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Rudy Giuliani’s Scott Brady Interview Doesn’t Appear in His Warrant Affidavit

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I’m about to do a larger post on some of the warrants targeting Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas, but first I want to make a point about the April 21, 2021 warrant targeting Rudy.

It doesn’t once mention Rudy’s January 29, 2020 interview with the Pittsburgh US Attorney’s office.

It sources Rudy’s own claims about his activities to a series of articles, interviews, and Tweets.

But the affidavit never once mentions that Rudy Giuliani sat for a 4-hour interview with the Pittsburgh US Attorney and nine other people on January 29, 2020.

NYT first disclosed the interview in this December 2020 article.

Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, asked the Justice Department for a meeting to discuss what he felt was explosive information about Hunter Biden that he had gathered from people in Ukraine and elsewhere, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

In response, Mr. Brady called Mr. Costello and offered to meet. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Costello sent reams of documents to Pittsburgh, then traveled there on Jan. 29. They were picked up by F.B.I. agents and stopped for breakfast before meeting for nearly four hours at the local F.B.I. office with Mr. Brady and his top deputies on the inquiry, Stephen Kaufman and Ira Karoll, the person said.

Rudy described the interview at length in a letter claiming that the government should never have seized his devices (and revealing that SDNY requested, in both November 2020 and January 2021, to do so).

[I]n January 2020, counsel for Giuliani contacted high officials in the Justice Department, to inform them that Giuliani wanted to provide evidence for their consideration about the Ukraine. Within a day, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Scott W. Brady, contacted Giuliani’s counsel and offered to hold a meeting in Pittsburgh with both the United States Attorney’s office personnel and the FBI. Mayor Giuliani immediately accepted, and a meeting was scheduled for January 29, 2020.

On January 29, 2020, Mayor Giuliani and his counsel, flew to Pittsburgh at their own cost, where they were met by agents of the FBI and transported to FBI headquarters in Pittsburgh. Present at that meeting were the United States Attorney, the First Assistant United States Attorney, the Chief of the Criminal Division, and two additional Assistant United States Attorneys (“AUSA’s”) from the Western District of Pennsylvania. The FBI was represented by the Special Agent in Charge (“SAIC”) of the Pittsburgh FBI, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge (“ASAIC”), and three other special agents of the FBI.

Prior to the meeting, Giuliani’s counsel had provided the Pittsburgh United States Attorney’s office with documents and an extensive outline of the subject matter to be discussed, so that the Government could be fully informed and prepared to ask probing questions. Giuliani began the meeting by making a presentation with handouts. During his presentation, and at the end of it, the Mayor and his counsel answered every question they were asked, to the apparent satisfaction of all of the Government officials in the room. In addition to the presentation, Giuliani provided the Government with the names and addresses of individual witnesses, both in the United States and in Ukraine, that could corroborate and amplify the information that the Mayor was providing. Subsequent to that meeting, and covering a period of months, counsel for Giuliani received a number of inquiries, discussions and requests from the First Assistant United States Attorney. All requests were granted and all inquiries were answered. [my emphasis]

At Scott Brady’s deposition before House Judiciary Committee, there was an extensive exchange about that interview — including regarding then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Seth DuCharme’s request that Brady sit in on the interview personally — which I first wrote about here.

And I’ll get copies for everyone. It’s very short. This is an email from Seth DuCharme to you, subject: “Interview.” The date is Wednesday, January 15, 2020. And, for the record, the text of the email is, quote, “Scott I concur with your proposal to interview the person we talked about would feel more comfortable if you participated so we get a sense of what’s coming out of it. We can talk further when convenient for you. Best, Seth.” And tell me if you recall that email.

A Yes, I do recall it.

Q Okay. And the date, again, is January 15, 2020, correct?

A That’s right.

Q So that was 14 days before the interview that you just described at which you were present, correct?

A Correct.

Q Does that help you recall whether this email between you and Seth DuCharme was referring to the witness that you participated in the interview of on January 29, 2020?

A Yes, it definitely did.

Q Okay. Just for clarity, yes, this email is about that witness?

A Yes, that email is about setting up a meeting and interview of Mr. Giuliani.

Q Okay. So the witness was Mr. Giuliani? That’s who you’re talking about?

A Yes.

Q Okay. And it was, in your judgment, important to get Mr. DuCharme’s opinion or, quote, “concurrence” about interviewing Mr. Giuliani. Is that fair to say?

A As I sit here, I don’t know if it was about interviewing Mr. Giuliani or just the logistics of where the interview would take place Pittsburgh, New York, D.C. It might’ve been about that.

Q So you needed Mr. DuCharme’s opinion about where the interview would be taking place?

A No, I didn’t need his opinion.

Q Oh. I’m just trying to

A Yeah.

Q understand, what was the reason, if you can recall, why you consulted with Mr. DuCharme about that particular decision, about whether or not you should interview Mr. Giuliani and any other aspect of that decision?

A Yeah, I I don’t know. I may have just been circling back to him, saying, “Hey, here’s the plan.” And he said, “Yeah, that sounds fine.”

Q Okay. Well, he also said that he would feel more comfortable if you participated, right?

A In that email, he did, yes.

Q Yeah. Was that consistent with what your experience with Mr. DuCharme was when you discussed interviewing Mr. Giuliani, or is there something unusual about the email?

A I don’t remember that there’s anything unusual. I would’ve sat in on that interview anyways, in all likelihood.

Q Okay. And just I don’t want to take this away from you, because I know you and I

A Oh, sure.

Q just have one copy. But just, again, what this email says is, “I concur with your proposal to interview the person we talked about.” And then he says, “Would feel more comfortable if you participated so we get a sense of what’s coming out of it.” Do you see that?

A Uhhuh.

Q Okay.

A Yes.

Q So what did he mean by “we”? Who was he referring to by “we”? Do you know?

A I don’t know.

Q Okay. Is it fair to infer that he is referring to the Attorney General and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General where he was working?

A I don’t know. Yeah, some group of people at Main Justice, but I don’t know specifically if it was DAG Rosen, Attorney General Barr, or the people that were supporting them in ODAG and OAG.

Brady would go on to concede there were a number of things — such as Rudy’s attempts to reach out to Mykola Zlochevsky and his possession of a hard drive of data from Hunter Biden — that Rudy never told the Pittsburgh US Attorney.

Q Okay. Then the other question I think that I have to ask about this is: This is a prior inconsistent statement of Mr. Zlochevsky that your investigation did not uncover, but it’s a statement that Mr. Giuliani was certainly aware of. Would you agree?

A Yes, if based on your representation, yes, absolutely.

[snip]

Okay. And what I am asking you is, have you ever heard that during the course of your investigation that Mr. Giuliani actually learned of the hard drive material on May 30th, 2019?

A No, not during our 2020 vetting process, no.

Q Mr. Giuliani never shared anything about the hard drives or the laptop or any of that in his material with you?

Mr. [Andrew] Lelling. Don’t answer that.

Q Oh, you are not going to answer?

Mr. Lelling. I instruct him not to answer.

Q. He did answer earlier that the hard drive. That Mr. Giuliani did not provide a hard drive.

Mr. Lelling. Okay.

Mr. Brady. He did not provide it. We were unaware of it.

By his own telling, Rudy spent four hours telling a team of ten people about these matters, and yet this affidavit doesn’t mention that interview at all.

To be sure, in his book, Geoffrey Berman — who was likely fired for conducting this investigation — provides one explanation for why Rudy’s 302s wouldn’t be incorporated in any warrant affidavit targeting Rudy: because the FBI refused to share those 302s with the NY Special Agent in Charge, William Sweeney.

So in January 2020 he came up with a plan. He described this plan he had hatched as “an intake process in the field.” That made it sound almost normal. The Department of Justice, in order to deal with the large influx of evidence, was going to employ this tried-and-true method in order to keep it all straight! But in all my years as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I had never heard of “an intake process in the field,” and neither had my executive staff or Sweeney.

His plan was to run all Ukraine-related matters, including information that Giuliani was peddling about the Bidens, through two other districts. His choices were Rich Donoghue, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who sat in Brooklyn; and Scott Brady, the US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. Donoghue would oversee all Ukraine-related investigations, and Brady would handle the intake of information from Rudy and his lawyer.

This scheme, notably, did not include me or SDNY, which, as the office running the Lev and Igor case, was well versed in all things Ukraine. Barr’s implication seemed to be that with such a fire hose of material coming in from Rudy and his lawyer, we needed to spread the work out. And we had to have some kind of traffic cop to keep it all organized and flowing in the right direction—which was to be Brady in Pittsburgh.

All of this, of course, was utter nonsense. If somebody has information about an ongoing case, they typically hire a lawyer and approach the office that’s involved. Regardless of the quality or veracity of the material, I wanted to see it. We were the office with the background to determine its value. And we certainly would have had our own questions for Rudy, because he was a close associate of the two guys we just indicted. What’s more, our office was only a taxi ride away for Rudy and his lawyer—Pittsburgh was a 350-mile trip for them.

We could have handled whatever information Rudy had. With more than two hundred fully capable attorneys, I would have found a couple more to throw into the mix if it came to that. But that’s not what was driving the attorney general’s machinations. I believe it was really an effort by Barr to keep tabs on our continuing Lev and Igor investigation and keep us segregated from potentially helpful leads or admissions being provided by Rudy.

This became immediately clear to me and to Sweeney when we tried to access the information Rudy was providing. Rudy and his lawyer met several times with Main Justice and then with Brady’s team in Pittsburgh. There were FBI reports of those meetings, called 302s, which we wanted to review. So did Sweeney. Sweeney’s team asked the agents in Pittsburgh for a copy and was refused. Sweeney called me up, livid.

“Geoff, in all my years with the FBI I have never been refused a 302,” he said. “This is a total violation of protocol.”

Sweeney asked Jacqueline Maguire, his special agent in charge, to reach out to the acting head of the FBI’s office in Pittsburgh, Eugene Kowel, to request the 302s and related information. A few days later Kowel got back to Maguire and repeated what Brady had told him about the 302s: “It’s not my job to help the Southern District of New York make a case against Rudy.” [my emphasis]

Yet SDNY had to wait until Bill Barr was long gone before they got approval to serve this warrant. How is it possible that in the month and a half since Merrick Garland came in, SDNY had never gotten permission to read the 302s from Rudy’s “cooperation” in Pittsburgh?

Related: In related news, in a request for a delay in responding to Hunter Biden’s lawsuit against Rudy and his former attorney now creditor Robert Costello, it appears they are represented by the same firm.

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Jim Jordan Says Trump’s Years of Blowing Off Subpoenas May Merit Impeachment

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In another ploy to get journalists at dick pic-sniffing right wing outlets like JustTheNews and NBC to air false claims, Jim Jordan and James Comer sent the White House a letter demanding any communications the White House had with Hunter Biden or his lawyers about blowing off a subpoena that — the letter itself notes — was issued before the chairmen obtained support of the House to issue impeachment subpoenas.

They base their claim that the President knew his son was going to blow off a subpoena on a misrepresentation of what Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said later that day: that the President was familiar with what his son was going to say.

Look, as you know, Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and so I certainly would refer you to his representatives. Look, the President was certainly familiar with what his son was going to say, and I think what you saw was from the heart from his son. And you’ve heard me say this, you’ve heard the president say this, when it comes to the president and the first lady, they’re proud of him continuing to rebuild his life. They are proud of their son.

Perhaps Jean-Pierre was suggesting Joe Biden knew Hunter would say things like, “James Comer, Jim Jordan, Jason Smith, and their colleagues have distorted the facts,” a true statement similar to comments Joe himself has made. Perhaps Jean-Pierre’s comment meant that Joe Biden knew his son would say that Jordan and Comer, along with Jason Smith, “ridiculed my struggle with addiction [and] belittled my recovery,” something consistent with her own focus on his recovery. Given Jean-Pierre’s observation that “what you saw was from the heart,” perhaps she was referring to Hunter’s tribute to his parents’ love:

During my battle with addiction, my parents were there for me. They literally saved my life. They helped me in ways that I will never be able to repay. And of course they would never expect me to. In the depths of my addiction, I was extremely irresponsible with my finances. But to suggest that is grounds for an impeachment inquiry is beyond the absurd. It’s shameless. There’s no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business because it did not happen.

[snip]

They have taken the light of my Dad’s love — the light of my Dad’s love for me and presented it as darkness.

There is nothing in her statement that confirms foreknowledge that Hunter would blow off the subpoena, something conceded in the letter that her statement only, “suggests that the President had some amount of advanced knowledge that Mr. Biden would choose to defy two congressional subpoenas” [my emphasis].

Nevertheless, serial liar Comer and subpoena scofflaw Jordan use Jean-Pierre’s statement to insinuate that Joe Biden has committed what they themselves call a potentially impeachable offense of dissuading a subpoena recipient from complying with it.

Later on December 13, when asked whether President Biden had watched Mr. Biden’s statement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated that President Biden was “certainly familiar with what his son was going to say.”11 Ms. Jean-Pierre declined, however, to provide any further details about the President’s actions or whether the President approved of his son defying congressional subpoenas.12 Nonetheless, Ms. Jean-Pierre’s statement suggests that the President had some amount of advanced knowledge that Mr. Biden would choose to defy two congressional subpoenas.

Under the relevant section of the criminal code, it is unlawful to “corruptly . . . endeavor[] to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any investigation or inquiry is being had by . . . any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress[.]”13 Likewise, any person who “aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures” the commission of a crime is punishable as a principal of the crime.14

In light of Ms. Jean-Pierre’s statement, we are compelled to examine the involvement of the President in his son’s scheme to defy the Committees’ subpoenas.

[snip]

[T]he fact that the President had advanced awareness that Mr. Biden would defy the Committees’ subpoenas raises a troubling new question that we must examine: whether the President corruptly sought to influence or obstruct the Committees’ proceeding by preventing, discouraging, or dissuading his son from complying with the Committees’ subpoenas. Such conduct could constitute an impeachable offense.

11 Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby. White House Briefing Room (Dec. 13, 2023).

12 Id. 13 18 U.S.C. § 1505 (Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies, and committees).

14 18 U.S.C. § 2(a).

Once you wade through all the bad faith and misrepresentation, this is a breathtaking development: Donald Trump’s most vigorous defender in Congress, Jim Jordan, someone who himself defied a subpoena to cover up Trump’s actions, has accused Donald Trump of committing an impeachable offense.

There are a slew of ways that Donald Trump, “prevent[ed], discourag[ed], or dissuad[ed]” witnesses from complying with subpoenas, during both his impeachments, the January 6 Committee, and elsewhere. Most famously, during the first impeachment, for example, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow got Trump to permit Trump attorney John Dowd to represent Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. In a response to a subpoena that was very similar to the pre-impeachment vote subpoena sent to Hunter Biden, Dowd made a bunch of claims about attorney-client relationships that, with the exception of the tie to Dmitry Firtash, have since been disproven, all in an attempt to deprive Congress of their testimony. While Parnas eventually cooperated with impeachment, neither Fruman nor Rudy did. Indeed, Trump’s entire Administration blew off the inquiry.

Trump did the same with the January 6 inquiry. Trump attempted to pressure Cassidy Hutchinson about her testimony. Even better documented, Robert Costello described that Trump’s lawyer instructed him to withhold materials about a meeting involving a bunch of lawyers but also Mike Flynn based on an attorney-client privilege claim. On Jordan’s logic, Trump should join Bannon in his 4-month contempt sentence for that intervention.

In short, while Comer and Jordan manufactured the claim that President Biden knew Hunter was going to blow off a subpoena, the evidence that Trump has ordered everyone in his orbit to do the same for years is overwhelming.

Once you argue that instructing people to blow off subpoenas merits impeachment, you’ve made the case for a third Trump impeachment.

Comer and Jordan have already surfaced far more evidence supporting an impeachment of Donald Trump than Joe Biden. Three major examples are:

  • Ties between DOJ access and dirt on Hunter Biden: In response to Comer’s allegations about Hunter and Joe Biden, Lev Parnas has renewed allegations he made in the past, much of which are backed by known communications and the recently released warrants from SDNY. Of particular note, he described that Rudy floated access with Trump’s DOJ in exchange for dirt on the Bidens with both Yuriy Lutsenko and Dmitry Firtash. Parnas also claimed that when he attempted to fly to Vienna on October 9, 2019, he believed he would retrieve content stolen from a Hunter Biden laptop.
  • Efforts to funnel Rudy Giuliani’s dirt to the investigation into Hunter Biden: Chuck Grassley revealed that during his first impeachment, when Trump was emphasizing the import of investigating Burisma corruption, his own DOJ shut down a 3.5-year old investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky. Testimony from Scott Brady enhanced what we already know about the dedicated channel Bill Barr set up days later for dirt Rudy had obtained, including from known Russian agents. Of particular import, Brady revealed that he mined the recently closed Zlochevsky investigation to obtain informant testimony about how Zlochevsky changed his story about Joe Biden during the course of impeachment. Brady and Gary Shapley both provided new details of how that information got shared with the Hunter Biden investigative team, with Brady submitting interrogatories about what they were investigative and getting David Weiss’ intervention to brief the information they obtained. Ultimately, after Trump yelled at Bill Barr about the Hunter Biden investigation, Richard Donoghue ordered the Delaware investigators to accept the FD-1023 memorializing Zlochevsky’s changed story about Biden; Bill Barr confessed that he was involved in this process. In short, Jordan and Comer, with an assist from Grassley, have confirmed many of the suspicions that drove the first impeachment.
  • Trump’s involvement in Tony Bobulinski’s inconsistent FBI testimony: The disgruntled IRS agents released Tony Bobulinski’s draft interview report (from the same day as the briefing about Zlochevsky’s changed Biden claims), key claims in which are not backed by previously unreleased communications. The disclosure of testimony that Hunter Biden alleges to be false comes even as Cassidy Hutchinson’s book describes a secret meeting Mark Meadows had weeks after that FBI interview, at which Trump’s chief of staff handed Bobulinski something that could be an envelope.

Thanks to Comer and Jordan — with an important assist from Grassley — Republicans have exposed that Trump has been corruptly involved in the Hunter Biden investigation — the Hunter Biden investigation they’re using to impeach Joe Biden — from the start.

But this letter is different.

Comer and Jordan never admitted that all the rest — all the evidence that Trump corruptly ginned up an investigation into Joe Biden’s kid — merited impeachment. They have claimed the opposite, even in the face of Grassley’s stunning claim that Trump’s DOJ shut down an investigation into Zlochevsky opened when Biden was Vice President.

But here, at long last, they’re admitting that Trump’s years-long efforts to stonewall Congress may merit impeachment.

Mind you, the outlets that believed this letter was newsworthy didn’t mention that fact. Instead, they treated Jordan’s stunning hypocrisy as if it were a good faith intervention. They didn’t even mention that Jordan himself blew off a subpoena to protect Trump!

We know why John Solomon — implicated himself in all these events — pretended this was all good faith. Solomon doesn’t pretend to be anything but a pro-Trump propagandist.

But NBC has no excuse. Either it is too stupid to recognize that this Jordan letter is the height of bad faith … or it is too addicted to dick pic-sniffing clicks to explain all that to their readers.

At some point, Jim Jordan’s confession that Donald Trump really did deserve impeachment becomes the story.

Update: I should have included Luke Broadwater — the NYT scribe who can’t do basic things like test the provenance of documents — in the right wing outlets that simply parroted Jordan’s garbage.

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In Lev Parnas Investigation, SDNY Decided that Ivana Trump Is Not Political

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I really should be writing a responsible article describing, in detail, the three phases of the Lev Parnas investigation. But instead, I need to obsess about Ivana Trump.

There were, roughly speaking, three phases of the investigation into Parnas:

January through August 2019: Campaign Finance crimes

The first — which I laid out here — focused primarily on the campaign finance crimes. SDNY obtained two warrants in this period:

  • January 18, 2019, 19 MJ 1729: For Yahoo and Google content
  • May 16, 2019, 19 MJ 4784: For iCloud content

When DOJ did a search of Parnas and Fruman’s residences the day they were arrested, the only crime listed on the warrants were the campaign finance crimes; they did this to hide the scope of the ongoing investigation. SDNY only unsealed the Fruman warrant, not the Parnas one (nor warrants in other districts targeting their co-defendants).

August through December 2019: Foreign Agent suspicions

After the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, SDNY investigated whether all Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman’s influence-peddling served the interests of foreign principals — chiefly Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, but also other Ukrainians and maybe some Russians too.

SDNY obtained at least 8 warrants in this period (there are at least two, 19 MJ 7594 and 19 MJ 9830, which must be related — perhaps targeting their Russian backer, Andrey Muraviev? — but which SDNY withheld). And SDNY also withheld the November 2019 warrants targeting Rudy Giuliani.

  • August 14, 2019, 19 MJ 7593: Yahoo and Google content since January, with expanded focus
  • August 14, 2019, 19 MJ 7595: Existing Yahoo and Google content, with expanded focus
  • October 17, 2019, 19 MJ 7595: Actual authorization of the warrant approved in August
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9829: iCloud content since May
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9831: Devices from Dulles
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9832: Existing iCloud content for expanded focus
  • November 4, 2019: Warrants targeting Rudy
  • December 10, 2019, 19 MJ 11500: Stuff seized from residences for foreign agent focus
  • December 10, 2019, 19 MJ 11501: Instagram

As I’ll return to, it looks like Bill Barr intervened to halt SDNY’s expanding investigation even earlier than previously disclosed, in December 2019 rather than January 2020.

The only additional warrants SDNY served after December 10, 2019 in the foreign agent investigation was a warrant obtained in March 2020 because Fruman had not synced his iCloud with his phone until after SDNY obtained the May 2019 warrants, meaning some of the texts and chats he had already sent were not in the earlier warrant return.

  • March 20, 2020, 20 MJ 3074: iCloud content obtained with October 21, 2019 to cover earlier periods

Effectively, SDNY discovered that they had obtained content in October 2019 pertaining to events in 2018 and earlier in 2019 that hadn’t been available when they first got Fruman’s iCloud in May 2019, so they asked to use the October 2019 warrant for the earlier periods.

This may mean that Fruman, like Parnas, deleted some of his content on his phones.

December 2019 through March 2020: Fraud Guarantee fraud

Starting on December 12, 2019 — two days after the foreign agent investigation halted — SDNY spent several months trying to figure out what Fraud Guarantee actually was.

  • December 12, 2019, 19 MJ 11651: Google for longer period and expanded focus
  • January 21, 2020, 20 MJ 740: Existing email content for expanded focus
  • February 28, 2020, 20 MJ 2240: Google from creation date for Fraud Guarantee
  • February 28, 2020, 20 MJ 2241: Parnas iCloud for expanded focus

SDNY originally had believed, in 2018, that Fraud Guarantee was a recent creation, one serving as another means to launder political donations. But they had to keep digging further and further back, to 2012, to try to figure out what Fraud Guarantee really was.

The Instagram pivot

I’m still triple checking my own work, but SDNY appears not to have complied with SDNY’s order to release all this backup. In addition to withholding the warrant for the search of Lev Parnas’ residence on October 9, 2019 (though that’s likely to be nearly indistinguishable from the one used to search Fruman’s residence, which was obtained in the same docket), I don’t think they released the affidavit for the December 10, 2019 search of the devices seized at the residences for foreign agent crimes.

That’s the one that should have the most expansive description of the foreign agent investigation (and, I suspect, of the financing behind the effort to fire Marie Yovanovitch and obtain dirt on Hunter Biden, which I’ll return to). I suspect the affidavit is closer in content to the one used to seize Rudy’s email in November 2019 than what was unsealed the other day.

The Instagram warrant obtained that same day necessarily used a different affidavit, partly because it included all the crimes under investigation (broadly, the campaign finance crimes and the suspected foreign agent crimes), but also because it was looking for a different kind of information: mostly, but not entirely, photos that Parnas had posted.

But there’s something really weird about it, which has made me obsess about Ivana Trump.

The warrant suggests SDNY learned about the Instagram account from this WSJ video.

As you’ll note, WSJ describes that the oldest thing on the account was an April 2015 photo of a dog, then this photo, showing Parnas and co-defendant David Correia with Ivana Trump, at what he billed as a “Fraud Guarantee pow wow.”

As WSJ notes, the next things in Parnas’ Instagram account are photos showing him getting access to Trump from very early on in Trump’s campaign, in 2015 (as I’ll return to, Parnas’ 2016 access peddling is something that the warrants focus on more than the coverage of Parnas ever did). Then there’s a break in the Instagram account until summer 2018, when it returns to its focus on political access. The Instagram shows Parnas’ work with Rudy to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and the 2016 election. It ends (again, per WSJ), with their trip days after the Perfect Phone Call to Madrid, to continue that effort.

SDNY obtained this warrant just two days before the investigation shifted focus to Fraud Guarantee. When they obtained the warrant, they undoubtedly had all the questions they spent the next two months pursuing.

Yet SDNY limited the temporal scope of this warrant to postings starting on October 1, 2015 — effectively excluding only the photo of the dog and some event with Ivana trump six months before Parnas started insinuating himself into Trump’s political orbit, one pertaining to Fraud Guarantee.

To the extent materials are dated, this warrant is limited to materials created between October 1, 2015, which is the month in which it appears Parnas first posted a photo related to a political event, to the present.

Did Ivana have some pre-existing relationship with Lev Parnas, one that dates to months before Lev started serially insinuating himself into Donald Trump’s orbit?

And if she did, why didn’t SDNY want that photo?

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Garrett Ziegler’s Landscaping Problem

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According to emails posted at BidenLaptopEmails dot com made available by Garrett Ziegler, sometime around May 31, 2017, someone set a Google alert for weekly landscaping work, which usually took place in the mornings. Many weeks, Hunter Biden would receive a Google alert on Wednesday, reminding him landscapers would show up the next day. Then the next day, his iCloud email would email his RosemontSeneca email (hosted by Google) with a reminder.

In the depths of his addiction — again, per emails made available by Garrett Ziegler — the only emails that Hunter Biden “sent,” the only sign of life on his email accounts, was that email. For weeks on end, the only communication “from” Hunter is that eerie repetitive notice: “Alert – FYI landscapers at CBR (usually in AM).” It’s like that Google alert is a phantom, always there in Hunter’s email box.

I’m not sure the technical explanation for it — though I expect that experts would be able to use the nature of those weekly alerts to determine what inboxes were really used to load up the laptop that found its way to John Paul Mac Isaac and from there, on a hard drive, to Rudy Giuliani and then, another hard drive, to Garrett Ziegler. The technical explanation may also explain why the FBI relied on the laptop for Google alert information rather than the information the FBI received from Google itself, as I laid out here.

“Alert – FYI landscapers at CBR (usually in AM).” There must be over 150 versions of either the Google alert or the email from Hunter’s iCloud email to Hunter’s RosemontSeneca email in the collection made available by Garrett Ziegler.

In fact, those emails, “Alert – FYI landscapers at CBR (usually in AM),” may doom Ziegler’s effort to defeat Hunter Biden’s hacking lawsuit against him.

Ziegler filed his response, along with a sworn but not notarized declaration from Ziegler himself, yesterday.

As to the claim that he hacked Hunter Biden’s phone — which I’ve noted is a key vulnerability for Ziegler — Ziegler admits he used a password to access the backup from a phone Hunter allegedly owned in 2019.

19. Paragraph 29 falsely casts my comments to imply thta I and Defendant Marco Polo “hacked” into Plaintiff’s iPhone backup file.

20. In the case of the iPhone backup file referred to in paragraph 29, I received a copy of an iPhone backup file which existed as part of the copied files.

21. Also contained on the external hard drive given to me were files containing passcodes, which are essentially similar in function to passwords designed to allow access to password-protected files. Although it took months of examination, we were able to locate the passcode which allowed access to the iPhone backup file. Those files existed on the external hard drive when it was first given to me.

But he argues that because the disk drive he received from an associate of Rudy Giuliani had the password for the phone on it, and because Hunter never owned the hard drive on which Ziegler received both sets of data, he did not “hack” anything.

Plaintiff selectively cites to Defendant Ziegler’s December 2022 remarks about decrypting a specific file which stored the passcode to the iPhone backup file, both of which were on Defendants’ copy of the Laptop. (Compl. at ¶ 29). The Complaint falsely suggests Defendants “hacked” into Plaintiff’s iPhone backup. (Zeigler Decl. at ¶ 19). Defendants received a copy of Plaintiff’s iPhone backup file which existed as part of the files. (Id. at ¶ 20). When Defendants received the external hard drive, it contained passcodes, which allowed access to the iPhone backup file. (Id. at ¶ 21).

[snip]

Moreover, Plaintiff does not allege unlawful access to a computer within the meaning of the CFAA. A computer user “without authorization” is one who accesses a computer the user has no permission to access whatsoever—an “outside hacker[ ].” Van Buren v. United States, 141 S. Ct. 1648, 1658, (2021). Here, Plaintiff admitted that Defendants accessed and used a hard drive that Plaintiff never possessed. Specifically, Plaintiff alleges that Defendants accessed a hard drive provided by a third party which contains a copy (duplicates) of files. (Compl. at ¶ 18). Plaintiff does not allege that Defendants possessed or accessed Biden’s computer or original files.

Plaintiff alludes to his actual iPhone and iCloud account when he alleges that “at least some of the data that Defendants have accessed, tampered with, manipulated, damaged and copied without Plaintiff’s authorization or consent originally was stored on Plaintiff’s iPhone and backed-up to Plaintiff’s iCloud storage.” (Id. at ¶ 28). However, Plaintiff alleges no facts which demonstrate Defendants ever accessed any computer, storage, or service which Plaintiff either owns or has exclusive control over. Likewise, the Complaint also shows facts which conclusively prove that Defendants had no need to access any service or storage because the laptop copy in their possession admittedly contained all of the necessary information, including the passcode to view all of the files contained on the Biden Laptop regardless of encryption. (Id. at ¶ 18). Put simply, both the encrypted iPhone backup file and the passcode to open the iPhone backup file were on the Laptop copy.

Given that Hunter’s lawsuit also names a bunch of John Does, blaming his access to this backup on Rudy’s unnamed associate and Rudy and John Paul Mac Isaac may not help Ziegler.

In any case, Ziegler may hope he doesn’t have to rely on this argument. His response actually spends more time arguing that venue, in California, is improper than he does that using a password to access an encrypted backup is legal. The “work” Ziegler did to make ten years of Hunter Biden’s emails available took place in Illinois. He has no employees or board members in California. Fewer than 10% of Marco Polo’s supporters live in California (Ziegler doesn’t say what percentage of his donations they provide, however).

His venue argument and his hacking argument ignore a part of Hunter’s lawsuit, though, which alleges that Ziegler “directed illegal conduct to occur in California.”

Plaintiff is informed and believes that Defendant Ziegler intentionally directed illegal conduct to occur in California and has therefore subjected himself to jurisdiction in California.

Similarly, his response only mentions Hunter’s allegation that in addition to accessing that iPhone, he also accessed data in the cloud once.

Plaintiff accuses Defendants of “knowingly accessing and without permission taking and using data from” Plaintiff’s devices or “cloud” storage (Compl. at ¶¶ 40, 41), computer service (id. at ¶ 42), or protected computer (id. at ¶ 35) but fails to identify a single device Defendants accessed without authorization

That allegation is a key part of alleging that Ziegler broke the law in California.

40. Defendants have violated California Penal Code § 502(c)(1) by knowingly accessing and without permission taking and using data from Plaintiff’s devices or “cloud” storage, including but not limited to, Plaintiff’s encrypted iPhone backup to devise or execute a scheme to defraud or deceive, or to wrongfully obtain money, property, or data.

41. Defendants also have violated California Penal Code § 502(c)(2) by knowingly and without permission accessing, taking, copying, and making use of programs, data, and files from Plaintiff’s devices or “cloud” storage, including but not limited to, Plaintiff’s encrypted iPhone backup.

Ziegler denies accessing any computer in the possession of Hunter Biden. That falls short of denying that he hacked data owned by Hunter Biden.

22. Neither I nor any person associated with Marco Polo have accessed, or attempted to access, any computer, device, or system owned or controlled by Plaintiff. We are not hackers, we are simply publishers, and the Plaintiff is attempting to chill our First Amendment rights and harass us through a frivolous and vexatious lawsuit.

I think Ziegler has a problem with his description of where the iPhone backup came from in the first place: he says that the “laptop” was in Hunter Biden’s possession when the iPhone backup was saved to it on February 6, 2019.

The metadata concerning the duplicated iPhone backup file on our external hard drive indicates that the last backup made of the iPhone file to the plaintiff’s laptop, which he left at the repair show of John Paul Mac Isaac on April 12, 2019, occurred on February 6, 2019, while still in the plaintiff’s possession based upon all the facts known to me to be provably true beyond dispute.

Hunter may be able to prove that Ziegler, of all people, doesn’t believe that to be true, doesn’t believe that when that iPhone was backed up on February 6 — a day when someone presenting as Hunter was involved in a car accident in DC — Hunter was in possession of that laptop.

But the bigger problem Ziegler that has is that phantom landscaping reminder.

According to emails that Garrett Ziegler has made publicly available, an October 14, 2021 notice triggered by a Google alert was received on November 24, 2021, long past the time, per Ziegler’s declaration, he was in possession of this hard drive.

Again, I’m not sure how that happened technically. But if it involved either Apple servers or Google servers (or both, given that the notice was dated October 24, 2021), that would get you venue in California.

Hunter Biden may not have been in possession of Apple’s and Google’s servers in 2021, but accessing them using passwords stored on the hard drive — at least one password that Ziegler admits to using — would also constitute hacking.

Update, to answer a question below: The text of the email shows that the notice was October 14, but the email was received on November 24, 2021.

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Luke Broadwater’s Attempt at Fact-Checking Covers Up Fabrications and IRS Sloppiness

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NYT has two articles out fact-checking GOP lies in support of impeachment.

One, from Adam Entous, is really worth reading. It describes how a text that Hunter Biden sent his daughter Naomi, which joked about the fact that Joe Biden had made his sons work their way through college, has been misrepresented to instead suggest that Hunter was giving his father 50% of his diminished 2019 earnings.

Hunter felt dejected, and, while apparently under the influence of drugs, wrote a series of angry and often nonsensical messages to Naomi in which he threatened to cut her off financially.

“Find an apartment with Peter by next week,” Hunter instructed. “And send me the keys and leave all of my furniture and art. I love all of you. But I don’t receive any respect.”

Then he sent the text message that Republicans have used to suggest that Hunter’s foreign income was going to enrich his father.

[snip]

Hunter’s oft-told story about giving half of his salary to his father appeared to originate during his freshman year at Georgetown.

His roommate at the time recalled Hunter telling him and his twin brother “a million times” that then-Senator Biden encouraged him to work, saying, “You can keep half of the paycheck, but you have to hand over the other half for ‘room and board.’”

It was a story, and a theme, that Hunter continued to invoke, especially after he married Ms. Buhle and they had three daughters — Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy — all of whom attended Sidwell Friends, a costly Washington private school, where they were surrounded by wealthier families.

Hunter told close friends that he was worried that his daughters had become spoiled. According to family members, he would frequently tell them the story about how he had to work in college and pay half of his salary to his father, in hopes of encouraging them to be more self-sufficient.

In other words, Republicans are literally trying to impeach Joe Biden because he made his sons work their way through college, and at a time he was broke, Hunter tried to do the same with his daughters.

Note that the underlying back story Entous describes, in which Hunter attempted to find specialized medical care for his daughter Finnegan, shows that while in Fox News pundit Keith Ablow’s care, Hunter was somehow cut off from the digital world.

Then Ablow responds to his own email, which this time is marked [External], noting that “His [apparently meaning Hunter’s] email is screwed up,” and then saying he had texted Rock.

From: Keith Ablow <kablow[redacted]>
Sent: Thursday, January 3, 2019 11:40 AM
To: Positano [redacted]; rhbdcicloud
Subject: [EXTERNAL]Re: From Keith

CAUTION: External Email.

Rock
His email is screwed up

I texted you

The doctor responds — happy to help — and provides his contact. Ablow thanks him. Hunter responds to that, plaintively,

Guys are you getting my emails?

And though neither of the external interlocutors ever said a thing directly to Hunter, Ablow says, yes, suggesting they had gotten his emails, then instructs Hunter to contact the doctor and “send him the x-rays,” even though in the original email Hunter already sent 2 jpgs.

Hunter then tried to email the doctor directly, using the same email included in Ablow’s email (possibly even using the link from the doctor’s own email), and it bounces, “RecipientNotFound; Recipient not found by SMTP address lookup.”

Hunter’s digital rupture from the outside world is part of the back story to how his digital life got packaged up for delivery, eventually, to Congress. And it should raise provenance questions about every other aspect of this investigation.

Which brings us to the other NYT story, an attempt to fact check that was, instead a confession that NYT scribe Luke Broadwater either doesn’t care or doesn’t know how to assess evidence and claims for reliability.

Broadwater feigns fact-checking Republican representations of a text Hunter sent in 2017, claiming to be sitting next to his father while he was trying to strong arm a business associate, which is another communication that Republicans are sure proves Joe Biden was in business with his son.

Before I show you what Broadwater wrote, let me reconstruct how we have the claim in the first place. Gary Shapley provided the texts to Congress in May. He shared them, he claimed, as proof that investigators were denied the ability in August 2020 to obtain location data — he doesn’t say for whom — and to search the guest house at Joe Biden’s house.

For example, in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant. Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on.

Nevertheless, prosecutors denied investigators’ requests to develop a strategy to look into the messages and denied investigators’ suggestion to obtain location information to see where the texts were sent from.

For example, we obtained a July 30th, 2017, WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, where Hunter Biden wrote: “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

Communications like these made it clear we needed to search the guest house at the Bidens’ Delaware residence where Hunter Biden stayed for a time. [my emphasis]

Already, at this point, the savvy interlocutor would have asked Shapley, “why do you need location data? You get about five different kinds of location information in an iCloud warrant. What more did you need?”

Which might have led Shapley to confess he really wanted to get a location warrant targeting Joe, not Hunter.

If these texts were ever introduced at trial, Hunter’s lawyers would likely point out that they were obtained in reliance on the laptop obtained from John Paul Mac Isaac. At the point they got those warrants in August 2020 — effectively obtaining text messages that were available on the laptop — the FBI still had never validated the laptop to make sure no one had tampered with it either before it got into the custody of John Paul Mac Isaac or while in JPMI’s custody. That is, the warrant to obtain these texts may well be a classic case of poisonous fruit, and the texts could be affected by an alteration done to Hunter Biden’s contact list in the period in January 2019 when he was staying in Keith Ablow’s property and seems to have been partially cut off from the digital world; his contacts were restored — from what, it’s not clear — on January 24, 2019.

As Shapley was walking Congressional staffers through these texts, he admitted that they weren’t WhatsApp messages themselves, they were summaries. He wasn’t sure who had done the summaries.

Q Okay. And these aren’t WhatsApp messages, these are summaries of WhatsApp messages, correct?

A Yeah, that’s correct. Because it was something about the readability of the actual piece, right? It was easier to summarize in a spreadsheet.

Q Okay. And who did the summary? Who prepared this document?

A It was either the computer analysis guy or [Ziegler], one or the other.

Who did the summaries matters, because whoever it was did a shoddy job. In one crucial case, for example, whoever did the summaries interjected their opinion about what a screen cap that showed in the message was. It is the only indication in the exhibit shared with Congress that identifies the first name of Hunter’s interlocutor.

This interjection — a parenthetical comment recording that this was “(believed to be Zhao)” but included inside quotation marks as if it was part of the screencap — is the only place where Zhao’s first name is identified. Elsewhere, he is always referred to as “Zhao” or “Z,” even in a summary also referring to “Zang” and “Zhang.” Nowhere in this “summary” is his WhatsApp identifier included, as it would be in reliable WhatsApp texts summaries (here, from Vladislav Klyushin’s trial). It’s not the only parenthetical comment included as if it were part of a direct quote, but as we’ll see, it is a critical one.

Even in spite of the inherent unreliability of this summary, the shoddiness of the underlying IRS work, Republicans love it.

Jason Smith took these unreliable summaries and fabricated them into texts, creating the illusion that they had a solid chain of evidence for these texts.

Smith’s tweets of these texts went viral.

In spite of the fact that Abbe Lowell has attempted to get Congress to correct this viral claim twice, Smith left it up.

The summary and the fabrications of the text and Smith’s use of the initials “HZ” matter because there’s a dispute between Republicans and their IRS source about the identity of the person involved.

Shapley said the texts involved Henry Zhao, consistent with Smith’s fabrication.

But in a later release, James Comer described the interlocutor as Raymond Zhao — which is consistent with the interjection in the summary (and other communications regarding this business deal).

On July 30, 2017, Hunter Biden sent a WhatsApp message to Raymond Zhao—a CEFC associate—regarding the $10 million capital payment:

As we’ll see, Broadwater predictably “fact checks” this as a dispute between Democrats and Republicans. It’s not. Before you get there, you first have to adjudicate a conflict between the guy who led the IRS investigation for more than two years, Gary Shapley, and James Comer. It’s a conflict sustained by the shoddiness of the underlying IRS work.

This is a story showing not only that James Comer and Jason Smith don’t know what they’re talking about, but are willing to lie and fabricate nevertheless, but even the IRS agents may not know what they’re talking about, and if they don’t, it’s because the standard of diligence on the investigation of Joe Biden’s son was such that they didn’t even include the identifier of the person to whom Hunter was talking, which would make it easy or at least possible to adjudicate this dispute.

This is a story that discredits the IRS agents — for their sloppy work and for their bogus claims to need location data to further investigate this and the conceit that it ever would have been appropriate to get location data for Joe Biden or search his guest home in August 2020. It is a story that shows that when faced with uncertainty created by the sloppiness of their IRS sources, Republicans instead just make shit up.

But here’s how Luke Broadwater describes the conflict:

‘I am sitting here with my father’

One WhatsApp message that has received much attention was provided by an I.R.S. investigator who testified before Congress under whistle-blower protections. In it, Hunter Biden invoked his father, who was then out of office, while pressing a potential Chinese business partner in 2017 to move ahead with a proposed energy deal.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to know why the commitment has not been fulfilled,” the message states. On its face, the message seemed to suggest Joe Biden was in league with his son pressuring for a payment to the family.

But Democrats have argued it is more likely an example of Hunter Biden’s bluster than an accurate statement of Joe Biden’s involvement in a shakedown. A lawyer for Hunter Biden says he does not remember sending the message.

The president has denied he was present at the time.

Broadwater turns this into an unknowable question about whether Biden was sitting next to Hunter, and claims it’s just about competing partisan arguments.

But this is a confession about Broadwater’s own abilities or work ethic, not a fact-check of truth claims. Because if you don’t understand or explain that the claim itself builds off provenance problems, you’re actively covering up several layers of shoddiness in this impeachment stunt.

If the point is to test the reliability of the impeachment inquiry, it’s that other story that needs to be told.

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Bankrupt!

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Rudy Giuliani admits he is bankrupt.

It’s unclear, given the Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition he filed today, whether it was his lying to cheat or his “scheme” to avoid paying taxes that was the final straw. He owes just shy of $1 million, to NY State and IRS, for two years of taxes.

Republicans have been quite clear that they believe that kind of tax negligence merits immediate incarceration — at least it does in Hunter Biden’s case.

In addition to the $148M judgement he owes Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, he also owes his co-defendant in the Hunter Biden lawsuit, Robert Costello, over $1.3M for past representation.

Ultimately, this is expected and a direct response to Beryl Howell’s order that he pay up immediately.

 

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Preliminary Comments on Rudy and Lev Warrants

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In the last few months, NYT asked to and did liberate the warrants in the Lev Parnas investigation and the expansion of the investigation into Rudy Giuliani on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job.

The Rudy warrants are very tidy. They include:

The Parnas warrants are a godawful mess — the digital equivalent of someone throwing 1,000 pages incorporating 30 or so documents on the floor, intermixing them all, thereby confusing where one document begins and the next ends. Here’s what just half look like: SDNY repeatedly split affidavits across multiple documents.

Bad words have been said in the Wheeler home today as a result.

Very bad words. And loudly.

For now, these two affidavits regarding Parnas provide a key introduction:

  • February 28, 2020: This warrant affidavit regarding Fraud Guarantee — the only ongoing investigation after Barr intervened to shut down any investigation into Rudy and after Parnas agreed to cooperate with impeachment — summarizes many if not all of the earlier warrants targeting Parnas.
  • December 10, 2019: This warrant, for Parnas’ Instagram account, is (for the moment) the most intact warrant describing the investigation as it was before Barr shut down any natural development. Temporally, it ends with a description of Trump’s perfect phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

I suspect the Parnas docket may look like it does to obscure what happened to the investigation when Barr intervened. Notably, while both sets of warrants make it clear that the Bidens were part of the project, there is much less focus on it in the Rudy warrants.

All that said, reviewing the Rudy affidavit, I have zero doubt — zero — that this affidavit was intended to obtain content for more than just the Foreign Agent investigation into Rudy. I was always confident that DOJ had set up that possibility (relatedly, former DOJ spox Anthony Coley pointed to this Politico story as proof that Garland nay-sayers have always been wrong), but there are several signs in this affidavit (which I’ll return to) that was the idea.

That said, as I reported, many of the devices seized with the Rudy warrant were corrupted, making them useless for any investigation.

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“Struck By Lightning:” The Deliberate Trump Politicization of the Hunter Biden Investigation

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In his latest podcast, Popehat delivered this opinion about the two indictments of Hunter Biden and Abbe Lowell’s aggressive attack on them.

In a way — and I don’t think this comparison is going to endear me to people — I think he’s doing very much what Trump is doing with his cases all over the place, calling them out about how they’re political and illegitimate and that type of thing. The truth is, the gun case is complete chickenshit but the tax case is absolutely the real deal, it’s something that, you know, if you get struck by the lightning that is IRS deciding to select you out to investigate you, you will absolutely get charged on that stuff and you’ll absolutely go to jail on that stuff. So it’s not a political case to that extent. The way it’s been handled might be political.

You should definitely listen to or read the podcast, as he and Josh Barro are two of the only people who even pretend to have read the motions to dismiss Hunter filed last week and you should never read just me on a topic.

They don’t mention two aspects of the tax indictment, which impact on whether it’s “absolutely the real deal.” First, something that even Weiss included in the plea statement but left out of the indictment: that Hunter has paid off his tax debt, along with up to $400,000 in penalties, for the charged years. And second, that Hunter’s lawyers at least claim (but have not substantiated publicly) that his accountant overstated his income for 2018, the year for which felonies have been charged. So (Hunter’s lawyers claim) when Hunter did belatedly pay his taxes, he overpaid them. Abbe Lowell has claimed that would mean the indictment would violate IRS guidelines, but it will also make it much hard to prove that whatever misrepresentations Hunter made in his 2018 tax filings were intentional.

To their credit, Popehat and Barro managed to lay out the content of much of the four motions to dismiss submitted last week, which I summarized this way.

The only things they missed were the Appropriations claim against David Weiss’ appointment, and the Separation of Powers claim about Congressional influence — though perhaps Popehat meant to invoke that in his characterization of the MTD as “it’s all politics.”

What’s interesting about the podcast is that Popehat continues to cling to his article of faith that Hunter’s claims of politics (he has made the same claims about Hunter’s accusations, which are backed by public evidence, that Rudy Giuliani and others have hacked his data) are all prospective: an attempt to taint anything Trump might do in a second term as political.

In the event that Donald Trump is elected President [Hunter Biden] is likely to be charged with a lot worse and a lot crazier stuff. And so what they’re really doing, I think, is using every situation that comes up as ways to get ahead of that, to get intel on it, to undermine it, and that type of thing.

Popehat gets a great deal right about this case (including the near-impossibility of winning a selective and vindictive prosecution claim). But it borders on insanity that he would read that MTD and then dismiss Hunter’s claims of politicization as an attempt to stave off future attacks from Trump.

The MTD about which Popehat made this argument — that the possibility of Trump politicization is all prospective — cited the following evidence:

  • In testimony he would subsequently caveat, Joseph Ziegler claimed that Bill Barr made the decision to put the tax investigation into Hunter Biden under David Weiss in May 2019, which would have been days after Joe Biden declared his run for President.
  • During his first impeachment, Trump sent tweets attacking Hunter Biden on October 6, October 10, October 12, October 13, November 15, 2019.
  • Rudy Giuliani traveled the world searching for dirt on Hunter Biden and got DOJ to open a dedicated channel, via Scott Brady, to accept the information he obtained.
  • Trump sent another tweet attacking Hunter on September 24, 2020.
  • Weeks before the election, Rudy Giuliani obtained what Hunter calls, “stolen electronic data,” manipulated it, and released it in an attempt to undermine Joe Biden’s election.
  • After Rudy released the “laptop,” President Trump led chants of “Lock him up” about Hunter Biden.
  • In the wake of the laptop release in mid-October 2020, Trump raised the Hunter prosecution with Bill Barr.
  • Bill Barr admitted having personal knowledge of how information from Scott Brady got shared with Weiss’ team, including on October 23.
  • In December 2020, after the investigation into Hunter was publicly revealed as a tax investigation but while Trump was still President, Trump tweeted twice more about the investigation.
  • On December 27, 2020, in the same hours-long phone call where Trump first floated replacing Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, Trump also raised the Hunter Biden investigation.
  • During his January 6 speech, Trump claimed that if more people had known about the contents of the “laptop,” he would have won and he also taunted, “Where’s Hunter?”
  • Trump posted about Hunter on March 31, 2023 after learning about the Alvin Bragg indictment.
  • Trump posted about the Hunter Biden plea deal three times on the day it was released on June 20, 2023, in one case calling it “The Hunter/Joe Biden settlement.”
  • On June 24, after the IRS agents’ transcripts were released, Trump made two more posts suggesting allegations against Hunter tied to Joe.
  • On June 26, Trump linked to a post falsely claiming that Hunter had shared classified documents with “foreign regimes.”
  • On July 11, Trump accused Weiss of giving Hunter a “traffic ticket instead of a death sentence.”
  • On November 23, Trump asked whether Joe had paid taxes on money he [claimed Joe had] made from Hunter.

This is the document Popehat claims to have read and decided Hunter was only doing this to claim that Trump was acting politically in some future prosecution.

And that’s not even the only evidence about Trump’s past politicization that Lowell has cited. In the subpoena request Abbe Lowell invoked in the MTD package, Hunter’s lawyer further described that Richard Donoghue ordered Weiss’ office to accept a briefing on an FD-1023 reporting a claim Mykola Zlochevsky made in late 2019, a briefing that occurred on October 23, 2020. By date, this briefing happened after Trump called Barr about the Hunter Biden investigation.

In a letter Lowell sent to Matthew Graves about Tony Bobulinski’s interview with the FBI on October 23, 2020, he noted that:

  • Bobulinski was Trump’s guest at the Nashville presidential debate on October 22.
  • Bobulinski’s claim to have attended a 2017 meeting with CEFC with Hunter Biden, at which — he claimed — Hunter received a diamond, conflicts with Bobulinski’s own communications from the period.
  • In her book, Cassidy Hutchinson described a clandestine meeting between Bobulinski and Mark Meadows weeks afterwards at which Trump’s Chief of Staff handed Bobulinksi something that might be an envelope; the excerpt describes Meadows having the meeting because, “The boss asked him to meet up with Tony Bobulinski.”

Plus, there’s a bunch that Lowell has not (to my knowledge) cited.

For example, FBI Agent Johnathan Buma claims that in January 2019, two Ukrainians with ties to the Prosecutor General’s Office — later deemed to be part of an information operation — shared allegations about Hunter Biden and Burisma with the Los Angeles US Attorney’s Office. The allegations were passed onto Baltimore FBI agents investigating Hunter Biden. The Ukrainians were later invited to an event hosted by the Trump White House.

In IRS agent Ziegler’s testimony, he described that it took him three tries before justifying a criminal (rather than civil) investigation into Hunter Biden; as part of that, he made claims about 2014 payments from Burisma that are explained in the tax indictment against Hunter. He similarly described learning, second-hand, that his supervisor during the first full year of the investigation documented repeated examples of potential improper political influence.

[M]y IRS supervisor, Matt Kutz, created memos which he put in the investigative files regarding the investigation potentially violating the subject’s Sixth Amendment rights. He also referred to Donald Trump’s tweets at the time.

On July 25, 2019 Trump withheld congressionally appropriated funds to support Ukraine to get Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden and Burisma, asking him to contact Barr and Rudy, the men who would later set up the channel via which information was ultimately shared with the Hunter Biden team. Two impeachment witnesses testified that Zelenskyy brought up a Burisma investigation, though the name does not appear in the transcript.

In addition to the details of Scott Brady’s task that Lowell did cite, Brady also described that he and Weiss spoke every four to six weeks about “the assignment.” Brady also describes getting Weiss to order his team to provide Brady details of the Hunter Biden investigation, which Brady described as “interrogatories.”

On September 12, Tim Thibault testified that, after such time as Steve Bannon would have had the “laptop” in 2020, the FBI made his propagandist Peter Schweizer an informant regarding matters pertaining to Hunter. The lead FBI supervisor on the Hunter Biden case asked the Washington Field Office to stop sending Schweizer’s reporting because it would give Hunter’s attorney, if he were ever charged, evidence to discredit the investigation.

FBI supervisor Thomas Sobocinski and David Weiss, along with other House Judiciary Committee witnesses, have testified that after the IRS agents’ claims went public — and so after Trump posted six times between when the plea deal was released and the hearing at which it failed — the investigative team, especially AUSA Lesley Wolf, began to get “pervasive” threats.

These are the kinds of Trump attacks that, the DC Circuit has found, have “real-world consequences” on those he attacks.

The record also shows that former President Trump’s words have real-world consequences. Many of those on the receiving end of his attacks pertaining to the 2020 election have been subjected to a torrent of threats and intimidation from his supporters. A day after Mr. Trump’s “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” post, someone called the district court and said: “Hey you stupid slave n[****]r[.] * * * If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly b[***]h. * * * You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.” Special Counsel Br. 5; see United States v. Shry, No. 4:23-cr-413, ECF 1 at 3 (Criminal Complaint) (S.D. Tex. Aug. 11, 2023). The Special Counsel also has advised that he has received threats, and that a prosecutor in the Special Counsel’s office whom Mr. Trump has singled out for criticism has been “subject to intimidating communications.” Special Counsel Mot. 12.

In all the litigation about the danger of Trump’s rhetoric, there has been no discussion of threats that Trump’s comments (or the members of Congress) may have ginned up against Hunter Biden’s prosecutors.

Again, all this evidence of Trump’s effort to dictate prosecutorial outcomes for Joe Biden’s son have already happened. They happened while he was President and while he was running against Hunter’s father. None of this is remotely speculative, and much of it has been described by Republican witnesses.

And the latter examples — the stuff Trump did while President — are particularly problematic. That’s because (as Abbe Lowell has noted on at least two court filings) it is a crime for the President to order up IRS investigations of someone.

77 President Trump initiated the investigation of Mr. Biden illegally. 26 U.S.C. § 7217 provides: “It shall be unlawful for any applicable person [including the President] to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.”

A separate law prohibits someone, who does not need to be President anymore, to intimidate someone investigating tax crimes.

After unlawfully requesting that Mr. Biden be investigated, President Trump violated 26 U.S.C. § 7212 of the Internal Revenue Code by interfering with that investigation. The section has two substantive provisions. The “Officer Clause” forbids “corruptly or by force or threats of force (including any threatening letter or communication) endeavor[ing] to intimidate or impede any officer or employee of the United States acting in an official capacity under [the Internal Revenue Code].” (emphasis added). The second clause, the “Omnibus Clause,” forbids “corruptly or by force or threats of force (including any threatening letter or communication) obstruct[ing] or imped[ing], or endeavor[ing] to obstruct or impede, the due administration of [the Internal Revenue Code].” (emphasis added). Mr. Trump has done both.

Here, Lowell overstates. I’m aware of no evidence that Trump ordered up the IRS investigation of Hunter, like he did Peter Strzok and others.

The available evidence shows that at least one strand of the investigation into Hunter Biden  — the one under Joseph Ziegler — started from a Suspicious Activity Report. And Barr is one of the people who would have been permitted to ask for an investigation into someone.

But it is nevertheless the case that the supervisor overseeing the investigation deemed Trump’s public demands for an investigation to be inappropriate. And at a time in 2020 after Trump knew there was an IRS investigation into Hunter, at a time he remained President, he privately and publicly pushed for an aggressive investigation. Those efforts, including publicly issued threats, have continued to this day.

The DC Circuit described how Trump uses social media posts to address people he knows are likely aware of his posts.

So too if the defendant posts a message on “social media knowing that [witness] is a social media follower of his,” id. 33:20–23, or that the message will otherwise likely reach the witness. In each of these scenarios, the defendant’s speech about witness testimony or cooperation imperils the availability, content, and integrity of witness testimony.

Accordingly, the district court had the authority to prevent Mr. Trump from laundering communications concerning witnesses and addressing their potential trial participation through social media postings or other public comments.

So whether or not Trump ever directly spoke to someone in the IRS about the investigations into Hunter Biden, under this theory of “laundering” communications, his tweets would have qualified as indirect communication.

Sure, a second Trump term will be worse.

But Hunter Biden is demonstrably among the handful of people who have experienced the kind of wholesale politicization of criminal investigations journalists imagine will only come in a second Trump term.

Udpate: Added some more details from Brady’s testimony.

Update: Fixed intro to DC Circuit opinion.

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Hearing Footsteps: The Paper Trail of Political Interference David Weiss Is Trying to Bury

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Update: Given confusion mentioned in comments, I thought I’d do another handy dandy chart to describe the motions to dismiss, like I did for Trump’s. This post addresses the MTD Selective Vindictive Separation of Powers. 

Abbe Lowell’s motion to dismiss the gun charges against Hunter Biden for selective and vindictive prosecution and violation of separation of powers only asks for discovery in passing.

Often, MTDs for selective prosecution are requests for discovery. For comparison, in a bid to argue that Jan6er David Judd was charged more harshly than Portland rioters, his excellent public defender, Elizabeth Mullin, conceded that she did not yet have proof he was treated worse because he was a Trump supporter, but then asked for six specific things to prove the case.

Mr. Judd does not yet contend the allegations below are sufficient for dismissal of the charges against him. However, they are sufficient for the Court to compel specific discovery regarding disparities in charging decisions.

[snip]

(1) Communication between the Department of Justice (“Main Justice”) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon regarding prosecution of defendants arrested in connection with protests in 2020.

(2) Communication between management at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Oregon and line Assistant U.S. Attorneys regarding prosecution of defendants arrested in connection with protests in 2020.

(3) Communication between the Department of Justice (“Main Justice”) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia regarding prosecution of defendants arrested in connection with the January 6 demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.

(4) Communication between management at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and line Assistant U.S. Attorneys regarding prosecution of defendants arrested in connection with the January 6 demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.

(5) Communication between the Department of Justice (“Main Justice”) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia regarding prosecution of the D.C. Fireworks Defendant.

(6) Communication between management at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and line Assistant U.S. Attorneys regarding prosecution of the D.C. Fireworks Defendant.

Mullin’s bid didn’t work. Judge Trevor McFadden ruled that January 6 was different than Portland — though he did use her argument to treat Jan6ers leniently at sentencing.

Compare that statement with this one, from page 50 of Abbe Lowell’s 60-page selective and vindictive MTD, where he asserts that this is the exceptional case where a defendant can prove vindictive prosecution without discovery.

Cases where a defendant can show actual vindictiveness without discovery may be few and far between, but this is surely one.

Lowell closes the entire brief with a similar statement, footnoted with the assertion that, “Were there to be any doubt at all, the basis for discovery and an evidentiary hearing has well been established.”

“[O]ur society is not bettered by law enforcement that. . . is not conducted in a spirit of fairness or good faith.” Banks, 383 F. Supp. at 397. This prosecution falls in that category, and the Court should dismiss the indictment. 109

109 As stated through this and the other motions to dismiss, the record available to the Court supporting dismissal is extraordinary. Were there to be any doubt at all, the basis for discovery and an evidentiary hearing has well been established.

This argument — that if Hunter Biden hasn’t met his burden for outright dismissal, then surely he should be granted discovery — is four other times relegated to a footnote.

One such footnote appears in a passage purporting to lay out the legal standards that govern this issue, in which Lowell cites a bunch of precedents from other circuits about dismissal in case of selective, vindictive, or separation of powers violations.

When a prosecution is selective, vindictive, or violates separation of powers, the tainted charges must be dismissed. See id. at 700 (“Preservation of this system of checks and balances requires the courts to invalidate actions that. . . undermine the authority and independence of one or another coordinate Branch.”) (citations omitted); In re Aiken Cnty., 725 F.3d 255, 264 n.7 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (“If the Executive selectively prosecutes someone based on impermissible considerations, the equal protection remedy is to dismiss the prosecution . . . .”).42

42 Where a defendant has not carried his burden, but has demonstrated a “colorable claim,” discovery and an evidentiary hearing should be permitted. United States v. Heidecke, 900 F.2d 1155, 1159 (7th Cir. 1990); United States v. Jones, 159 F.3d 969, 978, n.8 (6th Cir. 1998) (granting discovery to give the defendant “the opportunity to move to dismiss the indictment” for selective prosecution). See Mr. Biden’s Discovery Mot (filed concurrently). [my emphasis]

Armstrong, the precedent making it almost impossible for a defendant to get discovery, the one that Principal Senior Assistant Special Counsel Leo Wise cited 48 times in his bid to defeat subpoenas, does not appear in this section (though it does appear in several other places and in the discovery motion).

As this footnote does, two other such footnotes specifically cite a motion for discovery and evidentiary hearing filed the same day. In those other two instances, Lowell cites the line in this NYT article describing that David Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges because the average American would not be charged for these crimes.

[T]he New York Times reported that “Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses.” 9

9 Michael Schmidt et al., Inside The Collapse Of Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal, N.Y. Times (Aug. 19, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/us/politics/inside-hunter-biden-plea-deal.html. The article does not disclose the source. The account is most likely true considering the charging statistics, DOJ enforcement policies described below, and Mr. Weiss’s initial reluctance in prosecuting Mr. Biden on this charge. If it is true, it is extremely damning evidence of discriminatory prosecution. Thus, to the extent there is any doubt, the Court should grant Mr. Biden’s request for discovery and an evidentiary hearing. See Mr. Biden’s Discovery Mot. (filed concurrently).

[snip]

DOJ confirmed its own improper motive when, under fire from Congress and the public, it resorted to a rarely used gun charge that reports indicate Special Counsel Weiss himself admitted would not have been brought against the average American.85

85 Michael S. Schmidt et al., Inside The Collapse Of Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal, N.Y. Times (Aug. 19, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/us/politics/inside-hunter-biden-plea-deal.html. As noted above, the article does not disclose the source, and to the extent there is any doubt about the veracity of the claim, the Court should grant Mr. Biden’s request for discovery and an evidentiary hearing. See Mr. Biden’s Motion for Discovery and an Evidentiary Hearing (filed concurrently). [my emphasis]

I have repeatedly predicted we’d see this language in Hunter’s selective prosecution motion, because it provides what virtually no defendant ever has: proof that the prosecutor himself recognized he was selectively prosecuting a defendant.

If Lowell can find these witnesses — experts on gun crimes who said Hunter was charged only because he was prominent and a Weiss associate whom Weiss purportedly told he knew that average Americans would not be prosecuted for such crimes –and get them to testify, then he would have what virtually no other defendant would: Proof that the prosecutor who brought the charge knew that similarly situated defendants would not be charged, but charged the defendant anyway.

But I assumed the proof that David Weiss had said that would require witness testimony.

Perhaps it doesn’t.

Consider that the last instance (in this filing) where Lowell relegates a request for discovery and an evidentiary hearing to a footnote, he makes an assertion — that DOJ has long believed that Hunter’s rights must take precedence over efforts by Trump to interfere in this prosecution — that he does not cite.

But as DOJ itself has long believed, Mr. Biden’s rights must come first and efforts by members of Congress and the former President to interfere have tainted this prosecution beyond purification. As a result, there is no constitutional option but to dismiss this case.40

40 If the Court has any doubt that the material set out in this motion is sufficient to warrant outright dismissal of these charges, it should permit discovery and conduct an evidentiary hearing. Mr. Biden has already sought discovery from DOJ and information from third-parties with knowledge of former President Trump’s influence, and DOJ has not responded to the requests and filed an opposition for this information to be disclosed. [my emphasis]

To be sure, we know that David Weiss’ investigative team, led by Lesley Wolf, made repeated efforts — not always successful — to shield the investigative team from Trump’s efforts to interfere.

For example, Tim Thibault told the House Judiciary Committee that one reason he shut down Peter Schweizer as a source was because then-Supervisory Special Agent Joe Gordon reached out, insinuating they already had laptop-based evidence, and said that if a case against Hunter Biden ever went to trial and Hunter’s attorneys found the FD-1023 from Schweizer that the Washington Field Office had shared with the Hunter team, it would give Hunter’s attorneys ammunition.

A And then fast-forward to sometime in October, I received an unsolicited call —

Q Uh-huh.

A — from the supervisor of the Hunter Biden case. I knew him because he had been assigned to Washington Field Office as the case agent.

[snip]

A And I said: Okay. What are your concerns? And basically said: Look, the information isn’t of any value to us, number one. My — I deduced from everything he said that they already had the information —

Q Uh-huh.

A — from some other source, some other channel, maybe not a human source but some other channel. He also said that that person was politically connected —

Q Uh-huh.

A — and partisan in his view and he was concerned about the source being on media platforms.

[snip]

A So I was getting a call from this supervisor. And my — my takeaway was we don’t need your source reporting and also: Why are you sending a file to our — to our case file that we didn’t know about? Right? So Washington Field Office wrote this 1023 and it went to headquarters and it went to Baltimore.

[snip]

A I understand you don’t need the reporting anymore. I understand that if this goes to trial, Hunter Biden’s attorney —

Q Uh-huh?

A — could have some ammunition.

Regarding that very same laptop, Gary Shapley complained to Congress that Weiss’ office had prevented Joseph Ziegler from seeing a report addressing the “quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive.”

Ziegler himself complained that he hadn’t been able to interview Tony Bobulinski — the guy whom Donald Trump personally hosted at an election debate and who subsequently had a clandestine meeting with Trump’s chief of staff — because, prosecutors told him, Bobulinski, “was not viewed as a credible witness.”

In investigative team meetings that occurred after this, I can recall that agents on the investigative team brought up on multiple occasions to the assigned prosecutors that they wanted to do an interview of Bobulinski with the assigned case agents. I can recall being told that they would think about it and then ultimately being told there was no need for the team to interview Bobulinski and that Bobulinski was not viewed as a credible witness.

And Scott Brady not only confirmed Gary Shapley’s claim that Lesley Wolf repeatedly refused to be briefed by Scott Brady’s team because she didn’t want dirt from Rudy Giuliani, but also that David Weiss had to — and did — intervene before Wolf would share information about her investigation with Brady.

Okay. So, looking at paragraph four on page 2, as it continues onto page 2, the second full sentence, it says: The prosecution team discussed the Hunter Biden related work of the Pittsburgh USAO on several occasions, as it was a line item on the recurring prosecution team’s call agenda for a long period of time. Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf told us the Pittsburgh USAO and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady requested to brief the Delaware USAO’s Hunter Biden’s investigative team on multiple occasions, but they were turned down by AUSA Wolf and the Delaware USAO. Is it accurate that you had requested multiple times, you or your office, to brief the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office?

A Yes.

[snip]

Chairman Jordan. Got it. Got it. Now, also, based on what you said, throughout the process, you said that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office wasn’t willing to cooperate, so much so that you had to send interrogatories?

Mr. Brady. Yes, we had conversations, asked for communication and a flow of information, mostly one way from us to them, but also, as I testified, we wanted to make sure we weren’t duplicating what they were doing. They would not engage. And so finally, after me calling Mr. Weiss and saying can you please talk to your team, this is important, this is why we want to interact with them, the response that we got back is you can submit your questions to our team in written form, which we did.

This is an important instance where, at least per Scott Brady, Lesley Wolf was attempting to prevent the politicization of the case, but David Weiss overruled her.

Finally, Shapley also provided documentation of his own complaint that, “This investigation has been hampered and artificially slowed by various claims of potential election meddling.”

There are abundant examples where Lesley Wolf attempted to shield the investigative team from Trump’s efforts to intervene. Lowell cites none of them, nor other public evidence, such as Ziegler’s testimony that there were emails (probably his original supervisor’s memorialization of Trump’s improper influence). Instead, he asserts without citation that DOJ has long believed that Hunter’s rights must come first.

I’m mindful that, in the exhibits accompanying his motion to dismiss because the diversion immunizes Hunter Biden from further charges, Lowell also didn’t include the bulk of documentation that NYT and Politico appear to have relied on for stories about how the plea deal collapsed.

That is, it’s possible that one of the documents that NYT received records someone — possibly Wolf — sharing with Chris Clark the explanation that Weiss really wanted to avoid any charges, even misdemeanors. If Abbe Lowell has that document, he’s playing coy.

Indeed, that’s an important dynamic in the motion for discovery and an evidentiary hearing. In a footnote (footnote six in this post), it purports to support both the selective and vindictive motion and the immunity one.

1 To the extent the Special Counsel disputes the facts laid out in Mr. Biden’s Motion to Dismiss the Indictment Based on Immunity Conferred By His Diversion Agreement and the Declaration of Christoper Clark (his former counsel), filed contemporaneously, as noted in that Motion at Note 1, an evidentiary hearing where all the participants to the negotiations (including U.S. Attorney David Weiss) should be held on that motion as well.

The footnote it cites in the immunity motion (footnote seven) asks Judge Maryanne Noreika, if she needs more proof regarding the immunity conferred by the diversion agreement, to include David Weiss (and “responsible members of his prosecution team,” which would include Wolf) among the witnesses.

If the Court believes that parol evidence should be considered, Mr. Biden requests an evidentiary hearing in which all participants in the negotiation of the Diversion Agreement, including Mr. Weiss and the responsible members of his prosecution team, can be called as witnesses to address the extensive recapitulation provided in Mr. Clark’s Declaration.

Even in the discovery motion, Lowell doesn’t provide a list of things like the one that David Judd’s attorney included in hers.

Instead, he simply points to the October 8 and November 15 discovery requests he already made and describes that Weiss’ team responded with silence.

On October 8, 2023 and November 15, 2023, as well as in follow-up correspondence on November 15, Mr. Biden wrote to the prosecution with tailored and enumerated discovery requests, many of which are routine in a criminal defense case such as this one. 2 The October 8 requests included customary Rule 16 discovery requests and 19 specific requests under Brady, Agurs, Giglio, and the Fifth Amendment, Rule 26/Jencks Act and similar requests. These requests have largely been met with silence and will be the subject of a motion to compel should this case proceed. However, the November 15, 2023 requests as well as the motion for Rule 17 subpoenas filed that same day seek information bearing directly on the issues addressed in the motions to dismiss filed concurrently herewith—selective and vindictive prosecution, political interference, and separation of powers concerns. The prosecution has not responded to or addressed these requests by Mr. Biden in any fashion. During a meet and confer phone call on December 1, 2023, Mr. Biden’s counsel even asked Messrs. Wise and Hines for a status update of the prosecution’s discovery, and specifically whether the government intended to make any additional productions in the near-term or respond to our various discovery request letters, to which Mr. Hines responded that the government would “let the discovery stand for itself.”3 [my emphasis]

The November 15 discovery request is similar to the subpoena request from the same day (which Lowell invokes in footnote 3), though it includes any communications discussing an investigation of Hunter that involve Geoffrey Berman as well.

1. All documents and records reflecting communications from January 20, 2017 to the present (the “Relevant Time Period”) to, from, between, or among Donald J. Trump, William P. Barr, Geoffrey Berman, Scott W. Brady, Richard Donoghue, or Jeffrey A. Rosen relating to or discussing any formal or informal investigation or prosecution of Hunter Biden, or a request thereof.

2. All documents and records reflecting communications from the Relevant Time Period to, from, between, or among Donald J. Trump, William P. Barr, Geoffrey Berman, Scott W. Brady, Richard Donoghue, or Jeffrey A. Rosen and any Executive Branch official, political appointee, Department of Justice official, government agency, government official or staff person, cabinet member, or attorney for President Trump (personal or other) discussing or concerning Hunter Biden.

SDNY investigated both Hunter and James Biden as part of their investigation into Patrick Ho and Gal Luft, so there may be communications between Berman and Weiss on that topic. Berman’s investigation of Lev Parnas would have covered the October 2019 meeting at which Parnas believed he’d receive laptop-based dirt from a Burisma associate. Plus, Berman would have been told to stand down on Rudy Giuliani’s December 5, 2019 meeting with Andrii Derkach, in deference to Richard Donoghue. His book describes that those discussions were quite heated.

The October 8 request is — as Lowell claims — more conventional (at least on its face). It asks for the evidence Weiss has about Hunter’s addiction. It asks for affidavits in support of warrants. And some of that — a request for communications on the drafting of the plea agreement and stats on prosecutions of these gun charges — definitely would support Lowell’s motions to dismiss.

There are unsurprising additions, such as any communications regarding leaks to the press, including through cut-outs (which is how I think the October 6, 2022 leak happened).

Any documents and/or information reflecting communications between anyone in your Office or any member of the investigative team or their supervisors (including FBI and IRS agents) with any member of the press or public concerning the investigation, and any documents and/or information reflecting leaks of information concerning the investigation or prosecution of Mr. Biden to the press, any private person, or any government official or employee who was not authorized to receive such disclosure.

Sure, this likely aims to discover whether Shapley and Ziegler had any role, including through cut-outs, in the leaks in this case. But as I noted in my post on that NYT story, there are several claims in it attributed to a “senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the situation” who claimed to have knowledge of things only David Weiss would know.

Then there are things that look innocuous, but might be particularly problematic for Weiss. Given my suggestion above that there may be documentation of a claim that Weiss told an associate he didn’t want to charge Hunter at all, a collection of all the communications anyone in his office had with lawyers for Hunter might pose hazards for this prosecution.

Any documents and/or information reflecting communications between anyone in your Office and any attorney representing Mr. Biden from the onset of the investigation to June 20, 2023.

Normally, when someone takes over a case from a prior defense attorney, they usually get the case file from their predecessor. Lowell would be expected to ask Clark for this. But there are at least two other sets of lawyers who would have been involved (including an investigative interview with George Mesires), which would justify this request. Complying with this request would involve Principal Senior Assistant Special Counsel Leo Wise seeing communications that David Weiss may have attempted to use him to sheep dip from this prosecution.

Then there’s a request for 302s.

A. Any draft FBI-302s, FD-1023s or interview memoranda describing such interviews.

B. Any requests by investigating agents or members of the Department of Justice to edit, revise, or otherwise change the content of any 302 or interview memorandum

This would include the FD-1023s from Peter Schweizer and the Zlochevsky informant, the 302 from Luft, as well as the draft 302 from Tony Bobulinski (and any record that DOJ intervened to prevent its completion), at least three of which Wolf attempted to keep from investigators.

Weiss may be imaging he can withhold these based on a claim that the gun charge doesn’t implicate these documents pertaining to politicized witnesses, and normally he’d be right. Except Judge Noreika already permitted Jason Smith to file an amicus, including protected grand jury materials, based in part on the argument that this has gotten so much publicity already. Plus, in both Jack Smith’s prosecutions of the former President and the serial treatment of Mike Flynn, there is arguably support for sharing such information (I asked Weiss’ spox if his team would adhere to the discovery approaches in those cases and got no response whatsoever to my question).

Finally, there are communications with Congress.

Any documents and/or information reflecting communications between any Member of Congress, Committee or Subcommittee of Congress, or congressional staff and any person at the U.S. Department of Justice, including your Office, concerning the investigation or prosecution of Mr. Biden, including the decision to bring any particular charges.

This would include the letter, cited in the selective MTD, that Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent in 2021 regarding any gun charges against Hunter.

It would include the many letters sent to Merrick Garland.

It would also include the transcripts of the many interviews — including Brady, Thibault, from Lesley Wolf last week, and from Weiss himself — Jim Jordan did. At least some of those were shared with DOJ for an accuracy review. And in Weiss’ transcript, he made a claim that has already been rebutted in Chris Clark’s declaration, in which he described Weiss’ First AUSA saying there was no ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden.

This is an area where the Jack Smith precedent may be pertinent: in a response to Trump’s demand to subpoena Congress (which Lowell doesn’t do), Thomas Windom revealed that Smith shared 260 January 6 Committee transcripts with Trump. Jim Jordan has spent five months quizzing almost every member of the Hunter Biden investigative team about whether there was political interference on this case, which seems to make it relevant for any litigation about Congress’ usurpation of David Weiss’ role.

Normally, none of this would be discoverable and Principal Senior Assistant Special Counsel Leo Wise is likely to come back and say it is Jencks, which only will be relevant if these witnesses testify.

As I keep saying, normally none of this goes anywhere. I am assuredly not saying this will work.

What I am trying to lay out is that Lowell is going about via different tactics, in part by arguing this known proof of political interference is Brady (Brady about Brady!), not just evidence of selective prosecution hidden behind 48 invocations of Armstrong.

If Lowell prevails with his argument — his strongest argument, in my opinion — that Hunter is immune from prosecution on the gun charges, none of this may matter (until Lowell makes the same argument in Los Angeles, before a different Trump appointed judge). But once you get into the argument about improper influence on this case, David Weiss might begin to hear footsteps.

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John Paul Mac Isaac’s Serial Inaccuracies and the Ablow Laptop

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Right wing purveyors of the Hunter Biden “laptop” story say that John Paul Mac Isaac, the legally blind computer repairman who made a copy of a laptop that he said Hunter Biden dropped off, then sent a copy of the data to Rudy Giuliani, was perfectly entitled to do so. They point to the intake form JPMI used, stating that,

Equipment left with the Mac Shop after 90 days of notification of completed service will be treated as abandoned and you agree to hold the Mac Shop harmless for any damage or loss of property.

In Hunter Biden’s countersuit against JPMI, he noted that Delaware law only deems tangible personal property to be abandoned after a year, and requires some bureaucracy before someone can assert to own the property.

8. Contrary to Mac Isaac’s Repair Authorization form, Delaware law provides that tangible personal property is deemed abandoned when “the rightful owner has left in the care or custody of another person and has failed to maintain, pay for the storage of, exercise dominion or control over, and has failed to otherwise assert or declare the ownership rights to the [] property for a period of 1 year.” (25 Del. C. § 4001) (emphasis added). The procedure to obtain lawful title to abandoned personal property requires the person in possession of the property to file a petition in a court of competent jurisdiction. (25 Del. C. § 4003). Other obligations must then also be satisfied before obtaining lawful title, such as the court sending notice to the owner and the petitioner posting notice in five or more public places, and advertising the petition in a newspaper. (25 Del. C. § 4003(b)). [emphasis original]

The requirements of Delaware law have attracted the most attention amid debates whether JPMI was entitled to share the laptop with Rudy Giuliani.

More important to questions of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act lawsuits like the one Hunter filed against Rudy Giuliani, however, Abbe Lowell notes that JPMI’s intake form promises to “secure [his customers’] data.”

12. Moreover, even if the Repair Authorization form were enforceable under Delaware law, by its own terms, it provides abandonment of only any “equipment” that is left behind at the Mac Shop, and not the data on or embedded within any such equipment. In fact, the Repair Authorization form states that the Mac Shop will make every effort to “secure your data.” (Compl. Ex. A). Customers who sign Mac Isaac’s Repair Authorization form do not, therefore, waive any rights under Delaware law for the data that any equipment might contain. Reputable computer companies and repair people routinely delete personal data contained on devices that are exchanged, left behind, or abandoned. They do not open, copy, and then provide that data to others, as Mac Isaac did here.

13. At no time did Mr. Biden grant Mac Isaac any permission to access, review, copy, or disseminate for his own purposes any electronically stored data that ever was created or received or maintained by Mr. Biden (regardless of how Mac Isaac came into possession of such material). [my emphasis]

Hunter Biden did not, if he indeed signed that intake form, authorize JPMI to grant other people access to his data. Yet JPMI gave it to Rudy who gave it to half the world, including the NY Post, as this illustration from Thomas Fine lays out.

There are multiple theories of CFAA that Abbe Lowell might have in mind as he sues those who’ve disseminated Hunter’s data: I discussed that cracking the password of the iPhone stored on the device or accessing data stored in the cloud might qualify. It’s also possible, however, that Lowell would argue that simply accessing the drive that JPMI shared amounts to unauthorized access, even under JPMI’s own intake form, because he said he would keep the data secure.

Those details will undoubtedly be a part of all the litigation going forward.

But there’s another detail about the intake form that deserves more attention. JPMI didn’t identify the laptops that were dropped off, beyond simply saying they were three MacBook Pros.

JPMI doesn’t claim to have paperwork tying a serial number to any of these three laptops until the FBI put one, for the laptop given to the FBI, on a subpoena in December 2019.

JPMI doens’t claim to have proof that the laptop he would go on to give to the FBI — some of the contents of which he shared with Rudy Giuliani who then shared it with half the world, including the NY Post  — was the laptop he claims someone dropped off on April 12, 2019.

Normally, that would not be a big deal. But, as described in his book, the laptop he gave the FBI does not match any of the three laptops he claims were dropped off on April 12, 2019.

One at a time, I performed a quick inspection of the machines. The fifteen-inch laptop was a complete write-off. It had extensive liquid damage, and because the drive was soldered to the logic board, data recovery was beyond my capability. (If a Mac can’t power on, you won’t be able to access the drive and get to the data.)

The thirteen-inch 2015 MacBook Pro was in slightly better shape. It could boot up, but the keyboard was unresponsive. I pulled out an external keyboard and asked for permission to log in.

[snip]

I moved on to the last Mac, a thirteen-inch 2016 MacBook Pro. The drive was soldered onto the logic board. This one powered on but then would shut down. I suspected that there was a short in the keyboard or trackpad, and if I took it apart, I could at least get it to boot and possibly recover the data.

JPMI described three machines:

  • A 15″ laptop, of unknown date, with soldered drive
  • A 13″ laptop from 2015
  • A 13″ laptop from 2016 with a soldered drive

By description, JPMI claims the last one is the one he gave to the FBI.

Based on the serial number, the laptop turned over to the FBI is a 13-inch 2017 PowerBook purchased in October 2018 (the October 2018 purchase date is consistent when it was added to Hunter’s Apple account).

It can’t be the first laptop described here, because it’s a 13″ PowerBook, but it’s a different year — 2017 rather than 2015 or 2016 — than both the 13″ PowerBooks JPMI described.

The difference in year might be no big deal.

The other description JPMI gives about the laptop he claims to be the one he recovered is: According to several people who’ve checked, the laptop shared with the FBI has a removable hard drive.

The entire reason why JPMI claims to have copied the files in the manner he did — by dragging-and-dropping files — is because he didn’t have ports to plug both a keyboard, power, and a cable to his own server. Instead, he plugged in the server and a keyboard, and did the drag-and-drop in three passes, recharging the battery between each pass.

That’s what, he claims, led him to look at Hunter’s files more closely, starting with dick pics and moving onto an “income” document conveniently marked with a purple dot.

Finally, I went in the back to check on Hunter’s liquid-damaged MacBook Pro. It had powered off, dying overnight during the file transfer. I now realized that this was not going to be a simple drag-and-drop procedure. There was about three hundred gigabytes’ worth of data, but not enough charge in the battery to do it all in one go. I started to charge the unit again, planning to give it a couple of hours before making a second attempt. But I also decided to see what had been successfully transferred to the server, praying I didn’t have to start all over again.

[snip]

I changed the folder view to a columns view, to see the files and folders in an alphabetical list. Clicking on a folder in the list opens up a new column with the contents of the folder, and clicking on a file in that column brings up a preview of the file. Eventually, in two separate windows, I would be able bring up both the original desktop and what I had copied, compare them, and transfer the missing files to the recovery window. But first I had to wait until there was enough of a charge in the battery to power on the Mac and keep it on.

[snip]

Here’s where things started to get interesting.

The previous recovered window was open on the left, and I was waiting for the hundreds of files on the original to populate to the right. Scrolling down, I started to see files that didn’t align. I started to individually drag and drop the files to the recovery folder. It took only a few files before I noticed pornography appearing in the right column.

[snip]

I continued copying files until I got to one titled “income.pdf.” I likely wouldn’t even have noticed it if it hadn’t been tagged with a purple dot. On a Mac, you can apply tags, or color codes, to files as an organizational aid. It seemed odd that someone who clearly had zero organizational skills would bother tagging this one file purple. It was begging to be clicked open. So I did.

But once JPMI realized the battery was draining, he could have simply swapped the hard drive into a separate laptop, with functioning keyboard, to copy the files that way.

Indeed, that seems to be (per Gary Shapley’s notes) what the FBI did: just put the hard drive in a new laptop.

FBI determined in order to do a full forensic review a replacement laptop had to be purchased so the hard drive could be installed, booted and imaged.

[snip]

c. Lesley said (while laughing) that because a lot of p[e]op[l]e are going to be asking for the laptop

d. Josh Wilson stated that (while laughing) so whoever they are they are going to have to buy a laptop to put the hard rive in so they can read it [fixed errors in people]

Once you understand the laptop had a removable drive, then JPMI’s excuse for snooping in Hunter’s private files disappears.

But here’s why I can’t stop thinking about the fact that JPMI has no proof of which laptops he received and the laptop described in his book doesn’t match the one he shared with the FBI. One explanation for this discrepancy is ineptitude: during the entire period he was writing the book, he never even consulted the subpoena (the data for which he had provided the FBI). Another is he needed to invent an excuse, after the fact, to explain why he was reading Hunter’s stuff.

But there’s one other potentially related issue.

There aren’t three laptops. There are at least four.

The fourth is the laptop found at Keith Ablow’s in 2020, the one reportedly discovered after Hunter Biden left in February 2019. That laptop is reportedly one that Hunter first signed onto on September 1, 2018, at 10:34AM PDT, also a 13″ MacBook Pro, but one with a touch bar. The next day, Apple emailed Hunter to tell him he had gotten a new laptop — something that didn’t happen for many of his other new devices (including the one that first accessed his iCloud account in October 2018, the one that would end up with the FBI).

If that’s correct, then Hunter initiated the laptop left at Ablow’s in February 2019 in September 1, 2018. And the laptop ultimately shared with the FBI was initiated on October 21, 2018. Though there were accesses to his iCloud and other accounts from new devices almost every week in this period, there’s no sign at all that the touch bar MacBook (as opposed to one after another iPhone and an iPad) had been lost or inactivated.

And if the activity that packaged up Hunter’s digital life happened on the same laptop that ended up in a computer repair shop in Wilmington, then both would be presumed to be at Ablow’s in the same period in late January to early February. That’s an odd occurrence in the first place, since Hunter was going to get treatment, not to work on his memoir. But it’s also odd that the laptop ultimately shared with the FBI stopped synching on the same day that a laptop — possibly the Ablow one? — was purportedly deleted.

There are two problems with this story. None of the three laptops that JPMI describes receiving is the one shared with the FBI. And there’s not a good explanation for why two Hunter Biden laptops would be at Ablow’s property and why the one presumably in Hunter’s presence would stop synching the same day some other laptop was deleted.

This is all background for another post. But one thing that’s clear is none of the laptops JPMI describes in his book can be the one shared with the FBI. And there’s another laptop out there, which would have been present in the same place and time as the laptop that ultimately was shared with the FBI.

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