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How Chuck Grassley’s Politicized Redactions Gave Putin Leverage over Trump

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After making Canada, Japan, Vietnam, and Switzerland go to the US and making the EU go to Trump’s golf course in Scotland to negotiate tariffs, Trump sent his real estate developer buddy, Steve Witkoff, to Moscow to negotiate tariffs with Vladimir Putin.

I would have low expectations that Witkoff, who has gotten his ass handed to him at every turn, would negotiate a reasonable deal with Russia in any case.

All the more so given the politicized release of old documents on Russia that Tulsi Gabbard has orchestrated in recent weeks.

Consider just this redaction in the classified Durham appendix that Chuck Grassley released last week.

As I laid out here, the redaction is designed to fool readers in several ways.

First, it helps to sustain a fiction that the draft SVR memo purporting to report Hillary Clinton approving a plan to smear Donald Trump is the first document in a series, and not the last. That, in turn, serves to suggest that what I call the Deep State memo, laying out a plan by SVR to frame Hillary came after the draft memo, rather than laid out a plan to fabricate the memo, complete with fabricated emails including Russian idioms attributed to Leonard Benardo.

But that’s not right. The Deep State email was, Durham described, sent on July 26. The draft SVR email incorporates an email fabricated on July 27.

Indeed, after this Deep State email, Russian spies talked about “mak[ing] [something]” — that is, fabricating emails — to “illuminate” how Clinton wanted to “vilif[y]” Trump and Putin, proposing an initial fabricated July 25 email promising to, “put more oil into the fire,” but not yet adding reference to the doping scandal that was contemporaneously a very sore subject for Russia. The email with the reference to the Olympics, dated July 25 but almost certainly fabricated on July 27, is the one that was incorporated into the draft SVR memo.

In response, those Russian spies said … we don’t know what, but we do know that they attached the fabricated July 27 email purporting to reflect Hillary approving that plan on July 26.

I’d love to know what that email says; it may make it more clear that this was all a great plan to frame Hillary Clinton, or it may reveal other parts of the plan, possibly pertaining to Guccifer 2.0. But I don’t need to know what it says to know that the email gives Putin great leverage over Donald Trump at the moment that Trump finally tries to assert a strong hand with the Russian dictator.

By hiding that email in an attempt to hide that what Trump has claimed for eight years was an effort by Hillary to frame Trump was — is, still — a wildly successful attempt by SVR to frame Hillary, Trump’s top spies — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director and Useful Idiom John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel — have all sustained a secret with Russia’s spies, a secret Kash has been chasing all that time, a secret that could legally implicate at least Ratcliffe and Kash (not least because they sustained this campaign during the time they were private citizens) in a crime.

Trump’s top spies are keeping a secret: the secret that for the last eight years Trump has carried out precisely the plan to frame Hillary Clinton that those SVR spies first ginned up on July 26, 2016.

And here’s the thing. Putin’s spies know much of what is behind that redaction. They can reverse engineer it because the footnote to it shows that the email in question is the one to which those Russian spies attached that fake July 27 email, nine years ago. They still have that email. Hell, it’s probably hanging in a gilt-edged frame somewhere, Putin’s trophy from a wildly successful attempt to compromise the Main Enemy.

So that redaction is not, as a classification redaction should, keeping any secrets from our adversaries. The Russian spies know what is too embarrassing for Grassley and Tulsi and Kash and Ratcliffe to release.

But we don’t.

And that’s why this entire frenzy to release more secrets just in advance of this meeting with Putin has made Trump far, far weaker.

Donald Trump cares more about his claims of grievance, a fake grievance that has always gotten him out of jams, than he does about America, to say nothing of Ukraine.

And Chuck Grassley’s willful protection of this secret between Putin’s spies and Trump’s has only served to give Putin leverage over Trump and over the United States.

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Old Man Transparency Chuck Grassley Confesses He Covered Up the ICA Annex for Five Years

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Just days after releasing the Durham Report classified annex with critical details censored, Chuck Grassley released Intelligence Community Assessment appendix summarizing the Steele dossier that John Ratcliffe had declassified for him five years ago, then ran to Xitter and claimed other people had been involved in a cover-up.

These people are so incompetent that each new release only does more damage to their case.

The dossier appendix didn’t help in 2020

Grassley released the appendix along with John Ratcliffe’s cover letter, dated June 10, 2020, explaining to Grassley and Ron Johnson that, “I am writing in response to your 22 May 2020 letter seeking the declassification” of the dossier annex and the March 2018 version of the 2020 HPSCI report released weeks ago.

Grassley and Johnson asked Ratcliffe to declassify these things the day after he was confirmed, the day Ratcliffe resigned from the House where (among other things) he served on HPSCI. Ratcliffe turned around the ICA annex just over two weeks after he was sworn in, but noted that the HPSCI Report was a Congressional Report not in custody of ODNI, and he would have to ask the HPSCI Chair — then Adam Schiff — to turn it over.

The right wing has complained that Schiff, possibly with then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, didn’t release the HPSCI Report.

But Ratcliffe released the ICA appendix during the period when Senators were releasing similar documents (including, via Mike Flynn’s attempt to renege on his plea agreement). And no one bothered to release this publicly. And when HPSCI Republicans updated their Report months later, they didn’t bother to include the Appendix itself in the 10-page section of their report attacking the dossier.

This is not an example of transparency. It’s an example of suppression.

The ICA annex proves right wing lies now

It’s clear why Grassley never released the document.

There are several things in the ICA annex — as opposed to the dossier — that right wingers misrepresent. As I noted, the GOP neglected to mention the caveat in the first paragraph, noting that the dossier was “highly politically sensitive information” for which US spooks had “only limited corroboration” and so “did not use it to reach the analytic conclusions of the CIA/FBI/NSA assessment.” It turns out the 2-page annex is barely a page-and-a-half (which means between HPSCI and I we’ve written far more about this document than exists in the document itself). HPSCI might rightly complain that the appendix didn’t describe that Steele had been closed for cause, but they misrepresent several other parts of their complaint, notably that Steele “collected this information on behalf of private clients and was not compensated for it by the FBI” and that “multiple Western press organizations” started printing it (they got the date wrong but to get to the larger scope of Steele’s press blitz, HPSCI did over a year of persistent investigation). The GOP complained that this section had classification markers, but the most substantive ones come in the 3-bullet section that compares the dossier content to existing intelligence (and besides, when the ICA was published on January 5, 2017, Steele’s identity was not yet publicly confirmed).

Perhaps most egregiously, the HPSCI Report misrepresents what is in the ICA appendix.

It claims “the dossier’s most significant claims–that Russia launched cyber activities to leak political emails–were little more than a regurgitation of stories previously published by multiple media outlets prior to the creation of a dossier.” I pointed out how that is wildly, affirmatively false. The most immediately apparent problem with the dossier were its claims about hacking conflicted with known details of the Russian campaign.

As pertaining to hacking, though — their primary focus — it’s actually not that the dossier parroted things that were public.

It’s that they affirmatively rebutted the most obvious conclusions from the ongoing hack-and-leak. For example, the first and several reports completed after that all suggested that the Kompromat that Russia had on Hillary was decades old material from when she traveled to Russia, not the hack-and-leak campaign rolling out in front of our eyes. A July 26, 2016 report, released after the DNC release and almost a year after the first public attributions of the APT 29 hack of State and DOD to Russia, claimed that Russia wasn’t having much success at hacking Western targets, a claim that anyone briefed on those APT 29 hacks (including the Republicans so taken with the SVR reports stolen in those hacks) would know was laughable. The most incendiary December 13 post attributed the troll campaign to Webzilla, not Yevgeniy Prigozhin. That is, the dossier wasn’t just delayed; it affirmatively contradicted most of the publicly known details about the election interference campaign and even more of the details that the ICA addressed closely.

But that claim was about the dossier, not the ICA annex, which included the following:

  • A 3-bullet section describing things in the dossier that “is consistent with the judgments in this assessment,” including
    • A bullet on Moscow’s aim, which was the excuse HPSCI used to put the dossier in the section it appears in at all
    • A single bullet on the dossier’s claims about the hack-and-leak, focused on Russian attempts to direct coverage of the WikiLeaks material
    • A bullet describing the dossier’s claim that Russia backed off its influence campaign as the election approached
  • A 4-bullet section about Steele’s claims about Trump’s flunkies, pitched as a defensive briefing

The defensive briefing section includes this complaint (it is just one of the several places where they complain how widely this disseminated, without recognizing most of that dissemination took place under Trump):

I’m unclear what right wingers want from Carter Page. By the time of the ICA, the FBI knew (from Stefan Halper) that Carter Page was hoping to set up a pro-Russian think tank with funding from Russia. And if you believe Konstantin Kilimnik, Page had been wandering around Moscow just weeks earlier, claiming to speak for Trump on Ukraine.

The near-miss looks like a direct hit

But here’s the most remarkable thing about the ICA appendix — which likely explains why Grassley didn’t release it in 2020.

Here’s that defensive briefing section:

I’ve long described (here’s a post from 2018) that, to the extent Russia managed to fill the dossier with disinformation, they larded it with near-misses which would discomfort Trump, but help to provide cover for or deniability for the things that actually did happen. As a result, when you make a list of things that appear in the dossier but leave off the names, it looks utterly prescient (but was not). Take these bullets one by one:

The Kremlin had cultivated Trump for at least five years and fed him and his team intelligence agreed to use WikiLeaks in exchange for policy considerations. Moscow had cultivated Trump at least since the 2013 beauty pageant, far longer if you believe Craig Ungar. And not only did Russia give his campaign advance notice that they would drop emails on Hillary and offer his failson dirt on Hillary, Roger Stone credibly claimed to have advance access to WikiLeaks files (including specific files on John Podesta) and as Roger was arranging that, Manafort met with alleged spy Konstantin Kilimnik to share his strategy for winning swing states, a plan to get Manafort paid, and a plan to carve up Ukraine.

Russian authorities possessed compromising material on Trump from when he was in Russia. The SSCI Report found several claims of a sex tape and Russia knew Trump was lying to cover up Michael Cohen’s pursuit of that Trump Tower deal.

There were secret meetings between the Kremlin and Trump’s advisors, and at least one was offered financial renumeration. Cohen spoke with the Kremlin directly about an impossibly lucrative Trump Tower deal. And the Kilimnik meeting with Manafort fulfills all the claims of coordination and renumeration.

In other words, once you take the names out, Steele’s near-miss reports were direct hits, just in a way that distracted from the principals.

Update: WaPo describes that Tulsi released the HPSCI Report in much less redacted form than CIA wanted.

 

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Russia’s Useful Idiom, John Ratcliffe: Lost in Two Translations

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John Ratcliffe keeps going on propaganda channels to parrot Russian idioms (and make false claims) shamelessly. Whichever Russian spy wrote that disinformation package years ago must have gotten a new dacha to reward him for how he has turned America’s CIA Director into an unabashed useful idiom for Russia.

Ratcliffe might want to rein in his boisterousness, however. Because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard — or whoever actually did the declassification of the Durham appendix — left just enough breadcrumbs to suggest there’s a material difference between the FBI and some other government agency’s translation of the Deep State email reflecting an SVR plan to frame Hillary Clinton. Ratcliffe may not realize just how clear it is that John Durham framed Hillary Clinton, with Ratcliffe’s help.

I started down this rabbit hole when I puzzled through this footnote, revealing that there are multiple translations of “some” of the items in question.

So I made a table of all the documents identified as exhibits to the appendix, showing which footnote referred to which document and the language of the document.

The first thing this exercise disclosed were two missing documents — or rather, documents the discussions of which are entirely redacted.

The first appears in a discussion of a 2017 CIA review that concluded these SVR reports — it’s not clear whether the report reviewed just the Loretta Lynch ones, or all of them; I have a hunch this report also discusses Oleg Deripaska — were not fabrications. Note missing footnote 76 here.

The second is more interesting–but it’s part of a far more important discovery. At least according to the footnotes, the redactions in these two passages (which bracket the draft report that Durham falsely claims was the basis of his investigation) serve to obscure which fake Leonard Benardo email was incorporated into which SVR document.

The reference to “The above-referenced [SVR] memorandum included the English text of a document” pertains to the Benardo email that appears second in the appendix — the one with the (stupid, obviously Russian) references to the Olympics.

There are at least two versions of the Benardo email (identified as Appendix Documents 5 and 6 in footnote 36) that lack the Olympics reference.

And one of those, Appendix Document 6, is what was attached to the July 27 email described in the unredacted passage here.

The fake Benardo email dated July 27 — which these redactions tried hard to suggest was attached to the email mentioning “vilif[ying] Moscow” — was actually attached to another communication completely obscured by this redaction, the second missing document. Footnote 40 and footnote 41 both cite Classified Appendix Document 8.

This clarifies the process by which the draft report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation was made.

The first email in the chain is the July 26 Deep State one — the one saying it’d be cool to frame Hillary.

The second is that July 27 email — basically a discussion about how they were going to frame Hillary, attaching one of the fake Benardo emails without mention of the Olympics. Again, that’s what got mentioned in John Brennan’s notes, not the report. At that point, one of the spies must have thought it would be cute to make a reference to what appears to be the Olympics doping scandal, which was ongoing at the time, something that mattered to the Russians but probably not Benardo or Julianne Smith, and so they altered the fake Benardo email for inclusion in the eventual report, to add the Olympics.

And then a third email between Russian spies — the one that is completely redacted — attached the fake Benardo email, dated July 27, claiming Hillary had approved this plan. The email reflecting approval came after the spies decided to frame Hillary (not like it matters since the emails were all fake anyway).

Now, as I keep saying, the report that Durham falsely claimed was the basis of his investigation had to come after that missing email, because that’s what they fabricated to claim that Hillary had actually approved the plan. The report was the last document, not the first, as Durham misleadingly suggested by putting it at the beginning of his discussion. The unredacted report would make clear that both the approval and the Olympics reference were deliberately added to take Benardo emails, and then incorporated in the draft report itself.

Which brings me back to where I started. Aside from two documents of little interest here (a document on Benardo that could be a SVR profile of him or could just be his bio, Classified Appendix Document 1) and the entirely redacted reference associated with the 2017 CIA review (Classified Appendix Document 10), there are six documents in Russian:

  • The January 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch and Jim Comey
  • The March 2016 report mentioning Loretta Lynch
  • The July 26 Deep State email discussing framing Hillary
  • The July 27 email, to which one of the fake July 25 Benardo emails that did not mention the Olympics was attached
  • The missing document, to which the fake July 27 Benardo email was attached
  • The draft report, to which the fake July 25 Benardo email that mentioned the Olympics was incorporated

The January and March reports are actually the same document, Classified Appendix Document 2. Durham describes both were “in Russian,” with the discussion of translation redacted; this discussion tracks the DOJ IG Report closely, and so may have used those same versions.

As you can see above, the discussion about who translated the July 27 email and the missing one is entirely redacted. The same is true of the draft report itself.

Not the July 26 Deep State email, though.

The intro to that states clearly that Durham used an FBI translation: “The FBI’s translation of this email is as follows.”

In other words, the July 26 Deep State email showing that Russian spies decided to frame Hillary before they fabricated emails supporting their effort exists in at least two versions.

And John Ratcliffe, rattling off Russian idioms on every Fox show, may not know that.

Update: I’m reviewing the Michael Sussmann case, and Andrew DeFilippis played a similar temporal gimmick twice during that trial.

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Days After the FBI Announced an Investigation, Russian Spies Deliberately “Put More Oil into the Fire”

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I really don’t think enough people are getting the pee-your-pants humor — at least if you’re Russian and want to destroy the United States — at the core of the classified annex from the Durham Report.

Durham describes that, in a May 21, 2021 interview with Leonard Benardo, Durham showed the Open Society Foundation Executive an email purportedly stolen from him in 2016 and asked him if he wrote it. Benardo told Durham, “he would not have used certain terms, such as ‘oil into the fire.'”

Durham, you see, was pretty aroused by the term, “put more oil into the fire,” because he was chasing a conspiracy theory that Hillary framed Donald Trump by paying for a dossier that — unbeknownst to her — was likely riddled with Russian disinformation, thanks to Oleg Deripaska, and also — unbeknownst to her — got shared with the FBI, and because – unbeknownst to her — Michael Sussmann brought allegations about a DNS anomaly to the FBI (one that the guy I went to the FBI about had a role in inflaming just weeks later). So that phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” looked like paydirt. It seemed to confirm the exact same conspiracy theory Durham was chasing: that Hillary intended to frame Trump at the FBI (even though the FBI had already announced their investigation).

Durham doesn’t quote what Benardo said directly. It may well have been more colorful than that he wouldn’t have used that term. Benardo has lived in Moscow and other parts of the former Soviet Union, and so he surely recognizes the phrase not only is not one most Americans would use — they would say, “pour fuel on the fire” or “add fuel to the fire.” They definitely wouldn’t use “oil.”

But he would recognize it as a Russian idiom.

And to be clear, while Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are redacting most details about the provenance of these documents, the introduction says, “the above-referenced [SVR] memorandum included the English text of a document … the document contained a purported email from Benardo” on which, a redacted passage from Durham suggests, the SVR report “was partially based.”

That appears to confirm that this text appeared in the intelligence report that Durham chased like a toddler for four years in English. That is, it’s not a problem of translation — English to Russian back into English. A document that Durham spent years trying to verify as authentic uses a Russian idiom to describe the chaos that might ensue as a result of the FBI investigation that was publicly confirmed the very date of the email, July 25, 2016.

And this is one reason why the timing of these documents matters, which Grassley and Gabbard aggressively obscure. This is as close as we can establish:

  • July 25: Thomas Rid story
  • July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack, and then discovering the FBI has just announced such an investigation (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack, which goes a long way to debunking his conspiracy theory).
  • July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
  • July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
  • July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
  • July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported July 27 Benardo email which among other things reports that Hillary has “approved Julia’s idea”
  • July 26 to July 28: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
  • July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO

Importantly, Durham describes that this email between two Russian spooks was “dated the following day” from the email with the Russian idiom in the English text, so July 26.

This email between two Russian spooks says, let’s do something “about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State (or somewhere else?), about American websites deploying a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU.” This email between two Russian spooks effectively says, “Let’s do something about a campaign to demonize Trump.”

That’s why the date of the report — the one Durham never disclosed in his entire unclassified report and which he either didn’t disclose here or Grassley and Gabbard are covering up — matters.

Because even if you believed the emails from Benardo were real, the one with the Russian idiom dated July 25 and one dated July 27 — the very same day Trump would ask Russia to hack Hillary some more and Russian hackers would almost immediately comply, the same day Trump lied about chasing business interests in Russia, a lie Putin’s top people had proof was a lie, the same day Trump said he might recognize Crimea (in the days immediately following, Roger Stone attempted to script pro-Russian tweets from Trump) — even if you believed those emails were true, you’d have to notice that a key part of the SVR report, the detail that Hillary had, past tense, approved “a campaign to demonize the actions of Russia’s GRU” only appears in the July 27 email, not the July 25 one.

And that email, also in “English,” was attached to a follow-up email discussing the plan to “‘illuminate’ how Clinton was attempting to ‘villif[y] Moscow.'”

That all seems to suggest that the intelligence report itself — the one claiming to confirm that Hillary had approved a campaign to demonize Russia? — appeared the day after two Russian spooks said, “wouldn’t it be cool, now that we know the FBI is looking, to claim that Hillary was seeking to frame Trump?” Let’s pour fuel on the fire, as it were.

Durham ultimately concluded that these emails were “composites” of other emails — though he only identifies one, an email about an article from one of America’s foremost intelligence disinformation scholars, Thomas Rid, who is nowhere near as high up on Putin’s list of adversaries as Benardo surely is, but certainly someone it’d be hilarious to mock.

Durham doesn’t bother to discuss what Rid said, but much of what Rid did say conflicts with what the purported intelligence report does. Perhaps more importantly, Rid discussed how one of the early Guccifer documents included the signature of Felix Dzerzhinsky: “one dumped document was modified using Russian language settings, by a user named ‘Феликс Эдмундович,’ a code name referring to the founder of the Soviet Secret Police.” Likewise, it might have been worth mentioning that in the article whence this “composite” email came, Rid commented on the shitty English of Guccifer 2.0. “Guccifer 2.0’s English initially was also weak, but in subsequent posts the quality improved sharply.”

Had Durham actually looked these things: the apparent timing — including the coincidence with Donald Trump’s overtly pro-Russian statements, to say nothing of his lies about Russian business ties — had Durham actually considered all of this, that “English” phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” in shitty English, he might have gotten the joke.

Because honestly, it is fucking hilarious. Well-played, Russian spy dudes. Well-fucking-played.

But instead of seeing how he had been made a laughingstock — and really, the entire US intelligence community, especially the FBI that these conspiracy theories have serially destroyed — Durham instead doubled down, indicting two more men he hoped would fulfill his conspiracy theories, first destroying US DNS capabilities targeting Russia and then chasing Sergei Millian’s uncorroborated tweets, for years.

Nine years into this influence operation, that phrase, “put more oil into the fire,” a phrase that someone at the FBI should have recognized as a Russian idiom at least five years ago, is still ripping the country to pieces.

And somewhere, some Russian spies are peeing their pants in laughter.

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How John Durham and Chuck Grassley Covered Up Getting Ass-Handed by Russia

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The most important passage of the classified annex of the Durham Report is this one — though you won’t hear it from the frothy mob, in significant part because Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are hiding what these documents are. Durham describes that it is “dated the following day” just after discussing an email dated July 25, so July 26.

Go ahead and read it once. But before I explain why it is so important, first let me illustrate how Chuck Grassley and Tulsi Gabbard are obscuring the provenance of these documents.

As I explained here, these documents were stolen from Russian foreign intelligence (SVR) by another country’s intelligence service (understood to be the Dutch). The documents themselves generally consist of two different kinds of documents:

  • Emails and other raw intelligence that SVR stole from victims, including US think tanks, State Department, and the Executive Office of the President
  • Discussions among SVR — mostly intelligence analysis — about the files they stole

Sometimes the victim files the Russians stole would be attached to the reports, sometimes they would be incorporated into the reports. Sometimes the Russians would translate the English-language documents they stole, other times they would not. So the game of telephone that most of these documents entail looks like this:

  • SVR steals documents
  • SVR translates documents
  • SVR analyzes documents
  • Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
  • Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
  • CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits
  • CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
  • CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

But that’s not all. For the key documents in this collection, they report the speech of one or another Hillary Clinton associate, which means the game of telephone looks like this:

  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Julianne Smith talk with Think Tank guys (primarily Open Society’s Leonard Benardo, but also OSF’s Jeffrey Goldstein, as well as unidentified people at Atlantic Council and Carnegie Endowment)
  • Think tank guys write what they learned from DWS or Julianne Smith
  • SVR steals documents from Think Tank guys
  • SVR translates documents from English to Russian
  • SVR analyzes documents
  • Dutch intelligence steals documents from SVR
  • Dutch intelligence shares documents with CIA and/or FBI
  • CIA and/or FBI translate the Russian bits to English
  • CIA and/or FBI analyze what they found
  • CIA sends what they think they found to FBI

Best as I can tell, that path is the one involved in the documents Durham claims are the most important in his appendix, the ones that claim to report what Smith said about a Hillary Clinton plan to smear Donald Trump.

Here’s what FBI lawyer Tricia Anderson wrote about the problems with this game of telephone in a memo:

  • The reports likely reflected multiple levels of hearsay given that they were based on purported communications between Wasserman Schultz and potential donors, not any underlying communications between Lynch and Clinton campaign staff;
  • Wasserman Schultz’ communications may have contained exaggerations designed to reassure potential donors who were concerned by news about the FBI investigation;
  • The [Russians] who drafted the reports may have injected opinion, editorialization, or exaggeration into the reports; and
  • Translation errors may have contributed to the potential for unreliability

Durham provided just a summary of this assessment, but a fair one (in part because he’s more focused on later documents that don’t involve DWS but do involve all those levels of reported speech).

Here’s how the purported smoking gun was introduced (note, if Durham provided the date, it is redacted, but it reports something that happened on July 26, so it can be no later than then but could be July 27).

 

There was additional analysis about the provenance following the text.

There are a number of things conveyed in these redactions:

  • The classification marks
  • That CIA received these documents
  • The dates the Dutch passed them on
  • Presumably (though given Durham’s practice elsewhere in his report, not definitely) the date of the underlying memo
  • A description of the people at SVR they were obtained from
  • The import of all the other think tanks
  • The nature of the incorporated messages purported to be from Benardo

I don’t contest some of those redactions. But the amount of redaction, and lack of context elsewhere, obscure what the purported smoking gun is: a draft SVR report that in some way incorporates language attributed to Leonard Benardo. We have no clue whether it is dated July 26, 27, or 28 (by which date CIA had a copy). The section that most frothers are quoting (just like the section of other SVR reports released in recent weeks) is not an email itself, it is a Russian discussion about purported emails.

Durham follows the actual SVR report with the text attributed to Benardo; the description of how this text is incorporated in the document is redacted.

He follows it with another similar (raw) email attributed to Benardo (which should make evident whom Benardo sent the email to, or at what time, but Durham didn’t share that).

John Durham does not mention, at all, that the language of those first two purported Benardo emails — the ones with a date of July 25 — in no way supports the claim made in the SVR Report, that on,

26 July 2016, Clinton approved of a plan of her policy advisor, Julianna Smith … to smear Donald Trump. by magnifying the scandal tied to the intrusion by the Russian special services in the pre-election process to benefit the Republican nominee.

As envisioned by Smith, raising the theme of “Putin’s support for Trump” to the level of the Olympics scandal would divert the constituents’ attention from the investigation of Clinton’s compromised electronic correspondence.

He does note in a footnote that the SVR report got Julianne’s first name wrong, Juliana. He simply asserts that the “Julie” referred to in the purported Benardo emails is Julianne; he doesn’t note that in the purported follow-up Benardo email the name used is “Julia,” not the kind of thing a colleague would normally do. Durham interviewed Benardo, who specifically said he didn’t know who “Julie” (or “Julia”) was.

The only corroboration at all that the language in the Benardo email was real, was evidence it was not: an email sent by someone else, a Carnegie Endowment cyber guy named Tim Maurer, discussing this article on attribution from Thomas Rid. Durham says less about the Rid article than another cited in this correspondence, which is telling, because Rid discussed the Democrats’ decision, back in June, to go public with the hack.

This was big. Democratic political operatives suspected that not one but two teams of Putin’s spies were trying to help Trump and harm Clinton. The Trump campaign, after all, was getting friendly with Russia. The Democrats decided to go public.

Rid also discussed the Guccifer persona at length, which is important for reasons I’ll explain in a follow-up.

As noted, ultimately Durham concludes that the emails themselves — documents that are supposed to be raw collection — are instead “composites,” including from a totally different guy, Maurer.

The Office’s best assessment is that the July 25th and July 27th emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based Think Tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment, and others. Indeed, as discussed above, language from Tim Maurer’s email of July 25th is identical to language contained in Benardo’s purported email of the same date.

Durham is hedging wildly here. I think the NYT overstates when it says, “Mr. Durham concluded that the email from July 27, 2016, and a related one dated two days earlier were probably manufactured.” That would be the conclusion sane normal people would draw, that if emails purporting to be from Benardo were actually cut-and-pasted language from Maurer, but Durham doesn’t make that conclusion (perhaps because he continued to chase this conspiracy theory for another two years after he interviewed all these people, indicting two more men only to discover his theories about them, too, were made up). Indeed, in an almost entirely redacted (and therefore useless) passage, Durham claims that in what must be July 2017, the CIA still maintained that the report and at least some of the purported emails were not fabrications. He also cites interviews he did with people who thought the Benardo emails were authentic.

But yeah, if the emails themselves are “composites,” it means they’re made up, not even attributing the author correctly. In fact, if they’re composites, we have no reason to believe the emails dated July 25 weren’t in fact “composited” on July 26 or 27.

Now’s a good time to mention that Durham is obscuring the sequence of the documents here (not least by withholding the metadata of the real email he obtains, but also thanks to the redactions from Grassley and Tulsi). The sequence looks something like this, but we can’t be sure:

  • July 25: Thomas Rid story
  • July 25, 11 to 11:35AM: Smith texts other people trying to figure out if there was any investigation of the hack (as I noted here, Durham doesn’t disclose anywhere in his report that during the Michael Sussmann prosecution, Sussmann forced him to obtain these emails that show FBI releasing a statement without consulting with the Dems, the victims of the hack.
  • July 25, undisclosed time: Maurer responds to the Rid story
  • July 25, undisclosed time, but the date could be made up: Two drafts of purported Benardo emails
  • July 26: Email between two Russian spooks suggesting “doing something about a task from someone”
  • Unknown date: A draft Russian spy memorandum claiming that on July 26, Hillary Clinton approved a plan to smear Donald Trump, citing July 25 emails purportedly from Benardo
  • July 27: Email between two Russian spooks about illuminating Hillary’s attempts to vilify Trump and Putin that links to a purported Benardo email, in what Durham describes as English but is … probably not written by a native English speaker
  • July 27: Email from Smith soliciting signers for a letter condemning Trump’s attack on NATO

Narratively, Durham puts the draft report, incorporating a July 25 email attributed to Benardo, then citing another July 25 email attributed to Benardo, and describing Hillary approving a plan on July 26, before the email between two Russian spooks, which by description is dated July 26. But I’ve been staring at it for an hour (and reviewing Durham’s unclassified report and now realizing he never provides the date there, either) and for the life of me, I’m not sure if we know whether the two spooks email precedes the draft intelligence report or not (note, too, that it starts, “Great!” by responding to something, suggesting there’s an even earlier one Durham suppressed). If my read that it is dated July 26 is correct, it would have been written on the same day as the purported approval by Hillary, of a plan to smear Donald Trump. But the only email attributed to Benardo reflecting Hillary’s approval is written July 27, meaning it’s more likely it was written on July 27.

So we don’t know. I am still searching but I believe Durham never revealed the date of that memo. But based on what we can see, SVR didn’t “have” an email reflecting Hillary approving this plan until July 27, the day after (at least by Durham’s description) two Russian spooks discussed telling stories about the Deep State.

If that’s right, Russian spooks were discussing “making” such a report before they “found” an email in stilted English that Durham couldn’t match describing Hillary approving this plan.

Based on interviews (italicized here) that appear only in this annex, John Durham first started chasing this conspiracy theory no later than September 2019 (the day after meeting with Nate Batty, the politicized FBI Agent who killed the Alfa Bank investigation). After interviews done by July 2021, Durham should have come to the conclusion he states here: that the purported emails were “compiled” from emails of entirely different people. And yet all the while, the IC was in possession of documents showing one Russian spook suggesting that another one, “do something about a task from someone, I don’t know, some dark forces, like the FBI for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State.”

Durham tried to bury all that, that he created precisely the chaos the Russian spooks were trying to manufacture, in this classified annex and — if you believe Kash Patel — burn the proof.

The Russians told you what they were up to.

And yet you fell for it anyway.

Update: Fixed spelling of Benardo’s last name.

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Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

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I joked the other day that it’s as if Trump offered his cabinet members a free condo for whomever best distracted from his Epstein problem.

Tulsi Gabbard is, thus far, winning the contest for the sheer shamelessness of her ridiculous claims.

She has manufactured claims of sedition out of her conflation — whether deliberate or insanely ignorant — of voting machines and the DNC server, built on top of President Obama’s perfectly reasonable request to document all the ways Russia tampered in the 2016 election. Then, she released a different report — a 2020 GOP HPSCI report complaining about Intelligence Community tradecraft in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. The HPSCI Report not only exhibits all the tradecraft failure it complains about, but it conflicts in some ways with her original propaganda.

In a presser at the White House yesterday (skip ahead to 12:30), Tulsi went one better, presenting the contents of the HPSCI report without context, focusing closely on a section that cites a cherrypicked selection of Russian intelligence reports purportedly (but not certainly) based off documents stolen from Democrats, the State Department, and a think tank.

Tulsi stood at the podium of the White House press room and delivered Russian intelligence, with an occasional “allegedly” thrown in, without explaining clearly that’s what she was doing.

In so doing, the Director of National Intelligence effectively teamed up with Russian spies, parroting analysis those Russian spies did on documents stolen from Hillary and people associated with her, without masking Hillary’s identity as required by intelligence protocol. This is precisely the kind of (then unsubstantiated) abuse that first animated right wing grievance back in 2017, outrage over the possible politicized unmasking of political adversaries, carried out by the head of intelligence from the White House podium.

They have become the monsters they warned about.

The SVR documents

Let me explain the documents. By 2016, there were actually two parallel Russian hacking campaigns targeting Hillary (and others). One, starting in 2016 and conducted by Russia’s military intelligence (GRU, often referred to as APT 28), obtained and caused the dissemination of documents during the election — the hack-and-leak campaign that Trump exploited to win the election. But starting years before that, Russia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR, often referred to as APT 29) targeted a number of traditional spying targets, including the White House, DOD, and State, some think tanks viewed as adversarial to Russia, and the DNC.

Here’s a report on APT 29’s hacking campaigns published in September 2015, which I wrote about here. Here’s a more recent history that includes those earlier hacks. I’ve been told that the interactions between APT 29 and APT 28 hackers inside Democratic servers was visible, but reluctant. APT 29 had and still has the more skillful hackers.

Unlike GRU, SVR did not use most of the files it stole in a hack-and-leak campaign. Russian spies analyzed the documents and wrote reports on them, like normal spying. But then someone — some other spying service, probably — spied on their spying efforts. And that entity shared what they found, including both the things SVR stole and the reports that Russian spies wrote about those stolen files, with the US Intelligence Community. And starting at least by 2018, right wingers have been obsessed with those stolen files and Russian intelligence reports, using them to feed one after another investigation into Democrats.

This gets a bit confusing, because we’re seeing the results of that obsession out of order. We first saw a right wing campaign based off them when John Ratcliffe, then the Director of National Intelligence, released a report about one particular analytical report, then released background documents; both were used as part of the effort to undermine the Mike Flynn prosecution in advance of the 2020 election. That particular report — allegedly claiming that in July 2016, Hillary endorsed a plan to focus on Trump’s ties to Russia to distract from the Clinton email investigation — served as the animating force for the Durham investigation, though Durham had to fabricate new details in the intelligence to do so. For years, Chuck Grassley has been frothing to release a classified appendix of the 2018 DOJ IG Report on the Clinton email investigation that pertained to the SVR documents, which Pam Bondi released the other day. Yesterday’s propaganda presser was based on the release of a 2020 critique of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment of the 2016 hack (there were earlier versions in which Kash Patel was involved), written by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI).

We’re surely not done. There’s a classified annex to the Durham report in which he tries to justify treating Russian intelligence product as true. And yesterday, Grassley and House Intelligence Chair Rick Crawford asked to get more of the SVR files, this time focused on Barack Obama.

So, these documents were addressed at length by Michael Horowitz (it’s not yet clear how prominently they figure in earlier HPSCI work), then packaged up as part of Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, then further fluffed up by Durham in his failed prosecution effort and, on top of these recent releases, will no doubt feed the frothers indefinitely. But this order matters, because right wingers kept forgetting what they learned in earlier iterations of this obsession.

 The 2018 classified annex

The DOJ IG classified annex considers FBI’s treatment of two kinds of files from that SVR collection: first, report(s) claiming that Loretta Lynch was trying to cover up the Clinton investigation and Jim Comey was trying to exacerbate it (Comey only appears in one), and, also, a set of files that might have raw State Department documents stolen by Russia that could be used to investigate Hillary.

The reports became important to Horowitz’ discussion of the Clinton email investigation because Jim Comey claimed in June 8, 2017 congressional testimony that one reason why he decided to make the prosecutorial decision on the Clinton investigation is because he worried that the two reports on Lynch might leak.

The raw intelligence became a focus because early on, alleged Trump adversary Peter Strzok sought to review the raw collection, a request that ultimately fell through the cracks, which Grassley uses to claim the investigation was not diligent enough.

A several page section of the report describing the collection — eight thumb drives, along with a set of data provided via other means — makes clear that, on top of normal concerns about allowing the FBI to review stolen US person data, the hesitation to access the data arose from the large number of privileged files, from the White House, from State, and from Congress, in there.

  • Thumb drives 1-5: These thumb drives included files stolen from US victims, including the Executive Office of the President, the State Department, and the House of Representatives, probably including a number of unknown US victims. The FBI did analyze these files, which helped them to identify where the Obama ones came from, that the Russians had obtained “advance intelligence about a planned FBI arrest of a Russian citizen,” and network maps of classified US government systems. Two drives, drives 3 and 4, “focused primarily on State Department communications,” as did much of the content of the other thumb drives. The FBI never comprehensively reviewed these files because of concerns about Executive and Congressional privileges tied to the victims. The FBI has queried them, three times:
    • In early 2016, FBI queried the drives using some approved keywords, apparently to understand Russia’s targets.
    • FBI later conducted a second set of limited queries, without reading the actual content. It did, however, create a “word cloud” of what was in the US victim data, which FBI treated as an index.
    • In August 2017, FBI OGC permitted an analyst working with Mueller to query the word cloud index on Clinton and clintonemail.com.
  • Thumb drives 6 and 7: These drives appear to include Russia’s reports about their hacks; victim data was included as attachments. The FBI permitted analysts to review non-victim data for foreign intelligence and evidentiary purposes, but not any content from the Executive Office of the President, State, or Congress.
  • Thumb drive 8: This data was never uploaded until 2018 and by the time of this report (also 2018) had never been reviewed. It was believed to include data redundant to what was on drives 1-5, including privileged material.
  • Post-8 data: This data appears to have come to the FBI via a medium other than a thumb drive. Their source filtered out certain kinds of victim data before passing it on. It also was unlikely to have the privileged sources of information — from EoP, State, and the House of Representatives — that presented concerns about the data on thumb drives 1-5. The FBI was permitted to review this data under the same rules as applied to Thumb drives 6 and 7 — that is, they could review the non-victim information.

Staring in August 2016, Andy McCabe started asking to access all eight drives. While the Obama White House told the FBI in October 2016 that their request for access was overly broad, they never got around to negotiating that access because the FBI was too busy working on the Russian investigation and exploiting Anthony Weiner’s laptop. White House Counsel Neil Eggleston circled back on this issue in his last day on the job, January 19, 2017.

Ironically, the most aggressive attempt to access these files up to the IG Report came from an analyst on the Mueller team — no doubt someone who has subsequently been fired. The IG Report describes that this person likely exceeded search protocols prohibiting searches on victim information, including on Clinton and clintonemail. Now, however, Trump will undoubtedly use Tulsi’s propaganda campaign as an excuse to read emails stolen from Barack Obama, waiving any privilege concerns (indeed, that should be understood as one goal of the task force Bondi set up yesterday, to collude with Russian spies to spy on President Obama).

For the purposes of understanding how Tulsi colluded with Russian spies yesterday, the most important detail from the classified annex is that the FBI didn’t treat the two Loretta Lynch reports as credible — the report describes that FBI considered them “objectively false.”

[W]itnesses told us that the reports were not credible on their face for various reasons, including that they contained information that the FBI knew to be “objectively false.”

One reason they likely believed that is because one of the two Lynch reports said that Comey was deliberately trying to stall the investigation.

Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections; in order to effectively undermine the chances for the [Democratic Party] to win the presidential elections. [brackets original]

It also revealed that the FBI never found the underlying stolen documents on which the reports were purportedly based — at one point, the DOJ IG Report notes that it wasn’t clear “if such communications in fact existed.”

The FBI didn’t believe these documents were credible.

But if you do believe the reports are credible — if you treat the reports as “true” — then it is not just “true” that Jim Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans, but Russia believed that Comey was stalling the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans win the election.

HPSCI’s Jim Comey problem

The HPSCI report includes these SVR files, years after the FBI determined at least two of them were not credible, as “true” statements of Putin’s belief. I’ll write up the entire report separately; parts of it are quite rigorous and interesting, while the section on the Steele dossier was riddled with errors and this part — the part that relies on these SVR reports — was sort of an exercise in desperation to find as many reasons to discredit the claim that Putin tried to help Trump get elected as possible. This section is the mirror image of what the report alleges John Brennan was engaged in with the 2017 ICA Report, intelligence analysis that came to a conclusion and then found intelligence to back that conclusion. They include the SVR reports to argue that if Putin really wanted Trump to win, he would have released all these reports.

In a page and a half, the HPSCI report cites one after another of these reports.

  • In September 2016, Russian spies claimed that President Obama found Hillary’s health to be “extraordinary alarming.”
  • Russian spies claimed it had communications showing Hillary was suffering from “psycho-social problems” and even (Tulsi parroted there in the White House) “was placed on a regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’.”
  • Russian spies claimed Hillary had Type 2 Diabetes and deep vein thrombosis.
  • The claim — which John Ratcliffe noted could “reflect exaggeration or fabrication” in his report in 2020 — that Hillary had a plan to link Trump and Putin to distract from the Clinton email investigation.
  • Russian spies claimed Hillary traded financial funding for electoral support with religious organizations in post-Soviet countries.
  • US allies in London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome doubted her ability to perform the functions of President.
  • European government experts assessed that Trump’s only chance of winning was allegations about the Clinton Foundation.

The HPSCI Report includes in three bullets the allegations laid out in the two reports described in the IG Report, split up across two pages, as if they represent three reports.

[snip]

Not only do they ignore that the FBI viewed at least some of these reports as “not credible,” nor address the question of whether these reflected real intercepts at all.

But they don’t mention that the first of those two reports (probably the January 2016 one) also claimed that Jim Comey was going to stall the investigation to help Trump win.

If you believe the reports were “true,” then you believe that Jim Comey had a plan to help Trump win — much like what he did do — and that Putin shared that same belief.

It was bad enough that a bunch of right wing Congressmen desperate to create a propaganda document to help Trump get elected in 2020 exhibited such shoddy tradecraft.

But yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence stood at a White House podium and repeated one after another Russian intelligence report about which multiple entities have raised serious questions as to its accuracy.

In the guise of complaining about politicized spies exercising inadequate due diligence, Tulsi Gabbard just parroted these Russian intelligence reports — reports that either rely on intercepts of an American citizen or just make shit up — uncritically.

This was Russian spy product, delivered from the White House, from the head of US intelligence.

Links

A Dossier Steal: HPSCI Expertly Discloses Their Own Shoddy Cover-Up

Think of the HPSCI Report as a Time Machine to Launder Donald Trump’s Russia Russia Russia Claims

Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe Reveal Putin “Was Counting on” a Trump Win

Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with Russian Spies to Wiretap and Unmask Hillary Clinton

The Secrets about Russia’s Influence Operation that Tulsi Gabbard Is Still Keeping from Us

Tulsi Gabbard Accuses Kash Patel of Covering Up for the Obama Deep State

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Chuck Grassley Complicit in Sending Dozens of Innocent Men to a Concentration Camp

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As I laid out the other day, Chuck Grassley made a bunch of transparent excuses so he could cover up how Emil Bove gave advice to DHS that resulted in them defying an order from Judge James Boasberg.

It’s not me saying it. It is senior DOJ official Yaakov Roth saying it.

On March 16, he told Erez Reuveni and others that Bove was the one who — falsely — told DHS they could deplane flights that Boasberg had ordered be turned around without violating the court’s order.

On March 14, Bove said you might have to tell a judge “fuck you” to ensure Stephen Miller could use the Alien Enemies Act to deport people with no oversight. On March 15, Bove provided affirmatively false information to DHS, resulting in them defying Boasberg’s order — and with their actions, stranding hundreds of men, some completely innocent, in a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador.

Grassley must have recognized his arguments were transparent bullshit. Because in today’s hearing on Bove’s nominate, Grassley broke parliamentary rules to prevent Cory Booker, the home Senator on this nomination, from arguing against it.

 

As Sheldon Whitehouse notes, there are two parliamentary arguments that Bove’s nomination was not properly advanced. First, that Grassley blew off Booker’s point of order, then that there was a quorum to vote through the nomination.

HuffPo has more.

Chuck Grassley broke the rules to try to rush through Emil Bove’s lifetime appointment before — as Whitehouse noted — his conduct is investigated as criminal contempt.

He is protecting a guy who unloaded dozens of innocent men into a concentration camp. Worse, he is breaking the rules to promote Emil Bove to a lifetime appointment to reward him for stranding innocent men in a concentration camp.

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Old Man Chuck Grassley Got Snookered by Emil Bove’s Contemptuous Dodge

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Senate Judiciary Democrats asked Chuck Grassley to hold a hearing with whistleblower Erez Reuveni to learn about Emil Bove’s contempt in the face of orders Judge James Boasberg gave DOJ on March 15. In a letter that carefully dodges smoking gun proof that Emil Bove did command others to blow off Boasberg’s order, Grassley refused.

I’m going to assume that Chuck Grassley is just really old and so vulnerable to being duped by someone devious like Bove. Otherwise, of course, we’d have to conclude he’s complicit in a clear attempt to deport innocent men to a concentration camp at all costs.

Grassley’s three main rebuttals of Reuveni’s allegations are:

  • DOJ has gotten appellate relief on at least some of the misconduct Reuveni reported
  • Emil Bove made the comment about telling a judge “fuck you” before Boasberg issued any orders
  • Bove testified under oath that he did not order any DOJ lawyers to blow off Boasberg’s order

Grassley pretends that the files handed over by Reuveni include “almost none” that “include, reference, or even cite” Bove.

Almost none of the additional documents you published include, reference, or even cite Mr. Bove.

Almost none is not none, as I’ll show below.

Grassley further claims that most of the files reflect “litigation strategy about the scope of court orders.”

Most of the communications merely reflect Administration attorneys internally debating or discussing litigation strategy and the scope of court orders. Debate about the scope of court orders is fundamentally inconsistent with an intention to ignore them. Moreover, many of the legal positions discussed in the documents were ultimately advanced in federal court as the formal position of the United States, and the Administration has received at least some appellate relief in each of the cases described.

With regards to the JGG lawsuit to which the “fuck you” comment is pertinent, that relief consists of two Trump appointees stalling a contempt motion for months, as both TPM and NYT pointed out today. Here’s how TPM’s David Kurtz described it.

The DC appeals court — a three-judge panel composed of Trump appointees Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao and Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard (who opposed the move) — placed an administrative stay on Boasberg’s contempt proceedings way back on April 18. What is usually supposed to be a short-term pause in the case has now dragged on for nearly three months.

In that time, former DOJ career lawyer Erez Reuveni has revealed bombshell internal DOJ emails and texts. Those documents show that Bove, in his role as principal associate deputy attorney general, gave the green light for continuing with the March 15 removals of Venezuelan nationals to CECOT in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act in spite of Boasberg’s order blocking the deportations and directing the planes carrying the detainees to turn around. (For his part, Bove denies violating any court orders, and the Justice Department has made the preposterous argument that Boasberg’s written order didn’t include the direction to turn the planes around and that trumped his oral demand that they do so.)

In slow-rolling the contempt inquiry, the DC appeals court hasn’t just enabled Bove (who has engaged in other egregious conduct at DOJ). It has hung Boasberg out to dry, done nothing to staunch the Trump administration’s blatant defiance of court orders in other cases, and has left the judicial branch more exposed to a rogue executive determined to expand his power at the expense of the judiciary.

The relief Grassley is relying on is, in fact, partisan stonewalling.

That matters, because he is replicating a corrupt dodge that Bove — and DOJ itself — are both adopting.

That corrupt dodge starts, first of all, with his claim that Reuveni’s “fuck you” allegation — corroborated in four sets of texts exchanged with colleagues during the weekend in question — came before any judge had issued orders.

The gravamen of the allegations is that Mr. Bove directed Justice Department attorneys to ignore court orders, but (1) the meeting with Mr. Bove occurred before there was any litigation or court order to follow;

That’s true: Bove made the “fuck you” comment at a meeting on March 14. Boasberg issued the order not to unload any planes with Alien Enemies Act detainees on the evening of March 15.

Grassley makes much of the fact that August Flentje told DOJ HR that Bove told the lawyers to avoid an order prohibiting the AEA flights at all costs.

In an April 8th letter addressed to the Justice Department’s Human Resources Division, August Flentje—Mr. Reuveni’s former supervisor—stated: “The Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General [Bove] advised our team that we must avoid a court order halting an upcoming operation to implement the Act at all costs.”1 This statement was made under penalty of perjury months before Mr. Reuveni made the claims in his whistleblower disclosure, and directly contradicts his assertions. Mr. Bove’s comments to subordinate Justice Department litigators— made in advance of anticipated litigation—advising them to avoid a court order that would negatively impact a mission is inconsistent with instructions to ignore a court order, and entirely consistent with Mr. Bove’s sworn testimony.

But again, that was March 14.

They didn’t avoid an order prohibiting the operation. Drew Ensign tried his damndest to mislead Boasberg about flights in the air, but Boasberg nevertheless issued the order.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to turn the planes around, not to deplane the planes.

So, Mr. Ensign, the first point is that I — that you shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States. However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.

Boasberg did give the order that Emil Bove was so inexplicably desperate to avoid.

And that’s where Grassley gets either cute or duped. He quotes Bove stating, under oath, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order” (with equivocal comments, not under oath, from Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi).

At his hearing, under oath, Mr. Bove firmly stated, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.” The Deputy Attorney General issued a statement confirming that he also attended the meeting, and “at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.” In another statement, the Attorney General unequivocally said that “no one was ever asked to defy a court order.”

All very nifty, Senator, except when you consider the smoking gun that does name Bove by his title, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Yaakov Roth, a top Civil Division lawyer documented in an email to Reuveni and others that PADAG (Bove) “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior [sic] the court’s minute order was permissible under the law and the court’s order.”

Only it wasn’t.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to inform its clients to turn the flights around, not to deplane the planes.

And then Bove instructed DHS — not DOJ lawyers, but DHS personnel, possibly including lawyers — something different.

Bove instructed DHS they could do something impermissible under the order Boasberg gave. And that’s the core of the contempt for which Boasberg found probable cause that two Trump appointees have bottled up at DC Circuit.

By mid-Sunday morning, the picture of what had happened the previous night came into clearer focus. It appeared that the Government had transferred members of the Plaintiff class into El Salvador’s custody hours after this Court’s injunction prohibited their deportation under the Proclamation. Worse, boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully. The Secretary of State, for instance, retweeted a post in which, above a news headline noting this Court’s Order to return the flights to the United States, the President of El Salvador wrote: “Oopsie . . . Too late 😂😂.” Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele), X (Mar. 16, 2025, 7:46 a.m. EDT), https://perma.cc/Y384-4TDW, https://perma.cc/6VTW-5KRD (ellipses in original)

Bove may not have lied — this is not proof he told DOJ lawyers to fuck off a Boasberg order. But he did tell DHS to fuck off a Boasberg order.

Which is it, Senator Grassley: Are you old and confused? Or complicit?

Because Erez Reuveni supplied you the smoking gun proving that Bove blew off Boasberg’s order.

Grassley does one other dishonest thing in his letter. He makes much of the fact that Todd Blanche, not Bove himself, fired Reuveni.

The whistleblower also claims his termination was the result of his efforts to ensure agency compliance with court orders. The documents Mr. Reuveni produced, however, reveal that the ultimate termination decision was made and signed by Deputy Attorney General Blanche—not Mr. Bove.

Another of the “almost none” documents that Reuveni turned over showed that Bove was gunning for Reuveni just before he was ousted.

Days before Blanche put Reuveni on leave, April 1, Flentje texted Reuveni about “a nastygram from Emil Bove” conveyed by Roth, the same guy who sent the smoking gun email.

On April 5, a few hours after Todd Blanche did put Reuveni on paid leave, Flentje confirmed that at the meeting on March 15, he “told our host we would not violate a court order.”

That is, in response to Reuveni being placed on leave, Flentje confirmed there was a “through line” from questions about whether or not DOJ would follow an order to Reuveni’s suspension (and subsequent firing).

For Grassley, “almost none” is two too many to sustain his case, because the smoking gun documenting who defied an order after Bove proclaimed he might tell a judge “fuck you” is right there with Bove’s title on it.

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Seizing Opportunity from Chaos

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I have always said — and reiterated, in some form, on Friday — that the most immediate way to reverse the damage Trump is doing is seizing opportunity out of a catastrophe he creates.

The most likely way you will get Republicans to start breaking from Trump, the most likely way you will get Republicans to actually take action against Trump rather than simply mewling weakly, is if a catastrophe threatens the world Republicans — as distinct from average Americans — care about.

The global crisis Trump has created is one such possible moment. But it will require keeping focus and wits in a moment of chaos.

Last week, Democrats had several moments of solidarity, first with the Cory Booker Senate speech, then with Saturday’s protests. Those twin events gave aging white liberals who, before this moment, often complained about fecklessness, a sense of direction.

Then there’s the opportunity created by chaos. Both Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson have warned against Trump’s tariffs. Last week the Senate passed a Tim Kaine bill reversing Trump’s claimed emergency on which he based his Canadian tariffs (with Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell voting in support). Chuck Grassley’s bill with Maria Cantwell to reclaim Congressional authority over tariffs has seven of the 13 GOP supporters it would need to pass so far (with Grassley, Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell, plus Thom Tillis, Jerry Moran, and Todd Young). Don Bacon is introducing a similar bill in the House (where it would need more supporters to bypass Mike Johnson’s control).

There’s more overt opposition from the banksters who foolishly believed that Trump would help business, with Bill Ackerman undergoing a moment of cognitive dissonance in real time.

Thus far Trump has doubled down in the face of whatever lobbying he’s getting privately.

But Trump is, in my opinion, wildly overestimating his leverage over foreign countries and probably even Wall Street. China immediately responded to Trump’s tariffs with retaliation. I expect China has a belief that it can cut the US out of global trade flows, and eventually undermine the US role as reserve currency — though to be sure, Trump has telegraphed plans to retaliate using using precisely those tools.

Not only have Trump’s attacks on Canada reversed the Liberal Party’s fortunes [corrected] in advance of an election this month. But Mark Carney’s hard line has quieted Trump’s taunts (at least until after the election). And his experience as a central banker of both Canada and England makes him a natural leader of efforts to make sense of this chaos.

The EU has not yet decided on a response, but among the tools under consideration are sanctions against US tech companies.

Which is to say, other countries may soon disabuse Trump’s fantasy that he wields absolute power.

But in the last several weeks, Trump has gotten several court rulings that will help him accelerate his assault on the Federal government. A week ago Friday, a conservative panel on the DC Circuit ruled that Trump has authority to fire commissioners on panels that Congress has mandated to operate independently, effectively overruling Humphrey’s Executor [corrected] in anticipation that SCOTUS may ultimately do so. The plaintiffs are asking for an en banc review, as of yet to no avail. In the wake of this and an earlier DC Circuit ruling, Trump has successfully argued that Trump has broader authority to dismantle agencies than District judges have initially recognized. And this ruling makes it more likely that Trump will go after the Fed. [Update: The full Circuit reversed and unfired the commissioners.]

Then on Friday SCOTUS overruled a Temporary Restraining Order, thereby permitting Trump to cancel grants to teachers involving DEI, suggesting that the court will eventually side with DOJ’s argument that existing grants must be litigated in Court of Federal Claims. This reflects Amy Coney Barrett switching positions from an earlier USAID lawsuit. This will lead District court judges to pause before granting similar TROs on an Administrative Procedures theory.

The courts have slowed Trump down and on some matters the courts will continue to be a brake, but the twin legal theory that Trump can fire anyone and after installing his own leader dismantle what is left will accelerate some kinds of attacks. It may also encourage him to fire Jerome Powell, which will really spook the markets.

The 2008 bank crash created an opportunity that Barack Obama largely squandered in his effort to save the big banks from their own foolishness. Here, the foolishness is all Trump’s, with banks and hedgies on the hook only for their arrogance that they would be better off with a racist nihilist. That presents a kind of opportunity, even if Trump’s personal appeal counsels indirect counterattacks (for example, on Elon rather than Trump) for the moment.

Here, the task remains the same as it was last week, and the week before, and the week before that. Hold DOGE accountable for dismantling the government. Warn about what DOGE (and Congress) are in the process of doing to Social Security and Medicaid. Make government visible, especially with stories of those fired and great government projects killed. Get non-political networks — PTAs and library reading groups and disease communities — involved in the fight. Tell the stories of the human beings stripped of their due process rights.

Do everything you can to peel off right wingers.

Help your neighbors.

To the extent you are able as you try to protect your retirement and pay the bills, though, try not to lose your head over Trump’s economic catrastrophe. Lots of people are losing their head right now and the people around Trump are stuck defending tariffs on penguins, badly (and inconsistently). It is absolutely horrible, and billions of people are being hurt by Trump’s attacks.

The economic calamity is of a piece with the constitutional one. And the economic calamity may present a path out of both that and the constitutional calamity.

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MAGAts Confess They Cannot Compete with Penguins on a Level Playing Glacier

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Trump is well on his way to causing, with his stupid tariffs, the same kind of economic damage as COVID did, but without a global epidemic as catalyst and excuse, just himself and the batshit advisors who refuse to tell him no.

At least some of Trump’s handlers hope this will lead one after another country to supplicate Trump, begging for favors. Depending on who you ask, that may have been one of the poorly considered and often conflicting goals.

But even before price hikes start to affect consumers, there are signs of pushback.

After the Senate passed a (thus far) mostly symbolic law sponsored by Tim Kaine reversing Trump’s emergency declaration for Canada, Chuck Grassley teamed with Maria Cantwell to propose restoring Congressional authority over such taxes. (Grassley did not support Kaine’s bill; Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell did.) See this Aaron Fritschner thread for an explanation of why this second effort might have more prospect of success: because the House has not yet stopped time with regards to the latest emergency Trump declared to accrue more power.

The pure insanity of Trump’s tariffs is best (ahem) personified by his inclusion of Heard and McDonald Islands, which are inhabited largely by penguins.

Two tiny, remote Antarctic outposts populated by penguins and seals are among the obscure places targeted by the Trump administration’s new tariffs.

Heard and McDonald Islands – a territory which sits 4,000km (2,485 miles) south-west of Australia – are only accessible via a seven-day boat trip from Perth, and haven’t been visited by humans in almost a decade.

[snip]

Like the rest of Australia, the Heard and McDonald Islands, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island are now subject to a tariff of 10%. A tariff of 29% was imposed on the Norfolk Island, which is also an Australian territory and has a population of about 2,200 people.

Heard Island, though, is barren, icy and completely uninhabited – home to Australia’s largest and only active volcano, Big Ben, and mostly covered by glaciers.

It is believed the last time people ventured on to Heard Island was in 2016, when a group of amateur radio enthusiasts broadcast from there with permission of the Australian government.

Taken literally, Trump’s inclusion of two islands (over)run by penguins means that he believes American workers cannot compete with penguins without some kind of help — a 10% tariff — to level the playing field. A glacier field.

Right wingers who applaud Trump’s insanity are, effectively, confessing that their own industry and pluck is no match for a colony of penguins.

The penguins are useful for something beyond the MAGAt confessions that they are not as industrious as penguins. They help to identify how the Trump Administration came up with this hocus pocus.

James Surowiecki figured it out — the Administration took the trade deficit (Surowiecki later figured out it’s only the trade deficit in goods, not services) and split it in half.

This was largely confirmed when the Deputy WH Spox attempted to dispute Surowiecki’s description, only to confirm that’s precisely the formula they used (sorry, you need to click through for the pure dumber-than-a-penguin-glory).

So because the penguins have shown up as trading partners in a few different years, they’re included on here.

Russia is not. Russia, Belarus, North Korea. The Administration says that’s because sanctions effectively mean we have no trade with them, but we do — certainly more than we do with the penguins.

I guess Trump is more terrified of the Russians than he is the penguins.

This is a shit show. But it’s the kind of shit show that may disrupt the Republican lockstep in Congress. Whether the penguin tariffs were the cause, John Thune had to pull the first of the budget resolutions that were supposed to give legal sanction for Trump’s agenda (as well as massive tax cuts to the rich) yesterday. And Teddy Cancun Cruz has spoken up against the sanctions, calling them (accurately) taxes.

Even before constituents start to pay through the teeth, Republicans are beginning to accurately describe that these are taxes.

It’s unclear how this will end up, and billions of people will be hurt in the process (though, as with much else that Trump has done out of pique this Administration, China will likely find a way to capitalize on Trump’s idiocy). But this is the kind of disruptive event that presents opportunity to disrupt Trump’s power.

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