Mr. Flynn did not challenge those circumstances, and he stated, under oath, that he was aware that lying to the FBI was a crime. Id. In response to this Court’s questions, Mr. Flynn maintained his guilty plea. Id. at 9-10. None of Mr. Flynn’s arguments demonstrate that prejudice ensued. See Strickler, 527 U.S. at 291. The Court therefore finds that there was no reasonable probability that Mr. Flynn would not have pled guilty had he received the requested information in Requests 1, 3, 4, 11, 17, 21, 25, 28, and 35.

Earlier this month, Covington & Burling provided Flynn’s team with some materials they had overlooked when they transferred his case to Sidney Powell last summer. On Thursday, Covington & Burling gave the government over a hundred pages of declarations from four attorneys defending the competence of the legal advice they gave Flynn. Yesterday, the government provided Flynn reports that Jeffrey Jensen has done on the investigation into Flynn.

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

The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March and April 2020 and are provided to you as a result of this ongoing review; additional documents may be forthcoming.

Hours later, Powell filed a supplement to her motion to dismiss Flynn’s case for government misconduct (again, Sullivan has ruled on virtually all of these issues), claiming to show proof that Brandon Van Grack had promised not to prosecute Flynn’s son, but instead providing an email stating, “The government took pains not to give a promise to MTF regarding Michael Jr., so as to limit how much of a ‘benefit’ it would have to disclose as part of its Giglio disclosures to any defendant against whom MTF may one day testify” — that is, to show that Flynn did not have a guarantee. Even if the email said what she claimed, it would be yet more proof that Flynn lied under oath to Sullivan in December 2018 when he said no such promise had been made.

She also claimed the reports from Jensen included,

stunning Brady evidence that proves Mr. Flynn’s allegations of having been deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents at the top of the FBI. It also defeats any argument that the interview of Mr. Flynn on January 24, 2017 was material to any “investigation.”

Maybe she does have proof the FBI agents fucked up. The NYT reports that someone briefed on them claimed, “the documents indicated that F.B.I. agents did not follow standard procedures as they investigated Mr. Flynn,” which is different than framing Flynn. 

But Powell has made such claims over and over, and each time thus far, the claims have proven to be not only way overblown, but full of embarrassing factual errors.

And unless she can show Sullivan something new, something that changes the fact that Flynn told obvious lies in his original interview with the FBI, he risks not just the original charge, but additional perjury referrals from Sullivan.

Meanwhile, Flynn has rejoined Twitter (he even blocked me finally, after following me for four years!), posting a declaration from January as if it was news. The declaration, along with these new emails, strongly suggests his son was in legal trouble as well.

It would be unwise to underestimate Bill Barr’s ability to interfere with DOJ’s normal processes (precisely the allegation being waged against the FBI). Still, Judge Sullivan still gets a vote, and on some of this stuff, he already voted against it.

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John Durham’s Eternal Crossfire HurriFlame

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In recent weeks, Billy Barr seems to have decided that even the softball interviews with reporters he has known since the Poppy Bush Administration were too rigorous. He has sat for interviews with two unashamed propagandists, first Laura Ingraham and this week, Hugh Hewitt, to argue for expansive executive powers in the name of liberty during a pandemic.

In both, however, Barr used the opportunity to do what got Jim Comey fired, talk about an ongoing investigation. To Igraham, he claimed that the investigation into Trump, “sabotage[d]” — and then he corrected himself — “ha[d] the effect of sabotaging” Trump’s Presidency.

INGRAHAM: The president is very frustrated, I think you obviously know that – about Andrew McCabe, and he believes that people like McCabe and others were able to basically flout laws and so far with impunity.

BARR: I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Without any basis they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president. So I — to sabotage the presidency, and I think that – or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.

From this, I can only conclude that Trump is a far more fragile man that Poppy Bush, who managed to withstand an investigation — Iran-Contra — and still govern far more competently than Trump. Or perhaps Barr just concedes that covering up for Trump’s crimes is a greater challenge than it was to cover up the sprawling nest of corruption and presidential abuse that Ronald Reagan and Poppy engaged in? Whatever it is, Barr implies that Trump is not the measure of his first presidential boss.

With Hewitt, Barr said contradictory things that surprised even Hewitt about how the Attorney General would interpret DOJ guidelines about announcing indictments during an election.

HH: Now Mr. Attorney General, I want to close with a couple of specific issues. The investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham into the circumstances surrounding the surveillance of President Trump’s campaign, transition, and early administration, does that investigation remain on track undisturbed by the virus?

WB: Yes.

HH: There are guidelines concerning the announcement of indictments or the closing of the investigations prior to the election. When is that deadline for U.S. Attorney Durham? And do you think he will make it either to disclose indictments or to disclose that the investigation is over?

WB: As far as I’m aware, none of the key people that, whose actions are being reviewed at this point by Durham, are running for president.

HH: But would not the announcement of indictments after a time certain have an impact on an election of the sort that the U.S. Attorney’s manual recommends against?

WB: Well, what is the sort that the attorney manual recommends against?

HH: As I recall, this came up with Director Comey making his announcement, and the concerns in 2016 that he had acted improvidently during the run up to the election. I don’t recall what the exact timing is.

WB: Yeah, well, that was directly as to a candidate.

HH: And so it would not matter, in your view, if there is an investigation, and the day before the election, someone is indicted?

WB: Well, you know, I think in its core, the idea is you don’t go after candidates. You don’t indict candidates or perhaps someone that’s sufficiently close to a candidate, that it’s essentially the same, you know, within a certain number of days before an election. But you know, as I say, I don’t think any of the people whose actions are under review by Durham fall into that category.

HH: That’s big news to me. I had assumed that they would be in the category of people that could not be indicted given the obvious connection to President Trump, but I’ll take the news and I’ll put it away.

Barr’s comments undermine every single thing any Fox commentator (as he seems to have become) has said about the investigation into Carter Page, suggesting that DOJ rules protecting elections only apply to the candidate himself, and not even if the candidate was targeted for electoral purposes during an election, as Hillary was by the Clinton Foundation investigation.

But it also suggests that Barr imagines this might extend at least past August, when the deadline would normally trigger.

Later in the interview, Barr got snippy (again, this is with a propagandist, not even a softball real interview) when Hewitt asked if any results were imminent.

HH: Are you shocked by what you have found to date or have been briefed by U.S. Attorney Durham to date about?

WB: I wouldn’t use the word shocked, right? You know, I’m very troubled by it, but you know, I think the reason that we have this investigation is because there are a lot of things that are unexplained. And I think we’re getting deeply into the situation, and we’ll be able to sort out exactly what happened.

HH: I’m not going to ask you, because you wouldn’t answer whether there will be indictments or not. But when do you expect that the public will know a definitive assessment of where the U.S. Attorney Durham is going?

WB: As soon as we feel we have something that we are confident in to tell the people about.

HH: Is that imminent?

WB: No, it’s not imminent. But I’m not sure what imminent means. I’m not sure what imminent means, but it’s not imminent.

But in suggesting nothing will happen right away, Barr admitted that, in spite of his bold claims about how bad all this is, they don’t yet have confidence in any story to tell the American people.

With Ingraham, he even suggested there might not be evidence to support the claims he was making to his propagandists.

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS: What can you tell us about the state of John Durham’s investigation? People have been waiting for the final report on what happened with this –

ATTORNEY GENERAL BILL BARR: Well, I think a report maybe – and probably will be a byproduct of his activity, but his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report. He is looking to bring to justice people who are engaged in abuses if he can show that they were criminal violations, and that’s what the focus is on. And as you know, being a lawyer you yourself, building these cases – especially the kinds of sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years here, it takes some time – it takes some time to build the case. So he’s diligently pursuing it. My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted. [my emphasis]

That is, Barr is suggesting he has found a smoking gun. But even sitting with his propagandists, he is also backing off any claim there’s evidence of a crime.

Barr made this statement before SSCI reported their unanimous verdict that the Intelligence Community Assessment of the Russian attack, produced for Barack Obama during the same period the investigation into Trump started by the same Deep State people Barr claims were trying to sabotage Trump, correctly found that Vladimir Putin was personally in charge of the effort and one goal of the effort was to support Trump. The report is highly redacted, and the unclassified summary released back in July 2018 is, in some ways, actually more informative. The report notes that those who did the ICA were not briefed on the investigation into Trump’s people or any other ongoing investigation and didn’t know of Christopher Steele’s ties to the Democrats. Nevertheless, the report makes clear that Putin set out, in part, to help Trump.

Meanwhile, actual journalists at CNN report that — almost a year after Barr appointed Durham to investigate the first six months of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation — Durham has continued to expand his team.

Amid the pandemic, Durham and a team of prosecutors and investigators have continued their work, even requesting witness information after the country largely shut down in March because of coronavirus restrictions, according to people briefed on the investigation. Leading up to the lockdown, Durham’s team had spent many days a month reviewing classified intelligence inside a special facility for reviewing classified documents known as a SCIF.

In recent weeks Durham has added to his team of investigators who operate in Connecticut and Washington, DC, including FBI agents and the chief of the violent crimes and narcotics section in the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, Anthony Scarpelli, people familiar with the probe said.

Durham needs a DC-based prosecutor to make any prosecutorial decisions on Kevin Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who altered an email. So it’s unsurprising there is a prosecutor involved; what’s surprising is that he’s a violent crimes prosecutor, not a white collar crime one. And even there, Durham got a referral for Clinesmith at least by December 9, over four months ago, and yet DOJ hasn’t decided either that Clinesmith committed a crime (unless they gave him a plea deal to implicate others).

To be sure, the scope of Durham’s investigation has expanded, reportedly to include at least the early 2017 investigation. But if even if that scope continues through the Mueller appointment on May 17, 2017, it would mean Durham has been investigating ten months of an investigation for eleven months, with resources (including multiple prosecutors) that the investigation in question didn’t even have before Mueller’s appointment. Barr’s suggestion that this investigation will continue at least until August means that the Durham investigation will easily last longer than the known temporal scope of the investigation it is investigating. And all the while, we have no transparency on budget or FTEs that we had from the Mueller investigation.

Instead, we have only the claims of a guy breaking DOJ’s own rules about ongoing investigations who has already been rebuked by a judge for lying to help Trump.

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The COVID Delay Should Give Reggie Walton First Pass at the Roger Stone Unsealing

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Back when Reggie Walton ordered DOJ to give him a copy of the Mueller Report to review the exemption claims, I suggested that Judge Walton was unlikely to make much more public, except that his review might speed the process of liberating the material on Roger Stone that had been withheld under Amy Berman Jackson’s gag.

Be warned, however, that this review is not going to lead to big revelations in the short term.

There are several reasons for that. Many of the most substantive redactions pertain to the Internet Research Agency and Roger Stone cases. Gags remain on both. While Walton is not an Article II pushover, he does take national security claims very seriously, and so should be expected to defer to DOJ’s judgments about those redactions.

Where this ruling may matter, though, is in four areas:

  • DOJ hid the circumstances of how both Trump and Don Jr managed to avoid testifying under a grand jury redaction. Walton may judge that these discussions were not truly grand jury materials.
  • DOJ is currently hiding details of people — like KT McFarland — who lied, but then cleaned up their story (Sam Clovis is another person this may be true of). There’s no reason someone as senior as McFarland should have her lies protected. All the more so, because DOJ is withholding some of the 302s that show her lies. So Walton may release some of this information.
  • Because Walton will have already read the Stone material — that part that most implicates Trump — by the time Judge Amy Berman Jackson releases the gag in that case, he will have a view on what would still need to be redacted. That may mean more of it will be released quickly than otherwise might happen.
  • In very short order, the two sides in this case will start arguing over DOJ’s withholding of 302s under very aggressive b5 claims. These claims, unlike most of the redactions in the Mueller Report, are substantively bogus and in many ways serve to cover up the details of Trump’s activities. While this won’t happen in the near term, I expect this ruling will serve as the basis for a similar in camera review on 302s down the road.

But because of the COVID-related delay in Walton’s review, it’s likely he’ll make a first pass on the Roger Stone declassification, making it far harder for Bill Barr to politicize the release like he has the 302s.

Walton issued his order commanding DOJ to give him an unredacted version of the Mueller Report on March 5. DOJ complied with that order and delivered the report (and two other pages at issue in the lawsuit) on March 30. However, that same day, Walton issued a minute order stating that, because of Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s order suspending operations at the courthouse, he would be unable to start the review until April 20.

However, in light of the Chief Judge Howell’s March 16, 2020 Order Regarding Court Operations in Exigent Circumstances Created by the COVID-19 Pandemic, Standing Order No. 20-9 (BAH), the Court’s review of the unredacted version of the Mueller Report is unable to occur until the Court resumes its normal operations on April 20, 2020, unless the Court’s normal operations are further suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Signed by Judge Reggie B. Walton on March 30, 2020.

He even suggested that if operations were further suspended (as they have been), the review might be further delayed — though EPIC made a case that the review is an essential function and should start on April 20 (that is, yesterday).

EPIC respectfully submits that in camera review of the Mueller Report is an essential function warranting the Court’s prompt attention.

[snip]

Time is of the essence in this case. It is vital that the American citizenry know the full extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election before casting their votes in the 2020 presidential election, now just 200 days away. And it is vital that there be judicial review of the DOJ’s asserted exemptions that prevent public release of relevant information contained within the Mueller Report.

Walton has not indicated in the docket whether he started the review yesterday or not.

That said, once he does get around to the review, it will be far more substantive than it otherwise might. That’s because, days before Walton said he would conduct this review, ABJ issued her opinion denying Stone’s bid for a new trial. In her order, she released Stone from her gag.

Also, as of the date of this order, the defendant and his attorneys are hereby released from the media communication order of February 15, 2019 [Dkt. # 36], the minute order of February 21, 2019, and the order of July 17, 2019, [Dkt. # 149], although all other Court orders, including those related to the confidentiality of materials, and all other conditions of the defendant’s release, remain in place.

That means several of the exemptions invoked to hide Roger Stone’s efforts to optimize the WikiLeaks releases — everything under a b7A or b7B exemption starting on page 52 and in some other places — no longer apply. And given the way the timing has worked out, Reggie Walton will have first dibs on deciding whether President Trump’s personal involvement in Stone’s effort is entitled to any privacy consideration.

It may take Walton a while to get through this stuff (particularly if the 71-year old judge decides COVID threats prevent him from starting). But he should be able to get first review of what gets unsealed now.

Meanwhile, there’s another imminent source of more transparency coming.

Back in February 2019, a bunch of media outlets moved to get the warrants,

associated with the application for, issuance of, and returns regarding warrants related to the Russia Investigation generally and the Stone prosecution in particular.

The government interpreted that request this way:

It is unclear whether the movant’s request is limited to warrants issued pursuant to Rule 41 or also includes warrants under the SCA. In an abundance of caution, the government is treating the request as covering both categories. It is similarly unclear whether the reference to “warrants relevant to the Prosecution of Roger J. Stone, Jr.” means only warrants to search Stone’s property and facilities or includes other warrants that were executed as part of the same line of investigation. Again, in an abundance of caution, the government is treating the request as covering both categories.3

3 The government does not understand the request to include warrants that were not related to Stone or that line of investigation but that merely happened to yield evidence that concerns Stone and is being provided to him in discovery.

Back in January, the government said it could release the materials most closely related to Stone.

MR. KRAVIS: Yes, Your Honor. We believe that there are some materials in the warrant affidavits that can now be unsealed — in the affidavits that are responsive to the access request that can now be unsealed in light of the conclusion of the Roger Stone trial.

THE COURT: All right.

MR. KRAVIS: However, there are other materials in those warrant affidavits that the government believes should remain under seal either because those materials relate to other pending investigations — that is, investigations other than the one that culminated in the Roger Stone trial — and materials that implicate the privacy and reputational interests of uncharged third parties. And so the government’s request at this point is for the Court to set a deadline — the government would propose 60 days — for the government to go back and review the search warrant affidavits that are responsive to the movant’s access requests and make a recommendation to the Court as to which materials can be unsealed and which materials should remain under seal. And then the Court would have an opportunity to hear from Mr. Stone on that point, and then the Court could decide how to handle the matter from there.

Based on that schedule, the government submitted 33 exhibits — each of them, presumably, a warrant application — under seal for the court’s review.  After Judge Christopher Cooper ordered the government to give Stone a copy of the warrants so he could argue to redact more of the affidavits, the government asked that the protective order from the trial extend to these warrants because, “not all of them were previously provided to counsel for Mr. Stone in criminal discovery.”

After getting a COVID-related extension, Stone and his lawyers have until Friday to object to the privacy and grand jury related redactions in the warrants in question.

The upcoming release of warrants targeting Stone is interesting not least because we may see why he was investigated for hacking and wire fraud (though those are the kind of affidavit filings Stone once said they would fight to keep sealed). But filings in his case (this ABJ opinion is the most detailed) described that he received just 18 warrants in discovery. Which means there are 16 warrant applications that Stone had not seen before a few weeks ago, which either targeted people like Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico (and maybe even Steven Bannon and Ted Malloch), or of a scope previously unknown.

In the pandemic era, things have a way of getting delayed. And Stone has made it clear he’ll try to hide details explaining why the FBI thought he might have liability under the CFAA.

But as we’ve been focused on COVID, the release of Stone-related materials in the wake of his trial has inched closer.

Update: Judge Walton scheduled a status conference for June 18, which will likely be the earliest that we might learn what else he’ll release. And Stone submitted their response on the 33 warrants this morning, under seal.

Update: Stone did not object to the government’s redactions, so Judge Cooper ordered the government to release the warrants (there are actually 33, not 34 as I initially wrote) on Tuesday. The redactions include non-public information on pending investigations.

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The Nuances of the Carter Page Application

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I’ve now finished a close read of the last Carter Page FISA application. I think the contents bring a lot more nuance to the discussion of it over the last three years. This post will try to lay out some of that nuance.

Hot and cold running Carter Page descriptions

In most ways, the declassified application tracks the DOJ IG Report and shows how the problems with the application in practice. One newly declassified example conservatives have pointed to shows that FBI Agents believed that Page’s media appearances in spring 2017 were just an attempt to get a book contract.

The FBI also notes that Page continues to be active in meeting with media outlets to promote his theories of how U.S. foreign policy should be adjusted with regard to Russia and also to refute claims of his involvement with Russian Government efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. [redacted–sensitive information] The believes this approach is important because, from the Russian Government’s point-of-view, it continues to keep the controversy of the election in the front of the American and world media, which has the effect of undermining the integrity of the U.S. electoral process and weakening the effectiveness of the current U.S. Administration. The FBI believes Page also may be seeking media attention in order to maintain momentum for potential book contracts. (57)

Even if Page were doing media to get a book contract, short of being charged and put under a court authorized gag, there’s nothing that prevents him from telling his story. He’s perfectly entitled to overtly criticize US foreign policy. And as so often happens when intelligence analysis sees any denials as a formal Denial and Deception strategy, the FBI allowed no consideration to the possibility that some of his denials were true.

Julian Sanchez argued when the IG Report came out that FBI’s biases were probably confirmation bias, not anti-Trump bias, and this is one of the many examples that supports that.

One specific Page denial that turned out to be true — that he was not involved in the Ukraine platform issue — is even more infuriating reading in declassified form. As the IG Report noted, by the time FBI filed this last application, there were several piece of evidence that JD Gordan was responsible for preventing any platform change.

An FBI March 20, 2017 Intelligence Memorandum titled “Overview of Trump Campaign Advisor Jeff D. [J.D.] Gordon” again attributed the change in the Republican Platform Committee’s Ukraine provision to Gordon and an unnamed campaign staffer. The updated memorandum did not include any reference to Carter Page working with Gordon or communicating with the Republican Platform Committee. On May 5, 2017, the Counterintelligence Division updated this Intelligence Memorandum to include open source reporting on the intervention of Trump campaign members during the Republican platform discussions at the Convention to include Gordon’s public comments on his role. This memorandum still made no reference to involvement by Carter Page with the Republican Platform Committee or with the provision on Ukraine.

On June 7, 2017, the FBI interviewed a Republican Platform Committee member. This interview occurred three weeks before Renewal Application No. 3 was filed. According to the FBI FD-302 documenting the interview, this individual told the FBI that J.D. Gordon was the Trump campaign official that flagged the Ukrainian amendment, and that another person (not Carter Page) was the second campaign staffer present at the July 11 meeting of the National Security and Defense Platform Subcommittee meeting when the issue was tabled.

Although the FBI did not develop any information that Carter Page was involved in the Republican Platform Committee’s change regarding assistance to Ukraine, and the FBI developed evidence that Gordon and another campaign official were responsible for the change, the FBI did not alter its assessment of Page’s involvement in the FISA applications. Case Agent 6 told us that when Carter Page denied any involvement with the Republican Platform Committee’s provision on Ukraine, Case Agent 6 “did not take that statement at face value.” He told us that at the time of the renewals, he did not believe Carter Page’s denial and it was the team’s “belief” that Carter Page had been involved with the platform change.

But the application’s treatment of this issue doesn’t just leave out that information. The utterly illogical explanation of why the FBI believed he had a role in the platform — which was quoted in the IG Report — appears worse in context.

During these March 2017 interviews, the FBI also questioned Page about the above-referenced reports from August 2016 that Candidate #1’s campaign worked to make sure Political Party #1’s platform would not call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces [this matter is discussed on pgs. 25-26]. According to Page, he had no part in the campaign’s decision. Page stated that an identified individual (who previously served as manager of Candidate #1’s campaign) more likely than not recommended the “pro-Russian” changes. As the FBI believes that Page also holds pro-Russian views and appears to still have been a member of Candidate #1’s campaign in August 2016, the FBI assesses that Page may have been downplaying his role in advocating for the change to Political Party #1’s platform. (55)

(Here’s the March 16, 2017 interview.)

It’s not just that the FBI had about five other pieces of evidence that suggested Page was not involved, but for the FBI, it was enough that he was pro-Russian to suggest Page would have had the influence and bureaucratic chops to make it happen, even in the absence of any evidence to the fact. Add in the fact that FBI obtained a pen register on Page as part of this application (as reflected by notations in the margin of redacted material), and the fact that FBI didn’t track what communications he did or did not have at any time is particularly inexcusable.

So there’s abundant evidence in the Page applications that FBI acted like they normally do, seeing in every denial yet more evidence of guilt.

That said, the application does show more to explain why the FBI suspected Page in the first place and continued to have questions about his veracity until the end. For example, here’s the full explanation of how Page came to tell a Russian minister he had been the guy that Viktor Podobnyy was recruiting.

Based on information provided by Page during this [March 2016] interview, the FBI determined that Page’s relationship with Podobnyy was primarily unidirectional, with Page largely providing Podobnyy open source information and contact introductions. During one interview, Page told the FBI that he approached a Russian Minister, who was surrounded by Russian officials/diplomats, and “in the spirit of openness,” Page informed the group that he was “Male-1” in the Buryakov complaint. (16-17)

The FBI took this both as Page’s own confirmation that he was the person in the complaint, which in turn meant that Page knew he was being recruited, and, having learned that, sought ought well-connected Russians to identify himself as such.

As the application laid out later, Page at first denied what he had previously told the FBI about this incident and the Russians who had previously tried to recruit him in his March 2017 interviews. (This occurred in his March 16, 2017 interview.)

In a reference to the Buryakov complaint, Page stated that “nobody knows that I’m Male-1 in this report,” and also added that he never told anyone about this. As discussed above, however, during a March 2016 interview with the FBI regarding his relationship with Podobnyy, Page told the FBI he informed a group of Russian officials that he (Page) was “Male-1” in the Buryakov complaint. Thus, during the March 2017 interview, the FBI specifically asked Page if he told any colleague that he (Page) was “Male-1.” In response, Page stated that there was a conversation with a Russian Government official at the United Nations General Assembly The FBI again asked Page if he had told anyone that he was “Male-1.” Page responded that he “forgot the exact statement.”

Note, Page’s 302 quotes Page as telling the Minister, “I didn’t do anything [redacted],” but it’s unclear (given the b3 redaction) whether that relays what Page said in March 2017 or if the b3 suggests FBI learned this via other means. But the redacted bit remains one of the sketchier parts of this.

The application also describes how Page denied having a business relationship with Aleksandr Bulatov, the first presumed time Russia tried to recruit him, claiming he may have had lunch with him in New York. That Page claimed only to have had lunch with him is all the more absurd since this was the basis for his supposed cooperation with the CIA.

Having seen how Page handled his HPSCI interview and TV interviews, it’s not surprising to see he denied ties he earlier bragged about (which, in any case, undermines any claim he was operating clandestinely). But at best, Page didn’t deny the key thing he could have to avert suspicion: to admit (as George Papadopoulos readily did) that he was overselling his access in Russia to the Trump campaign, in emails the FBI presumably obtained using FISA. Nothing in the IG Report rebuts the claim that Page claimed things in communications that provided basis to believe he was lying (the actual communications are redacted in the applications because all of the FISA collection targeted at Page has been sequestered). So while the FBI did a bunch of inexcusable things with Page, there were things that Page did — and never explained — that explain the FBI’s sustained suspicion of him.

An explanation for some of the GOP’s core beliefs about the dossier and the investigation

The release of the full application also helps to explain how Republicans came to have certain beliefs about the Steele dossier and the Russian investigation. Take this passage:

Source #1 reported the information contained herein to the FBI over the course of several meetings with the FBI from in or about June 2016 through August 2016.

The passage is slightly inaccurate: Mike Gaeta first got reports from Christopher Steele in early July.

Shortly before the Fourth of July 2016, Handling Agent 1 told the OIG that he received a call from Steele requesting an in-person meeting as soon as possible. Handling Agent 1 said he departed his duty station in Europe on July 5 and met with Steele in Steele’s office that day. During their meeting, Steele provided Handling Agent 1 with a copy of Report 80 and explained that he had been hired by Fusion GPS to collect information on the relationship between candidate Trump’s businesses and Russia.

Since initial details of Steele’s reporting have been made public, the frothy right has been unable to understand that information doesn’t necessarily flow instantaneously inside of or between large bureaucracies. And having read this line, I assume Kash Patel would have told Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy that it was proof that the FBI predicated the investigation on the Steele dossier, because “the FBI” had Steele’s reports a month before opening the investigation into Trump’s aides (though, in fact, that was months after NYFO had opened an investigation into Page). The IG Report, however, explains in detail about how there was a bit of a delay before Steele’s handler sent his reports to the NY Field Office, a delay there for a while, and a further delay after a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team asked NYFO to forward anything they had. As a result, the CH team didn’t receive the first set of Steele reports until September 19, over a month after the investigation started.

On August 25, 2016, according to a Supervisory Special Agent 1 (SSA 1) who was assigned to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, during a briefing for then Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on the investigation, McCabe asked SSA 1 to contact NYFO about information that potentially could assist the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. 225 SSA 1 said he reached out to counterintelligence agents and analysts in NYFO within approximately 24 hours following the meeting. Instant messages show that on September 1, SSA 1 spoke with a NYFO counterintelligence supervisor, and that the counterintelligence supervisor was attempting to set up a call between SSA 1 and the ADC. On September 2, 2016, Handling Agent 1, who had been waiting for NYFO to inform him where to forward Steele’s reports, sent the following email to the ADC and counterintelligence supervisor: “Do we have a name yet? The stuff is burning a hole.” The ADC responded the same day explaining that SSA 1 had created an electronic sub-file for Handling Agent 1 in the Crossfire Hurricane case and that he

In any other world, this delay — as well as a delay in sharing derogatory information freely offered by Bruce Ohr and Kathleen Kavalec — would be a scandal about not sharing enough information. But instead, this passage about when FBI received the files likely plays a key part of an unshakeable belief that the dossier played a key role in predicating the investigation, which it does not.

Similarly, declassification of the application helps to explain why the frothy right believes that claims George Papadopoulos made to Stefan Halper and another informant in fall 2016 should have undermined the claims FBI made.

To be clear: the frothy right is claiming Papadopoulos’s denials should be treated as credible even after he admitted to a second informant that he told the story he did to Halper about Trump campaign involvement in the leaked emails because he believed if he had said anything else, Halper would have gone to the CIA about it. The FBI, however, believed the claims to be lies in real time, and on that (unlike Carter Page’s denials) the record backs them. There’s even a footnote (on page 11) that explicitly said, “the FBI believes that Papadopoulos provided misleading or incomplete information to the FBI” in his later FBI interviews.

That said, the way Papadopoulos is used in this application is totally upside down. A newly declassified part of the footnote describing Steele’s partisan funding claims that Papadopoulos corroborates Steele’s reporting (the italicized text is newly declassified).

Notwithstanding Source #1’s reason for conducting the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia, based on Source #1’s previous reporting history with the FBI, whereby Source #1 provided reliable information to the FBI, the FBI believes Source #1’s herein to be credible. Moreover, because of outside corroborating circumstances discussed herein, such as the reporting from a friendly foreign government that a member of Candidate #1’s team received a suggestion from Russia that Russia could assist with the release of information damaging to Candidate #2 and Russia’s believed hack and subsequent leak of the DNC e-amils, the FBI assesses that Source #1’s reporting contained herein is credible.

This is the reverse of how the IG Report describes things, which explains that the DNC emails came out, Australia decided to alert the US Embassy in London about what Papadopoulos had said three months earlier, which led the FBI to predicate four different investigations (Page, Papadopoulos, Mike Flynn, and Paul Manafort; though remember that NYFO had opened an investigation into Page in April) to see if any of the most obvious Trump campaign members could explain why Russia thought it could help the Trump campaign beat Hillary by releasing emails. The Steele dossier certainly seemed to confirm questions raised by the Australia report (which explains why the FBI was so susceptible, to the extent this was disinformation, to believing it, and why, to the extent it was disinformation, it was incredibly well-crafted). The Steele dossier seemingly confirmed the fears raised by the Australia report, not vice versa. It seems like circular logic to then use Papadopoulos to “corroborate” the Steele dossier. That has, in turn, led the right to think undermining the original Australian report does anything to undermine the investigation itself, even though by the end of October Papadopoulos had sketched out the outlines of what happened with Joseph Mifsud and discussed wanting to cash in on it, and Papadopoulos continued to pursue this Russian relationship, including a secret back channel meeting in London, well into the summer.

Finally, I’m more sympathetic, having read this full application, to complaints about the way FBI uses media accounts — though for an entirely different reason than the frothy right. The original complaint on this point misread the way the FBI used the September 23 Michael Isikoff article reporting on Page, suggesting it was included for the facts about the meeting rather than the denials from Page and the campaign presented in it. The discussion appears in a section on “Page’s denial of cooperation.”  And — as I’ve noted before — the FBI always sourced that story to the Fusion GPS effort, even if they inexcusably believed that Glenn Simpson, and not Steele, was the “well-placed Western intelligence source” cited in the article.

But with further declassification, the way the application relied on two articles about the Ukraine platform to establish what the campaign had actually done (see page 25), rather than refer to the platform itself — or, more importantly, Trump’s own comments about policy, which I’ll return to — appears more problematic (not least because FBI confused the timing of one of those reports with the actual policy change.

Steele and Sergei Millian as uniquely correct about WikiLeaks

There’s another thing about sourcing in this application (which carries over to what I’ve often seen in FBI affidavits). While there are passages discussing the larger investigation into Russia’s 2016 operation that remain redacted (and indeed, there’s a substitution of a redaction with “FBI” on page 7 which probably hides that the IC as a whole continued to investigate Russian hacking), key discussions of that investigation cite to unclassified materials, even in a FISA application that would have under normal circumstances never been shared publicly. For example, the discussion describing attribution of the operation to Russia from pages 6 to 10 largely relies on the October 7 joint statement and Obama’s sanctions statement, not even the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, much less (with the exception of two redacted passages) anything more detailed.

Even ignoring secret government sources, there was a whole lot more attributing Russia and WikiLeaks’s role in the hack-and-leak, especially by June 2017. Yet the Page application doesn’t touch any of that.

And that makes the way the application uses the allegations — attributed to Sergei Millian — to make knowable information about the WikiLeaks dump tie to unsupported information in the dossier all the more problematic. As parroted in the application, this passage interlaces true, public, but not very interesting details with totally unsupported allegations:

According to information provided by Sub-Source [redacted] there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them [assessed to be individuals involved in Candidate #1’s campaign] and the Russian leadership.” Sub-Source [redacted] reported that the conspiracy was being managed by Candidate #1’s then campaign manager, who was using, among others, foreign policy advisor Carter Page as an intermediary. Sub-Source [redacted] further reported that the Russian regime had been behind the above-described disclosure of DNC e-mail messages to WikiLeaks. Sub-Source [redacted] reported that WikiLeaks was used to create “plausible deniability,” and that the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Candidate #1’s team, which the FBI assessed to include at least Page. In return, according to Sub-Source [redacted], Candidate #1’s team, which the FBI assessed to include at least Page, agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise U.S.NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.

The DOJ IG report describes how FBI responded to this report by (purportedly) examining the reliability of Steele and his sources closely.

The FISA application stated that, according to this sub-source, Carter Page was an intermediary between Russian leadership and an individual associated with the Trump campaign (Manafort) in a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” that led to the disclosure of hacked DNC emails by Wikileaks in exchange for the Trump campaign team’s agreement, which the FBI assessed included at least Carter Page, to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue. The application also stated that this same sub-source provided information contained in Steele’s Report 80 that the Kremlin had been feeding information to Trump’s campaign for an extended period of time and that the information had reportedly been “very helpful,” as well as information contained in Report 102 that the DNC email leak had been done, at least in part, to swing supporters from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. 300 Because the FBI had no independent corroboration for this information, as witnesses have mentioned, the reliability of Steele and his source network was important to the inclusion of these allegations in the FISA application.

Except there would seem to be another necessary step: to first identify how much of this report cobbled together stuff that was already public — which included Russia’s role, the purpose of using WikiLeaks, Carter Page’s trip to Russia (but not specifics of his meetings there), and — though the application got details of what happened with Ukraine in the platform wrong — the prevention of a change to the platform. On these details, Steele was not only not predictive, he was derivative. Putting aside the problems with the three different levels of unreliable narrators (Steele, his Primary Subsource, and Millian), all of whom had motives to to package this information in a certain way, the fact that these claims clearly included stuff that had been made available weeks earlier should have raised real questions (and always did for me, when I was reading this dossier). Had the FBI separated out what was unique and timely in these allegations, they would have looked significantly different (not least because they would have shown Steele’s network was following public disclosures on key issues).

This is not the kompromat you’re looking for

Which brings me to perhaps the most frustrating part of this application.

As I started arguing at least by September 2017 (and argued again and again and again), to the extent the dossier got filled with disinformation, it would have had the effect of leading Hillary’s campaign to be complacent after learning they had been hacked, because according to the dossier, the Russians planned to leak years old FSB intercepts from when Hillary visited Russia, not contemporaneous emails pertaining to her campaign and recent history. It might even have led the Democrats to dismiss the possibility that the files Guccifer 2.0 was releasing were John Podesta files, delaying any response to the leak that would eventually come in October.

To the extent the dossier was disinformation, it gave the Russian operation cover to regain surprise for their hack-and-leak operation. At least with respect to the Democrats, that largely worked.

And, even though the Australians apparently believed the DNC release may have confirmed Papadopoulos prediction that Russia would dump emails, it appears to have partly worked with the FBI, as well. This passage should never appear in an application that derived from a process leading from the DNC emails to the shared tip about Papadopoulos to a request to wiretap Page:

According to reporting from Sub-Source [redacted] this dossier had been compiled by the RIS over many years, dating back to the 1990s. Further, according to Sub-Source [redacted] his dossier was, by the direct instructions of Russian President Putin, controlled exclusively by Senior Kremlin Spokesman Dmitriy Peskov. Accordingly, the FBI assesses that Divyekin received direction by the Russian Government to disclose the nature and existence of the dossier to Page. In or about June 2016, Sub-Source [redacted] reported that the Kremlin had been feeding information to Candidate #1’s campaign for an extended period of time. Sub-Source [redacted] also reported that the Kremlin had been feeding information to Candidate #1’s campaign for an extended period of time and added that the information had reportedly been “very helpful.” The FBI assesses the information funneled by the Russians to Page was likely part of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

Note, the FBI contemporaneously — though not after December 9, 2016 — would not have had something Hillary’s team did, the July Steele report on Russia’s claimed lack of hacking success that the FBI should have recognized as utterly wrong. Still, the earliest Steele reports they did have said the kompromat the Russians were offering was stale intercepts. At the very least, one would hope that would raise questions about why someone with purported access to top Kremlin officials didn’t know about the hack-and-leak operation. But the FBI seems to have expected there might be something more.

Trump clearly was not, but should have been, the target earlier than he was

There’s an irony about the complaints I lay out here: they suggest that Trump should have been targeted far earlier than he was.

The Page application rests on the following logic: One of the notably underqualified foreign policy advisors that Trump rolled out to great fanfare in March 2016 told someone, days later, that Russia had offered to help Trump by releasing damaging information on Hillary. The July dump of DNC emails suggested that Papadopoulos’ knowledge foreknowledge may have been real (and given Mifsud’s ties to someone with links to both the IRA and GRU people behind the operation, it probably was). The temporal coincidence of his appointment and that knowledge seemed to tie his selection as an advisor and that knowledge (and in his case, because Joseph Mifsud only showed an interest in Papadopoulos after learning he was a Trump advisor, that turned out to be true). That made the trip to Russia by another of these notably underqualified foreign policy advisors to give a speech he was even more underqualified to give, all the more interesting, especially the way the Trump people very notably reversed GOP hawkishness on Ukraine days after Page’s return.

In other words, the FBI had evidence — some of it now understood to be likely disinformation, and was trying to understand, how, after Trump shifted his focus to foreign policy, he shifted to a more pro-Russian stance in seeming conjunction with Russia delivering on their promise (shared with foreign policy advisor Papadopoulos) to help Trump by releasing the DNC emails.

It turns out the change in policy was real. And JD Gordan attributed his intervention on the RNC platform, in contravention of direction from policy director John Mashburn, to Trump’s own views.

Gordon reviewed the proposed platform changes, including Denman’s.796 Gordon stated that he flagged this amendment because of Trump’s stated position on Ukraine, which Gordon personally heard the candidate say at the March 31 foreign policy meeting-namely, that the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.797 Gordon told the Office that Trump’s statements on the campaign trail following the March meeting underscored those positions to the point where Gordon felt obliged to object to the proposed platform change and seek its dilution.798

[snip]

According to Denman, she spoke with Gordon and Matt Miller, and they told her that they had to clear the language and that Gordon was “talking to New York.”803 Denman told others that she was asked by the two Trump Campaign staffers to strike “lethal defense weapons” from the proposal but that she refused. 804 Demnan recalled Gordon saying that he was on the phone with candidate Trump, but she was skeptical whether that was true.805 Gordon denied having told Denman that he was on the phone with Trump, although he acknowledged it was possible that he mentioned having previously spoken to the candidate about the subject matter.806 Gordon’s phone records reveal a call to Sessions’s office in Washington that afternoon, but do not include calls directly to a number associated with Trump.807 And according to the President’s written answers to the Office’s questions, he does not recall being involved in the change in language of the platform amendment. 808

Gordon stated that he tried to reach Rick Dearborn, a senior foreign policy advisor, and Mashburn, the Campaign policy director. Gordon stated that he connected with both of them (he could not recall if by phone or in person) and apprised them of the language he took issue with in the proposed amendment. Gordon recalled no objection by either Dearborn or Mashburn and that all three Campaign advisors supported the alternative formulation (“appropriate assistance”).809 Dearborn recalled Gordon warning them about the amendment, but not weighing in because Gordon was more familiar with the Campaign’s foreign policy stance.810 Mashburn stated that Gordon reached him, and he told Gordon that Trump had not taken a stance on the issue and that the Campaign should not intervene.811

[snip]

Sam Clovis, the Campaign’s national co-chair and chief policy advisor, stated he was surprised by the change and did not believe it was in line with Trump’s stance.816 Mashburn stated that when he saw the word “appropriate assistance,” he believed that Gordon had violated Mashburn’s directive not to intervene.817

Sam Clovis would ultimately testify there had been a policy change around the time of the March 31 meeting (though Clovis’ testimony changed wildly over the course of a day and conflicted with what he told Stefan Halper).

Clovis perceived a shift in the Campaign’s approach toward Russia-from one of engaging with Russia through the NATO framework and taking a strong stance on Russian aggression in Ukraine.

But (as noted above), to lay this out in the Page application, the FBI sourced to secondary reporting of the policy change rather than to the platform itself. More notably, in spite of all this happening after late July 2016, there’s no mention of Trump’s press conference on July 27, 2016, where he asked Russia to go find more Hillary emails (and they almost immediately started hacking Hillary’s personal accounts), said he’d consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and lifting sanctions, and lied about his ongoing efforts to build a tower in Russia.

Trump directed Mueller to a transcript of the press conference, I’ve put excerpts below. They’re a good reminder that at the same press conference where Trump asked Russia to find Hillary’s emails (and in seeming response to which, GRU officers targeted Hillary’s personal office just five hours later), Trump suggested any efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow were years in the past, not ongoing. After the press conference, Michael Cohen asked about that false denial, and Trump “told Cohen that Trump Tower Moscow was not a deal yet and said, ‘Why mention it if it is not a deal?’” He also said they’d consider recognizing Russia’s seizure of Crimea, which makes Konstantin Kilimnik’s travel — to Moscow the next day, then to New York for the August 2 meeting at which he and Paul Manafort discussed carving up Ukraine at the same meeting where they discussed how to win Michigan — all the more striking. Trump’s odd answer to whether his campaign “had any conversations with foreign leaders” to “hit the ground running” may reflect Mike Flynn’s meetings with Sergei Kislyak to do just that.

In other words, rather than citing Trump’s language itself, which in one appearance tied ongoing hacking to an even more dramatic policy change than reflected in the platform, the Carter Page application cited secondary reporting, some of it post-dating this appearance.

Mueller asked Trump directly about two of the things he said in this speech (the Russia if you’re listening comment and the assertion they’d look at recognizing Crimea) and obliquely about a third (his public disavowals of Russian business ties). Trump refused to answer part of one of these questions entirely, and demonstrably lied about another. Publicly, Mueller stated that Trump’s answers were totally inadequate. And these statements happened even as his campaign manager and Konstantin Kilimnik were plotting a clandestine meeting to talk about carving up Ukraine.

The FBI may have done this to stay way-the-fuck away from politics — though, to be clear, Trump’s call on Russia to find more Hillary emails in no way fits the bounds of normal political speech.

But by doing do, they ended up using far inferior sourcing, and distracting themselves from actions more closely implicating Trump directly — actions that remain unresolved.

The Carter Page application certainly backs the conclusions of the DOJ IG Report (though it also shows I was correct that DOJ IG did not know what crimes Page was being investigated for, and as such likely got the First Amendment analysis wrong). But it also shows that the Steele dossier, which fed the FBI’s inexcusable confirmation biases, undermined the FBI investigation into questions that have not yet been fully answered.

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Trump Blames Mueller for Woes Mike Flynn Brought on Himself

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Yesterday, in his COVID rally, Trump was asked whether he was thinking of pardoning Paul Manafort or Roger Stone so they’re not exposed to coronavirus in prison.

I just tell you this. Roger Stone was treated very unfairly. Paul Manafort — the black book turned out to be a fraud — we learned that during the various last number of weeks and months, they had a black book that came out of Ukraine, turned out to be a fraud. Turned out to be a fraud — they convicted a man — turned out to be a fraud! General Flynn was a highly respected person, and it turned out to be a scam on him. The FBI said, he didn’t lie. And Mueller’s people wanted him to go to jail. So what am I gonna do? You’ll find out what I’m gonna do. I’m not gonna say what I’m gonna do. But I’ll tell you the whole thing turned out to be a scam and it turned out to be a disgrace to our country. It was a take-down of a duly elected president. And these people suffered greatly. General Flynn! I mean, what they did to him! And even the FBI said, and they had some — nobody bigger fan of the FBI than me at the level of the people that really matter. But the top of the FBI was scum. And what they did to General Flynn — and you know it and everybody knows it — was a disgrace.

Unsurprisingly, all of these claims are lies.

Roger Stone was treated unfairly, but because Billy Barr intervened to override a guidelines sentence. Barr himself said the prosecution was righteous.

The black book was not proven to be a fraud. More importantly, however, it wasn’t used in the Manafort prosecution. And he pled guilty to all the money laundering alleged.

But the Flynn claim is perhaps most ridiculous of all, because it obscures why Flynn faces prison time, absolving Fox News for the role it played.

Mueller’s people didn’t want prison time for Flynn (indeed, their sweetheart deal for him was probably one of the mistakes they made). They recommended probation when he was first set to be sentenced in December 2018.

And then Flynn stepped in it by insinuating he had been ambushed in an FBI interview he willfully took and believed to be friendly.

Then Flynn stepped in it again when he fired Rob Kelner and decided to renege on his promises to cooperate against Bijan Kian.

And then he stepped in it again by letting Sidney Powell convince him to withdraw his guilty plea, multiplying his lies under oath.

Flynn may yet avoid a prison sentence and if he gets one and if BOP actually makes him report during the coronavirus Trump likely will pardon him. But Trump will only be pardoning Flynn for his own stupidity that led him, at each stage of the game, to expose himself to more and more legal danger.

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Liberate All Trump’s Criminals to Sustain the Lockdown

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According to multiple reports yesterday, Michael Cohen will soon be released to serve out the remainder of his prison sentence in home confinement.

The federal Bureau of Prisons has notified Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, that he will be released early from prison due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to people familiar with the matter and his lawyer.

Cohen is serving a three-year sentence at the federal prison camp in Otisville, NY, where 14 inmates and seven staff members at the complex have tested positive for the virus.

Cohen was scheduled for release in November 2021, but he will be allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence from home confinement, the people said. He will have to undergo a 14-day quarantine at the prison camp before he is released.

Cohen was notified on Thursday of his pending release, and his lawyer, Roger Adler, confirmed it to CNN.

As Josh Gerstein has described, sometimes these promises don’t work out.

The spouse of an inmate at one of the hardest-hit federal prisons, in Elkton, Ohio, described a puzzling transfer of prisoners into pre-release quarantine and then out again.

Tammy Hartman said her husband Pete, who’s due out of prison in August of next year, was one of 56 inmates whose names were called on Saturday to report for quarantine so they could be sent on home confinement.

“They were all told: you’re going home,” she said. But on Wednesday, 54 of the men were sent back to their cells. “They told them, sorry, you’re not going anywhere, because they’d approved only two of them to leave.”

“I actually thought he was coming home,” Hartman said of her 59-year-old husband who — like other prisoners mentioned in this story — is serving time on drug charges. “I canceled all his subscriptions to magazines because I thought he’d be home in 14 days… I’m trying to hold it together.”

Which is, I guess, why Cohen’s lawyers promptly made this public — to make it harder for BOP to renege.

Otisville prison is one of the federal prisons with a growing cluster — currently, officially, with 14 prisoners and 7 guards testing positive. So it is an appropriate places for BOP to attempt to move older, non-violent prisoners. That said, Cohen is not actually that old (just 53) and as far as is public, his health is fine.

A far better case might be made that Paul Manafort should be sent to home confinement. He’s 71 and wasn’t all that healthy when he first went to jail almost two years ago, and he has continued to have health problems since then. His attorney, Kevin Downing, cited those health problems in a letter to BOP asking for his release. Curiously, Downing appears to be thinking exclusively in terms of internal appeals, rather than appealing to a judge, which suggests he thinks his client stands a better chance if someone working for Bill Barr makes the decision (which certainly worked to keep him out of Rikers when he was arraigned in New York). Perhaps that’s because the prison he’s in, Loretto, has had no reported cases yet. Manafort has been quarantining since the end of March, so can be sent home if there are cases there.

Paul Manafort is a shithole who sold out the candidate he worked for and his own country. He got fabulously wealthy fronting for dictators and other sleazebags, and stiffed the American taxpayers on the blood money he got in exchange.

But BOP should seriously consider moving him to home confinement for as long as the COVID outbreak lasts. Manafort was not nor should he have been sentenced to a death for his crimes. And if you can’t support that move for his miserable humanity, then do it for others he might infect, like the far poorer guards who tend to him.

Cohen and Manafort are not the only Trump criminals who may dodge full prison terms because of this virus. As bmaz noted, yesterday Amy Berman Jackson rejected Roger Stone’s bid for a new trial. While BOP doesn’t assign spots to people all that quickly in any case, for new non-violent prisoners, BOP is not rushing people into incarceration. And Stone, at 67, is also old enough to be considered a higher risk.

So rather than starting rebellions against stay-at-home orders in Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, Trump should encourage Bill Barr to liberate his criminal co-conspirators, along with the similarly situated men of color incarcerated with them.

But the only reason to remove Paul Manafort from an environment where he’d be more likely to contract the virus is if there’s a shut-down. So if Trump wants his criminals liberated — or wants Stone to remain out of prison long enough for the post-election pardon — then he should be rooting for a continued shut-down.

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The DOJ IG Footnotes Show FBI Doing What They Do and Russia Doing What They Do

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Three Republican Senators — Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham — have gotten Bill Barr and Ric Grenell to declassify a bunch of things pertaining to Carter Page’s surveillance. While the materials have sent the frothy right into a frenzy again, the materials are actually far more interesting, ambiguous, and at times, damning to Trump’s narrative than the right wing stenographers have made out. This post will look at a series of footnotes to the DOJ IG Report on Carter Page that have been declassified. I’m going to look at allegations about Russian knowledge of Steele’s project in July 2016 and evidence the Michael Cohen claims were disinformation in more detailed in a follow-up; both revelations may hurt Trump’s narrative more than help it, contrary to claims by the frothers.

The purge at ODNI enabled this declassification to occur

Before I get into what the declassified footnotes show, it’s important to understand Grenell’s role in it. In his statement releasing the full set of declassified footnotes, Grassley thanked both Bill Barr and Grenell. In Ron Johnson’s WSJ op-ed feeding the ignorant frenzy about the footnotes, he described how he and Grassley had to keep pressing for their declassification until Grenell made it happen.

My colleague Sen. Chuck Grassley and I began pressing Attorney General William Barr, and eventually acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, for full declassification of these footnotes. That’s why they’re now public.

In Grenell’s letter providing the footnotes (which very notably did not come as a re-released IG Report, as a prior declassification had), he explained that,

[H]aving consulted the heads of the relevant Intelligence Community elements, I have declassified the enclosed footnotes. I consulted with the Attorney General William Barr, and he has authorized the ODNI to say that he concurs in the declassification insofar as it relates to DOJ equities.

Grenell, of course, is doing the DNI job part time, on top of his full-time job as Ambassador to Germany and his day job of trolling dishonestly on the Internet.  So the declassification might be better understood as the work of Kash Patel, who, while he was a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, started this declassification project and also served as a gatekeeper to ensure GOP Congressmen did not get accurate information on Russia. While he was on the National Security Council, Patel ensured that Trump did not get accurate information on Ukraine. And the release comes just days after Trump got rid of the last Senate confirmed person at ODNI, something that Adam Schiff has raised concerns about.

Don’t get me wrong: I support these declassifications and with a very few exceptions in these footnotes, don’t think embarrassing stuff got hidden because Grenell was involved (I have a different opinion about how stuff was declassified for Lindsey, even while I’m thrilled to have the precedent for entire FISA applications being released). Some of the most interesting declassifications confirm small details about FISA that have long been known, but have been impossible to prove since DOJ guarded that confirmation so assiduously. But it is crystal clear this declassification happened as a result of dismantling longtime Intelligence Community protections, for better and worse.

The footnotes show FBI and FISA worked like it normally does and so did the Russians

As noted, Grenell didn’t effectuate this declassification by having DOJ IG release an updated version of the report, but instead by releasing all the redacted footnotes, with any newly declassified information unmarked, out of context. Not only does that obscure a few key ones that weren’t further declassified or had already been declassified, but it makes it harder to understand what they mean in context. I’ll treat each of them in turn, italicizing the newly disclosed information, if any.

17: The Brits let Steele cooperate

The OIG also interviewed witnesses who were not current or former Department employees regarding their interactions with the FBI on matters falling with the scope of this review, including Christopher Steele and employees of other U.S. government agencies. 17

17 According to Steele, his cooperation with our investigation was done with the consent of his government.

The fact that Steele emphasized this — and the delayed timing of Steele’s cooperation — suggest that the UK wanted to make clear that they were willing to expose their own intelligence weaknesses to cooperate with something Trump had put significant stock in.

21, 354: DOJ IG considered some of the FISA collection on Page irrelevant to this review

We also received and reviewed more than one million documents that were in the Department’s and FBI’s possession. Among these were electronic communications of Department and FBI employees and documents from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, including interview reports (FD-302s and Electronic Communications or ECs), contemporaneous notes from agents, analysts, and supervisors involved in case-related meetings, documents describing and analyzing Steele’s reporting and information obtained through FISA coverage on Carter Page, and draft and final versions of materials used to prepare the FISA applications and renewals filed with the FISC. 21

21 We did not review the entirety of FISA collections obtained through FISA surveillance and physical searches targeting Carter Page. We reviewed only those documents collected under FISA authority that were pertinent to our review.

[snip]

Emails and other communications reflect that in the first week of surveillance on Carter Page [redacted], following the granting [redacted] application -· in the October 2016, the Crossfire Hurricane team collected [redacted] 354

354 We did not review the entirety of FISA collections obtained through FISA surveillance and physical searches targeting Carter Page. We reviewed only those documents collected under FISA authority that were pertinent to our review.

These declassifications reveals two phrases — “collections,” and “physical searches” — that have long been treated as classified (though they appear elsewhere in the report, usually by accident). The import of these phrases, especially “physical search,” which actually includes “stored communications,” is why they’ve been hidden in the past.

While the meaning of these footnote was always clear, the import of it (that is, what DOJ IG would considered irrelevant to their review) remains unclear, especially given Michael Horowitz’s public questions about whether the collection was ever useful.

That’s especially true given how FISA surveillance was integrated into later Carter Page applications. The applications Lindsey Graham released makes it clear there was a good deal (indeed, it clearly corroborated concerns about Page’s hope to open a pro-Russian think tank as well as sustained questions about whom Page met with in Russia — though that’s partly because he oversold his ties there to the campaign). The redactions, however, were just hiding FISA vocabulary that had previously been hidden.

61 and 63: How the FBI decides to make someone an informant

The CHSPG recognizes that the decision to open an individual as a CHS will not only forever affect the life of that individual, but that the FBI will also be viewed, fairly or unfairly, in light of the conduct or misconduct of that individual. 59 Accordingly, the CHSPG identifies criteria that handling a ents must consider when assessing the risks associated with the potential CHS. [redacted]60 These risks must be weighed against the benefits associated with use of the potential CHS. 61

Once a CHS has been evaluated and recruited, the CHSPG does not allow for tasking until after the CHS has been approved for opening by an FBI SSA; the required approvals for a specific tasking have been granted; and the CHS has met with the co-handling agent assigned to his or her file, who has the same duties, responsibilities, and file access as the handling agent. 62 The CHSPG requires additional supervisory approval by a Special Agent in Charge (SAC) and review by a Chief Division Counsel CDC to open CHSs that are “sensitive” sources, [redacted]

61 Criteria used by agents and analysts to weigh the risks and benefits are: (1) access [redacted] (2) suitability: [redacted] (3) susceptibility: [redacted] (4) accessibility: [redacted] (5) security; [redacted]

62 CHSPG § 3.1.

63 CHSPG Section 3.5.1.1 Special approval and notification requirements also are necessary for CHS operations in extraterritorial jurisdiction, such as tasking a CHS to contact the subject of an investigation who is located in a foreign country. The requirements and notifications differ, for example, depending on whether the CHS operating is a national security extraterritorial operation or a criminal extraterritorial operation involving a sensitive circumstance. Approval from an FBI Assistant Director is necessary for national security extraterritorial operations, [redacted]

[snip]

Under the CHSPG, which vests SSAs with daily oversight responsibility for CHSs in routine investigations, approval at the SSA level was sufficient. 525 The only relevant exception for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation were counterintelligence CHS extraterritorial operations, which required approval by an FBI Assistant Director, and which we found received approval by Priestap. 526

526 As described in Chapter Two, the special approval and notification requirements for CHS operations in extraterritorial jurisdiction differ, for example, depending on whether the CHS operation is a national security extraterritorial operation or a criminal extraterritorial operation involving a sensitive circumstance. Approval from an FBI Assistant Director is necessary for national security extraterritorial operations, CHSPG Sections 19.2, 19.3.3. Because the Crossfire Hurricane investigation at the outset was a national security investigation, the extraterritorial CHS operations in the case required Assistant Director approval.

These sections reveal details of the FBI’s rules on informants and the special approvals needed in some cases. This information had already been liberated by Terry Albury (see PDF 25 and 31ff) for the earlier sections that remain redacted (which is a testament to the novelty of this declassification, since he’s in prison for having released it). They’re interesting in the case of Carter Page because there was some dispute about using Steele (to say nothing of the disagreement between Steele and the FBI about what their relationship really entailed).

Apparently, Bill Priestap had to give approval for overseas use of informants (and this must extend to Stefan Halper), not because the investigation was sensitive, but because it was a national security investigation.

164, 464, 484: Joseph Mifsud was neither a CIA asset nor had CIA collected on him

During one of these meetings, Papadopoulos reportedly “suggested” to an FFG official that the Trump campaign “received some kind of a suggestion from Russia” that it could assist the campaign by anonymously releasing derogatory information about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. 164

164 During October 25, 2018 testimony before the House Judiciary and House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Papadopoulos stated that the source of the information he shared with the FFG official was a professor from London, Joseph Mifsud. Papadopoulos testified that Mifsud provided him with information about the Russians possessing “dirt” on Hilary Clinton. Papadopoulos raised the possibility during his Congressional testimony that Mifsud might have been “working with the FBI and this was some sort of operation” to entrap Papadopoulos. As discussed in Chapter Ten of this report, the OIG searched the FBI’s database of Confidential Human Sources (CHS), and did not find any records indicating that Mifsud was an FBI CHS, or that Mifsud’s discussions with Papadopoulos were part of any FBI operation. In Chapter Ten, we also note that the FBI requested information on Mifsud from another U.S. government agency, and received a response from the agency indicating that Mifsud had no relationship with the agency and the agency had no derogatory information on Mifsud.

(U) We refer to Joseph Mifsud by name in this report because the Department publicly revealed Mifsud’s identity in The Special Counsel’s Report (public version). According to The Special Counsel’s Report, Papadopoulos first met Mifsud in March 2016, after Papadopoulos had already learned that he would be serving as a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign. According to The Special Counsel’s Report, Mifsud only showed interest in Papadopoulos after learning of Papadopoulos’s role in the campaign, and told Papadopoulos about the Russians possessing “dirt” on then candidate Clinton in late April 2016. The Special Counsel found that Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about the timing of his discussions with Mifsud, as well as the nature and extent of his communications with Mifsud. The Special Counsel charged Papadopoulos under Title 18 U.S.C. § 1001 with making false statements. Papadopoulos pled guilty and was sentenced to 14 days in prison. See The Special Counsel’s Report, Vol. 1, at 192‐94

[snip]

The FBI’s Delta files contain no evidence that Mifsud has ever acted as an FBI CHS,463 and none of the witnesses we interviewed or documents we reviewed had any information to support such an allegation. 464

464 The FBI also requested information on Mifsud from another U.S. government agency, and received a response from that agency indicating that Mifsud had no relationship with that agency.

[snip]

In Crossfire Hurricane, the “articulable factual basis” set forth in the opening EC was the FFG information received from an FBI Legal Attache stating that Papadopoulos had suggested during a meeting in May 2016 with officials from a “trusted foreign partner” that the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist by releasing information damaging to candidate Clinton and President Obama. 484

484 Papadopoulos has stated that the source of the information he shared with the FFG was a professor from London, Joseph Mifsud, and has raised the possibility that Mifsud may have been working with the FBI. As described in Chapter Ten of this report, the OIG searched the FBI’s database of Confidential Human Sources (CHSs) and did not find any records indicating that Mifsud was an FBI CHS, or that Mifsud’s discussions with Papadopoulos were part of any FBI operation. The FBI also requested information on Mifsud from another U.S. government agency and received no information indicating that Mifsud had a relationship with that agency or that the agency had any derogatory information concerning Mifsud.

These declassifications debunk something George Papadopoulos has long claimed: that Joseph Mifsud was part of a Deep State plot run by either the FBI or CIA. The FBI asked CIA if they knew anything about him but did not.

166: How the FBI got involved

The Legat told us he was not provided any other information about the meetings between the FFG and Papadopoulos. 166

166 According to Legat, the senior intelligence official stated at the meeting with the USG official that the FFG information “sounds like an FBI matter.”

This explains how, after Australia passed the Papadopoulos tip to State, State called in both the FBI Legal Attaché in London and a senior intelligence officer — probably Gina Haspel, who at the time was London Station Chief — to explain the tip, after which the SIO said FBI should deal with it. Again, it undermines part of the claims of a Deep State coup.

205: Proof Steele should have known FBI considered him an informant, not a consultant

Steele stated that he never recalled being told that he was a CHS and that he never would have accepted such an arrangement, despite the fact that he signed FBI admonishment and payment paperwork indicating that he was an FBI CHS. 205

205 During his time as an FBI CHS, Steele received a total of $95,000 from the FBI. We reviewed the FBI paperwork for those payments, each of which required Steele’s Signed acknowledgement. On each document, of which there were eight, was the caption “CHS Payment” and “CHS’s Payment Name.” A signature page was missing for one of the payments.

This passage was redacted to hide the fact that when the FBI pays informants they don’t do so under their own name. The passage as a whole provides reason why Steele should have known, contrary to his claims, that FBI treated him bureaucratically as an informant. The fact he had a payment name may or may not strengthen that proof.

208: Oligarchs spent much of 2015 trying to meet the FBI through Steele

In our review of Steele’s CHS file, other pertinent documents, and interviews with Handling Agent 1, Ohr, and Steele, we observed that Steele had multiple contacts with representatives of Russian oligarchs with connections to Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) and senior Kremlin officials. 208

208 (U) A 2015 report concerning oligarchs written by the FBI’s Transnational Organized Crime Intelligence Unit (TOCIU) noted that from January through May 2015, 10 Eurasian oligarchs sought meetings with the FBI, and 5 of these had their intermediaries contact Steele. The report noted that Steele’s contact with 5 Russian oligarchs in a short period of time was unusual and recommended that a validation review be completed on Steele because of this activity. The FBI’s Validation Management Unit did not perform such an assessment on Steele until early 2017 after, as described in Chapter Six, the Crossfire Hurricane team requested an assessment in the context of Steele’s election reporting. Handling Agent 1 told us he had seen the TOCIU report and was not concerned about its findings concerning Steele because he was aware of Steele’s outreach efforts to Russian oligarchs. We found that the TOCIU report was not included in Steele’s Delta file. Handling Agent 1 said that he found preparation of the TOCIU report “curious” because he believed that TOCIU was aware of Steele’s outreach efforts and fully supported them.

The fact that Steele was a liaison between the US government and Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs was not secret. Indeed the sections on Bruce Ohr, as well as Ohr’s declassified 302s, make that clear. What’s most interesting about this (prior) redaction is that, while marked as unclassified, the footnote was redacted. While it’s damning that this was not in Steele’s Delta file, that it had been but is not now redacted may say more about investigations into Ohr and Oleg Deripaska and others, than it does about Steele (meaning they’re no longer protecting those investigations).

210 and 211: Deripaska’s contemporaneous knowledge of the Steele dossier

Ohr told the OIG that, based on information that Steele told him about Russian Oligarch 1, such as when Russian Oligarch 1 would be visiting the United States or applying for a visa, and based on Steele at times seeming to be speaking on Russian Oligarch l’s behalf, Ohr said he had the impression that Russian Oligarch 1 was a client of Steele. 210 We asked Steele about whether he had a relationship with Russian Oligarch 1. Steele stated that he did not have a relationship and indicated that he had met Russian Oligarch 1 one time. He explained that he worked for Russian Oligarch l’s attorney on litigation matters that involved Russian Oligarch 1 but that he could not provide “specifics” about them for confidentiality reasons. Steele stated that Russian Oligarch 1 had no influence on the substance of his election reporting and no contact with any of his sources. He also stated that he was not aware of any information indicating that Russian Oligarch 1 knew of his investigation relating to the 2016 U.S. elections. 211

210 As we discuss in Chapter Six, members of the Crossfire Hurricane team were unaware of Steele’s connections to Russian Oligarch 1. [redacted]

211 Sensitive source reporting from June 2017 indicated that a [person affiliated] to Russian Oligarch 1 was [possibly aware] of Steele’s election investigation as of early July 2016.

I’m going to save my longer discussion on this for a separate post, though I already flagged and explained why these two footnotes were important in this post. The short version is, it suggests that to the extent the dossier was disinformation, focusing on Carter Page would have given cover for whatever mission Konstantin Kilimnik was pursuing in July 2016, at which point Deripaska may have already known of the dossier (remember he went to Moscow and met with Viktor Yanukovych before the meeting). Note, too, that the redacted word that has been substituted as “possibly aware” is too short to be that uncertain, so I question the substitution. Also note that footnote 210 is one of a handful footnotes in the entire report that was not further declassified with this review.

214: Steele used to be a spook

Steele told us he had a source network in place with a proven “track record” that could deliver on Fusion GPS’s requirements. Steele added that this source network previously had furnished intelligence on Russian interference in European affairs. 214

214 Steele told us that the source network did not involve sources from his time as a former foreign government employee and was developed entirely in the period after he retired from governmental service

This redaction only served to hide what we all knew, that Steele used to be an MI6 officer. Either the UK no longer considers that sensitive or they really want to give Trump what he wants.

242: The Carter Page investigation wasn’t only about whether he was a spy

Case Agent 2 told the OIG that he informed Steele that the FBI was interested in obtaining information in “3 buckets.” According to Case Agent 2’s written summary of the meeting, as well as the Supervisory Intel Analyst’s notes, these 3 buckets were:

(1) Additional intelligence/reporting on specific, named individuals (such as [Page] or [Flynn]) involved in facilitating the Trump campaign-Russian relationship; 241 (2) Physical evidence of specific individuals involved in facilitating the Trump campaign-Russian relationship (such as emails, photos, ledgers, memorandums etc); [and] (3) Any individuals or sub sources who [Steele] could identify who could serve as cooperating witnesses to assist in identifying persons involved in the Trump campaign-Russian relationship. 242

242 The FBI advised the OIG that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was a national security investigation, and these activities therefor[e] involved national security extraterritorial CHS operations [redaction]

The only thing interesting about this declassification is how it relates the earlier and later ones, at 63 and 526, on special approval for using an informant overseas. It is equally interesting, however, that the description of why FBI focused on what they did remains substantially classified.

244: The FBI’s knowledge of Sergei Millian’s activities remains classified

For example, Steele identified a sub-source (Person 1) who Steele said was in direct contact with Steele’s primary source {Primary Sub-source). 244

244 Person 1 [redacted]

Like the footnote about Crossfire Hurricane’s knowledge of Oleg Deripaska’s ties with Steele, nothing new has been redacted here. Incidentally, after the first batch of these declassifications had come out and I called Sergei Millian out on making a chronologically impossible claim about what they showed, we had a charming exchange where he told me his interest in what I told the FBI was unique, which I include here solely to break up the monotony of this post!

253: Someone told Steele that Millian was hiding out

According to Handling Agent l’s records, during October 2016, Steele communicated with him four times and provided seven written reports, one of which concerned Carter Page and thus was responsive to the FBI’s request for information concerning Page’s activities. 253

253 (U) These seven reports, with selected highlights, were:

(U) Report 130 (Putin and his colleagues were surprised and disappointed that leaks of Clinton’s emails had not had a greater impact on the campaign; a stream of hacked Clinton material had been injected by the Kremlin into compliant western media outlets like WikiLeaks and the stream would continue until the election);

[redacted] Report 132 (a top level Russian intelligence figure claimed that Putin regrets the operation to interfere in the U.S. elections);

(U) Report 134 (a close associate of Rosneft President Sechin confirmed a secret meeting with Carter Page in July; Sechin was keen to have sanctions on the company lifted and offered up to a 19 percent stake in return);

(U) Report 135 (Trump attorney Michael Cohen was heavily engaged in a cover up and damage control in an attempt to prevent the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia being exposed; Cohen had met secretly with several Russian Presidential Administration Legal Department officials; immediate issues were efforts to contain further scandals involving Manafort’s commercial and political role in Russia/Ukraine and to limit damage from the exposure of Carter Page’s secret meetings with Russian leadership figures in Moscow the previous month);

(U) Report 136 (Kremlin insider reports that Cohen’s secret meeting/s with Kremlin officials in August 2016 was/were held in Prague);

[redacted] Report 137 (Divyekin was moved from his position in the Presidential Administration to one in the Duma; this move followed Divyekin being exposed in the western media, e.g., the Yahoo News story of September 23, 2016, as a secret interlocutor of Page); and

[redacted] Report 139 (Person 1 was forced to lie low abroad following his/her exposure in the western media and was currently in [redacted]).

There are three things about these disclosures. First, the redacted bullets were classified (they had some redaction other than the Unclassified markings these other paragraphs have). If they were known disinformation, it’s not clear why they’d be classified.

Second, this and other declassified passages suggest that FBI had IDed Divyekin (otherwise it’s unlikely to be classified). The application itself said FBI believed this person to be Igor Nikolayevich Dyevkin, who work(ed) in the Presidential Administration. Unless these original redactions were attempts to hide what FBI didn’t know but should have?

The other detail is that — whether disinformation or no — Steele got a report in October, during the month after FBI started actively investigating Millian, that claimed he had hidden out. He was in New York at the time, though, and remained out and about at least through the inauguration (where he partied with Papadopoulos). So why redact his purported locale?

This spreadsheet lists which files the FBI got when.

265: Grenell liberates basic FISA vocabulary that has long been hidden

The same day, OGC submitted a FISA request form to OI providing, among other things, a description of the factual information to establish probable cause to believe that Carter Page was an agent of a foreign power, the “facilities” to be targeted under the proposed FISA coverage, and the FBI’s investigative plan. 265

“Facilities” are the items to be searched or subjected to electronic surveillance, such as email accounts, telephone numbers, physical premises, or personal property.

The term facilities has long been unredacted in reports on FISA, but without a definition (though the definition was obvious). Its declassification is long overdue. That said, this definition leaves out a lot of things that can be defined as facilities, such as IP addresses and encryption keys.

276: The rush to surveil Page before he met with foreigners

3: 11 p.m., Lisa Page to McCabe: “QI now has a robust explanation re any possible bias of the chs in the package. Don’t know what the holdup is now, other than Stu’s continued concerns. Strong operational need to have in place before Monday if at all possible, which means ct tomorrow. 276

As described below, it appears the desire to have FISA authority in place before Monday, October, 17, was due, at least in part, to the fact that Carter Page was expected to travel to the United Kingdom and South Africa shortly thereafter, and the Crossfire Hurricane team wanted FISA coverage targeting Carter Page in place before that trip.

This sounds shocking and any rush may have led to problems with the application (though the most serious problems were more substantive than that). But it’s not unusual to tie surveillance to upcoming foreign activities. After all, FBI is trying to understand what someone’s relationship to foreign governments is. And Page had some pretty interesting meetings in places besides just Russia.

Moreover only the details of where Page was traveling were classified in the original release — a description of his travel appears at 321ff.

293, 362, 368, 377: Individualized FISA orders automatically qualify the target for 705(b) surveillance

Yates signed the application, and OI submitted the application to the FISC the same day. By her signature, and as stated in the application, Yates found that the application satisfied the criteria and requirements of the FISA statute and approved its filing with the court. 293

293 Her signature also specifically authorized overseas surveillance of Carter Page under Section 705(b) of the FISA and Executive Order 12333 Section 2.5

362 Her signature also specifically authorized overseas surveillance of Carter Page under Section 705(b) of the FISA and Executive Order 12333 Section 2.5.

368 Boente’s signature also specifically authorized overseas surveillance of Carter Page under Section 705(b) of the FISA and Executive Order 12333 Section 2.5.

Rosenstein’s signature also specifically authorized overseas surveillance of Carter Page under Section 705(b) of the FISA and Executive Order 12333 Section 2.5.

A set of four footnotes describing that the Attorney General designee signature on the Page applications are one of the declassifications that has been significantly misunderstood.

Under FISA, for authorizations that are more strict (with an individualized content warrant being the most strict), authorization for less or equivalent surveillance is fairly automatic. People targeted with individual orders here in the US must either be covered, when they travel overseas, by 703 (surveillance overseas with the assistance of a US provider) or 704 (surveillance without assistance overseas, meaning EO 12333 surveillance), but there’s an authorization, 705(b), that allows both domestic collection and 12333 collection overseas. As far as all public records and some non-public ones show, 703 has never been used. 705(b) has instead, meaning that when people travel overseas, the government uses techniques available under EO 12333. There’s good reason to believe that the techniques available under 705(b)/EO 12333 are much niftier, including (as one example) more sophisticated device hacks.

I wrote about the import of 705(b) authority with Carter Page back in April 2017 (in a piece that also suggested he might be the first person ever to get to review his FISA application).

That he was approved for 705(b) is important because he was surveilled overseas. But that is in no way unique to Page. Nor, even if this were “physical search” mean they were surveilling his person. A hack of a phone, conducted from Maryland, would qualify.

296: Steele fluffed his MI6 experience

Steele is a former [redacted] and has been an FBI source since in or about October 2013. [Steele’s] reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings and the FBI assesses [Steele] to be reliable. 296

296 Although Case Agent 2’s summary of the early October meeting with Steele states that Steele described his former position in a manner consistent with the footnote in the FISA application, other documentation (discussed in Chapter Eight) indicates that Steele’s former employer told the FBI in November 2016, after the first application was filed, that Steele had served in a “moderately senior” position, not a “high‐ranking” position as Steele suggested.

This is a complaint about whether Steele or the FBI agent was responsible for the depiction of how he was described in a footnote in the application. It basically shows that Steele fluffed his experience when meeting with the Crossfire Hurricane team, but this kind of distinction is often semantics.

301 to 303: Hiding more details about Sergei Millian

Before the initial FISA application was filed, FBI documents and witness testimony indicate that the Crossfire Hurricane team had assessed, particularly following the information Steele provided in early October, that Source E was most likely a person previously known to the FBI, referred to hereinafter as Person 1. 301

[snip]

In addition, we learned that Person 1 was at the time the subject of an open FBI counterintelligence investigation. 302 We also were concerned that the FISA application did not disclose to the court the FBI’s belief that this sub-source was, at the time of the application, the subject of such an investigation. We were told that the Department will usually share with the FISC the fact that a source is a subject in an open case. The 01 Attorney told us he did not recall knowing this information at the time of the first application, even though NYFO opened the case after consulting with and notifying Case Agent 1 and SSA 1 prior to October 12, 2016, nine days before the FISA application was filed. Case Agent 1 said that he may have mentioned the case to the OI Attorney “in passing,” but he did not specifically recall doing so. 303

301 As discussed in Chapter Four, Person 1 [redacted]

302 According to a document circulated among Crossfire Hurricane team members and supervisors in early October 2016, Person 1 had historical contact with persons and entities suspected of being linked to RIS. The document described reporting [redacted] that Person 1 “was rumored to be a former KGB/SVR officer.” In addition, in late December 2016, Department Attorney Bruce Ohr told SSA 1 that he had met with Glenn Simpson and that Simpson had assessed that Person 1 was a RIS officer who was central in connecting Trump to Russia.

303 Although an email indicates that the OI Attorney learned in March 2017 that the FBI had an open case on Person 1, the subsequent renewal applications did not include this fact. According to the OI Attorney, and as reflected in Renewal Application Nos. 2 and 3, the FBI expressed uncertainty about whether this sub‐source was Person 1. However, other FBI documents in the same time period reflect that the ongoing assumption by the Crossfire Hurricane team was that this sub‐source was Person 1.

301 is one of a small number of footnotes that did not get declassified any further. 302 still hides the source of intelligence claiming that Millian was rumored to be a former Russian intelligence officer, though that Glenn Simpson believed it was not really secret. Clearly there are things about Millian — or about the reporting on Millian — that remain legitimately secret. For some reason, 303 was included on the declassification list even though it had been entirely declassified (it was clearly at least FOUO) for the initial release of the report.

328: Secret discussions sometimes remain secret

Priestap said he interpreted the comments about Steele’s judgment to mean that “if he latched on to something … he thought that was the most important thing on the face of this earth” and added that this personality trait doesn’t necessarily “jump out as a particularly bad or horrible [one]” because, as a manager, it can be helpful if the “people reporting to [you] think the stuff they’re working on is the most important thing going on” and use their best efforts to pursue it. Information from these meetings was shared with the Crossfire Hurricane team. However, we found that it was not memorialized in Steele’s Delta file and therefore not considered in a validation review conducted by the FBI’s Validation Management Unit (VMU) in early 2017. 328

328 Priestap told the OIG that he recalled that he may have made a commitment to Steele’s former employer not to document the former’s employer’s views on Steele as a condition for obtaining the information.

It’s unclear whether DOJ IG doesn’t believe Bill Priestap’s explanation for not including details that might be considered derogatory about Steele. And he’s right that the judgment — that Steele might follow shiny objects — might not be a bad thing in a well-managed source. In any case, the US now appears uninterested in hiding this detail.

334: For some reason Steele’s primary sub-source claimed to believe he was getting paid to meet with friends

As noted in the first FISA application, Steele relied on a primary sub-source (Primary Sub-source) for information, and this Primary Sub-source used a network of sub-sources to gather the information that was relayed to Steele; Steele himself was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting. 334

334 When interviewed by the FBI, the Primary Sub‐source stated that he/she did not view his/her contacts as a network of sources, but rather as friends with whom he/she has conversations about current events and government relations. The Primary Sub‐source [was] [redacted]

This passage (the “was” was previously unredacted but is now redacted) has generated a lot of uncritical attention, as has the DOJ IG Report’s reporting on the primary sub-source generally. One possibility for who this person is is that he’s someone in a British-based Russian community; that community has successfully been targeted for assassination repeatedly (and if the person were in Russia, would be even more vulnerable). If this person was knowingly part of disinformation, undermining Steele would be part of the disinformation. If the person was not, he might want to minimize what he did to avoid assassination himself. But the claim — made here — that someone getting paid to tell Steele these stories (as he was) didn’t realize his network was being treated as subsources is laughable, and reflects more on the reliability of what the Primary Subsource actually said, because it is solid evidence he’s spinning his relationship with Steele.

339: People who would have ties to Russian intelligence are alleged to have ties to Russian intelligence

The Primary Sub-source told the FBI that one of his/her subsources furnished information for that part of Report 134 through a text message, but said that the sub-source never stated that Sechin had offered a brokerage interest to Page. 339

339 The Primary Sub‐source also told the FBI at these interviews that the subsource who provided the information about the Carter Page‐ Sechin meeting had connections to Russian Intelligence Services (RIS). [redacted]

From the day the dossier came out, it was explicit that some of the claimed sources for it had ties to Russian intelligence, and it would be unsurprising if someone close to Igor Sechin did too. The context to this footnote — that the Primary Subsource’s texts with the subsource didn’t reflect any payment to Page — is actually far more damning for Steele (or his Subsource, who for reasons I laid out above, I think shouldn’t be trusted). But the fact that spooks talk to spooks is actually not all that interesting (and in Steele’s dossier, is explicit).

Note there’s a redaction after this claim, which may be an assessment of whether the claim, in this case, makes any sense.

342: On top of disinformation, FBI believed both Steele and his sources may have been boasting

According to the Supervisory Intel Analyst, the cause for the discrepancies between the election reporting and explanations later provided to the FBI by Steele’s Primary Sub-source and sub-sources about the reporting was difficult to discern and could be attributed to a number of factors. These included miscommunications between Steele and the Primary Sub-source, exaggerations or misrepresentations by Steele about the information he obtained, or misrepresentations by the Primary Sub-source and/or sub-sources when questioned by the FBI about the information they conveyed to Steele or the Primary Sub-source. 342

342 In late January 2017, a member of the Crossfire Hurricane team received information [redacted] that RIS [may have targeted Orbis; redacted] and research all publicly available information about it. [redacted] However, an early June 2017 USIC report indicated that two persons affiliated with RIS were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early 2016. The Supervisory Intel Analyst told us he was aware of these reports, but that he had no information as of June 2017 that Steele’s election reporting source network had been penetrated or compromised.

There are two allegations in this newly declassified information. First, that someone on the Crossfire Hurricane team received information that said Steele’s company may have been targeted. And second, a recurring report about one or multiple June 2017 reports stating that Russian intelligence knew of Steele’s efforts in “early” or “July” 2016.

The first claim, with the continued redaction, is unclear about three things: whether Steele was targeted by human or cyber spying, and who conducted the open source investigation, and what the “it” refers to (it could be Orbis, or the attempted targeting of him). It would be thoroughly unsurprising if Steele had been phished, for example, as virtually all anti-Russian entities were in this period. Phishing might have entailed open source investigation into Orbis (but then, so would human targeting). If phishing or any other hacking were successful, Russia might have learned of his project that way.

I’ll deal with this June 2017 report(s) in more depth later. Here, though, the Supervisory Intel Analyst was making a distinction between knowing of Steele’s project and compromising it that may not be entirely credible. It’s important in this context because the FBI did not consider, before Page’s June 2017 FISA application, whether Steele’s allegations about him were disinformation. (Elsewhere, Priestap describes that he considered but dismissed the possibility because he didn’t understand how that would work.)

347: FBI used 702 collection to test Steele’s sub-sources

FBI documents reflect that another of Steele’s sub-sources who reviewed the election reporting told the FBI in August 2017 that whatever information in the Steele reports that was attributable to him/her had been “exaggerated” and that he/she did not recognize anything as originating specifically from him/her. 347

347 The FBI [received information in early June 2017 which revealed that, among other things, there were [redacted]] personal and business ties between the sub-source and Steele’s Primary Sub-source; contacts between the sub-source and an individual in the Russian Presidential Administration in June/July 2016; [redacted] and the sub‐source voicing strong support for candidate Clinton in the 2016 U.S. elections. The Supervisory Intel Analyst told us that the FBI did not have Section 702 coverage on any other Steele sub‐source.

A number of frothy right wingers have pointed to this as further proof of a grand conspiracy. It could be that. But that’s not necessarily what this shows. It does show that 1) the sub-source was in touch with both the primary Subsource (which you’d want to prove to make sure the contact actually happened, and 2) the sub-source had the kind of contacts — with Russia’s Presidential Administration — to reflect actual access to information. The Hillary support absolutely could mean that the sub-source played up whatever he or she had learned from Russian sources, in which his or her claim that Steele’s reporting was exaggerated might be a way to deflect blame. That said, the better part of potential sources for this dossier would not have been pro-Hillary.

The declassification reveals the interesting detail that one and only one of Steele’s subsources was targeted under Section 702.

350: The FBI identified the Michael Cohen reporting as erroneous from early on

Stuart Evans, NSD’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General who oversaw OI, stated that if OI had been aware of the information about Steele’s connections to Russian Oligarch 1, it would have been evaluated by OI. He told us: “Counterintelligence investigations are complex, and often involve as I said, you know, double dealing, and people playing all sides…. I think that [the connection between Steele and Russian Oligarch 1] would have been yet another thing we would have wanted to dive into. “350

350 In addition to the information in Steele’s Delta file documenting Steele’s frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from [redacted] indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting. A January 12, 2017, report relayed information from [redacted] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen. The [redacted] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations. A second report from the same [redacted] five days later stated that a person named in the limited subset of Steele’s reporting had denied representations in the reporting and the [redacted] assessed that the person’s denials were truthful. A USIC report dated February 27, 2017, contained information about an individual with reported connections to Trump and Russia who claimed that the public reporting about the details of Trump’s sexual activities in Moscow during a trip in 2013 were false, and that they were the product of RIS “infiltrate[ing] a source into the network” of a [redacted] who compiled a dossier of that individual on Trump’s activities. The [redacted] noted that it had no information indicating that the individual had special access to RIS activities or information.

This footnote is meant to elaborate on Evans’ comment about counterintelligence investigations involving a lot of double dealing, context that is particularly important to reading the still redacted footnote. The footnote explains two things. First, that by January 12, 2017 — that is, days after Buzzfeed published the dossier — what is probably another intelligence service (it could even be the Czechs, given the import of Prague) raised concerns about the accuracy of the subset of reporting on Michael Cohen. Given how Steele represented his reports, however, one set of reports would not necessarily reflect on the accuracy of the others (unless they pointed to disinformation from the primary Subsource); that’s how raw intelligence works! The accuracy of the Cohen reporting does not necessarily reflect on the Page FISA application, which is what this report is about.

The record shows that Mueller did not use the Steele dossier in his investigation of Cohen — which seems to have arisen from Suspicious Activity Reports from his banks showing that immediately after the election a bunch of foreigners, including a key Russian, started paying him large sums. And given what else we know about Cohen, confirmation that this is disinformation actually suggests the disinformation was more sophisticated than otherwise understood, in that it provided cover for other things Russia was doing, something I’ll return to.

As to the 2013 dossier about 2013, because of the redactions, it’s unclear whether the FBI obtained a report of someone reporting that he had learned about a Russian dossier on Trump from his 2013 trip, or that someone else was doing a dossier about someone associated with Trump’s trip. Given what we know from Giorgi Rtskhiladze’s testimony to the FBI and Cohen’s discussion of it since, we already knew there was a dossier material from Trump’s 2013 trip, and had been floated continuously since then. Indeed, this report could actually suggest that the CIA learned of the interactions Rtskhiladze (who had ties to Russia and Trump) had before FBI did.

Update: the version of the footnote that appears in the letter to Grassley shows this footnote was transcribed incorrectly in the full version (replacing “a dossier of information” with “a dossier of that individual”), which raises questions about some of the other transcriptions.

That doesn’t actually change my point:

  1. At least according to Michael Cohen’s sworn testimony, the alleged pee tape had been out there since 2013
  2. Giorgi Rtskhiladze is one person — and if Cohen is to be believed, he’s not alone — who knew of the pee tape allegation, and he definitely wanted to claim it was not real (which I’m not contesting), even while having tried to pressure Cohen with it; he also would fit the description of someone who has ties to Russia and Trump but not public ties to Russian intelligence
  3. The redaction of whose dossier this was — which was DOJ IG’s transcription of the report, not a direct quote — is redacted. If this is about Steele (and I’m not wedded to either reading), then for some reason DOJ IG’s redacted description is sensitive (for some reason they didn’t write “source #1”). And the Steele dossier is not just about Trump’s activities. There are multiple possible explanations for why it is sensitive.

I should not have used “2013” above to distinguish this second claim. But my underlying point remains: in context, that redaction suggests something else is going on.

In any case, I’m grateful to my fan who pointed out the difference in the footnote.

365: Classified stuff about Millian that had already been declassified remains declassified

Renewal Application Nos. 2 and 3 did advise the court of a news article claiming that Person 1 was a source for some of the Steele reports and that Person 1 denied having any compromising information regarding the President. 365

365 In Chapter Five, we describe how the FBI did not specifically and explicitly advise or about the FBI’s assessment before the first FISA application that Person 1 was the sub-source who provided the information relied upon in the application from Steele Reports 80, 95, and 102; that Steele had provided derogatory information regarding Person 1; and that the FBI had an open counterintelligence investigation on Person 1. As noted previously, in the next chapter, we describe the information from the Primary Sub-source interview concerning Person 1 and the information that was not shared with or about inconsistences [sic] between the Primary Sub-source and Steele concerning information provided by Person 1.

As with other instances, there was stuff about Sergei Millian that was declassified for the original release, but as a result was included in this declassification review.

372: FISA collections that corroborated Page’s application has been sequestered

In original form, this footnote (modifying an entirely redacted bullet) described what the third application had said. Because the FISC ordered FBI to sequester all collection from the FISA applications targeting Page, this footnote now marks the information as sequestered.

379: FBI violated minimization procedures in retaining information on Carter Page

According to NSD supervisors, as of October 2019, NSD had not received a formal response from the FISC to the Rule 13 Letter. 379

379 On May 10, 2019, NSD sent a second letter to the FISC concerning the Carter Page FISA applications, advising the court of two indicants in which the FBI failed to comply with the SMPs applicable to physical searches conducted pursuant to the final FISA orders issued by the court on June 29, 2017. According to the letter, the FBI took and retained on an FBI‐issued cell phone photographs of certain property taken in connection with a FISA‐authorized physical search on July 13, 2017, which NSD assessed did not comport with the SMPs. In addition in a separate incident on July 29, 2017, the FBI took photographs in connection with another FISA‐authorized physical search and transferred the photographs to an electronic folder on the FBI’s classified secret network. . According to NSD, court staff contacted an NSD official in response to this letter and asked when the information at issue would be removed from non‐compliant FBI systems, and asked about other cases that might be impacted by the same problem. On October 9, 2019, NSD sent another letter to the FISC advising the court that the FBI completed the remedial process for the information associated with the Page FISA applications and information from other cases impacted by the same problem.

This footnote reveals something specific to Page and more generalized as well. First, FBI did “physical searches” on Page on June 29 and July 13, 2017. Remember, “physical searches” can include searches of stored communication, and in this period, FBI had a specific interest in Page’s use of an encrypted messaging app and bank accounts they had not yet reviewed, so these may not be searches of wherever Page lived at the time (though he has said he was out of the country during one or both of them). It appears the minimization violation pertained to the means by which FBI collected the information, basically by taking a picture of evidence. The language makes it clear that this is a more general problem, one suggesting the FBI had misused cell phones in conjunction with FISA searches (but which are probably totally okay under criminal physical searches).

This is the kind of thing, incidentally, where FBI (or NSA) usually gets FISA to adjust the rules to incorporate such practice, while requiring FBI to purge files of collection that violated the rules when collected.

389: Was the Primary Sub-Source actually not truthful and cooperative?

The Supervisory Intel Analyst did not recall anyone asking him whether he thought the Primary Sub-source was “truthful and cooperative,” as noted in the renewal applications. 389

Email communications reflect that in March 2017—after the first FISA application and first renewal were filed and before the last two renewals—the Supervisory Intel Analyst reviewed the first FISA application and the first renewal at OGC’s request to assist with potential redactions before the Department responded to Congressional information requests. The Supervisory Intel Analyst provided comments to the OGC Attorney, including advising him that the Primary Sub‐source was not [redacted] as stated in the FISA applications, and asking whether a correction should be made. The Supervisory Intel Analyst did not provide any other comments relating to the Primary Sub‐source, and he told us that he did not notice anything else potentially inaccurate or incomplete in the applications at that time.

Nothing new was declassified in this declassification review — the redaction continues to hide what had been claimed about Steele’s Primary Sub-Source. That raises questions about what might still be hidden here, including that there may be some question about how helpful the Primary Sub-Source really was.

475 FBI still had stuff from a pro-Trump informant in their files

The Handling Agent placed the materials into the FBI’s files. 475

475 We notified the FBI upon learning during our review that [redacted] material that the CHS had provided to the FBI were still maintained in FBI files.

This footnote was not further declassified with the declassification review. It pertains to a standing FBI informant who (unbeknownst to the Crossfire Hurricane team) was a part of the Trump campaign and had provided some information to his handler. For some reason, it seems the information should have been removed from FBI files, perhaps because it was disinformation. Note the SSA on this other team was avowedly anti-Hillary and was working on the Clinton Foundation investigation.

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