Remember how I responded to CNN’s scoop that DOJ had recordings of Trump bragging about a document describing a plan to attack Iran that he acknowledged remained classified?

I suggested that if DOJ knew he had the document in July 2021, but didn’t find it in the documents returned in January 2022 or June 2022 or August 2022, then we’d have problems.

If it is, then it would be a document that Trump transported back and forth from Florida — something that would make it easier for DOJ to charge this in DC instead of SDFL.

If it’s something DOJ didn’t obtain in the search, but also didn’t obtain among the documents Trump returned in either January or June 2022, then … then we have problems. If this is among the documents that DOJ thinks Trump didn’t return, then we have problems, especially given Jack Smith’s focus on Trump’s LIV golf deal, because this is the kind of document that the Saudis would pay billions of dollars for.

CNN has a follow-up, revealing that after Margo Martin was asked about the recording in her March grand jury appearance, DOJ subpoenaed Trump for the document.

His lawyers couldn’t find it.

Attorneys for Donald Trump turned over material in mid-March in response to a federal subpoena related to a classified US military document described by the former president on tape in 2021 but were unable to find the document itself, two sources tell CNN.

[snip]

Prosecutors sought “any and all” documents and materials related to Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Iran, including maps or invasion plans, the sources say. A similar subpoena was sent to at least one other attendee of the meeting, another source tells CNN.

The sources say prosecutors made clear to Trump’s attorneys after issuing the subpoena that they specifically wanted the Iran document he talked about on tape as well as any material referencing classified information – like meeting notes, audio recordings or copies of the document – that may still be Trump’s possession.

That was in March.

In April, DOJ asked Trump for records on — among other things — his business ties to the Saudis.

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

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

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

In March, DOJ asked for this Iran document Trump boasted on tape of having at Bedminster in July 2021, but his lawyers couldn’t find it.

In April, DOJ asked for records describing how and when he made a deal to host Saudi golf tournaments, and for how much.

In May, DOJ got Trump’s Chief Operating Officer to explain what he knew about gaps in the five months of surveillance footage Trump Organization turned over.

I’d like to talk about Durham’s treatment of what he calls the “Clinton Plan” in his report, an attempt to criminalize Hillary’s effort to hold Trump politically accountable for his coziness with Russia.

This part of the investigation was the core of Durham’s work. Charlie Savage noted that, after Durham found no evidence US intelligence targeted Trump by early 2020, he and Barr then turned to trying to blame Hillary for the FBI’s suspicions about Trump.

But by the spring of 2020, according to officials familiar with the inquiry, Mr. Durham’s effort to find intelligence abuses in the origins of the Russia investigation had come up empty.

Instead of wrapping up, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham shifted to a different rationale, hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for suspicions surrounding myriad links Trump campaign associates had to Russia.

I’m going to variably refer to this as “Durham’s Clinton conspiracy theory,” because it’s what he imagines this might be: a criminal conspiracy to lie to the FBI, or “Russian intelligence,” which is what it is based on. Durham, however, names it the “Clinton Plan,” accepting as given that the Russian intelligence product he bases it on is truthful, even while admitting that the intelligence community believes it may not be. And as we’ll see, he omits part of the intelligence report to make it all about Hillary.

Durham’s Clinton conspiracy theory is the first mention of a potential crime in his description of the scope of his investigation (the first two bullets had significantly been covered by DOJ IG by the time Durham started his investigation and weren’t criminal at all).

Similarly, did the FBI properly consider other highly significant intelligence it received at virtually the same time as that used to predicate Crossfire Hurricane, but which related not to the Trump campaign, but rather to a purported Clinton campaign plan “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” which might have shed light on some of the Russia information the FBI was receiving from third parties, including the Steele Dossier, the Alfa Bank allegations and confidential human source (“CHS”) reporting? If not, were any provable federal crimes committed in failing to do so?

Only after that bullet does Durham list, in describing the scope of his criminal investigation, the possibility that people lied to the FBI, the only imagined crimes he discovered, and for which he got only acquittals.

The order of these bullets tracks the known timeline of the investigation, which I laid out here: Durham didn’t fully develop his now-debunked theory that Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko lied to the FBI and then — building off that theory — come to believe Clinton had conspired to lie to the FBI. Rather, he worked in the opposite direction, pursuing the Clinton conspiracy theory first, and only after Nora Dannehy thwarted Durham’s attempts to release an interim report focused on that conspiracy theory just before the 2020 election, did he do key interviews collecting much of his evidence in the Alfa Bank and Danchenko investigations. Worse still, in both investigations, he never took obvious steps (like checking Jim Baker’s iCloud, or interviewing the Clinton staffers Sussmann allegedly coordinated with, or interviewing Sergei Millian, to say nothing of interviewing George Papadopoulos, which he never did) until months after indicting the two men. Everything happened in reverse order than it should have if he were following the evidence.

The section describing his Clinton conspiracy theory makes up almost 18 pages of the report, about 5% of the total. Here’s a summary of that section:

While I won’t focus on it, note that about a third of this section consists of complaints about the Steele dossier and Fusion, some of which conflicts with his complaints about the Steele dossier elsewhere, some of which ignores evidence submitted at the Sussmann trial.

Even on its face, there are real problems with Durham’s Clinton conspiracy theory. As Phil Bump (one, two) and Dan Friedman already showed, Hillary’s concerns about Trump couldn’t have been the cause of the investigation into Trump. By the time (a Russian intelligence product claimed) that Hillary approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia on July 26, 2016, the events that would lead FBI to open an investigation were already in place. Here’s Friedman:

This isn’t just false. It would require time travel. Durham himself confirms that the FBI launched its investigation into Trump and Russia based on events that occurred months prior to Clinton’s alleged July 26 approval of the plan. In April 2016, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, met with a professor with Kremlin ties, who informed him that Russia “had obtained ‘dirt’ on…Clinton in the form of thousands of emails,” as Robert Mueller’s final report noted.  A week later, according to Mueller, Papadopoulos “suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release” of damaging material. When hacked Democratic emails were indeed published—by WikiLeaks on July 22—this foreign diplomat alerted US officials about what Papadopoulos had said. The FBI quickly launched an official investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties in response to that tip, Durham notes, while arguing they should have begun only a “preliminary investigation.”

It was the same Russian hack, not Hillary Clinton, that drove media attention, even before the documents were leaked to the public.

Ultimately, Durham hangs potential criminality (at least with respect to the FBI) on the Carter Page FISA applications, a suggestion that by not alerting the FISA Court that (Russia claimed) Hillary had this plan, the FBI was withholding what he calls “exculpatory” information. But in doing that, Durham conflates a Russian intelligence report making claims about Hillary with Hillary herself, something else Friedman rightly mocks.

To figure out how an American presidential campaign supposedly went about attacking a rival campaign, Durham relied on information US intelligence gathered on claims made by Russian intelligence agents about what they supposedly found by spying on Americans. That’s a pretty roundabout way to learn the kind of information you’d expect to see in “Playbook.” And this game of spy telephone was actually even longer than Durham details. According to the New York Times, US spies obtained their “insight” into Russian intelligence thinking from Dutch intelligence, which was spying on the Russians as the Russians spied on Americans. Durham seems to have found no other confirmation for his “Clinton Plan intelligence.” That’s reason enough for skepticism.

But there is a bigger problem. Russian security services did hack Clinton’s campaign to help Trump, according to the entire US intelligence community and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Yet Durham relies on those Russian spies for insight into how Clinton reacted to the hack. That is like the cops citing a bank robber who says the bank framed him.

Given how selective Durham is about how he treats Russian disinformation, this is a grave problem for his project, which I’ll return to.

But there are far more problems with Durham’s conspiracy theory.

Durham invents out of thin air that Hillary’s plan included false information

First, it’s not just that Durham focused his entire investigation on potential Russian disinformation with little worry about doing so.

At least per what is in the unclassified report, Durham added something to the Russian intelligence product: That Hillary had a plan to spread “false” information. Durham’s first paragraph explaining why the Russian intelligence claim about a Hillary plan is important claims:

First, the Clinton Plan intelligence itself and on its face arguably suggested that private actors affiliated with the Clinton campaign were seeking in 2016 to promote a false or exaggerated narrative to the public and to U.S. government agencies about Trump’s possible ties to Russia. [my emphasis]

Durham bases his entire pursuit of this piece of Russian intelligence on his judgment that the Russian intelligence “arguably suggested” Hillary’s people were going to pursue a “false or exaggerated” narrative to tie Trump to Russia. But the notion that this narrative would be — would have to be! — false is nowhere in any of the three formulations of the intelligence Durham describes in his unclassified report.

U.S Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

[snip]

CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”

[snip]

U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.

Even the Russians were only claiming that Hillary would tie Trump to the hacking targeting her. The Russians didn’t claim Hillary would lie to do so. Yet Durham justifies this prong of investigation by adding something to the Russian intelligence that wasn’t in it: that tying Trump to Russia would “arguably” require false information.

That’s an utterly critical addition to what was actually contained in the Russian intelligence, because — as Durham noted in a footnote to this paragraph — oppo research is not itself illegal. It only becomes illegal if you intentionally lie to the government about it.

393 To be clear, the Office did not and does not view the potential existence of a political plan by one campaign to spread negative claims about its opponent as illegal or criminal in any respect. As prosecutors and the Court reminded the jury in the Sussmann trial, opposition research is commonplace in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, is conducted by actors of all political parties, and is not a basis in and of itself for criminal liability. Rather, only if the evidence supported the latter of the two conditions described above-i.e., if there was an intent by the Clinton campaign or its personnel to knowingly provide false information to the government-would such conduct potentially support criminal charges.

Never mind that Durham never developed evidence that the Hillary campaign wanted or intended to privately share either the Steele dossier or the Alfa Bank allegations with the FBI. In fact, his report provides affirmative evidence that the Hillary campaign wanted nothing to do with the FBI, because it had already so damaged her campaign.

Without Durham’s invention — something that he made up out of thin air! — that Hillary planned to spread false information, Durham had no business spending three years investigating this. And remember, much of his investigation on Danchenko and the Alfa Bank allegations happened a year after he started pursuing his Clinton conspiracy theory, and two juries ultimately rejected his accusations that even the people who did share information with the FBI intentionally shared false information.

That’s one of many reasons why it matters that Durham so assiduously ignores all the evidence that Trump really was tied to Russia — that Mueller really did find hundreds of such ties, including a slew that Trump and his closest associates lied to the FBI to hide.

By the time Hillary allegedly approved this plan, on July 26, Trump had publicly hired a campaign manager with close ties to Russia, his foreign policy advisor had publicly made pro-Russian comments while speaking in Moscow, and he himself had publicly attacked NATO. The next day (and the day before the CIA discovered this), Trump publicly called for Russia to help him and publicly floated recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Even just on what was public, Hillary wouldn’t have had to invent anything.

But Russia knew about far more that wasn’t public. In January, Michael Cohen contacted the Kremlin to pursue a real estate deal in Moscow, involving both GRU and a sanctioned bank, something Trump would lie publicly about on July 27. In April, George Papadopoulos got an early warning of this operation. In May, Paul Manafort started sending polling data via Konstantin Kilimnik to Oleg Deripaska. In June, Trump’s failson accepted a meeting from the son of a Russian Oligarch promising dirt on Hillary. If you believe Rick Gates, Roger Stone claimed he was in contact with Guccifer 2.0 before the persona went public in June, and on July 25 (the day before the Russians claimed Hillary approved this purported plan), Manafort asked Stone to reach out to WikiLeaks and find out what else they had. The only one of these details that Russia didn’t definitely know was that Stone was pursuing WikiLeaks. By the time it wrote up that intelligence report, Russia was involved in all the rest of it.

And as I noted, Durham hid most of these non-public details. He hid the abundant evidence that Hillary wouldn’t have needed to make false claims, because the public and private reality all confirmed what Russia claimed Hillary was going to claim: that Trump had ties to Russia, ties he was hiding from voters.

Durham invents something that wasn’t in the Russian intelligence report he relies on, even while hiding abundant evidence that Hillary would have no reason to make stuff up, because there was so much public that was already damning.

Durham uses Hillary’s focus on true events as proof of his false claims

After inventing the claim that Russia said Hillary would rely on false information to tie Trump to the Russian operation, Durham points to Clinton’s focus on true things as evidence that Clinton really did have such a plan. In section vi, which Durham describes as, “Other evidence obtained by the office that appears to be relevant to an analysis of the Clinton Plan intelligence,” Durham uses several entirely true things that Hillary’s foreign policy advisors did, two of which precede the date when (the Russian intelligence report claims) Hillary approved a plan to focus on Trump, to try to prove that such a plan existed.

The section is punctuated with one after another Hillary staffer, and Hillary herself, saying that no such plan existed, but in spite of that, Durham spins three pieces of documentary evidence to claim it supports his conspiracy theory. The documentary evidence cited starts with a July 27 letter-writing effort to condemn Trump’s attacks on NATO.

We are writing to enlist your support for the attached public statement. Both of us are Hillary Clinton supporters and advisors but hope that this statement could be signed by a bipartisan group[.] Donald Trump’s repeated denigration of the NATO Alliance, his refusal to support our Article 5 obligations to our European allies and his kid glove treatment of Russia and Vladimir Putin are among the most reckless statements made by a Presidential candidate in memory.

This letter wasn’t even oppo research: It was mainstream opinion about a true fact about Trump.

Durham’s focus on this is exactly analogous to GOP efforts to attack a completely true letter former spooks wrote expressing their opinion that the Hunter Biden laptop looked like a Russian information operation, which Republican Congressmen have falsely depicted as a claim about disinformation. It’s even worse though, because Durham points to the mere expression of an opinion as evidence of criminal intent. True (and solidly within mainstream) opinion equals false and criminal in Durham’s book.

Then Durham turns to a Hillary staffer’s early July effort to follow-up on Franklin Foer’s July 4, 2016 review of Trump’s very real Russian ties. The article itself is really inconvenient for Durham’s narrative, because it summarizes all the absolutely true reasons (in addition to the ones I listed above) why Trump’s Russian ties were suspect, including an accurate description of why Carter Page’s fawning praise for Russia was so alarming. The article effectively proves this was a press concern before Hillary allegedly approved a plan to make it one. Given Foer’s later ties to Fusion, this entirely accurate article likely also relies on Fusion research, but Durham puts it in this section rather than the 5-page Fusion subsection, perhaps to hide that Fusion’s open source research largely held up. Perhaps because this Foer article itself undermines Durham’s narrative in various ways, Durham claimed this follow-up pertained to this June 2020 Foer article rather than the one written in July 2016, which would require an even more time travel than what Friedman described. Did Durham read the real article here and realize how badly it undermined all his claims about Fusion and Hillary and so cite one written four years later?

Insanely, however, Durham claims that this July 5 attempted follow-up, “provide[s] some support for the notion that the Clinton campaign was engaged in an effort or plan in late July 2016 to encourage scrutiny of Trump’s potential ties to Russia.” Durham cites a Clinton staffer’s focus on Trump’s true ties to Russia as proof Hillary approved — three weeks later — a plan to invent such ties. Again, true equals false.

Perhaps the craziest of all, buried deep in his report, Durham claims that Hillary’s staffers’ interest in finding out whether the FBI was actually investigating the crime committed against her — without any tie to Trump — is proof that Hillary had a plan targeting Trump.

In addition, on July 25, 2016, Foreign Policy Advisor-1 had the following text message exchange with Foreign Policy Advisor-2:

[Foreign Policy Advisor-2]: Can you see if [Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council member] will tell you if there is a formal fbi or other investigation into the hack?

[Foreign Policy Advisor-1]: [She] won’t say anything more to me. Sorry. Told me [she] went as far as [she] could.

[Foreign Policy Advisor-2]: Ok. Do you have others who might?

[Foreign Policy Advisor-1]: Has [Individual-2] tried [her]? Curious if [she] would react differently to [Individual-2]? can also try OVP [Office of the Vice President]. They might say more.

[Foreign Policy Advisor-2]: I don’t know if he has but can ask. Would also be good to try ovp, and anyone in IC [intelligence community]

[Foreign Policy Advisor-1]: Left messages for OVP but politico just sent me a push notification stating that they are indeed investigating.

[Foreign Policy Advisor-2]: Fbi just put our [sic] statement. Thx454

Remember: Durham accuses the FBI of confirmation bias, but here he uses a victim’s attempt to find out whether the crime committed against her was being investigated as evidence that, instead, she was victimizing Trump.

More problematic for Durham’s conspiracy theory, emails the Special Counsel only sought out in response to Sussmann’s discovery requests show that Sussmann knew of the investigation (because he was helping the FBI conduct it), proving that he had no ties with the people Durham imagined were behind this conspiracy theory.

In fact, FBI’s Assistant Director would concede to Sussmann that he should have consulted with the campaign before making such a public statement.

First let me apologize for any perceived or actual disconnect on this matter. I agree fully that when making statements to the media and others, we need to be in lock step with victims and partners. In this case, it appears we were not.

The FBI admitted it fucked up by not being more forthcoming about the status of the investigation. But Durham takes an effort to learn about whether there even was an investigation and claims it is evidence that victim may have committed a crime. This is the digital equivalent of slut-shaming, criminally investigating Hillary because she was hacked.

Durham’s report takes true stuff, some of it unrelated to Trump and other parts of it before the purported plan, as evidence that Hillary wanted to make false claims. And remember, these true details that Durham adopts to support his invented claim that Hillary was pursuing a false narrative are things Durham relies on to justify adopting a Russian intelligence product as the backbone of his investigation.

Given how shoddy this stuff is, I can only imagine what additional stuff he pointed to in his classified summary.

What Durham calls “Clinton Plan” is actually the Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence

Time for a detour about Guccifer 2.0.

Remember how Durham omitted, without an ellipsis, damning information about Sam Clovis?

He similarly omitted two redacted lines in his presentation of the CIA referral of the Russian intelligence about Hillary and Guccifer 2.0. Here’s what it looks like in his report, with Durham’s omission marked:

Here’s what the original looks like, with the redaction Durham omitted marked.

I don’t know what is behind the redaction. Given what Durham did with the Clovis information, it probably doesn’t help his narrative. And given that Durham barely mentions Roger Stone and definitely doesn’t mention the rat-fucker’s suspected advance discussions with Guccifer 2.0, and given that his lead prosecutor criticized DARPA investigators for trying to identify Guccifer 2.0, the redaction is suspect. At the very least though, he should be referring to this not as “Clinton Plan intelligence,” but as “Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence,” because that’s how it got packaged up for the FBI.

And if he treated this as Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence, Durham might consider why the FBI didn’t begin to look at Roger Stone’s ties to Guccifer until almost a year after opening Crossfire Hurricane — but that would provide proof that the FBI wasn’t aggressive enough in their investigation of Trump, not that they were too aggressive.

Durham conflates reporting on Russia’s attack on the US with intelligence about Hillary

Durham’s failure to note the two-line redaction about Guccifer 2.0 matters because of something else he does.

First, note that this intelligence, if true, seems to reflect the collection by Russian spy agencies of recent communications between Hillary’s close associates (which would be explained in the second redaction). So if the intelligence were true, it would reflect a Presidential candidate’s associates being wiretapped by foreign spies. But Durham isn’t interested in that part of it. He’s interested in the content that Russia allegedly intercepted, not the the claimed intercept itself.

Key to Durham’s claim that the content of what Russia claimed to have intercepted from Hillary associates, rather than the claimed interception itself, is important is that John Brennan briefed it, the content, “expeditiously” to President Obama. But throughout this section, Durham plays word games to suggest a larger collection of intelligence is the same thing as the intelligence pertaining to Hillary(-and-Guccifer). As you read this section, imagine how it would read if instead of “Clinton Plan,” it read, “the intercept of Hillary’s associates.”

The Intelligence Community received the Clinton Plan intelligence in late July 2016. 397 The official who initially received the information immediately recognized its importance including its relevance to the U.S. presidential election- and acted quickly to make CIA leadership aware of it. 398

[snip]

Immediately after communicating with the President, Comey, and DNI Clapper to discuss relevant intelligence, Director Brennan and other agency officials took steps to ensure that dissemination of intelligence related to Russia’s election interference efforts, including the Clinton Plan intelligence, would be limited to protect sensitive information and prevent leaks.404

[snip]

On August 3, 2016, within days of receiving the Clinton Plan intelligence, Director Brennan met with the President, Vice President and other senior Administration officials, including but not limited to the Attorney General (who participated remotely) and the FBI Director, in the White House Situation Room to discuss Russian election interference efforts. 406 According to Brennan’s handwritten notes and his recollections from the meeting, he briefed on relevant intelligence known to date on Russian election interference, including the Clinton Plan intelligence. 407 Specifically, Director Brennan’s declassified handwritten notes reflect that he briefed the meeting’s participants regarding the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”408

[snip]

In late September 2016, high-ranking U.S. national security officials, including Comey and Clapper, received an intelligence product on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election that included the Clinton Plan intelligence. 421

[snip]

CIA Director Brennan and other intelligence officials recognized the significance of the intelligence by expeditiously briefing it to the President, Vice President, the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI, and other senior administration officials. 491 [my emphasis]

Virtually all these references are to the wider body of intelligence the CIA was collecting on Russia’s targeting of Hillary, and the one that’s not — the reference to the discovery of the intelligence — almost certainly refers to the intelligence shared by the Dutch. Nevertheless, Durham uses the urgency of the intelligence about an ongoing attack to claim the importance of the Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence.

The Hillary stuff — and whatever reference to Guccifer it included — was just one piece of intelligence among a bunch of intelligence. It probably wasn’t considered all that important a part of that intelligence, because it only appears on pages 5 and 6 of the notes taken from Brennan’s briefing of the intelligence.

In fact, Durham’s description of Brennan’s interview suggests that Brennan didn’t even consider this to be a piece of intelligence about Hillary. Indeed, he thought the intelligence was about Russia hacking Hillary, not Hillary making a plan to talk about being hacked by Russia.

When interviewed, Brennan generally recalled reviewing the materials but stated he did not recall focusing specifically on its assertions regarding the Clinton campaign’s purported plan. 400 Brennan recalled instead focusing on Russia’s role in hacking the DNC. 401

On July 28, 2016, Director Brennan met with President Obama and other White House personnel, during which Brennan and the President discussed intelligence relevant to the 2016 presidential election as well as the potential creation of an inter-agency Fusion Cell to synthesize and analyze intelligence about Russian malign influence on the 2016 presidential election. 402

Brennan’s impression that this intelligence was about Russia’s hack of the DNC would make sense if it were treated as a piece of intelligence about Russia intercepting communications of Hillary’s associates.

Durham’s conflation of the Hillary-and-Guccifer-specific intelligence with the wider body of intelligence continues as he describes how it got shared with the FBI. Again, imagine how this passage would read if you replaced “Clinton Plan” with “intercept of Hillary’s associates.”

It appears, however, that this occurred no later than August 22, 2016. On that date, an FBI cyber analyst (“Headquarters Analyst-2”) emailed a number of FBI employees, including Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten and Section Chief Moffa, the most senior intelligence analysts on the Crossfire Hurricane team, to provide an update on Russian intelligence materials. 409 The email included a summary of the contents of the Clinton Plan intelligence. 410 The Office did not identify any replies or follow-up actions taken by FBI personnel as a result of this email.

When interviewed by the Office, Auten recalled that on September 2, 2016 – approximately ten days after Headquarters Analyst-2’s email – the official responsible for overseeing the Fusion Cell briefed Auten, Moffa, and other FBI personnel at FBI Headquarters regarding the Clinton Plan intelligence. 411

[snip]

FBI records reflect that by no later than that same date (September 2, 2016), then-FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Bill Priestap was also aware of the specifics of the Clinton Plan intelligence as evidenced by his hand-written notes from an early morning meeting with Moffa, DAD Dina Corsi and Acting AD for Cyber Eric Sporre. 415

He falsely suggests that the entirety of an investigative referral memo regarded,

“U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.”

In fact, the memo in which this intelligence got formally packaged up for the FBI included three things, paragraph a, paragraph b, and paragraph c (though the Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence was first), with the introduction that these were simply “examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,” not that they were particularly important examples. Nevertheless, Durham pretends the Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence was the entirety of the memo.

There’s no reason to believe any of these briefings were about the Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence specifically. Durham pretends there was a buzz among the intelligence agencies about Hillary, when in reality there was a buzz about Russia hacking Hillary that he presents as if it were primarily about Hillary.

Durham failed to coach witnesses into claiming they had received the FBI memo

In the section where Durham considers whether to charge some FBI agents for not doing more with the the Russian Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence, he repeats his ploy of conflating the Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence with the wider body of evidence to even deign to make a prosecutorial decision, though in this instance, he provides no reminder that the Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence was just one of the things Brennan briefed to Obama, after five pages of other items.

The FBI thus failed to act on what should have been – when combined with other, incontrovertible facts – a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, CIA Director Brennan and other intelligence officials recognized the significance of the intelligence by expeditiously briefing it to the President, Vice President, the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI, and other senior administration officials. 491

He lets the urgent import of an ongoing Russian hack to stand in for the import of this Hillary-and-Guccifer intelligence.

And that’s important, because Durham makes a prosecutorial decision about whether to charge FBI agents for how they responded to the intelligence that Russia claimed to have intercepted communications of Hillary personnel without proof that most of them ever read it.

As he describes, the top analytical people on the campaign learned of the claimed intercept of Hillary associates almost a month after CIA first obtained it.

On that date, an FBI cyber analyst (“Headquarters Analyst-2”) emailed a number of FBI employees, including Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten and Section Chief Moffa, the most senior intelligence analysts on the Crossfire Hurricane team, to provide an update on Russian intelligence materials. 409 The email included a summary of the contents of the Clinton Plan intelligence. 410

There were in-person briefings for the top analytical people and the cyber people ten days later.

When interviewed by the Office, Auten recalled that on September 2, 2016 – approximately ten days after Headquarters Analyst-2’s email – the official responsible for overseeing the Fusion Cell briefed Auten, Moffa, and other FBI personnel at FBI Headquarters regarding the Clinton Plan intelligence. 411 Auten did not recall any FBI “operational” personnel (i.e., Crossfire Hurricane Agents) being present at the meeting. 412 The official verbally briefed the individuals regarding information that the CIA planned to send to the FBI in a written investigative referral, including the Clinton Plan intelligence information. 413

[snip]

Separate and apart from this meeting, FBI records reflect that by no later than that same date (September 2, 2016), then-FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Bill Priestap was also aware of the specifics of the Clinton Plan intelligence as evidenced by his hand-written notes from an early morning meeting with Moffa, DAD Dina Corsi and Acting AD for Cyber Eric Sporre. 415

Durham describes the CIA writing a memo about what the fusion intelligence team had found — but he curiously never describes how or when it was sent.

Five days later, on September 7, 2016, the CIA completed its Referral Memo in response to an FBI request for relevant information reviewed by the Fusion Cell. 417

That’s important because Durham describes witness after witness describing that they had never seen it.

None of the FBI personnel who agreed to be interviewed could specifically recall receiving this Referral Memo.

[snip]

The Office showed portions of the Clinton Plan intelligence to a number of individuals who were actively involved in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Most advised they had never seen the intelligence before. For example, the original Supervisory Special Agent on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Supervisory Special Agent-1, reviewed the intelligence during one of his interviews with the Office. 428 After reading it, Supervisory Special Agent-I became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he had never been apprised of the Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen the aforementioned Referral Memo. 42

[snip]

Former FBI General Counsel Baker also reviewed the Clinton Plan intelligence during one of his interviews with the Office. 431 Baker stated that he had neither seen nor heard of the Clinton Plan intelligence or the resulting Referral Memo prior to his interview with the Office.

In lieu of proof that it ever got sent, Durham reveals that Brian Auten might have hand-carried the memo to the team, but had no memory of doing so.

Auten stated that it was possible he hand-delivered this Referral Memo to the FBI, as he had done with numerous other referral memos,419 and noted that he typically shared referral memos with the rest of the Crossfire Hurricane investigative team, although he did not recall if he did so in this instance. 420

Note that two of the interviews on which this passage relies — a June 18, 2020 interview of Jim Baker and a July 26, 2021 interview of Auten — were shown to be highly problematic at trial.

In the former case, Durham called Baker back a week after an earlier interview; it’s the interview where Baker’s memory started changing fairly dramatically, under coaching from Durham, to coincide with the story Durham needed to have told to support his conspiracy theory.

Q. Did Mr. DeFilippis or Mr. Durham ask you to go back and think harder about certain things?

A. I don’t remember that.

Q. Well, do you remember when you met with them on June 18th of 2020? Do you remember generally that date?

A. I’ll take your word for it. I don’t remember that date specifically.

[snip]

Q. And at that meeting for the first time, you told them, After thinking about it further, you recalled being briefed at some point on an unrecalled date about the investigation involving the intrusion of the DNC computers and possibly learning at that briefing that Sussmann, who you knew from previous contacts, was representing the DNC on that matter.

Do you remember that that was the meeting where you said, “After further thought, Mr. Sussmann was representing the DNC at least on the hack?”

A. Again, I don’t remember that it was at that particular meeting, but I remember at some point acknowledging that.

Sussmann attorney Sean Berkowitz got Baker to admit that at the meeting, Durham only showed Baker the notes that matched the story the Special Counsel needed to be told, not those that utterly contradicted the story (and were consistent with a bunch of other evidence that at least four people at the FBI believed that Sussmann was there on behalf of the Democrats).

Q. Now, the government did not show you other people’s notes in that June of 2021 time period, correct?

A. At that point in time I don’t think they showed me anybody else’s notes.

[snip]

MR. BERKOWITZ: And if you could blow up, “The attorney brought to” — Page 2, I believe. Page 6.

A. I’m sorry, these are the notes we looked at yesterday.

Q. Right. These are the notes — just to be clear for everybody — March 6th of 2017. Did the FBI or anybody from Special Counsel Durham’s team show you these notes in an attempt to refresh your recollection of what happened in your interactions with Mr. Sussmann in 2016?

A. No.

The interview with Auten is similar.

As Danchenko attorney Danny Onorato laid out at trial, before Auten’s July 26, 2021 interview, Durham told Auten he was being criminally investigated.

Q Does July 26 of 2021 sound fair?

A Yes, it does.

Q Okay. And when you met with them for the first time after you were meeting with people for 25 or 30 hours, did your status change from a witness to a subject of an investigation?

A Yes, it did.

Q Okay. And in your work for the FBI, has anyone ever told you that you are a subject of a criminal inquiry?

A No.

Q Was that scary?

A Yes.

In addition to showing that at trial, Durham coached Auten into making an inaccurate statement about how Danchenko claimed Millian had called him, Onorato also showed — as Berkowitz had months earlier — that Durham had withheld documents that undermined Durham’s story and corroborated Danchenko’s during these earlier witness interviews.

In other words, both these interviews were shown at trial to have reflected coaching of witnesses to tell the story Durham wanted told, not the story reflected by the evidence. (Unsurprisingly, Durham never cites the trial testimony that disproves his claims in his report, yet another thing he accused the FBI of doing that he himself did.)

And even in spite of proof that Durham was coaching witnesses in these interviews, he still presented no affirmative evidence that the FBI investigators ever received the Fusion Cell memo. In the same way that all of Hillary’s people disclaimed any plan, the FBI investigators disclaimed having seen this memo.

Yet in spite of having no evidence that these people ever saw this memo, Durham compares how they responded to the Steele dossier with how they didn’t respond to this memo, and then generously decides not to charge anyone for doing nothing in response to a memo he has no proof they ever saw.

That’s how his conspiracy theory ended, after four years of trying to create evidence to support it, with him making an extended declination decision about a document he has no proof the FBI ever saw. His prosecutorial decision weighs whether the FBI “intentionally furthered” a Clinton plan to “frame” Trump with improper ties to Russia, as if he had presented proof there was such a plan.

The aforementioned facts reflect a rather startling and inexplicable failure to adequately consider and incorporate the Clinton Plan intelligence into the FBI’ s investigative decision-making in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Indeed, had the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation as an assessment and, in turn, gathered and analyzed data in concert with the information from the Clinton Plan intelligence, it is likely that the information received would have been examined, at a minimum, with a more critical eye. A more deliberative examination would have increased the likelihood of alternative analytical hypotheses and reduced the risk of reputational damage both to the targets of the investigation as well as, ultimately, to the FBI.

The FBI thus failed to act on what should have been -when combined with other, incontrovertible facts – a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, CIA Director Brennan and other intelligence officials recognized the significance of the intelligence by expeditiously briefing it to the President, Vice President, the Director ofNational Intelligence, the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI, and other senior administration officials. 491 Whether or not the Clinton Plan intelligence was based on reliable or unreliable information, or was ultimately true or false, it should have prompted FBI personnel to immediately undertake an analysis of the information and to act with far greater care and caution when receiving, analyzing, and relying upon materials of partisan origins, such as the Steele Reports and the Alfa Bank allegations. The FBI also should have disseminated the Clinton Plan intelligence more widely among those responsible for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation so that they could effectively incorporate it into their analysis and decision-making, and their representations to the OI attorneys and, ultimately, the FISC. 492

[snip]

Although the evidence we collected revealed a troubling disregard for the Clinton Plan intelligence and potential confirmation bias in favor of continued investigative scrutiny of Trump and his associates, it did not yield evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any FBI or CIA officials494 intentionally furthered a Clinton campaign plan to frame or falsely accuse Trump of improper ties to Russia.

Again, to get to the point where Durham is making a prosecutorial decision about whether the FBI helped Hillary frame Trump, Durham has,

• Relied on proof that Hillary pointed to the true things that were damning enough
• Presented affirmative evidence that Hillary wouldn’t have approved of sharing the Alfa Bank anomaly with the FBI
• Been told, by two juries, that he couldn’t prove that anyone actually lied to the FBI
• Presented no evidence that the FBI investigators saw this memo

And yet virtually every Republican claims that this is what the Durham Report did conclude, that Hillary did have such a plan.

He made it up.

For the more than three years, John Durham criminally investigated whether Hillary framed Donald Trump. And that entire investigation is based on a premise that even he describes was only “arguably suggested” by the evidence on which he builds it.

In fact, Durham fabricated that entire part of it. He made up, out of thin air, his claim that a Russian intelligence report “suggested” Hillary was going to make false claims about Donald Trump rather than simply repeating all the true things that were damning enough.

The entire Durham Report was built on this fabrication, a fabrication he used to claim that Hillary was framing someone, instead of doing so himself.

Update: Durham himself submitted this email thread between Fusion and Foer showing that Fusion was heavily involved in Foer’s article and that their focus on Carter Page significantly preceded Page’s July speech in Russia.

CNN has a blockbuster report about a recording, taken in conjunction with Mark Meadows’ memoir, capturing Trump claiming that he had a document planning an attack on Iran that he wished he could share, but could not, because it was classified.

The July 2021 meeting was held at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, with two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as aides employed by the former president, including communications specialist Margo Martin. The attendees, sources said, did not have security clearances that would allow them access to classified information. Meadows didn’t attend the meeting, sources said.

Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”

The document Trump references was not produced by Milley, CNN was told.

[snip]

The meeting in which Trump discussed the Iran document with others happened shortly after The New Yorker published a story by Susan Glasser detailing how, in the final days of Trump’s presidency, Milley instructed the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern. The story infuriated Trump.

Glasser reported that in the months following the election, Milley repeatedly argued against striking Iran and was concerned Trump “might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified.” Milley and others talked Trump out of taking such a drastic action, according to the New Yorker story.

On the recording and in response to the story, Trump brings up the document, which he says came from Milley. Trump told those in the room that if he could show it to people, it would undermine what Milley was saying, the sources said. One source says Trump refers to the document as if it is in front of him.

Several sources say the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around, though is not clear if it was the actual Iran document.

This is clearly an elaboration of what WaPo reported (as evidence of obstruction!) here, which I wrote about here. It is one of two documents — the other is a map — persistently described as something prosecutors asked about because Trump discussed sharing it with others.

The meeting was in Bedminster, not Mar-a-Lago.

One reason witnesses would be asked about it is to find out if Trump really had the document in front of him.

Let me explain how I think it relates (WaPo’s conceit notwithstanding) to potential Espionage Act or 18 USC 2071 charges.

First, it’s certainly possible this is one of the documents pertaining to Iran that WaPo has reported were among the ones obtained in the search in August 2022.

If it is, then it would be a document that Trump transported back and forth from Florida — something that would make it easier for DOJ to charge this in DC instead of SDFL.

If it’s something DOJ didn’t obtain in the search, but also didn’t obtain among the documents Trump returned in either January or June 2022, then … then we have problems. If this is among the documents that DOJ thinks Trump didn’t return, then we have problems, especially given Jack Smith’s focus on Trump’s LIV golf deal, because this is the kind of document that the Saudis would pay billions of dollars for.

Weeks ago, CNN also reported that Smith had asked NARA for 16 documents about declassification decisions. Few have considered the possibility those documents relate to specific documents that Trump still retained — though if there are any Russian investigations among those Trump retained at least until January 2022, then there surely would be. The same could be true here.

The document is, as CNN reports, evidence that Trump knew he had stolen classified documents.

Importantly, though, it’s also evidence about motive. No matter what reason Trump originally stole this document, this incident shows how Trump was exploiting it: To prove a critic wrong.

It’s precisely the same reason why Trump spent his last days attempting to declassify all the Russian investigation documents: revenge. It’s the most Trump motive ever.

But it also goes a long way to prove one of the more serious crimes listed in the warrant authorizing the search last August.

As I laid out in August, the elements of a straight up 18 USC 793 offense are:

• Did the defendant, without authorization, have possession of, access to, or control over a document that was National Defense Information?
• Did the document in question relate to the national defense?
• Did the defendant have reason to believe the information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation?
• Did the defendant retain the above material and fail to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it?
• Did he keep this document willfully?

All of Trump’s behavior here fulfils these elements of offense. The document could be heard rustling on the recording, and several witnesses can describe whether he really had it. The document pertained to an attack on Iran, quintessentially a matter of national defense. Trump exhibited awareness that he couldn’t share it, because it was classified. And Trump had it, at least in part, to avenge what he perceived as a slight by Milley.

The one caveat — one made by Charlie Savage on Twitter — is the bolded bullet. DOJ had not yet subpoenaed this document. If he wasn’t caught in possession in of this document, it would serve only as evidence of 18 USC 2071 — the law prohibiting taking classified documents that disqualifies someone from holding federal office. Though if he ever did share it with people, it could exposure him to more serious levels of the Espionage Act.

All trials are about prosecutors telling stories.

This incident is a story so good that Trump tried to tell it himself, and in the process got recorded admitting he had stolen classified documents. And that’s why prosecutors asked a bunch of witnesses about it.

Update: Hugo Lowell’s version of this includes important details (the NYT also got several of these):

1. The meeting in question was in July 2021.
2. The recording came from Margo Martin, whose devices prosecutors obtained and imaged.
3. The actual document in question predates Mark Milley’s tenure as CJS.
4. Trump’s lawyers claim a document matching this description was among those returned to the Archives.
5. Prosecutors have shown the actual document to grand jury witnesses.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Memorial Day as a kid meant traveling long hours in the car with my family – over the years three, and then four siblings swimming around for more than eight hours in the back of the land whale known as the Chrysler 300 station wagon.

We’d crawl out of that avocado-colored earthbound leviathan like so many chewed-up Jonahs, reeking of tuna fish sandwiches, exhausted but ready for fresh air and sunshine, hot dogs and flag waving, candy thrown from the local firetruck along the day’s celebratory parade route.

Nobody was ready for my uncle, though, not ever. Let’s call him Ralph since he has always reminded me a bit of the hard right conservative character in the 1970s cartoon, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. Meld Ralph with Norman Lear’s Archie Bunker and you’d have a pretty good bead on my uncle’s persona.

Uncle Ralph — my great-uncle, being my grandfather’s younger brother — would’ve been among the other local veterans marching in the parade from the township hall to the cemetery at the opposite end of town. He’d have dusted off his dress uniform for the occasion though it had become a bit snug around the middle. I avoided getting too close to the man to see if his green wool serge had any moth holes as I suspected it might.

The man was a hard ass, no doubt about it. He was a dick to everyone around him. I don’t know what his long-suffering wife saw in the man or how she managed to stick it out with him for his lifetime apart from their intense Catholicism and their five kids. Nor was he less difficult with other family outside of his wife and kids; he’d screwed several family members with real estate deals he cooked up. Don’t get my mom started about him, yeesh – you’ll draw back with a bloody stump where your ear once was.

But on Memorial Day every year, on arrival at the cemetery, that snapping turtle of a man softened like ice cream on a summer’s day. Watching him stand at attention as the trumpeter played Taps and the flag was raised, you could see in his face something wordless and deep. It remained with him as he visited the veterans’ headstones in the cemetery, fussing with the flags and flowers on each burial plot.

I never saw this timeworn anguish in his face when he dealt with his quadriplegic son, or with his other son who’d tried to commit suicide. His hardness only cracked in the cemetery where his cohort was buried.

Whatever happened during his service in World War II molded him, made him that aggressive man who hid a fathomless sorrow beneath his rigidity. I wish I’d been brave enough as a kid to ask him right then, in the cemetery, what he was thinking about during the ceremony and afterward among the graves.

I don’t think his own brothers with whom he was very close even knew what Ralph had buried so long ago. They only talked about him with their spouses and the rest of the family as that mean son-of-a-bitch.

It’s a story which will never be revealed now that all of his generation in my family have passed on.

I’m thinking of you Uncle Ralph, our family’s anti-fascist, on this Memorial Day. I’m glad your burden has been laid down with you, and you didn’t live long enough to become compromised by today’s right-wing ideology.

~ ~ ~

My uncle came to mind when I read this article about a Black Civil War veteran Hiram White who lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and only now has a headstone thanks to the efforts and generosity of another Yooper.

He wasn’t the only Black Civil War veteran in the U.P.; Samuel Cary lived in Negaunee for 30-plus years after the Civil War. Both White and Cary shared a profession, though – they were barbers in their respective parts of the U.P., separated by 60 miles or so.

I can’t help wonder what Uncle Ralph would have made of the new headstone for White’s previously unmarked grave, or that of the other Black Civil War veterans who have more recently received long-overdue headstones.

My uncle was racist, to be frank and blunt; I don’t know if he would have been generous about these Black veterans. Ralph’s the one member of my mom’s extended family I can recall using the n-word, which is saying something since there were more than 120 people in the family. He was never openly so toward my dad or my siblings though there were never any warm fuzzies between Ralph and my dad. Ralph respected my dad’s military service even if he might not have been welcoming toward the one brown-skinned person in the family, but dad wasn’t Black but Asian-Pacific Islander.

It’s this one character flaw which makes me think Uncle Ralph would have been susceptible to Trump-y fascism antithetical to his military service. His racism could have been played to crack his anti-fascist history.

I’m glad time and entropy kept Ralph from becoming more bigoted than he was.

~ ~ ~

Two geopolitical challenges might have limited Uncle Ralph’s slide into fascism had he lived long enough. While Nixon as a GOP president might have been able to go to China, Ralph wouldn’t have felt comfortable with the relationship the U.S. has had with China.

Part of this would have been borne of his racism, I’m sure. But part of it would have been Ralph’s staunch pro-defense pro-democracy politics. He would have been deeply concerned about importing any defense products from China. In this I think his skepticism would have been like that of Sen. John McCain.

I doubt my uncle would ever have been comfortable as a GOP voter with supporting Russian aggression, either.

I can hear Uncle Ralph even now, sunburned to a lobster-red crisp, peeling the ring top open on his umpteenth Schlitz next to a blazing bonfire, barking at the top of his lungs about “those goddamned commies” while talking with my other uncles and male cousins about world events during beach-side family reunions.

At the time he would have been fulminating about North Vietnam; I know I avoided these particular family discussions because even as early as age seven I did not believe military action in Vietnam was good.

Today he would have been chomping at the bit to do more to stem Putin’s overreach, and I can’t say that I’d disagree though I wouldn’t advocate anything more than increasing support for Ukraine.

Again, I wish I’d been brave enough to ask him what he thought then about global politics; he might have illuminated my understanding of their evolution and right-wing positioning since Nixon. But when we’re kids we’re rarely encouraged to engage our curiosity and interview older family; we weren’t often offered safe situations in which queries were permitted and entertained respectfully by adults.

Adults, for that matter even now, aren’t reminded there are histories to be shared and life lessons to pass on, ones which might shape the future. There’s no general curriculum of adulthood which tells them to make sure they teach the children well how to avoid the errors of the past.

Because of Uncle Ralph and the other members of my family whose histories weren’t recorded and shared, I’m going to make an effort this month to document another oldster’s personal story. My father-in-law was born 10 years after Ralph was, missed World War II, but he still has so much to share about the 1930s-1970s that my kids and me and even my spouse don’t know about.

Everything I was afraid to ask Uncle Ralph about his military service I will ask my FIL, documenting it to share with my kids and grandkids to come. Doing so is my duty to the future, a fight requiring no weapons to prepare my kin and others for what’s ahead.

This Memorial Day I’m thinking of my great-uncle and I’m grateful for what he taught me even as the old hard ass frightened the bejabbers out of me as a kid.

He’s taught me Memorial Day is about memories. Capture them now while you can, because they are history.

~ ~ ~

Let it make no difference to thee whether thou art cold or warm, if
thou art doing thy duty; and whether thou art drowsy or satisfied
with sleep; and whether ill-spoken of or praised; and whether dying
or doing something else. For it is one of the acts of life, this act
by which we die: it is sufficient then in this act also to do well
what we have in hand.

Look within. Let neither the peculiar quality of anything nor its
value escape thee.

All existing things soon change, and they will either be reduced to
vapor, if indeed all substance is one, or they will be dispersed.

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6

The NYT did a 3-byline 1,700-word story describing how the number of minor Republican candidates joining the race serves Trump’s purpose.

Its analysis of the numbers and Ron DeSantis’ early failures isn’t bad. But because it is silent about how the expanding field might play in the likelihood of Trump indictments, it is entirely worthless.

For example, the content and timing of indictments may have an utterly central impact on the two dynamics described in the piece: Trump’s diehard base and the unwillingness of others in the party to criticize Trump directly.

The rapidly ballooning field, combined with Mr. Trump’s seemingly unbreakable core of support, represents a grave threat to Mr. DeSantis, imperiling his ability to consolidate the non-Trump vote, and could mirror the dynamics that powered Mr. Trump’s takeover of the party in 2016.

It’s a matter of math: Each new entrant threatens to steal a small piece of Mr. DeSantis’s potential coalition — whether it be Mr. Pence with Iowa evangelicals or Mr. Scott with college-educated suburbanites. And these new candidates are unlikely to eat into Mr. Trump’s votes. The former president’s base — more than 30 percent of Republicans — remains strongly devoted to him.

[snip]

The reluctance to go after Mr. Trump, for many Republicans, feels eerily like a repeat of 2016. Then, Mr. Trump’s rivals left him mostly alone for months, assuming that he would implode or that they were destined to beat him the moment they could narrow the field to a one-on-one matchup, a situation that never transpired.

Consider how each of three legal risks (and these are only the most obvious) might affect these issues. This post builds on this series I did last month:

• Where the Trump Investigations Stand: Georgia
• Where the Trump Investigations Stand: Stolen Documents
• Where the Trump Investigations Stand: The January 6 Conspiracies

August Georgia indictments

The NYT itself has, as have many other close observers, noted the many signs that Fani Willis has given that she will indict Trump and others in August — probably mid-August.

The Georgia prosecutor leading an investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies has taken the unusual step of announcing remote work days for most of her staff during the first three weeks of August, asking judges in a downtown Atlanta courthouse not to schedule trials for part of that time as she prepares to bring charges in the inquiry.

The moves suggest that Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, is expecting a grand jury to unseal indictments during that time period. Ms. Willis outlined the remote work plan and made the request to judges in a letter sent on Thursday to 21 Fulton County officials, including the chief county judge, Ural Glanville, and the sheriff, Pat Labat.

“Thank you for your consideration and assistance in keeping the Fulton County Judicial Complex safe during this time,” wrote Ms. Willis, who has already asked the F.B.I. to help with security in and around the courthouse.

Ms. Willis had said in a previous letter that any charges related to the Trump investigation would come in the grand jury term that runs from July 11 to Sept. 1. Her letter on Thursday appears to offer more specificity on timing.

That means these indictments will come around the same time as the GOP primary debate scheduled for Milwaukee, hosted by Fox.

Trump has already signaled he may not attend this debate and the party has talked about floating minimum requirements to avoid another cattle call like we saw in 2016. If Willis indicts before this debate, the debate will focus closely on those indictments, meaning the middling candidates will be on a stage without Trump talking about alleged crimes he committed to try to win the 2020 election — alleged crimes he committed instead of doing what he could to win the two Georgia Senate seats that tipped control to Democrats.

While I agree with NYT that a cattle call primary and DeSantis’ weaknesses help Trump, had DeSantis had a stronger start, Trump might have been able to finish off any perceived opposition before substantive indictments drop. Now a bunch of other people will be prepped to capitalize on opportunities created by any Trump charges.

A far more important dynamic than the timing of this, though, is the likelihood Willis will indict others. If those others are just top Trump aides and a handful of fake electors (with other fake electors cooperating against them), it could set up a Trump versus the party dynamic, especially given Brian Kemp’s singular success at finding a way to ignore Trump’s demands while not antagonizing him. But if more Republicans are indicted — and commentary on the fake electors plot always seems to forget that the plot involved some of the most prominent Republicans in all the swing states necessary to win the presidential — then it may tend to solidify the Republican party with Trump, in spite of the legal damage his efforts to steal the last election will start to do.

It matters that Fox will host this debate, too, though it’s still too early to tell how. In the wake of the Dominion settlement and with Smartmatic still to come, Fox News has swung wildly from supporting to criticizing Trump. But Rupert Murdoch does seem intent on finding an alternative to him. And that means this debate may provide an opportunity for someone else to break out of the pack.

Stolen documents

Recent reporting suggests that possible August Georgia indictments may not even be the next indictments against Trump.

Last week, both the WSJ and Bloomberg reported that the stolen documents investigation is substantially finished, with Bloomberg suggesting it could be a matter of days or weeks after today’s federal holiday before Jack Smith announces charges.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is wrapping up his investigation into former president Donald Trump’s refusal to return classified documents after his election defeat and is poised to announce possible criminal charges in the days or weeks after Memorial Day, according to people familiar with the matter.

For months, key Republicans like Bill Barr and Andy McCarthy have been treating the stolen documents case as a legitimate investigation, effectively giving firebreathing Republicans permission to criticize Trump for these suspected crimes. And they’re doing so even if this is charged only as obstruction, 18 USC 1519.

Jack Smith might tell any of four stories with a hypothetical stolen documents indictment:

• A straight-up obstruction charge for blowing off the August subpoena, the likes of which Barr envisions
• An 18 USC 793 indictment charging fairly innocuous documents — the two classified documents used along with post-presidential records and the schedules Chamberlain Harris copied — both of which show Trump made use of stolen classified documents for his own personal benefit; such an indictment might focus on the fact that Trump made classified documents available to others, including non-staffers, too
• An 18 USC 793 indictment making it clear that Trump sought out some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets in advance to take with him when he left; such an indictment might plausibly include a 18 USC 2071 charge, which with conviction, disqualifies someone from holding federal office (though that punishment is constitutionally suspect)
• An Espionage Act indictment making it clear that documents Trump is believed to have stolen have not yet been retrieved and tying gaps in surveillance footage to business meetings at Mar-a-Lago with foreigners reflecting Smith’s recent focus on Trump’s business deals

We don’t know how Jack Smith will charge it if he does (or where, which for reasons I laid out here, is critically important). But the very last thing Smith is known to have done — the one thing he has done since what WaPo described as the last known grand jury meeting on May 5 — is obtain 16 documents from the Archives advising Trump about whether or how he should declassify specific records.

In a May 16 letter obtained by CNN, acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall writes to Trump, “The 16 records in question all reflect communications involving close presidential advisers, some of them directed to you personally, concerning whether, why, and how you should declassify certain classified records.”

[snip]

According to the letter, Trump tried to block the special counsel from accessing the 16 records by asserting a claim of “constitutionally based privilege.” But in her letter, Wall rejects that claim, stating that the special counsel’s office has represented that it “is prepared to demonstrate with specificity to a court, why it is likely that the 16 records contain evidence that would be important to the grand jury’s investigation.”

The special counsel also told the Archives that the evidence is “not practically available from another source.”

The letter goes on to state that the records will be handed over on May 24, 2023 “unless prohibited by an intervening court order.”

Smith would have obtained these records last Wednesday, three weeks after the last activity of the grand jury.

You don’t hold off on indicting someone to obtain such records — the content of which Smith surely already knew from interviews with those who wrote the documents — solely to indict on obstruction.

There’s literally no predicting how Republicans would respond to a stolen documents indictment. But Barr and McCarthy have been laying the foundation to use it to finally split with Trump for months. And if such an indictment included a 18 USC 2071 count, it would present the additional dilemma for Republicans that if an inevitable constitutional challenge of the statute failed, their leading candidate could not legally be President.

It matters, too, that Jack Smith is a white male who has said literally nothing since he was appointed, not an elected Black prosecutor. It matters that Merrick Garland didn’t take the bait last week (though virtually every journalist did), when Trump responded to news of an imminent indictment by trying to turn this into a legal fight between him and Joe Biden’s appointed Attorney General, rather than him and laws his own advisors told him not to break.

I don’t know what to expect from a hypothetical stolen documents indictment; nor does anyone else. But I do know that if it drops in the next month or so, if it is perceived as legitimate and serious, it provides an opportunity for Republicans who have long been seeking an opportunity to split with Trump.

January 6 conspiracy

Finally, there are potential charges tied to January 6, which may have to wait on appellate certainty around the presumed lead charge, 18 USC 1512(c)(2) or may require an interim set of charges against others.

Aside from expecting some conspiracy charge under that obstruction statute, though, we have no idea what such an indictment might look like. Here are some possibilities that would affect how the GOP responds:

Trump could be charged with inciting the attempted assassination of his Vice President. Smith — and DOJ prosecutors before him — spent a lot of time obtaining details about the communications between Mike Pence and Trump in advance of insurrection, as well as on Trump’s inaction that day. While it would be the most aggressive potential charge, there is evidence to support it. How would mainstream Republicans respond if Trump were charged with siccing a mob he knew to be armed on a lifelong GOPer, someone who will be an announced primary challenger to Trump by then?

Trump could be charged with aiding and abetting the near-murder of Michael Fanone. I’ve laid out how distinctly DOJ treated the prosecution of Danny Rodriguez’ co-conspirator. Prosecutors aired footage from Ellipse speeches rather than excluding it from trial, as DOJ has successfully done with dozens of other defendants. DOJ developed evidence to show Rodriguez responding viscerally and violently to Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s Ellipse speeches just hours before he walked to the Capitol and tased a cop defending it. Rodriguez confessed to the FBI he knew in advance such casualties might be necessary. If DOJ were to implicate Trump in such an assault — something Judge Amit Mehta said was at least plausible over a year ago — it would implicate Trump in the worst assault of an officer that day.

Trump could be charged with conspiring with convicted seditionists. As I laid out here, Trump asked Alex Jones to bring his mob to the Capitol, and after Jones brought the mob there, the Proud Boys exploited those bodies to attack the Capitol. Trump is — as an exhibit introduced in the Christopher Worrell case (whose guilty verdict was closely reliant on evidence implicating Roger Stone) showed — literally the coin of the Proud Boys gang.

DOJ emphasized the import of Trump’s Stand Back and Stand By comment from the opening arguments of that sedition trial. Those are just some of the reasons why it is possible DOJ could charge Trump for conspiring not just with Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, but also with men already convicted of sedition. Such a charge would take more time to develop — but charging Trump with conspiring with the Proud Boys is completely within the realm of conspiracy law.

Trump’s efforts to cheat could damage swing-state Republican parties. Before Trump asked Republicans from seven swing states to help him create fraudulent certificates in an attempt to steal the election, Kenneth Cheesebro wrote down (!!!) that such an effort would be legally problematic in Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. It’s bad enough asking key Republicans to break the law to help win an election; it is insane that Trump’s lawyers wrote down that it would be illegal before asking them. Of those four states, only Republicans in Pennsylvania took adequate efforts to protect themselves legally from Trump’s requests that they submit fraudulent certificates to the Archives. That means it is possible that DOJ will charge some of the most prominent Republicans in precisely the states that Trump proved unable to win in 2020. Such charges could align Trump and those Republican parties on the same side, or it could really piss off those whom Trump’s recklessness endangered. In Georgia, at least, some prominent Republicans have chosen to testify against others if it means avoiding jail time themselves and I could see Republicans in other states making the same choice.

Trump could be accused of cheating Republican small donors. Trump’s success in 2016 and since has always built off his success at fundraising from small donors. But even as he reaped millions from such efforts, he played fast and loose with campaign finance law, violations of the law for which Republican Federal Elections Commissioners have thus far refused to punish him. Now Jack Smith is reportedly considering criminal charges for the same kind of conduct — in fact, criminal charges tied to claiming he was going to pursue election integrity but then paying lawyers for unrelated legal exposure. Such charges for defrauding his supporters — parallel to the successful charges SDNY prosecuted in the Build the Wall case — would make it clear that Trump has been cheating loyal Republicans for years. They may not care in bulk, but some of the Build the Wall victims did. Such charges might also limit the ways Trump could fundraise going forward. Republicans might not care about the fraud itself, but they would care if a presidential candidate might be disadvantaged financially because of alleged crimes he had committed in the past.

Obviously, we don’t know whether these prosecutors will charge and if so with what (though in both the Georgia and stolen documents case, prosecutors look poised to ask a grand jury for an indictment). The Georgia case is the only one where we have a good idea of timing (though that timing is guaranteed to matter for the primary).

Trump actually used the Russian investigation brilliantly to win personal loyalty from Republicans who had previously been tepid to him (something I’ve been meaning to write up). The Alvin Bragg indictment, similarly, helped him at least in the short term. Trump’s bio on his failed media site literally equates the pursuit of him with an attack on his aggrieved supporters.

This is an utterly central part of his brand, the conceit that totally justified legal pursuits of him were really just an attack on the core identities of angry white nationalists.

And that brand has worked stupendously well. They love him because he is a suspected criminal according to the code of their imagined Deep State. There’s some reason to believe that Boris Epshteyn, a political advisor gatekeeping his legal advisors, has pursued a strategy in the stolen documents case that emphasizes this confrontation even while putting Trump at far greater legal risk.

Thus far, Trump has successfully used his own legal exposure as a way to grievance-monger with other Republicans, building loyalty every time his own legal jeopardy increases. If he were able to seal the GOP nomination before more serious indictments drop, he might do the same here.

But the possibility — the likelihood even — of criminal charges before he makes this equation into the GOP slogan for the entire 2024 election may disrupt that power.

The next three months, before the primary formally starts with a debate, are likely to be unprecedented in the history of presidential elections. Because they are unprecedented, literally no one can envision how those events will affect the primary, even if we know what the charges were and who else will get charged.

What we can be sure of, though, is that the old stale horse race analysis won’t apply to this race.

Update: I should have made something clearer. This analysis, about the impact of potential indictments alone, is meant to be separate from the possibility he’ll be convicted of these crimes. It is virtually impossible that Trump would be convicted before November 2024, and barring a successful application of 18 USC 2071, none of these charges would prevent him from being elected.

Rather, the argument here is that these indictments have the ability to alter the loyalty calculus for Republican voters. I’m not even arguing that will work against Trump! There are a number of ways it could actually help him, at least through the primary. All I’m saying is that each of these potential indictments carries with it the possibility of upending the loyalty that the NYT described, and doing so in ways that are so unprecedented (even setting aside the way Trump himself is almost unprecedented in the US), that no one will really know how it’ll all fall out.

And that’s probably why more Republicans keep hopping into the race.

[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

It’s been a while since we had a chat about the crustpunk Nazi bar known as Twitter. The dead-ending bird decided press the issue for us.

~ 3 ~

Community members have been asking in comments about the now-empty widget in the right-hand vertical navigation zone.

It’s dead, Jim.

The widget in the right-hand navigation column which featured latest tweets by emptywheel contributors no longer works because Elon Musk changed the business model at Twitter yet again, requiring users of Twitter’s API to pay $42,000 to continue to do so.

That kind of money can buy a lot of original reporting as well as platform updates and hosting.

The original developers of that widget also stopped servicing it years ago.

It will be replaced at some time in the near future with a Mastodon or Fediverse-friendly widget though we don’t have an estimated time to completion.

Bear with us on this matter, please and thanks.

You can continue to follow Marcy, bmaz, Ed Walker, and Jim White on the bird app without having to log in –- just click on the embedded links. Unfortunately this will also count as engagement at the crustpunk Nazi bar which Musk will use to continue to claim the bird app is a going concern.

Whenever the major news outlets and U.S. officials both elected and appointed – yes, taxpayer-funded persons are using the crustpunk Nazi bar – get their heads out of their asses and migrate from the Nazi bar, more of Team emptywheel will move as well. But as long as the media and government entities continue to use the Saudi-funded right-wing mouthpiece the bird app has become, some of the team will tweet there.

As for the exorbitant and extortive fee Musk wants for API access, the damage is not just emptywheel readers being unable to read tweets through this site.

Now academic researchers and NGO monitors of hate speech, illegal activity, disinformation, and foreign influence may no longer be able to access bird app content. That’s not a bug but a feature.

~ 2 ~

Speaking of hate speech and illegal activity and other content typically moderated by reputable social media platforms, Mike Masnick at Techdirt created and shared an excellent game in which players can experience what moderators must do to boot crap out of comments and still keep their jobs:

(Side note: Techdirt left the bird app this past week because of the $42K fee. Good for them.)

Moderation here at emptywheel is not as strenuous as Masnick’s Moderator Mayhem game because this site’s traffic simply isn’t a big factor 95% of the time. We can also predict most traffic spikes which lead to trolling upticks based on news events and specific posts as well, unlike most Big Tech social media platforms.

But the fuzzy nature of some comments which moderators must screen can be challenging and is likely to be more so over time here and at the big platforms as influence operations incorporate AI to weasel around moderation.

Unlike the Big Tech social media platforms this site doesn’t demand community members provide a cell phone number or verifiable email address or other personal data which links them personally to content they share in comments. It’s a careful balancing act between recognizing legitimate human participants commenting in good faith and assuring them privacy. Moderation at Big Tech socmed platforms compromises privacy to eliminate the necessity of validating legitimate community members.

Balancing community members’ privacy and site security means we spend a bit more obvious effort asking community members who want to comment to create and maintain a username which can be readily recognized over the history of their comments. The emergence of AI will make this more important to prevent spoofing of established community members.

All of which means emptywheel community members will continue to be nagged for a unique username consisting of a minimum 8 letters which they will use every time they comment, or risk moderation.

For more perspective on moderation, it’s worth reading Vanity Fair’s article about new socmed platform Bluesky’s problematic approach (or lack thereof) to moderation. You’d think Jack Dorsey would have had this nailed down before launch given his experience at Twitter but no – he’s proven he’s another “free speech absolutist” which is just code for crustpunk Nazi bar owner/operator.

~ 1 ~

Aside from how the bird app and moderation affects emptywheel’s site, the bird app continues to find out about its fucking around.

Or rather, certain persons foolish enough to trust Elmo and the bird app after he fired ~85% of its employees are finding out about Elmo’s fuckery.

In a debacle rivaling SpaceX’s 4/20 Starship launch explosion, we’ve all heard by now about Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis’ spectacular implosion on soft launch last Wednesday when Twitter Spaces failed to work as expected during his presidential campaign launch announcement.

One of Twitter’s top engineers, Foad Dabiri, quit on Thursday, amid much speculation the exit was due to the Twitter Spaces failure and not a resignation but a separation.

You’ll note the first comments at that Yahoo News piece are Elmo fanboi trolls who blame the Twitter Spaces’ failure on sabotage.

The other shoe dropped Friday: it seems Elmo didn’t pay the bill for the Redis Labs software which handled audio streaming traffic.

The best engineers in the world can’t turn a deadbeat into a viable production platform. No wonder the engineer left; one might wonder if Dabiri was a green card employee who had no choice to stay until it was obvious it would damage his personal cred.

The failure reflected badly not only on Elmo and Twitter but on DeSantis. Why would any sentient being risk their next desired job on a platform which has been riddled with problems since Elmo bought it, let alone a platform run by a guy who has twice tweeted supportive comments about a rival candidate Sen. Tim Scott and is in part funded by another major campaign contributor, Larry Ellison?

That’s just begging for an opportunity to find out.

~ 0 ~

As with all social media platforms, your mileage may vary. Engage wisely.

Raw emotions positively dominated a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. this week as the Justice Department secured significant sentences for two more Oath Keepers involved in a larger conspiracy to forcibly stop America’s transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021. 

On the heels of an 18-year-sentence delivered to a defiant Elmer Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right group, and a 12-year-sentence handed down to Kelly Meggs, Rhodes’ deputy on the 6th, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins, once the founder of the Ohio Regular Militia, to 8.5 years and Kenneth Harrelson, a ground team leader on the 6th, to four years. Both were acquitted of the sedition charge in this case but they were found guilty of multiple felonies including serious obstruction charges. Sedition itself is rarely prosecuted in the United States and rarer still are these prosecutions successful since the bar to prove this sort of conspiracy is set so high. 

This week marked a victory for the Justice Department, the rule of law, and the victims of Jan. 6 even if Donald Trump, the man who started it all, has yet to bear any real legal responsibility for his role in inciting an attack on the U.S. Capitol to stay in power. 

That day may come. But in the meantime, the willing pawns in Trump’s betrayal of the U.S. Constitution and common decency alike will now begin to serve their time. 

Underlining the severity of events, prosecutors initially sought an 18-year sentence for Watkins noting the jury’s conclusion that her true objective on Jan.6 was to storm the Capitol, use her body—and the bodies of her recruits—to violently obstruct the certification of the 2020 election, and intimidate Congress and impede police. 

Judge Mehta told a highly emotional Watkins in court Friday that though she was acquitted of the most serious charge, at the time of Jan. 6 she was nevertheless a self-professed Oath Keeper who conspired to mar and disrupt democratic proceedings and lead recruits who, he believed, wouldn’t have been there but for her leadership. That would include, Mehta noted, Oath Keepers Bennie and Sandra Parker. She also led Donovan Crowl and Graydon Young into the fray. 

Watkins was on the Nov. 9, 2020, GoTo Meeting with Stewart Rhodes and other Oath Keepers, where, Judge Mehta described, the origins of a violent conspiracy began to emerge. Before sentencing, the judge told her she “knew exactly what Rhodes had said, [and] was listening carefully on the call.” 

In that meeting, Rhodes said he had abandoned all hope of a peaceful way to keep Trump in office or stave off a civil war. There was “nothing left but to fight,” and “we’re not getting out of this without a fight,”  he said in November 2020. 

He was primed for violence and ready to issue orders. Watkins was ready to take them. 

She would ask Rhodes then about providing weapons for Oath Keeper events, Mehta noted, pointing to a discussion about transporting altered, weaponized pool cues. She and Oath Keeper Donovan Crowl called them “nightsticks.” 

The foreseeable violence of Jan. 6 was evident in her constant willingness to prepare for it in the days and weeks leading up to the certification, Mehta said. And on that day, Watkins used an “aggressive, assaultive” posture and was “purposeful” as she coursed through the Capitol. Communications between her and others like Oath Keeper Donovan Crowl showed she wasn’t in D.C. merely to provide a security detail for Trump VIPs or to protect Trump supporters attending speeches like she and her defendants argued at trial.

She understood why Oath Keepers had set up the arsenal of weapons they dubbed a “quick reaction force” or a “QRF” at a hotel in northern Virginia, Mehta said. She brought an AR-15 from her home base of Ohio to Winchester, Virginia on the 6th. At trial, she said she decided to leave it at Crowl’s property there because she worried cleaning staff at the hotel outside of D.C. (the QRF) would “freak out” if they saw them. 

In court Friday, Mehta told Watkins he believed she would have gone to get weapons if Rhodes had asked her and it was “small comfort” that she had left her own personal weapon further behind. 

In any event, it is unlikely Watkins would have needed to drive hours back to Winchester anyway: The arsenal at the hotel in Arlington, Virginia, was just over the Potomac River from the U.S. Capitol, and it had more weapons than Oath Keeper Terry Cummings had seen in one place since his time in the military, he testified in October.

Watkins was part of the first stack, or line formation, inside of the Capitol. Leading the group on the ground was Kelly Meggs. He was sentenced to 12 years for seditious conspiracy earlier this week. Watkins used Zello, a walkie-talkie messaging app to communicate her maneuvering inside the Capitol and Mehta said there was no doubt that she pushed her way past police and headed toward the Senate. She could be seen and heard in footage urging “push! push! push!” and encouraging rioters to overrun police. 

Watkins kept some of her communications tied to Jan. 6 intact but others she deleted, and this, both the jury and Judge Mehta concluded, indicated an intent to conceal her activities and obstruct an investigation into her crimes after she was identified in press reports in the wake of the attack. He told Watkins he didn’t know if there was a direct connection between Rhodes’ orders to Oath Keepers to delete communications after the 6th and her decision to remove her own communications but he considered it obstruction nonetheless. 

Mehta agreed to a terrorism enhancement sought by the Justice Department but still went below the guidelines. He was sympathetic to her and her background. Watkins is transgender and she had a difficult upbringing in a strict religious household. Once in the Army she temporarily went AWOL because of harassment from a bunkmate who discovered her online searches involving gender identity. Her military service didn’t earn her any special deference at sentencing. 

“I don’t think you’re Stewart Rhodes. I don’t think you’re Kelly Meggs. But your role in those events was more than a foot soldier. I think you can appreciate that,” Mehta told her in court Friday. 

She nodded slightly as he spoke to her. 

Watkins was racked with emotions during the sentencing hearing. She burst into tears the moment she took the podium and it was her chance to ask for mercy from the court. After somewhat composing herself, she spoke loudly though often her voice would quake as her tears flowed. She clutched a tissue for a few moments as she spoke. Her face flushed.

 “I wrote this letter to you today to express my feelings of remorse considering my participation in Jan 6. As I said previously, my actions and behaviors that fateful day were wrong and as I now understand, criminal. This is what has brought me before you today and why you must hold me responsible. The events of Jan. 6 are unfortunate and while I believe in peaceful protest and redress of government, violence is never the answer,” Watkins said.

She expressed her “strong” frustration with people who assaulted police and told Judge Mehta since she had been incarcerated she had studied video evidence online and emphatically claimed she had “solved the crime” of a police assault on Jan. 6 unrelated to her case.

She also said she accepted that “her actions in and around the Capitol inspired those people to a degree.” 

“They saw me there and that probably fired them up,” she said, noting how Oath Keepers were pat on the back as they ascended the Capitol steps. 

“At trial, I said I was an idiot for going in there. But idiots can be held responsible and this idiot must be held responsible,” she said. 

Watkins cried as she left the stand, saying she still loved her country and that it was never her intent to harm it or anyone. She regretted that Metropolitan Police Officer Christopher Owens was not present Friday. She wanted to personally apologize again though she aired the same sentiments at trial while he was in the courtroom. Owens, who was on the receiving end of Watkins’ push inside the Capitol, issued a poignant and painful victim impact statement two days before her sentencing. She was present for it but unable to address him then.

Judge Mehta’s empathy for Watkins was substantial. She had overcome a lot, he said. And in a tone that sounded stern yet near fatherly, the federal judge looked at Watkins earnestly, telling her he believed she was someone who could one day be a role model for others. 

“I’m happy you have found someone who loves you. You and he tried to make a go of it with your own business… you served as a firefighter and a medic, and frankly, I do believe that the purpose of the Ohio State Regular Militia was not to battle our government,” Mehta said. “But somewhere along the line, that all got waylaid and perverted. I don’t know what it was. Whether it was Alex Jones or other corners of the internet you found yourself in; you clearly began to have delusional thoughts about what the risks were if the other guy won and what you would need to do to ensure the safety of your countrymen.” 

No one with a “human bone in their body,” Mehta added, could hear Watkins’ life story and not feel some degree of compassion.

“You have overcome a lot. You are resilient. You are someone who could serve as a role model. I say that at a time when people who are trans are so readily vilified and used for political purposes. It makes it all the more hard for me to understand why there is still a lack of empathy for those who suffered that day. Maybe it’s part of the process, the journey,” Mehta said. 

The “lack of empathy” the judge referred to was tied to Watkins’ remarks in private calls reviewed by prosecutors and raised at sentencing. In one call, she had derided police who came under attack on Jan. 6 and spoke publicly of their post-traumatic stress. 

“‘Boo hoo, poor little police officers got a little PTSD, wah! ‘I had to stand there and hold the door open for people. Wah!'” Watkins had said, according to prosecutor Alexandra Hughes.

Her attorney, Jonathan Crisp, said Watkins had undertaken efforts at deradicalization. She’s been detained for two years. Mehta did raise the question with Crisp of how he could reconcile her seeming callousness in the phone call with her more remorseful presentation in court. The lawyer, who is a JAG and served in Iraq but did not see combat, admitted, “it may sound evil,” to make the comment but it came from an opinion that any wearer of any uniform in law enforcement or military service should expect that risk, danger and sacrifice effectively come with the territory. Crisp argued that wasn’t to diminish the unique circumstances of Jan. 6 and the unexpected conditions police were under, but that was the opinion, deluded as others may perceive it to be.

At her sentencing as well as at Rhodes and Meggs’ sentencing and later, at Harrelson’s, the judge made it a point to underline to each that their sentences would need to reflect the role they played and how serious it had impacted not just people of the United States but also the very people who defended the Capitol with their lives, forsaking their own families, self-interest and self-preservation instincts. 

Mehta said it was an officer’s job to expect sacrifice though this did not diminish their heroism in the face of something that, “I would dare say, even a police officer would have expected [on the 6th.]”

Roughly an hour after Watkins, her co-defendant Florida Oath Keeper Kenneth Harrelson was sentenced by Judge Mehta to four years in prison. Prosecutors initially sought 15. Much like it was with Watkins, Harrelson was deeply emotional before the judge. 

He was acquitted of seditious conspiracy. He was also acquitted of conspiracy to obstruct proceedings and destruction of property. The jury convicted him on just two of six counts that he faced: obstructing an official proceeding and conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging his duties. He did not testify at trial whereas Watkins, Rhodes, and co-defendant Thomas Caldwell, did. 

Harrelson was somewhat enigmatic in court. He was reserved throughout roughly 30 days of proceedings; reading from paperwork ceaselessly, his head down and face close to the pages before him. His lawyer, Bradley Geyer, while certainly not a shrinking violet when he would speak before the jury, was among the least chatty attorneys at trial, seemingly preferring to let Harrelson fade into the background. 

Harrelson wasn’t a prolific texter or user of social media and very few of his messages emerged in evidence. He deleted most and deleted Signal off his phone. The extent of his communications around the 6th is something that will remain a mystery for prosecutors for sometime and maybe forever. 

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler said in court Friday. 

Prosecutors considered Harrelson a “ground team leader” who took orders from Meggs. Another fellow Oath Keeper, Jason Dolan, told the jury in October he considered Harrelson to be his superior and it was Dolan who also helped transport weapons to the QRF in Arlington. Harrelson also participated in firearms training with Meggs and was close with Rhodes in the days leading up to the critical Nov. 9 GoTo meeting. Like Watkins, Harrelson heard Rhodes call for violence if Trump wasn’t permitted to stay in the White House (despite his defeat). 

At sentencing, Judge Mehta was unwilling to add leadership enhancements to Harrelson’s sentence because while he thought there were elements of Harrelson’s role that could fall into the leadership category, what he reviewed he didn’t consider dispositive proof that the Florida man “controlled” anyone in a significant sense on the 6th.

Harrelson went up the Capitol steps in the first stack led by Meggs and once atop, turned to wave at others to come inside. Once in, he and Dolan screamed “treason!” at police officers and “This is our fucking house!” Dolan told the jury when he was on the stand this was done to put fear into lawmakers preparing to certify the election. 

When law enforcement came calling for Harrelson after the 6th, he hid the AR-15 he brought to the D.C. area as well as the rifle case. He failed to tell investigators about several photos he took on the 6th during the melee. 

And, Nestler noted, he didn’t show any remorse in the days afterward. Quite the contrary: he continued to speak with Meggs, Rhodes and Oath Keeper and Roger Stone security goon Jeremy Brown. 

Mehta told Harrelson he believed he was just as responsible in many ways for the conspiracy as his cohorts on Jan. 6, including his superior Kelly Meggs. He knew the QRF was packed to the gills with weapons, for one, and his time in the Capitol—while fleeting—was not unimportant since it advanced the group’s mutual attempt to stop Congress from its work.

Oath Keepers like Caleb Berry testified at another Oath Keeper trial that Harrelson had bubbled over after leaving the Capitol because he had patted down an officer at one point and made a tantalizing revelation.

“It was clear as day in the video that you did pat down Officer [Ryan] Salke as you are leaving the building and if that were not enough, we had [Oath Keeper] Graydon Young who testified you did pat him down and Caleb Berry said you told him you did the pat down and said you were surprised at how little armor they had,” Mehta said. 

Mehta noted too how Berry, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding in July 2021, said Harrelson was “pumped” at this and excited. Then the men talked about how they could have been more effective if they would have brought gas masks and firearms. 

At the trial and at sentencing, Geyer emphasized how rioters burst into singing the National Anthem on the stairs. And while Geyer and the defendants had invoked that moment with a type of romantic patriotic reverence in court last year, on Friday, Mehta’s tone was pointed when he told the Army veteran” video may have indeed shown rioters singing the National Anthem on the Capitol steps as the Oath keepers ascended and burst inside,  but it, more importantly, showed him walking through the crowd to the landing. 

“And you are the first one. You were the first one to get close enough to see what was happening at the doors and what was transpiring there. Nevertheless, you enter and you immediately start recording and the words “treason!” are being uttered” Mehta said. 

Harrelson claimed once inside, he and Meggs attempted to “help” U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn after coming upon him in the small rotunda near then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office.

A jury may have agreed that as Harrelson made his way through a Capitol under siege, the Florida Oath Keeper would have, at the bare minimum, clearly understood this was not the place to be. The judge said he would only guess that the jury acquitted him of the conspiracy to obstruct charge because they didn’t agree beyond a reasonable doubt that he actually understood how Congressional proceedings actually worked. (Harrelson voted once his entire life and in a state election; had no political interests prior to his involvement with Rhodes and the Oath Keepers and had a very hardscrabble upbringing with a “junkie mom,” his attorney said, and an absentee father.) 

Harrelson has a one-point terrorism enhancement on his sentence because he did intimidate officials: staffers were trapped inside the office he stalked outside of; police inside, like Officer Dunn had been fighting off the mob, defending colleagues, helping people who were overcome, when Harrelson and Meggs came upon him, adding to his already crushing burden. 

When he spoke on his own behalf, Harrelson cried several times, sniffing hard with his body tightening up as he delivered remarks to the court. 

“I got into the wrong car at the wrong time and I went to the wrong place with the wrong people,” Harrelson said before going to explain how he got to D.C.. and was told to report to Michael Greene, a designated Oath Keepers operations leader on the 6th. Greene was acquitted of conspiracy at the third Oath keepers trial in March.

“I have no gripes with the government… I shouldn’t have been there. I should have paid more attention to what was being said [and] on my phone…to Officer Harry Dunn: I would like to truly apologize. when he came up those stairs and expressed that they were killing his friends and carrying out his buddies on stretchers,  all I said was ‘really’? I didn’t know what was happening on the west side…I didn’t know I was hurting anyone and I could have done more and I apologize. I think about that a lot,” he said, choking through tears. “I know I should have done more. I apologize.”

Harrelson continued on to say that he had “demolished” his life, loved his wife and children, was scared for them, and apologized to them as well. 

After Mehta sentenced him, and after the terms of his supervision were read and the Oath Keeper left the courtroom in his prison-issued jumpsuit, he turned his head to the pews and blew his wife a kiss. 

(Coming up this week at the federal courthouse: Oath Keepers and co-conspirators Roberto Minuta, Edward Vallejo, Joseph Hackett, and David Moerschel— all of whom were found guilty of seditious conspiracy—will be sentenced on June 1 and 2.)

After expressing zero remorse and heralding himself to a federal judge as a “political prisoner” who “like Donald Trump only committed the crime of opposing those who are destroying our country,” Oath Keeper Elmer Stewart Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role leading and orchestrating a seditious conspiracy to stop America’s transfer of presidential power by force on Jan. 6, 2021. 

It would have been surprising if Rhodes took any other tack when it was his chance to speak. 

But Rhodes offered no surprises at the Prettyman courthouse in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. 

He was unrepentant, just as he was at trial when he testified on his own behalf for a little over a day. Even then, as a jury actively held his fate in their hands, he publicly smeared proceedings in jailhouse interviews while comparing himself to Nelson Mandela. And just four days ago, in yet another interview from jail, Rhodes kept up The Big Lie. 

The 2020 election was fraudulent, he argued, and the U.S. government had launched a “terror campaign” on Jan. 6 defendants. Four days ago he called for “regime change” and in words that could haunt any appeal of his conviction in the future, he added: “We’re going to have to stop it, the American people” and “It’s not going to stop until it’s stopped.” 

In his bright orange jumpsuit on Thursday, Rhodes gripped the sides of the podium as he read eagerly from his lengthy remarks, perhaps soothed by the sound of his own voice. 

“All Jan. 6 defendants are political prisoners. They are grossly overcharged. A steep sentence here won’t help or deter people, it will make people think this government is even more illegitimate than before,” Rhodes said.

He continued on to issue what sounded like a veiled threat with his voice moving from even and calm to more emphatic as his tone was slightly raised. 

“Characterizing Trump supporters as racists, fools and led down the primrose path by Trump as fools doesn’t help either,” Rhodes exclaimed. “My goal will be to be an American Solzhenitsyn to expose the criminality of this regime.”

He said his guilt was “preordained” and told presiding U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta claims that he is a white supremacist should lead him to “sue for defamation.” He said the “regime change” he hoped for a few days ago meant he hoped Trump would win in 2024. He went on a tear about leftist violence and antifa. Rhodes may impress himself or his supporters with such diatribes, but Judge Mehta appeared thoroughly unimpressed. (Mehta has presided over three Oath Keepers trials alone in recent months and his familiarity with this defense is arguably second to none.)

So long did Rhodes’ defiant remarks ramble on that Mehta actually interrupted him at one point and quite politely reminded him that his time speaking was finite. 

When Rhodes was finally done, Mehta looked at the Oath Keeper leader. On Thursday, Rhodes met Mehta’s eyes only sometimes. He frequently jotted down notes as Mehta spoke. 

“Mr. Rhodes, you are convicted of seditious conspiracy. You are a lawyer. You understand what that means,” Mehta said. 

For those who are not, Mehta provided a background. It was true, he said, neither Rhodes nor his conspirators assaulted police. It was true there were those who “did worse” in this regard on Jan. 6 than Rhodes specifically or members of his organization. 

But Rhodes is unique nonetheless. The seditious conspiracy he led against the United States is the most serious crime one can commit against this government, Mehta said. 

“It is an offense against the government to use force. It is an offense against the people of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes. 

The Oath Keeper founder looked right at the judge at this comment. 

“This isn’t confined to one day or how you reacted… it is a series of acts in which you and others committed to use force, including potentially with weapons against the government of the United States as it transitioned from one president to the other. And what was the motive? You didn’t like the new guy. I get it. But let me be clear to you, Mr. Rhodes, and anyone else who is listening: In this country, we don’t paint with a broad brush, and shame on you if you do,” Mehta said.

He continued: “What we cannot have, what we absolutely cannot have is a group of citizens who because they did not like the outcome of an election and don’t believe the law was carried out in the way they believe it should be, for them to take up arms and foment a revolution. That’s what you did. Those aren’t my words. Those are yours… you are not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes. You are not here for your beliefs or because Joe Biden is president or because you supported the other guy.”

The evidence presented to jurors was convincing beyond a reasonable doubt, Mehta underlined. And though Rhodes has been quick to whine about unfair jurors, Mehta reminded him Thursday that it was this jury that acquitted him of multiple other counts. 

“But they found you guilty of sedition. That was a jury of your peers. Make no mistake about it,” Mehta said. 

Telling Rhodes the enduring legacy of Jan. 6 belonged to the police and people working on Capitol Hill that day who “protected this democracy as we know it,” Mehta emphasized how law enforcement officers “laid their bodies on the line.” 

“You talk about keeping oaths? No one is more emblematic of that than those police officers. Their heroism, their stamina, their courage. But for their acts, it could have been a far uglier day than it already was and it is one of the blackest stains on our country. People shouldn’t forget that,” he said. 

In the days leading up to Jan. 6, Rhodes convinced dozens of people to come to Washington, D.C. simply because he called on them to do so, the judge said. 

“You sir, present an ongoing threat and peril to this country and to the fabric of this country. You are smart, charismatic, and compelling and that is frankly, what makes you dangerous,” Mehta said. “Anyone think for a moment that Joseph Hackett would come to D.C. with a weapon to fight in the streets? That only happens because of you, Mr. Rhodes.”

Everyone Rhodes called to D.C. for Jan. 6 was a victim of the “lies and propaganda” he shared. It would have been one thing, the judge noted, if Rhodes had looked at what happened on Jan. 6 and said anywhere in his communications with Oath Keepers or in public that it wasn’t a good development. But he didn’t. He celebrated the carnage. 

And just three days after the attack on the Capitol, Rhodes wasn’t dialing it back. 

At trial in November, Jason Alpers, a military veteran and government witness, testified that he met with Rhodes on the night of Jan. 10 in a parking lot outside of an electronics store. Alpers said he was asked to meet with Rhodes by one of Alpers’ former employees. Rhodes, Alpers said, wanted to pass a message to Trump.  

Uneasy about the meeting from the outset, Alpers secretly recorded Rhodes. The recording was played for jurors. 

“If he’s not going to do the right thing, and he’s just going to let himself be removed illegally, then we should have brought rifles,” Rhodes told Alpers. “We could have fixed it right then and there.”

Rhodes said he would have hung then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from a “fucking lamppost.” 

The Oath Keepers defense has hinged almost entirely on the claim that members did not come to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to foment violence, but to act as a “security detail.” 

After the judge read Rhodes’ own words back to him from that Jan. 10 meeting, Mehta noted: “Doesn’t sound like you were there for a security detail.” 

Mehta pointed to Rhodes’ comments during a “Freedom Corner Rally” broadcast from the jailhouse four days ago and how Rhodes said, “at the risk of another charge, I’m going to leave it at that” after he mentioned finding a “way to fix this” situation for Jan. 6 defendants.

With just a hint of exasperation, Mehta told the 58-year-old: ”Nothing has changed, Mr. Rhodes. Nothing has changed.”

“The reality is, based on the words we hear you speak, the moment you are released, you will be prepared to take up arms against your government. Not because you think the wrong president is in office but because you think that is an appropriate way to have redress of government when the law is applied in a way you don’t think it should be,” Mehta said. 

And then perhaps encapsulating the very gravity of his decision, Mehta told Rhodes that when the Oath Keeper found himself in a bad place, “everyone else did too, leaving everyone as objects of his willingness to engage in violence.”

“And we just cannot have that in this country,” Mehta said.  

In an interview during a break in proceedings Thursday, U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn told me it was clear that Rhodes had no remorse. 

“He didn’t care how much time he got,” Dunn said. 

The sentence brought him little comfort, he said. 

Rhodes is “misguided,” and he is fixated on assigning himself labels, Dunn said. Rhodes picked “political prisoner” as his label because he certainly wasn’t going to choose the more accurate one of “insurrectionist,” Dunn said. 

If Trump is elected in 2024 or Ron DeSantis wins the White House or there is any political candidate that has sympathy for seditionists, Dunn expects there could be pardons for Oath Keepers in the future. DeSantis has already said he would consider them. Including one for Trump. 

“That’s why we need to make sure they don’t get the opportunity to pardon them. That’s why we have to have people vote for people who aren’t insurrectionists or seditionists. There is a possibility it could happen we have to make sure it doesn’t. We the American people,” Dunn said. 

Rhodes’ sentence gave him little solace. Dunn said while it was abundantly clear to him that Mehta understood the threat Rhodes poses to society until there is also accountability for Trump, lawmakers, or even some of the influencers involved with undertaking or promoting the violence and destruction of Jan. 6, he genuinely worries about what is ahead.

“My heart and mind still wander about this looming threat. It’s hard to find comfort knowing this threat still exists,” Dunn said. 

A day prior, when Dunn delivered a victim impact statement to the defendants, Rhodes rarely looked at Dunn. He was writing notes most of the afternoon. On occasion, he did look up though his face was expressionless. 

Dunn described how the violence on Jan. 6 upended his life and left him, nearly 900 days later, “a shell of his former self,” Rhodes didn’t look up then. Then Dunn uttered three words that snapped the extremist leader right to attention: “real oath keepers.” 

Dunn was describing how on the day he testified at the Oath Keepers trial, he was originally scheduled to speak to first responders. But instead of talking to them—“real oath keepers, real victims”— he had to testify instead and tell the jury about “what actually happened” on Jan. 6. 

Dunn turned to look right at the defendants when he said this. Rhodes looked back at Dunn. His head was already cocked to one side but the “real oath keepers” remark prompted Rhodes’ neck to crane downward even further. He didn’t blink. He seemed to bristle instead, though he kept it just barely under the surface. 

Tasha Adams, who recently won her divorce after a years-long estrangement from Rhodes, told me in an interview Thursday that she thinks Rhodes is “incapable” of feeling remorse. 

“He only ever adjusts his version of reality to fit into his personal storyline. He believes he has done nothing wrong, that he has been wronged himself, and that someday he’ll get even,” Adams wrote in an email. 

In court Thursday, Rhodes was “speaking to get the attention of DeSantis and Trump,” she said. 

“He is in this for the pardon and the long game, even if that is not 2024. Even if it means 2028. He is not sorry. He is only sorry it wasn’t bigger,” she wrote. 

As for Adams, there is closure with the sentence.

She has been outspoken about her now ex-husband as she watched the trial from afar. She has publicly described his history of abusing her or isolating her. And when the government submitted its sentencing proposal, prosecutors included excerpts of an interview with Adams where she described the depths of Rhodes’ abuses against her and their children. 

“There was always violence in little ways. If he was really mad over something, he would want to do what he called martial arts training which included sticks and knives with a dulled edge or a knife with its edge taped. He would usually hurt us when he would do this training and it would always wind up with whoever he was angry at at the time. It was never just rough training or when he was happy with you… I don’t know if you can see all the scars on my arms. That’s from knife training. He would keep me pinned down in a chair….and he would hit the chair or sofa next to my head when he was upset with me,” she told Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy. 

“[I have] closure in that I know at least we have a couple of years of peace. I’m more focused on getting passed this next election, but at least we are all in the clear for a while.  It is also a statement. It says that Stewart is definitively not a good guy. Which is extremely powerful to me, after decades of people telling me what a good man is and how lucky I am,” Adams said Thursday.

Today, her children are happy and relieved, she said. 

“They were of course hoping for 25 years. But 18 is pretty solid. I think they’re mostly glad to just not have to think about him for a while,” Adams wrote. 

I also asked Adams what the big takeaway was for the day or what she thinks society can do to move away from extremism. 

“That is a very big question. I wish we could find a way to move away from the fear of change. I really believe that is what extremism is deeply rooted in. Extremists are a group of people whose self-worth is completely entangled with a way of life that society has grown up and left behind. We don’t need those old belief systems of race, and gender and control anymore. And yet they truly they believe they will cease to exist in any meaningful way without them. I don’t know if there is a way to solve it, beyond time and communication (whenever possible,)” she wrote. 

Judge Mehta also sentenced Rhodes’ 54-year-old co-defendant Kelly Meggs to 12 years in prison on Thursday. Meggs was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, too. (Rhodes was also convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding and tampering with documents and proceedings. Meggs was also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct a proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging their duties, and tampering with documents or proceedings.)

Meggs cried several times as he spoke in court, reeling at the pain he said he caused his family. Many of his family members, including his sister and son, attended the hearing. No one showed up for Rhodes. The moment Meggs’ sister, Crystal, approached the podium to provide character testimony, Meggs began to weep. His face turned red and his shoulders shook as he cried. A marshal handed him a box of tissues. 

“I truly apologize for being here,” Meggs said, choking through tears. “It has not only ruined my life but the life of my entire family.”

Meggs’ son, Zachary, asked Mehta to show mercy on his father. His father put him through college and employed him at a car dealership, he said. Without his father at home, he fears he won’t be able to keep the family’s house.

Meggs’ wife, Connie Meggs, was tried separately and found guilty in March for obstructing an official proceeding. Connie was one of several Oath Keepers who breached the Capitol in a stack formation on Jan. 6. 

Zachary is getting married soon and he told Judge Mehta he “would really like to have my father at the wedding.” 

Meggs’ lawyer, Stanley Woodward, also represents Connie Meggs and as such, didn’t find it prudent to read a letter she wrote in support of her husband in court. Meggs, as he cried, said his “deepest regret is the pain I’ve caused my wife.” 

“I have failed her. I have caused my wife more pain than she should ever deserve, incarceration and home confinement for two years all because of me,” he said. 

Meggs also lamented how he lost his life as he knew it, including things like cars and retirement accounts. 

“Everything has been taken away… I’ve been taken away from my family for 828 days. I want to apologize to everyone I’ve let down,” Meggs said amid tears.

Meggs also addressed Officer Dunn who was seated in the pews behind him. Though Mehta said neither the jury nor he ever found any evidence to support the claim by Oath Keepers at trial that they were “helping” Dunn on the 6th, Meggs nonetheless circled around that unsupported claim once more Thursday.

Then he apologized. 

“Officer Dunn, if my presence in any way affected you, I do apologize, sir,” Meggs said before a U.S. Marshal quickly approached him and told him to turn around and address the judge. Defendants are not allowed to turn to address people in the pews. 

During the trial, prosecutors showed jurors a patch Meggs wore on Jan. 6.  It read, “I don’t believe in anything, I’m just here for the violence.” 

Before he was sentenced, Meggs said yes, he did wear a patch that said “I’m just here for the violence.” 

“I wasn’t there to cause violence or instigate violence. I was there to keep the violence from happening to anyone. It’s what I had done so many times before and what I was doing that day,” Meggs said. 

Whether he forgot or omitted it for convenience, Meggs did not mention the front half of the slogan: “I don’t believe in anything.” 

Meggs admitted the language he used in numerous texts and Oath Keepers communications was vile, but he chalked it up to hyperbole. 

And as to his own public comments about the trial—which have included the assessment that it is “bullshit” and that the jury is biased—Meggs said only: “I don’t blame them for having bias. I would too if my town had been locked down for some violent event but I still think they were biased.” 

In truth, the jury was vetted for bias extensively by both prosecutors and the defense, and in the end, the final verdicts were a mixed bag of acquittals and convictions. 

Mehta addressed Meggs directly before sentencing him. 

There may have been dispute by the defense about whether Meggs was looking for Nancy Pelosi once inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, for example. But while on this day he called that language unfortunate and hyperbolic, nonetheless, “there was a lot of it,” Mehta said. 

Witnesses at trial described how Meggs went searching for Rhodes on Jan. 6 and turned to him for direction and leadership. Meggs also led efforts to coordinate and establish a huge arsenal of guns to be held at a hotel in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. This was what Oath Keepers dubbed a “quick reaction force” or QRF.

Mehta was at times incredulous with Meggs’ defense.

If Oath Keepers were there for security, why did they need the QRF? If the Oath Keeper talk was bombast and just bombast—well, Mehta said, he could understand a person believing that to be the case with one message.

But two? Or three? 

“I don’t know how anyone can stand here today and say this is just bombast. You were telling others on this ‘OK FL hangout chat,’ you were prepared to die and that’s what patriots did by the thousands,” Mehta said. 

And like he told Rhodes during his sentencing, it didn’t sound like Meggs was part of any security detail; the jury didn’t believe that and neither did he. Meggs didn’t even step foot in the area he claimed he was slated to be in to provide security, the judge added. And it didn’t help matters that Meggs had discussed bringing Proud Boys to D.C. to act as force multipliers on the 6th. 

The former chapter leader may disagree with the jury’s decision and that’s fair, Mehta acknowledged.

“But we have a process like this for a reason. In the mind of the 12 people in that jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, you committed conspiracy offenses in many ways that day,” Mehta said. 

The pain Meggs expressed in court was tangible and the judge said he felt it deeply.

“I have felt it deeply with every sentence I’ve made in connection to [Jan. 6] cases,” Mehta said. 

He added that he still finds it “astonishing how average Americans somehow transformed into criminals in the weeks before Jan. 6.”

“In contemplating violence to prevent the transfer of power: maybe you were just under the spell of Mr. Rhodes. I don’t know. Even today, I get it. I don’t really blame you for it. Unlike Rhodes, who I think poses a real threat, you’re not in the same category but you do continue to say things that are not consistent with reality,” he said.

This February, Meggs said in a media interview that police had invited people inside the Capitol and that he thought it was acceptable for him to walk through the door. Mehta also underlined the absurdity of Meggs’ claims that somehow if there was just more closed-circuit footage from the 6th made public, he would be absolved. 

That blurs the fact that there was access to every single hour of his conduct that day, Mehta said. 

In the end, Meggs still opposed the U.S. government by force.

“We have a process,” Mehta underlined. “It’s called an election. If your guy or gal loses, you hope for better results next time. You don’t take to the streets or join in for a war in the streets. You don’t rush into the U.S. Capitol with the hope of trying to stop the electoral count.”

On Friday, Rhodes’ and Meggs’ co-defendants Jessica Watkins and Kenneth Harrelson will be sentenced. Fellow co-defendant Thomas Caldwell’s sentencing date was originally set for this Wednesday but it was vacated on Monday as Judge Mehta awaits a ruling from the circuit in another Jan. 6 case that will provide a definition of the “corruptly” requirement in the obstruction of an official proceeding statute.

Judge Amit Mehta, one of the most measured judges in DC, just sentenced Stewart Rhodes to 18 years in prison.

In sentencing Rhodes, Judge Mehta observed,

I dare say Mr. Rhodes, and I have never said this to anyone I have sentenced: You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, the Republic and the very fabric of democracy.

Brandi Buchman will have a much more detailed report much later today, after fellow seditionist Kelly Meggs also gets his sentence.

Until then, consider this an thread for talking about Yale Law Grads who take up terrorism.

Update: Kelly Meggs, the car salesman who set up cooperation between the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, and Roger Stone before the attack and led the main stack into the Capitol, was sentenced to 12 years.

I’m really grateful we’ll have more of Brandi’s evocative reports from the courthouse. If you’d like to support Brandi’s coverage, please consider donating! 

I want to look at how CNN became a willing dupe of John Durham’s propaganda (and not for the first time, either).

An isolated clip of Jake Tapper, claiming the Durham Report “exonerates Trump” has gone viral. In much the same way that short clips of Kaitlan Collins’ Trump Town Hall have made the propaganda impact of that event even worse than the event itself, that clip has served as the equivalent of Bill Barr’s false claims about the Mueller Report, a premature and grossly inaccurate conclusion that served to pre-empt a more nuanced understanding of a deep reading of the report itself.

The clip came the day of the release of the report, seemingly before even a team of seven people could (and it’s clear, had) digested the full report, and to that extent, it made grand conclusions without understanding how the report itself totally undermines those conclusions. It closely parallels (though except for Tapper’s comment about exonerating Trump, is not even as bad as) an affirmatively problematic story that made the following misleading or affirmatively false claims:

• Special counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, according to a report compiled over three years by the Trump-administration appointee and released on Monday.
• Durham’s 300-plus page report also states that the FBI used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” to launch the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia but used a different standard when weighing concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
• Durham notes that the FBI did not open an investigation into a purported plan by foreign operatives to target the Clinton campaign but rather took other steps in response to those concerns, which included providing defensive briefings for the then-Democratic presidential nominee and her staff.
• Mueller found no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but investigators documented numerous contacts between Trump associates and Russians.

I’ll explain why each of these claims should be corrected. Before I do, I want to look at comments that Tapper and others made in the appearance from which the clip was taken: because they actually provided evidence that undermined Durham’s key claims and, with more substance, would demonstrate that Durham repeatedly engaged in exactly the kind of misconduct of which he accused the FBI.

These details are why CNN’s people surely believe their report was not as problematic as it has been treated. But it’s also precisely why CNN owes its viewers a follow-up that describes how Durham fails to meet the standard to which he held the FBI.

First, Tapper noted that the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, completed by a Committee led by Republicans, had concluded that FBI had ample cause for concern in 2016.

Rachel Cohen, who is a spokeswoman — communications director for Mark Warner who is the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, she notes — and this is important context — that the Senate intelligence committee spent 3- 1/2 years reviewing millions of documents and interviewing hundreds of witnesses, this is on Twitter, and concluded that the FBI had ample cause for concern in 2016.

She notes that the committee, the Senate intelligence committee at the time was led by Republicans. She’s referring to former North Carolina Senator Richard Burr.

Tapper then described some of those concerns: not just the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, but also Paul Manafort sharing polling information with Konstantin Kilimnik (the record actually shows he also briefed Kilimnik on the campaign’s strategy to win swing states).

It’s also true that there was a lot of smoke, right? I mean, there was that meeting between the Trump campaign, Kushner, Don Jr. and others, that whole thing about, if it’s what you say it is, I love it, especially later in the summer.

There is, you know, Manafort giving polling information to Konstantin Kilimnik. There is stuff as the Senate Intelligence Committee communications director points out that would raise alarms.

Finally, Sara Murray added another cause for concern: Trump’s public coziness with Putin.

MURRAY: Well, yeah. There’s also how sort of publicly cozy Donald Trump was when he talked about Putin, when he talked about Russia that sort of raised red flags for people throughout the campaign.

Tapper and Murray have, in raising Kilimnik and others, identified one of the gaping holes in Durham’s report (which I wrote about here): the way he minimized what the final results of the Mueller investigation were.

Durham mentioned the June 9 meeting. He did not mention Kilimnik’s name once. He mentioned Roger Stone only in suggesting that Fusion GPS had unfairly identified him as someone with potential ties to Russia, a suspicion utterly vindicated by the Mueller investigation. Durham mentioned Trump’s “Russia, are you listening” comment four times, including two references to people describing it as important background to the predication of the investigation, but he never once considers whether a presidential campaign asking a hostile foreign power for help is itself evidence of “collusion.” Durham did not mention that Michael Cohen had called the Kremlin during the campaign to chase a Trump Tower deal, something that Trump lied about publicly in the same presser where he made the “Russia are you listening” comment, and something Cohen lied about to Congress. Durham used an ellipsis to alter the meaning of a key passage of the Mueller Report (the kind of deceit for which Durham rightly prosecuted Kevin Clinesmith), then used a range of other dishonest tactics to hide the true results of the investigation into George Papadopoulos, where the investigation actually started.

Between them, Tapper and Murray identified one of the most fatal gaps in Durham’s report, one that completely undermines Durham’s complaint that there was insufficient predication to open the investigation because there was no evidence of “collusion” in Intelligence Community coffers at the time the FBI opened the investigation.

If the IC doesn’t know that the campaign manager on a presidential campaign has employed someone that — the investigation would ultimately conclude — was a Russian agent sharing information with several more Russian agents, is that proof that the FBI shouldn’t have investigated, or that the IC hadn’t investigated enough in previous years? If the President’s rat-fucker told people on the campaign he was in direct contact (per Rick Gates’ testimony) with a persona run by the GRU weeks before the GRU would release emails stolen from Hillary, is the FBI wrong for ultimately discovering that, or was the FBI instead remiss for not investigating that tie until almost a year after it first would have been identified?

And that’s why the way CNN headlines its reports is so problematic. The transcript itself uses a teaser that, “Special Counsel Durham Concludes FBI Never Should Have Launched Trump-Russia Probe.” The chyron erroneously claimed that Durham “conclude[d]” that the FBI should never have launched the investigation. The headline of the problematic report reads, “Special counsel John Durham concludes FBI never should have launched full Trump-Russia probe.” The lede of that report states that,

Special counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, according to a report compiled over three years by the Trump-administration appointee and released on Monday.

All are misrepresentations of what the report said, which the problematic report doesn’t clarify until sixteen paragraphs later. As Perez explained on Tapper,

Durham says that he sees reason for the FBI to at least take a look at some of the initial tips that led to what became Crossfire Hurricane. He said the FBI had reason to investigate, at least preliminary. What he doesn’t see is the reason for a full-blown investigation according to this report.

Durham’s judgment about the level of investigation not only ignores evidence presented at both trials about these various decisions (effectively, leaving out exculpatory evidence just as the FBI left out exculpatory evidence in the Carter Page applications). But he also never weighs the balance between a Full Investigation, which would last long enough to get through the election, at which point the FBI could engage in overt steps, with opening a Preliminary Investigation that might close before such steps could be taken. Indeed, many of Durham’s recommendations, as well as his complaints about the slow speed at which FBI did obtain very damning information on Trump’s associates, don’t account to the degree to which the FBI successfully shielded Trump from the impact of the disclosure of the investigation during the campaign, something the FBI failed to do for two investigations into Hillary during the same period.

And that’s why another point that Perez made is important.

Jake, one of the interesting — one of the things that stood out to me, if you remember the former president kept saying he was going to find evidence of deep state spying. Well, there is a part here that talks about a confidential human source, essentially a spy, who was tasked with going to a Clinton campaign fund-raiser. Let me repeat that. A Clinton campaign fund-raiser because the FBI had gotten information that somebody was saying that perhaps a foreign government might be expecting some favors from a future Clinton presidency.

So there you have it. The FBI was spying on the Clinton campaign, according to John Durham’s report.

To be very clear: This is not a judgment Durham made. It’s Perez’s judgment, instead, that applies the standards that Bill Barr and Durham adopted to be able to claim that the FBI “spied on” Trump’s campaign to the claims laid out by Durham about his purported comparison of the investigations into Hillary with the investigation into Trump. This is Perez reading Durham’s allegations on their face rather than parroting Durham’s conclusions.

Perez doesn’t note that there was another instance of an informant targeting Hillary in the Clinton Foundation investigation, the handling agents for which (and at least one likely witness for Durham) were shown to be biased in the DOJ IG Investigation. That’s another detail that — I noted — Durham left out of his report. Durham suggests that people like Strzok were predisposed to open an investigation into Trump, but never acknowledges that at least two of the FBI Agents investigating Hillary (and one of the FBI Agents investigating Mike Flynn) expressed pro-Trump bias in their FBI texts.

The fact that Perez busted Durham for adopting a double standard for his claims about the Trump campaign as he does to the Hillary campaign — again, precisely one of the problems he identifies in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation — makes these two misstatements in the published CNN report all the more unfortunate.

Durham’s 300-plus page report also states that the FBI used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” to launch the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia but used a different standard when weighing concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

[snip]

Durham notes that the FBI did not open an investigation into a purported plan by foreign operatives to target the Clinton campaign but rather took other steps in response to those concerns, which included providing defensive briefings for the then-Democratic presidential nominee and her staff.

These descriptions appear to be muddled (again, this report was written in the day of the release of the report). They either confuse the several investigations into Hillary that Durham describes or don’t address the Clinton Foundation one.

As for the Clinton Foundation investigation, even ignoring Durham’s silence about biased Agents on that team, Durham acknowledged that one office at the FBI opened a preliminary investigation into Hillary based solely off Clinton Cash. Durham made absolutely no mention about the tie between that unsubstantiated report and Trump’s eventual campaign manager — again, Durham here commits precisely the professional lapse he accuses the FBI of on the Carter Page application, hiding a tie to the campaign. Even on top of that, though, his ultimate comparison has several problems.

As an initial matter, the NYFO and WFO investigations appear to have been opened as preliminary investigations due to the political sensitivity and their reliance on unvetted hearsay information (the Clinton Cash book) and CHS reporting. 388 By contrast, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was immediately opened as a full investigation despite the fact that it was similarly predicated on unvetted hearsay information. Furthermore, while the Department appears to have had legitimate concerns about the Foundation investigation occurring so close to a presidential election, it does not appear that similar concerns were expressed by the Department or FBI regarding the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

One of three investigations was opened as a Full Investigation based off a source report and unverified documentary claims; if that investigation was okay, then making Crossfire Hurricane a Full Investigation upon receipt of the Steele dossier, however problematic, would have adopted the same standard. Furthermore, in Durham’s comparisons, he always leaves out the fact there was undeniably a crime committed before the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the hack against the DNC. The question was whether Trump’s associates had a tie to that undenied crime, not whether a crime had been committed. Yet, as Adam Goldman recently revealed, the FBI investigated Clinton Foundation for five years and never found a crime they could charge.

More importantly, it is rank nonsense for Durham to claim that the FBI didn’t have concerns about investigating Trump’s aides so close to an election with Crossfire Hurricane. The election is precisely why the FBI chose to use covert means like informants instead of sending out subpoenas. It is precisely why it was March before the FBI had obtained call records (using NSLs) on three of four subjects of the investigation. It is precisely why the FBI didn’t discover ties to Ivan Timofeev that George Papadopoulos hid during his early interviews with the FBI until later.

Many of Durham’s complaints in his report are that the FBI didn’t use overt means, like interviewing George Papadopoulos or obtaining his and Sergei Millian’s call records, during the election season, effectively a complaint that the FBI adhered to election season restrictions on investigative activity. That’s particularly notable given the NYT report that Durham tried — only to be thwarted by Nora Dannehy’s noisy resignation — to release a report during the pre-election time period. Durham basically complained that the FBI adhered to a rule he attempted to break.

As for the two foreign interference investigations that CNN seems to reference, the first was opened as a Full Investigation from the start, in late 2014. It’s unclear what the classified corroboration for this is, but as described by Durham, Hillary’s campaign explicitly rebuffed this offer.

Beginning in late 2014, before Clinton formally declared her presidential candidacy, the FBI learned from a well-placed CHS (“CHS-A”) that a foreign government (“Foreign Government-2”) was planning to send an individual (“Non-U.S. Person-I”) to contribute to Clinton’s anticipated presidential campaign, as a way to gain influence with Clinton should she win the presidency. 316 The FBI’s independent corroboration of this information is discussed in the Classified Appendix.

Upon receipt of this information and the predication it provided, Field Office-I sought to have one of two other better-positioned and higher-resourced field offices open a counterintelligence or public corruption investigation into these allegations, but Counterintelligence Division Executive Management directed Field Office-I to open a full counterintelligence investigation into the matter. 317

And Durham’s own report describes that it took 11 months before Hillary was briefed on this counterintelligence concern and Republicans got a defensive briefing over a month earlier than Hillary.

In line with the directive, the FBI ultimately provided defensive briefings to the officials or their representatives, though it took approximately 11 months from the receipt of the original allegations. 328

328 OSC Report(s) of Interview(s) of Field Office-1 Handling Agent-1 on April 23, 2020 and May 5, 2020; OSC Report of Interview of Headquarters Supervisory Special Agent-4 on May 28, 2020 at 5 – 7; OSC Report of Interview of David Archey on June 21, 2021 at 1 – 3 ( discussing the rationale for the debriefings regarding the threat from Foreign Govemment-2 and ECs documenting the September 1, 2015 briefing to a designated staffer on behalf of an elected official within the Republican party, and the October 15, 2015 defensive briefing Archey provided to Clinton’s personal attorneys).

Trump was briefed on the investigation into Mike Flynn in January 2017, six months after the opening of an investigation into his associates (and President Obama gave Trump a separate warning about Mike Flynn before that, in November).

So Durham’s complaint, effectively, is that Trump’s warnings came sooner than Hillary’s did, and he says that shows the FBI was biased against Trump! That’s confirmation bias, not evidence, yet another thing Durham accuses the FBI of while committing the same error.

There’s another problem with Durham’s complaint about the differential treatment of the defensive briefing (a concern that Durham chased after Chuck Grassley raised it, yet another case where Durham did — allowed Congress to influence an investigation — what he complained the FBI had done improperly with Crossfire Hurricane). The lead about the other country’s attempted influence campaign came from operatives of the country, not the campaign itself. The lead about the foreign influence into Hillary’s campaign was prospective, from someone outside the campaign; the lead from Papadopoulos was historical, from someone inside the campaign. That is, from the start, the FBI had reason to believe that Trump would accept help offered by Russia.

That, plus the results of the Mueller investigation, vindicate the logic behind the FBI delay on briefing Trump — that someone might have taken the Russians up on their offer. The Mueller investigation showed that:

• Don Jr gleefully accepted an offer of help
• Michael Cohen sought and received Dmitry Peskov’s assistance for a real estate deal during the campaign
• George Papadopoulos did obtain advance notice of Russia’s interference and pursued a back channel with Russia at least until July 2016
• On Manafort’s request, Stone did pursue advance access to the stolen Hillary emails (both Manafort and Gates testified Stone actually got advance notice of the Podesta drop, and Gates claimed to have gotten advance notice of the earlier DNC drop)
• In pursuit of millions in debt relief, Manafort provided Konstantin Kilimnik campaign briefing

With the exception of the June 9 meeting, these are all the results of the investigation that Durham omits, effectively more exculpatory evidence that he left out, yet another instance where Durham commits precisely the errors he complains about.

As Perez rightly noted, if you take what Durham describes about the other investigations rather than conclusions he draws off misrepresentations of those descriptions, it’s clear that the decisions the FBI took arose from different circumstances. In two cases at least — the use of biased informants and the delay in defense briefings — the facts actually show Hillary was treated worse than Trump. And that’s before you get into the leaks and Comey violations of FBI procedures the FBI made during the election season with Hillary.

That’s why it matters that, in its written report, CNN appears to go beyond even what Durham claims about this differential treatment. I don’t think Durham shows the FBI used a different standard when opening the investigation into election interference (though he does show they delayed a FISA application). Likewise, the evidence shows that the FBI did open an investigation into the foreign election interference, and then expanded it to cover a second country.

Although this information pertained to a foreign influence threat from a different country, the handling agent for CHS-A continued to work this threat under the existing counterintelligence case for the threat CHS-A reported regarding Foreign Government-2

If anything, the Durham report shows that the informant the FBI was running was permitted to engage in illegal activities with Hillary even after the campaign asked a foreigner not to come to a campaign event (this may be the incident Perez refers to).

CHS-A, however, did attend a fundraiser in January 2016, after providing same-day notice and receiving the approval of his FBI handling agent. 345 CHS-A reported in an email that Insider-1 “got cold feet” and was not going to attend, but the source file report indicates Insider­-1 was told by a representative of Clinton not to attend. 346 When Insider- I decided not to attend, he/she asked CHS-A to deliver a message of support. CHS-A provided the draft message to the handling agent, who received same-day approval from FBI OGC for the CHS to deliver the message at the event scheduled for later that day. 347

However, without the knowledge or prior approval of the handling agent, CHS-A had made a $2700 campaign contribution (the maximum amount at the time for an individual contribution) prior to the event, which CHS-A indicated he/she “made on [his/her] [credit] card” on behalf of Insider-I. 348 If true, the campaign contribution on behalf of a foreign national would violate Title 52 USC Section 30121 (“Contributions and donations by foreign nationals”). However, despite CHS-A’s claim that the contribution was made in his/her personal name, the Federal Election Commission records reviewed did not reveal any contribution in CHS-A’s name. Rather, Commission records corroborate a contribution paid by a credit card in the name of a close associate (who was a U.S. person) of CHS-A. CHS-A also told the handling agent that “[t]hey [the campaign] were okay with it. […]yes they were fully aware from the start” ofthe contribution being made on behalf of a foreign interest and CHS-A offered to provide a copy of the credit card charges. 349 Despite this offer by CHS-A to provide a copy of the credit card charges, we did not find any indication that the handling agent asked for or otherwise secured a copy. [my emphasis]

This looks like a poorly handled FBI informant attempted to frame Hillary during the election year, yet Durham nevertheless concludes from that that the FBI was biased against Trump.

This larger discussion — including Tapper and Murray’s ready list of all the damning details that Mueller found — is why CNN continues to err when it makes this claim, which appears to be part of its boilerplate.

Mueller found no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but investigators documented numerous contacts between Trump associates and Russians.

Of course Mueller found some evidence of a conspiracy — Tapper laid out some of that himself in his piece. Trump’s campaign manager shared the campaign’s swing state strategy with someone involved in the interference operation, and did so with the expectation he might get paid out of it. Ultimately, Mueller referred evidence of a CFAA conspiracy between Russia and Stone to DC USAO for further investigation, and he laid out but didn’t charge  Manafort with conspiracy for his August 2 meeting, more clarity on which seems to have taken years to develop. Manafort did, notably, plead guilty to conspiring with Kilimnik, ultimately deemed to be a Russian agent, for attempting to cover up their full ties to Russian-backed Ukrainians, an effort that started during the campaign (and included the son-in-law of an Alfa Bank founder, precisely one of the concerns raised by one of the Alfa Bank researchers).

Just in that one Tapper appearance, CNN has shown that it knows better than to make these claims. CNN has shown awareness of two of the numerous instances of which Durham failed precisely the standards he tried to criminalize with the FBI.

And that’s why this early report — a report just as toxic as Bill Barr’s more deliberate effort to misrepresent the results of an investigation — should be revisited. Particularly given that, as the problematic report and Murray’s appearance with Tapper make clear, Jim Jordan and others are going to use this as a political football.

If Jim Jordan wants to talk about the weaponization of government, Durham’s own failures should be the focus, not the claims he sustains only by violating precisely the standards he tried to criminally enforce.

Update: Corrected that the Tapper appearance was the day of the report.