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Donald Trump’s Dumbass Russia Binder

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There is some tie between Donald Trump’s effort — as one of his last acts as President — to declassify a binder of materials from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and his hoarding of still-classified documents that could get him charged under the Espionage Act.

It’s not yet clear what that tie is, though.

On May 5 of last year, Kash Patel offered the declassification effort as an alibi, claiming Trump had declassified a bunch of materials, including not just the Crossfire Hurricane materials, but everything else discovered in boxes returned to NARA in January 2022. Kash’s claim would be included in the search affidavit for Mar-a-Lago and ultimately lead to his compelled testimony in the investigation.

Last fall, at a time when Alex Cannon and Eric Herschmann would have been under some scrutiny for their role in Stefan Passantino’s dubious legal advice to Cassidy Hutchinson, Maggie Haberman told a story in which the Trump lawyers heroically warned Trump about the risks of holding classified documents. That story claimed Trump had offered to swap the documents he did have for the Russian-related documents the former President believed NARA had.

It was around that same time that Mr. Trump floated the idea of offering the deal to return the boxes in exchange for documents he believed would expose the Russia investigation as a “hoax” cooked up by the F.B.I. Mr. Trump did not appear to know specifically what he thought the archives had — only that there were items he wanted.

Mr. Trump’s aides — recognizing that such a swap would be a non-starter since the government had a clear right to the material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House and the Russia-related documents held by the archives remained marked as classified — never acted on the idea.

The story doesn’t mention Cannon’s role in a fall 2021 inquiry to NARA about the Russian documents. Nor does it say that National Archives General Counsel Gary Stern told Cannon and Justin Clark that NARA had 2,700 undifferentiated documents, but that the binder Trump wanted declassified had been rendered a Federal Record when it got sent back to DOJ.

That’s what NARA told John Solomon on June 23, 2022 — that Trump’s lawyers had requested the binder in fall 2021 — in Stern’s first explanation for why NARA didn’t have the binder.

John, fyi, last fall Justin Clark, another PRA representative of President Trump, also asked us for a copy of this declassified binder. Upon conducting a search, we learned that the binder had been returned to the Department of Justice on January 20, 2021, per the attached memo from Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to the Attorney General, titled “Privacy Act Review of Certain Declassified Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.”

Accordingly, we do not have the binder containing the declassified records. As we explained to Justin, what we were able to locate is a box that contains roughly 2700 undifferentiated pages of documents with varying types of classification and declassification markings, but we could not be certain of the classification status of any of the information in the box. We are therefore obligated under Executive Order 13526 to treat the contents of the box as classified at the TS/SCI level.

Then on August 9 and again on August 10 last year, immediately following the search on Mar-a-Lago, Solomon asked for all correspondence between Cannon and NARA up until days before the search.

Gary, John: My research indicates there may be a new wrinkle to the Russian declassified documents. As part of my authorized access, I would like to see all correspondence between NARA and attorney Alex Cannon between December 2020 and July 31, 2022. I think the information will have significant value to the public regarding current events. Can that be arranged?

[snip]

Checking back on this. It’s time sensitive from a news perspective. Can you accommodate?

Stern, no dummy, likely recognized that this information would not just have news value, but would also have value to those under criminal investigation; he responded with lawyerly caution. As NARA representative for Trump, he explained, Solomon was only entitled to access Presidential records — those that predate January 20, 2021 — and communications between Cannon and NARA post-dated all that. But, Stern helpfully noted, Cannon was cc’ed on the request for the Russian binder.

It’s important to clarify that, as a designated PRA representative of President Trump, you may receive access to the Presidential records of the Trump Administration that have been transferred to NARA, which date from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021.

Alex Cannon has represented President Trump on PRA matters (along with Justin Clark) only since the summer of 2021, principally with respect to the notification and review process in response to special access requests. Accordingly, there would not be any Trump Presidential records between NARA and Alex Cannon.

FYI, in my June 23 email to you (which is below within this email thread), I noted that “last fall Justin Clark, another PRA representative of President Trump, also asked us for a copy of this declassified binder.” Alex Cannon was cc’d on Justin’s request and our response. I am not aware of any other communications that would exist between NARA and Alex about this matter. [my emphasis]

That would be the only communications “about this matter,” seemingly distinguishing the Russian binder from the missing Presidential records.

At the time Maggie was distracting the chattering classes with the swap story, ABC had a very thorough story that revealed some of what Stern had explained to Solomon last year. That story suggests the month-long focus on the Russian binder had led overall compliance with the Presidential Records Act to be lacking. As Hutchinson tells it, it was worse, with 10 to 15 NSC staffers madly copying classified documents in the last days Trump was in office, with two sets of four copies — one still classified, one less sensitive — circulating to who knows where.

The tie between the Russian documents and the documents Trump stole may be no more than the alibi Kash tried to use them as, an attempt to claim that the limited declassification was instead a blanket effort. Perhaps it was also a failed effort to use Kash and Solomon as moles to figure out what NARA got back. Or perhaps some of these materials madly copied at the last moment were among the classified documents Trump took with him. Perhaps some of those materials were among the still-classified documents Trump took and hoarded in a storage closet with a shitty lock.

But that tie is one of the reasons I read the version of the binder released earlier this year in response to a Judicial Watch FOIA closely (release 1, release 2).

That is one dumbass binder. If you’re going to expose yourself and your assistants to Espionage Act prosecution, this is one dumbass document to do so over.

Having reviewed it — even with great familiarity with the unending ability of certain frothers to get ginned up over these things — I cannot believe how many people remain obsessed about this document.

The document, as released to Judicial Watch, is little more than a re-release of a bunch of files that have already been released. Perhaps the only released documents I hadn’t read closely before were memorializations that Andy McCabe wrote of conversations he had in the wake of Jim Comey’s firing with and about Trump, including the one that described Rod Rosenstein offering to wear a wire to meetings at the White House.

And because DOJ subjected the documents to a real Privacy Act review, unlike declassifications effectuated by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe when Kash babysat him as his Chief of Staff, a number of the documents actually are more redacted than previous versions, something that will no doubt be a topic of exciting litigation going forward.

Mark Meadows ordered DOJ to do a Privacy Act review and as a result great swaths of documents were withheld, page after page of b6/b7C exemptions as well as b7D ones to shield confidential information.

Here’s what got released to Judicial Watch, along with links to the previous releases of the documents:

The Bruce Ohr 302s are the only documents that include much newly released materials, mostly reflecting Igor Danchenko’s subsequent public identification. Both the candidate briefing and the Carter Page FISA application include significantly more redaction (and those are not the only interesting new redactions); given the redactions, it doesn’t look like Trump contemplated disseminating any Page material that was sequestered by the FISA Court, which would have been legally problematic no matter what Trump ordered, but references to the sequestration were all redacted.

As noted above as Requests 1, 5, 6, 14, and 17, there were five things Trump asked for that were still pending at DOJ when Trump left office. Two of those are identified: A request for materials on Perkins Coie lawyers, which (DOJ informed Trump) had no tie to Crossfire Hurricane, and a request for details on an August 2016 meeting involving Bruce Ohr, Andrew Weissmann, and one other person “concerning Russia or Trump.”

There were a number of communications between Ohr, Weissmann, and others later in 2016, including communications potentially relating to an effort to flip Dmitry Firtash, as well as October 2016 communications between Ohr and McCabe. But the jumbled timeline of Ohr’s communications has often been used to insinuate that the Crossfire Hurricane team learned of the Steele allegations earlier in the investigation than the September 19 that DOJ IG reflects. In any case, some of these meetings likely touched on Oleg Deripaska and some might touch on the suspected Egyptian donation Trump used to stay in the race past September 2016, not the dossier.

Between other then-pending requests and big chunks of withheld information (I’ve noted the biggest chunks above, but it would be around 300 pages total), there are things I would have expected to see in this binder that are not there. For example, almost none of the material released as part of DOJ’s attempt to undermine the Flynn investigation (links to which are in this post) is included here. Most of that stuff constitutes information that would never normally be released. It was egregiously misrepresented by Barr’s DOJ. Some of the files were altered. If these were requested, I can think of a number of reasons it would take DOJ a while to provide the materials. Even still, though, the materials didn’t persuade Emmet Sullivan to overturn Flynn’s prosecution, and documents left out of this bunch — such as Flynn’s later 302s, including some where he obviously told the same lies he had told in January 2017, would easily rebut any claims Trump might offer with the Flynn documents.

The documentation showing Strzok learning of a Russian intelligence product claiming not very damning things about Hillary is not in here. That, too, is something that would never have been released with a normal DNI not being led around by Kash Patel and it’s one that would take DOJ a good deal of time to clear. But as I laid out here, the report came after Trump had already demonstrably started pursuing files stolen by Russia. By the time Hillary purportedly decided to call out Trump for encouraging the Russian hack, Trump was encouraging the Russian hack.

Given that Mike Rogers’ 302 from the Mueller investigation is included here, you’d expect those of Trump’s other top intelligence officials to be included as well. Dan Coats and Mike Pompeo were interviewed in the weeks after Rogers. Coats’ aide Mike Dempsey and NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett were also interviewed about Trump’s March 2017 effort to get the IC to deny he had a role in Russian interference, as was Trump’s one-time briefer Edward Gistaro (Gistaro was interviewed a second time in 2018, in an interview treated as TS/SCI, which likely pertained to his involvement in briefing at Mar-a-Lago during the transition). Details of these interviews show up in the Mueller Report, and his request only helps to make Trump look more guilty.

It doesn’t include materials released as part of the failed Sussmann and Danchenko prosecutions. But like Barr’s effort to overturn the Flynn prosecution, none of that evidence sustained Trump’s conspiracy theories either. Indeed, during a bench conference in the Danchenko trial, Durham fought hard to keep the substance of the discussions — ostensibly about energy investments — between Sergei Millian and George Papadopoulos starting in July 2016 out of the trial because, “it certainly sounds creepy.” The Sussmann trial showed how justified people were in wondering about Trump’s Russia ties in the wake of his “Russia are you listening” comment. It provided a glimpse of how time-consuming being a victim of a nation-state hack had been for Hillary in 2016. Durham even demonstrated that FBI badly screwed up the Alfa Bank investigation. When subjected to the rules of evidence, none of Trump’s hoax claims hold up.

The point is, nothing in this binder — particularly as released — supports Trump’s claims that the investigation into him wasn’t independently predicated and didn’t lead to really damning information implicating at least five of his top aides and his own son.

Trump keeps trying to collect some set of evidence that will make go away the far more damning ties to Russia that his National Security Advisor, his Coffee Boy, his personal lawyer, his campaign manager, and his rat-fucker all lied to hide. And in this case, it may have led Trump to do something far dumber, to defy a subpoena and hoard highly classified documents.

Which possibility only makes the dumbass Russia binder even more of a dumbass Russian binder.

Kash’s Castles of Scatter and Evan Corcoran’s BCC

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More than seven months after seemingly threatening to sue the National Archives because Mark Meadows and Donald Trump fucked up their effort to declassify the Russian investigation documents, John Solomon finally did sue on March 21, represented by the America First Legal Foundation — Stephen Miller’s gig.

I’d be shocked if the lawsuit went anywhere.

That’s because NARA General Counsel Gary Stern provided Kash and Solomon with the explanation of what happened with the attempted declassification over and over and over. First, Trump didn’t declassify the documents. He ordered the binder of Crossfire Hurricane documents be sent to the Attorney General, who would implement the final declassifications, then send the document back to the White House.

I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.

Then the next day, January 20, 2021, Mark Meadows sent all that to the Attorney General to conduct a Privacy Act review before releasing anything.

As Stern explained to Kash and Solomon, what remained at the White House at that point was a collection of 2,700 “undifferentiated pages,” a cursory review of which revealed conflicting redactions and some documents lacking the requisite declassification stamp. The stuff that got sent to DOJ was a Federal Record, not a Presidential Record, and by the time Kash and Solomon started this process, it was already being processed as part of a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit (the first two releases in which — one, two — recently came out).

In other words, Trump and Mark Meadows fucked this up. NARA didn’t. Trump did.

The likely futility of the lawsuit notwithstanding, the lawsuit and its timing may have more to do with publicly sharing the correspondence Solomon and Kash Patel had with NARA last year, between the time Trump would have realized he had a legal problem with this stolen classified documents, and the immediate wake of the search that made that legal problem a far bigger problem.

As the correspondence Solomon released with the lawsuit reveals, Evan Corcoran initiated this process, on June 17, 2022, informing Stern that “because of his schedule” on June 17 and 18, he would sign a letter designating Kash and Solomon NARA representatives on June 19, after which the two wanted to immediately (Solomon explained in reply) get access to the Russian documents.

Because of his schedule today and tomorrow, former President Donald J. Trump will sign a letter on Sunday afternoon, June 19, 2022, informing the Acting Archivist of the United States that he has designated Kash Patel and John Solomon (copied) to be his NARA representatives.

I will transmit that letter to the Archivist and you (and John Laster) via email when I receive it.

Kash and John would like to begin work reviewing documents at the Archives on Tuesday, June 21, 2022.

I will leave it to the three of you to work out logistics (and feel free to move me to bcc)

Think about that! By April 29, Corcoran was the guy with whom Stern was coordinating on the FBI request for access to the documents Trump belatedly returned in January 2022. On May 5, Corcoran asked to access what had been returned and on the very same day — the search affidavit notes — Kash claimed that not just the Russian documents had been declassified, but a bunch of other documents had too. On May 11, FBI subpoenaed Trump for remaining classified documents. On June 3, Corcoran provided just a subset of the remaining documents.

And then, two weeks after participating in a shell game to facilitate withholding classified documents, Corcoran contacted Stern to arrange fairly urgent access for Kash and Solomon to the materials he had first asked to access in May.

The guy in charge of staving off criminal exposure for hoarding classified documents is the guy who arranged to have Kash and Solomon made NARA representatives!

And then, Stern noted, he moved Corcoran to “bcc.” That means it’s not clear whether Corcoran remained on bcc or not. We don’t know whether Corcoran, as was his intent, remained part of the rest of this exchange. Which makes the timing of this probably futile lawsuit — the second business day after Beryl Howell ruled that Corcoran must testify and the day before Corcoran was initially due to comply — all the more interesting.

There are other interesting tidbits of the correspondence Solomon includes — most notably Kash’s increasing frustration because he couldn’t name via what agency he retained clearance.

On July 18, for example, Kash wrote an email riddled with typos bitching because Stern did not take, from the letter Patel’s one-time contractor employer sent, as approval to access classified records at NARA.

Actually, that’s only part of the communications your security team and you received. The rest states:

they (NARA) could look up your clearance in DISS or Scattered Castles and your need to know came from working directly for President Trump. Per policy- In order to access anything – you would need a clearance and a need to know. You have both of these based on your position with President Trump.

If you are going to provide a correspondence on this matter and directly site a communication, please do not cut out the important, substantive portion that resolves the matter. As you can see, you can validate my clearance and my need to know is satisfied. The only question that remains is why I am getting poor/incorrect information, and why you haven’t used the data bases to verify my clearance, when that is clearly within your agencies ability (its literally how every agency in government validates said clearances). Again, I expect to be reviewing these records tomorrow since the data bases search to validate my clearance is instantaneous. Direct your security office accordingly and stop blocking my access. Thanks much

Kash

[my emphasis]

Much of this section of the exchange reads like a sloppy attempt to social engineer access. Which makes Kash’s claim that the NSC was a more recent employer of his than ODNI of particular interest.

Thanks for the update, please go to DoD and the NSC at the White House, those being my last employers in govt, they would be best suited to verify my clearance (they would not be held at ODNI) but anyone with access to Scattered Castles can easily verify the clearance and who holds it. Thanks much Kash

It’s not clear how this part of the exchange was resolved. The whole exchange led me to wonder whether Kash had a clearance during his time running DOD at all. But none of this would have amounted to a need to know in any case, notwithstanding what a former employer had said.

There was great urgency in this period to get into the archives, to see what Trump had actually turned over in January 2021. Then the correspondence ended — at least as Solomon has it — on August 17.

Incidentally, the correspondence provides at least some corroboration for my speculation that Kash was disseminating parts of the Carter Page FISA applications that had been sequestered under an order from the FISA court — sequestered, as it happens, by an order from Jeb Boasberg, who just took over as DC’s Chief Judge. It also may explain some curious metadata in the copy of the Mark Meadows order that John Solomon released on July 20, 2022. Solomon’s copy of Meadow’s order showed a creation date of September 27, 2021, but a modification date of June 23, 2022.

June 23 is the first of two times that Stern sent Solomon and Kash a copy of the memo. The modification date likely reflects NARA resending the document.

The September 27, 2021 creation date likely reflects the time when, in fall 2021, NARA first discovered the memo after Justin Clark and Alex Cannon came looking for it.

There’s one more reason this is significant. After receiving (or being described) that Mark Meadows’ memo last fall, Cannon — the guy who repeatedly advised Trump to return the classified documents — would have known the Russian documents were not declassified. But if those got returned as a result, it would mean that any other copies out there, including copies shared with Solomon, would be illegally disseminated classified records.

Update: I’ve updated my stolen documents resource page with some of the dates from Solomon’s lawsuit and caught up to my past posts.

Update: This led me to go back and review the stories John Solomon wrote in the aftermath of the search, which unsurprisingly include numerous bullshit claims.

August 11, 2022: Solomon regurgitates story describing “cooperation” in June, including Secret Service involvement in June 3 meeting and aftermath.

August 22, 2022: JustTheNews posts the text of letter from Debra Steidal Wall to Trump.

Update: Corrected which year Trump returned some documents.

 

Remember: DOJ May Still Suspect Trump Is Hoarding Classified Documents

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When I wrote up initial reports of Christina Bobb’s first interview with investigators in the stolen documents case, I noted,

Bobb’s testimony will clarify for DOJ, I guess, about how broadly they need to get Beryl Howell to scope the crime-fraud exception.

Here we are five months later, and Beryl Howell has indeed, very predictably, scoped out the crime-fraud exception for Evan Corcoran’s testimony and the DC Circuit has refused Trump’s request of a stay to fight that ruling.

In fact, ABC reported a list of the things that Judge Howell ruled Evan Corcoran must share with Jack Smith’s prosecutors, the scope I predicted she’d draw up five months ago.

As you read it, keep in mind that DOJ likely suspects that Trump still is hoarding classified documents. I say keep that in mind, because these questions will help to pinpoint the extent to which Trump or Boris Epshteyn masterminded efforts last June to hide classified documents, which may help DOJ to understand whether someone has masterminded efforts to hide remaining classified documents since.

The six things Corcoran has been ordered to testify about, per ABC, are:

  1. “[T]he steps [Corcoran] took to determine where documents responsive to DOJ’s May subpoena may have been located”
  2. Why Corcoran “believed all documents with classification markings were held in Mar-a-Lago’s storage room”
  3. “[T]he people involved in choosing Bobb as the designated custodian of records for documents that Trump took with him after leaving the White House, and any communications he exchanged with Bobb in connection with her selection”
  4. “[W]hether Trump or anyone else in his employ was aware of the signed certification that was drafted by Corcoran and signed by Trump attorney Christina Bobb then submitted in response to the May 11 subpoena from the DOJ seeking all remaining documents with classified markings in Trump’s possession”
  5. “[W]hether Trump was aware of the statements in the certification, which claimed a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago had been conducted, and if Trump approved of it being provided to the government”
  6. What Corcoran “discussed with Trump in a June 24 phone call on the same day that the Trump Organization received a second grand jury subpoena demanding surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago that would show whether anyone moved boxes in and out of the storage room

Questions 1 and 2 are a test of whether Corcoran wrote the declaration that Christina Bobb signed on June 3 in good faith. Given the fact that boxes were moved out of the storage room, it’s quite plausible that Corcoran did do a good faith search of the remaining boxes. So the answer to question 2 — why did he think all the classified documents were in that room? — will help pinpoint who has criminal liability for that obstructive act. Someone told him only to search the storage room and he took Jay Bratt to that storage room on June 3 and falsely (but likely unwittingly) told them that’s where all the classified documents would have been stored. Who told him that was true?

Questions 4 and 5 go to Trump’s awareness of the attempt to mislead DOJ on June 3. Did he know about the signed certification, and if so was Trump aware that Corcoran and Bobb had, between them, claimed the search of a storage room out of which boxes had been moved amounted to a diligent search? Since he reportedly ordered Walt Nauta to move boxes out of there, does that mean he knew the declaration was false?

Question 3 is more interesting though: The fact that Corcoran wouldn’t sign the certification himself is testament that he had doubts about the search he did himself or, at least, that someone knew enough to protect him. Per reporting from after she spoke to investigators the first time (see this post), Boris Epshteyn contacted Bobb the night before the search to serve the role she played.

She told them that another Trump lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, contacted her the night before she signed the attestation and connected her with Mr. Corcoran. Ms. Bobb, who was living in Florida, was told that she needed to go to Mar-a-Lago the next day to deal with an unspecified legal matter for Mr. Trump.

When she showed up the next day, Bobb complained that she didn’t know Corcoran, which is one of the reasons she wisely caveated the document before signing it.

“Wait a minute — I don’t know you,” Ms. Bobb replied to Mr. Corcoran’s request, according to a person to whom she later recounted the episode. She later complained that she did not have a full grasp of what was going on around her when she signed the document, according to two people who have heard her account.

And Bobb wasn’t the custodian of records. Someone decided to have someone unaffiliated with the Office of the Former President sign as custodian of records, thereby protecting Trump’s legal entity — the one served with the subpoena — from liability for the inadequate response.

She was, however, someone who — like Boris Epshteyn — likely has significant exposure for January 6, and even (per her testimony to January 6 Committee) witnessed Trump’s call to Brad Raffensperger.

But either Corcoran knew or suspected his own search was inadequate, or someone built in plausible deniability for him. DOJ may find out which it was on Friday.

As noted, this may help DOJ understand what has happened since Bobb’s initial testimony. Reports of her testimony came in the same days as initial reports that DOJ had told Trump they believed he still had classified records. Both Bloomberg and NYT described the tensions that arose among Trump’s lawyers as a result, with some objecting to any further certification.

Christopher M. Kise, who suggested hiring a forensic firm to search for additional documents, according to the people briefed on the matter.

But other lawyers in Mr. Trump’s circle — who have argued for taking a more adversarial posture in dealing with the Justice Department — disagreed with Mr. Kise’s approach. They talked Mr. Trump out of the idea and have encouraged him to maintain an aggressive stance toward the authorities, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That was in October. In November, Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith. In late November, Trump hired Tim Parlatore to do the search Kise had recommended over a month earlier. The search found, and returned to DOJ, two documents with classification markings found in a separate storage facility.

But even as Trump lawyers were dribbling out details of the result of that search, they were hiding at least two more details: that a Trump aide had been carting around — and had uploaded via the cloud — White House schedules that included once-classified information. And, Parlatore’s searchers had discovered, there was another empty classified folder on Trump’s bedside table that hadn’t been discovered in the August search. Whether willful or not, both likely show that additional documents with classification markers were brought back to Mar-a-Lago after the August search.

Since the time in December DOJ tried to hold Trump in contempt for refusing to comply with the May subpoena, they have chased down the box of schedules and the computer to which they were uploaded and subpoenaed the extra empty classified folder. They have interviewed the people who did the search, as well as the lawyers that Boris Epshteyn was giving orders. Significantly, they also interviewed Alina Habba, whose own search of Mar-a-Lago for documents responsive to Tish James’ subpoena had obvious gaps, most notably the storage closet full of documents where a bunch of classified documents were being stored. And finally, after five months, they will answer the questions first made obvious after Bobb’s initial interview in October: what Trump told Corcoran to get him to do an inadequate search.

Which brings me to Question 6: What Trump said to Corcoran after he received a subpoena for security footage that Trump knew — but Corcoran may not have known — showed Walt Nauta moving boxes that would thereby be excluded from the search Corcoran had done in May and June. Since this was a call, it may well be one of the things about which Corcoran took notes or even a recording that he later transcribed. Also recall that there was a discrepancy as to the date of the subpoena (as well as whether Trump greeted Jay Bratt and others when they were at MAL) when the search was originally revealed last year, a discrepancy that led me to suspect DOJ first served a subpoena on Trump’s office and only then served a subpoena on Trump Organization. June 24 may have been the first date that Corcoran became aware that his representations about the search for documents was incomplete.

Here’s the point, though. Trump played a shell game in advance of the search that Corcoran did last summer. Alina Habba’s declaration, on its face, reflects a shell game. There’s reason to believe — given the box containing additional documents marked classified and the empty classified folder — that Trump played another shell game when Parlatore’s investigators searched in November and December. And Howell reportedly also approved a crime-fraud waiver for Jennifer Little, a lawyer representing Trump in conjunction with the Georgia investigation.

If Corcoran does testify tomorrow, it may crystalize DOJ’s understanding of that shell game, at least. Not only will that help DOJ understand if another shell game, one involving Parlatore, managed to hide still more documents in November and December. But it may help to understand any other shell games Trump engaged in in NY and GA.

It may also finally provide the basis to hold Trump in contempt for withholding further documents.

Just for Perspective: Investigations Take Longer When Presidents Don’t Wiretap Themselves

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A few weeks ago, Peter Baker marked the day that the January 6 investigation has taken as long as the time between the burglary to Nixon’s resignation.

I reacted poorly to Baker’s claim to offer perspective; even on past presidential investigations, he has been overly credulous. And there’s really no comparison between Watergate and January 6, particularly if one compares — as Baker does — time-to-resignation under a still-sane Republican party with time-to-indictment in the MAGAt era. The comparison offers no perspective.

But I thought I’d take Baker up on the challenge, because the Watergate investigation offers a worthwhile way to demonstrate several of the reasons why the January 6 investigation is so much harder. (I plan to make running updates of this post because I expect feedback, particularly from people who know the Watergate investigation better than me, will help me fine tune this explanation.)

Same day arrests

In Watergate, the burglars were arrested in the act of breaking into the DNC headquarters.

On January 6, the cops tried to (and in a relative handful of cases, did) arrest people onsite. But this is the challenge they faced when they tried: Every attempted arrest required multiple officers to focus on one individual rather than the mob of thousands poised to invade the Capitol; every arrest was a diversion from the effort to defend the Capitol, Mike Pence, and members of Congress, with a woefully inadequate force.

In the case pictured above, the cops made a tactical decision to let Garret Miller go. After assuring the cops he only wanted to go home, just 33 minutes later, Miller burst through the East door with the rest of the mob.

There wasn’t a great delay in arrests of January 6 rioters, though. Nicholas Ochs, the first Proud Boy arrested, was arrested on January 7 when his flight home from DC landed in Hawaii.

Q-Shaman Jacob Chansley was arrested on January 8. The first person who would be convicted of a felony by a jury, Guy Reffitt, was arrested on January 15 (his son had tipped the FBI about him before the attack). The first person known to later enter into a cooperation agreement, Jon Schaffer, was arrested on January 17. Miller, pictured above, was rearrested January 20. VIP Stop the Steal associates Brandon Straka and Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet — the former of whom did provide and the latter of whom likely provided useful information on organizers to earn misdeamenor pleas — were arrested on January 25 and January 17, respectively. Joe Biggs — now on trial for sedition and an utterly critical pivot between the crime scene and those who coordinated with Trump — was arrested January 20, the same day that Joe Biden would, under tight security, be sworn in as President, the same day Steve Bannon’s last minute pardon was announced.

Kelly Meggs, the Oath keeper who facilitated cooperation among three militias who was convicted with Stewart Rhodes of sedition last November, was arrested on an already growing conspiracy indictment on February 19.

In the first month then, DOJ had already taken steps in an investigation implicating those who worked with Trump. The table below includes the arrests of some of the witnesses who will have an impact on an eventual Trump prosecution. There are others that I suspect are really important, but their role is not yet public.

Trial delays

The Watergate burglars didn’t go to trial right away. They were first indicted on September 15, 1972, 90 days after their arrest. Those who didn’t plead out went on trial January 8, 1973, 205 days after their arrest. Steps that John Sirica took during that trial — most notably, refusing to let the burglars take the fall and reading James McCord’s confession publicly — led directly to the possibility of further investigation. Nixon wouldn’t even commit his key crimes for over two months, in March.

That’s an important reminder, though: the Watergate investigation would have gone nowhere without that trial. That’s unsurprising. That’s how complex investigations in the US work.

Many people don’t understand, though, that there were two major delays before anyone could be brought to trial for January 6. First, COVID protocols had created a backlog of trials for people who were already in pretrial detention and for about 18 months, would limit the number of juries that could be seated. Efforts to keep grand jury members safe created similar backlogs, sometimes for months. In one conspiracy case I followed, prosecutors were ready to supersede several defendants into a conspiracy in April 2021, but did not get grand jury time to do so until September.

To make that bottleneck far, far worse, the nature of the attack and the sheer volume of media evidence about the event led DOJ to decide — in an effort to avoid missing exculpatory evidence that would undermine prosecutions — to make “global production” to all defendants. That required entering into several contracts, finding ways to package up media that started out in a range of different formats, getting special protective orders so one defendant wouldn’t expose personal details of another (though one defendant is or was under investigation for doing just that), then working with the public defenders’ office to effectively create a mirror of this system so prosecutors would have no access to defense filings. It was an incredibly complex process necessitated by the thing — the sheer amount of evidence from the crime scene — that has made it possible to prosecute so many of the crime scene culprits.

Here’s one of the memos DOJ issued to update the status of this process, one of the last global updates. Even at that point over a year after the attack, DOJ was just starting to move forward in a few limited cases by filling in what remained of discovery.

The first felony trial coming out of January 6 was that of Guy Reffitt, which started on March 3, 2022, a full 420 days after the event. Bringing him to trial that was made easier — possible even — because Reffitt never went into the Capitol itself, so didn’t have to wait until all global discovery was complete, and because there were several witnesses against him, including his own son.

The delays in discovery resulted in delays in plea deals too, as most defense attorneys believed they needed to wait until they had seen all of the discovery to make sure they advised their client appropriately.

Lots of people thought this process was unnecessary. But the decision to do it was utterly vindicated the other day, as DOJ started responding to defendants claiming that Tucker Carlson had found video that somehow proved their innocence. As I noted, prosecutors were able to point to the video shown by Tucker Carlson that he said vindicated Jacob Chansley and describe specifically when an unrelated defendant, Dominic Pezzola, had gotten what was effectively Chansley’s discovery.

The footage in question comes from the Capitol’s video surveillance system, commonly referred to as “CCTV” (for “closed-circuit television”). The Court will be familiar with the numerous CCTV clips that have been introduced as exhibits during this trial. The CCTV footage is core evidence in nearly every January 6 case, and it was produced en masse, labeled by camera number and by time, to all defense counsel in all cases.3 With the exception of one CCTV camera (where said footage totaled approximately 10 seconds and implicated an evacuation route), all of the footage played on television was disclosed to defendant Pezzola (and defendant Chansley) by September 24, 2021.4 The final 10 seconds of footage was produced in global discovery to all defense counsel on January 23, 2023. Pezzola’s Brady claim therefore fails at the threshold, because nothing has been suppressed. United States v. Blackley, 986 F. Supp. 600, 603 (D.D.C. 1997) (“For an item to be Brady, it must be something that is being ‘suppress[ed] by the prosecution.’”) (quoting Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 87 (1963)).

While discovery in this case is voluminous, the government has provided defense counsel with the necessary tools to readily identify relevant cameras within the CCTV to determine whether footage was produced or not. Accordingly, the volume of discovery does not excuse defense counsel from making reasonable efforts to ascertain whether an item has been produced before making representations about what was and was not produced, let alone before filing inaccurate and inflammatory allegations of discovery failures.

You may think the thirteen month delay for discovery was a waste of time. But it just prevented Tucker Carlson from being able to upend hundreds of prosecutions.

Obviously, most of the trials that have occurred in the last year won’t directly lead to Trump. Some will. I’ve said for 22 months that I think the Proud Boy trial is critical — and that won’t go to the jury for another two or three weeks yet. There are a number of steps that, I suspect, DOJ has been holding on pending the results of that trial, because so much else rides on it.

The Stewart Rhodes trial was likely helpful. I’ve suggested DOJ may use Danny Rodriguez as a way to tie Trump and Rudy Giuliani to the near-murder of Michael Fanone on an aid-and-abet theory. And there are a few more sleeper cases that seem to have greater significance than what went on at the Capitol that day.

The legal uncertainty

In the Nixon case, there were fairly well established crimes: burglary, and obstruction of a criminal investigation.

I won’t say too much on this point, because I already have. But in this case, prosecutors were (and undoubtedly still are) trying to apply existing statute to an unprecedented event. One law they’ve used with a lot of the rioters — civil disorder — was already being appealed elsewhere in the country when prosecutors started applying to the January 6. Since then its legal certainty has been all-but solidified.

Far more importantly, the way prosecutors have applied obstruction of an official proceeding, 18 USC 1512(c)(2), has been challenged (starting with Garret Miller–the guy in the aborted arrest photo above) for over a year. That’s precisely the crime with which the January 6 Committee believes Trump should be charged (I advocated the same before their investigation even started in earnest); but I’m not sure whether Jack Smith will wait until the appeals on the law get resolved.

Still, DOJ has spent a great deal of time already trying to defend the legal approach they’ve used with the investigation.

The insider scoop

For all the delays in setting up the January 6 Committee, it (and an earlier Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry into Jeffrey Clark’s efforts to undermine the vote) got started more quickly than Sam Ervin’s committee, which first started 11 months after the burglary.

Yet it only took Ervin’s Senate investigators about two months to discover their important insider, whose testimony would provide critical to both Congressional and criminal investigators. On July 13, 1973, Alexander Butterfield first revealed the existence of the White House taping system.

For all the January 6 Committee’s great work, it wasn’t until her third interview, on May 17, 2022, before Cassidy Hutchinson began to reveal more details of Trump’s unwillingness to take steps against his supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Even Hutchinson’s remarkable public testimony on June 28, 2022, when she described Trump demanding that his supporters be allowed to enter the Ellipse rally with the weapons Secret Service knew them to be carrying, is not known to have provided the kind of Rosetta stone to the conspiracy that disclosure of Nixon’s White House taping system did. In later testimony, Hutchinson provided key details about a cover-up. And her testimony provided leverage for first J6C and then, in at least two appearances, grand jury testimony from Pat Philbin and Pat Cipollone, the latter appearance of which came with an Executive Privilege waiver on December 2, 2022, 23 months after the attack.

Cell-xploitation

This brings us to the biggest difference in the timeline. Once the Senate and prosecutors learned that Nixon had effectively wiretapped himself, it turned the investigation into a fight over access to those materials.

The parts of the draft Nixon indictment that have been released describe a fairly narrow conspiracy. The proof against Nixon would have comprised, in significant part:

  • The report John Dean did disclaiming a tie to the break-in
  • Proof of payments to Howard Hunt
  • White House recordings, primarily from several days in March 1973, proving that Nixon had the payments arranged

That is, in addition to the James McCord confession and John Dean’s cooperation, any charges against Nixon relied on recordings Nixon himself had made, the import of which were made all the more salient with the disclosure of the 18-minute gap.

One thing likely made the January 6 prosecution easier: The sheer amount of data available to prosecutors using subpoenas. We have yet to see any of that with regards to organizers (though we know that Denver Riggelman, with far weaker subpoena power, was able to do a detailed map of ties between Trump, organizers, and mobsters).

There will undoubtedly be a great deal of evidence obtained from cloud companies. The only hint of this process we know about yet involves the emails from Jeffrey Clark, Ken Klukowski, John Eastman, and one other person, who is not a lawyer. DOJ had obtained emails from them with a warrant by last May. They have undoubtedly done the same for dozens of other subjects (beyond those arrested from the crime scene, where they have done so as well), but we won’t know about it until we see it in indictments.

But even that is not always easy. DOJ has spent seven months so far getting Peter Navarro to turn over emails from his Proton Mail account covered by the Presidential Records Act. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly just issued an order requiring him to turn the emails over, but it’s not clear whether he’ll further obstruct this effort to simply enforce his normal record-keeping obligations.

But one challenge that didn’t exist fifty years ago makes prosecutors jobs much harder: the need to obtain and exploit individual cell phones to obtain encrypted communications — things like Signal and Telegram chats — not otherwise available. In Enrique Tarrio’s case, simply breaking into the phone took most of a year. In Rudy Giuliani’s case (his phones were first obtained in the Ukraine investigation starting on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job, but the results would be available with a separate warrant here), it took a nine month Special Master review. In Scott Perry’s case, his speech and debate claims will be appealed to SCOTUS. The table below shows whose phones we know to have been obtained, including how long it took to exploit the phones to the extent that became public (It does not show known cloud content obtained; much of that remains secret.)

The point being, even for the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper cases, you had to get one phone, use it to get probable cause on the next guy, then get his phone to use it to get probable cause on the next guy. This process is very obviously at the stage where both Alex Jones and Roger Stone would be in prosecutors’ sights, as well as much of the fake elector plot. But that’s still several steps away from people like Mark Meadows, who would necessarily be involved in any Trump prosecution.

Privilege

When DOJ subpoenaed the two Pats last summer, multiple media outlets reported that subpoenaing the White House counsels was particularly “aggressive.”

Two top lawyers who worked in the White House under former President Donald Trump have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury investigating the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, people familiar with the matter said, in the latest sign that the Justice Department’s probe is entering a more aggressive phase.

Mr. Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Pat Philbin received subpoenas in recent days seeking documents and testimony, the people said. [my emphasis]

But as coverage of, first, Mike Pence’s two aides and, then, the two Pats being compelled to testify about topics Trump had claim was privileged noted, it’s not actually a new or particularly aggressive thing to ask White House counsels to testify. Indeed, John Dean’s cooperation — the most important part of holding Nixon accountable — arose after he had gotten himself deeper and deeper into Nixon’s cover-up.

And in spite of the Nixon precedent that said there were limits to Executive Privilege, and in spite of the DC Circuit ruling that the import of investigation January 6 overcame Trump’s Executive Privilege claims, even with Congress, Trump has used — and DOJ has been obligated to navigate — a series of privilege claims to delay the investigation.

As I’ve noted, there are close to thirty key witnesses or subjects whose attorney-client claims have to be carefully addressed to avoid blowing both that case and those of any downstream investigation.

In the case of Scott Perry, DOJ has spent six months trying to get into his phone. That delay is not a sign of lassitude. On the contrary, it’s a sign they’re including subjects who very rarely get investigated in the investigation.

Cooperating witnesses

According to this timeline, John Dean started cooperating on April 6, 1973, almost ten months after the arrest of the burglars, though just a few weeks after the day of Nixon’s crimes as alleged in the draft indictment.

As noted on this table, there were people who entered into cooperation agreements more quickly than that, but it’s not clear who of them will help prosecute those closer to Trump. As I keep noting, I’m really dubious of the value of Brandon Straka’s cooperation.

There are maybe 30 to 35 known known cooperators in January 6, but most only cooperated against their buddies, and most of those prosecutions didn’t much build prosecutions related to Trump.

This table only includes a few of the cooperating witnesses — the first (Schaffer, the nature of whose cooperation is still totally obscure), the dubious cooperation of Straka and, potentially, Gionet, the most important of at least five Proud Boy cooperators, Jeremy Bertino, and the most important of at least eight Oath Keeper cooperators, Joshua James.

James, along with a few of the other Oath Keeper cooperators, might help prosecute Roger Stone. But there is no one on this list who has the goods on Trump, like John Dean did. No one even close.

That said, we wouldn’t necessarily know if someone closer to Trump were cooperating. Even some people who are secondary cooperators remain entirely obscure, both that they are cooperating, and the extent of their knowledge. I suspect several people are cooperating — I even have specific people in mind, based on other details. But we won’t know anytime soon if someone has flipped on Donald Trump.

And given the ferociousness of his supporters and the aggressiveness of Trump’s obstruction that’s a good thing.

Beryl Howell’s Biggest Secret: Whether Bill Barr Killed the Egyptian Bank Investigation

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As I noted, Judge Beryl Howell ended her tenure as DC’s Chief Judge yesterday decisively, ruling that Evan Corcoran must testify about topics she has found to be crime-fraud excepted.

By dint of age and tenure, Howell was appointed Chief Judge just in time to preside over the most remarkable set of investigations against a sitting and former President: the Mueller investigation and certain follow-on investigations, the January 6 investigation, and the stolen documents investigation.

And now Jeb Boasberg gets to pick up her work. Like Howell, he’s an Obama appointee; he already did a stint presiding over the FISA Court.

Howell’s decision requiring Corcoran to testify elicited all sorts of superlative language about the import of the decision. I’ll return to the number of other Trump lawyers against whom Howell has already approved legal process. The Corcoran decision really is not that unusual in the twin Jack Smith investigations. Or even in the other grand juries over which Howell has presided.

Indeed, the fruits of a warrant Howell approved on August 1, 2017 as part of an investigation into suspicious payments (especially those from Viktor Vekelselberg) to Michael Cohen’s Essential Consultants’ bank account, will likely yield Donald Trump’s first criminal indictment next week. Referrals of part of the resulting investigation to SDNY led to Cohen’s 2018 prosecution, including on the hush payments scheme. NYC has started making security preparations for Trump’s arrest on the same campaign finance scheme next week.

To repeat: a fairly uncontroversial decision Howell made six years ago — to approve the first of a series of warrants targeting Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen — will have played a part if and when Alvin Bragg indicts Trump next week.

Howell’s colleagues razzed her yesterday about all the secrets she may keep from the past seven years.

Howell seemed to freeze in her seat as the most senior jurist on the court, Judge Paul Friedman, publicly described her still-secret rulings in grand jury-related matters, pointing to press accounts of Howell ruling in favor of Trump in a contempt dispute over his office’s response to a grand jury subpoena for classified records and against Trump on an effort to assert attorney-client privilege in the same probe.

“What fascinating issues!” Friedman declared wryly as Howell remained stone-faced on the dais. “We’d all love to read her opinions, but we can’t,” he said to laughter.

Friedman did note, however, that Howell had issued 100 secret grand jury opinions during her seven-year term.

Another colleague, Judge Tanya Chutkan, also alluded to Howell’s work resolving disputes related to the court’s grand juries over the past seven years.

“There’s so much work Chief Judge Howell has done that we may never know about,” Chutkan said.

In an interview with Zoe Tillman, though, Howell suggested she expects some of it will be unsealed.

Howell said she was still processing the past seven years.

“A lot of my work in the grand jury arena remains under seal, so it is going to be very hard to say what my legacy will be until after some of that work gets unsealed and people are able to evaluate it,” she said.

I expect a good deal of her recent work will be unsealed, in fairly short order.

It bears reminding, though, that Judge Howell attempted to share information about what she had been overseeing in a grand jury with the House Judiciary Committee in 2019. In a 75-page opinion invoking the Federalist papers and defending separation of powers, Howell issued a ruling that should have been uncontroversial: that the House could have grand jury materials in contemplation of impeachment.

In her opinion, Howell cited a number of the things the House might get with grand jury testimony. They included Paul Manafort’s description of how Trump ordered him to chase the documents stolen from Hillary.

Again, the Mueller Report recounts an incident when then-candidate Trump spoke to associates indicating that he may have had advance knowledge of damaging leaks of documents illegally obtained through hacks by the Russians, stating “shortly after WikiLeaks’s July 22, 2016 release of hacked documents, [Manafort] spoke to Trump [redacted]; Manafort recalled that Trump responded that Manafort should [redacted] keep Trump updated. Deputy campaign manager Rick Gates said that . . . Manafort instructed Gates [redacted] status updates on upcoming releases. Around the same time, Gates was with Trump on a trip to an airport [redacted], and shortly after the call ended, Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.” Id. at II-18 (footnotes omitted) (redactions in original, with citation in footnote 27 redacted due to grand jury secrecy).

They included Don Jr’s refusal to testify to the grand jury about the June 9 meeting.

[A] discussion related to the Trump Tower Meeting contains two grand jury redactions: “On July 12, 2017, the Special Counsel’s Office [redacted] Trump Jr. [redacted] related to the June 9 meeting and those who attended the June 9 meeting.” Id. at II-105 (redactions in original).

They included Manafort’s details of his discussions with Konstantin Kilimnik.

The Mueller Report further recounts evidence suggesting that then-candidate Trump may have received advance information about Russia’s interference activities, stating:

Manafort, for his part, told the Office that, shortly after WikiLeaks’s July 22 release, Manafort also spoke with candidate Trump [redacted]. Manafort also [redacted] wanted to be kept apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks and separately told Gates to keep in touch [redacted] about future WikiLeaks releases. According to Gates, by the late summer of 2016, the Trump campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks. [Redacted] while Trump and Gates were driving to LaGuardia Airport. [Redacted], shortly after the call candidate Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.

Id. at I-53–54 (footnotes omitted) (redactions in original, with citation in referenced footnote 206 redacted due to grand jury secrecy).

But Bill Barr’s DOJ, after having challenged the uncontroversial notion that the House should be permitted to receive what was obviously an impeachment referral, appealed to the DC Circuit, lost, and then stalled long enough to outlast Congress. Bill Barr effectively refused to let Congress receive and act on an impeachment referral. But Howell did her constitutionally mandated part.

It’s an action DOJ took during precisely the period when Barr was stalling long enough to outlast Congress that, in my mind, is the biggest secret Howell takes from her tenure: What happened with an investigation into a suspected $10 million donation in September 2016 from an Egyptian-owned bank that allowed Trump to stay in the race when he was running out of funds. Though aspects of the investigation were dribbled out in grand jury unsealings from Howell along the way, CNN first confirmed the Egyptian bank angle in 2020.

For more than three years, federal prosecutors investigated whether money flowing through an Egyptian state-owned bank could have backed millions of dollars Donald Trump donated to his own campaign days before he won the 2016 election, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

The investigation, which both predated and outlasted special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, examined whether there was an illegal foreign campaign contribution. It represents one of the most prolonged efforts by federal investigators to understand the President’s foreign financial ties, and became a significant but hidden part of the special counsel’s pursuits.

The investigation was kept so secret that at one point investigators locked down an entire floor of a federal courthouse in Washington, DC, so Mueller’s team could fight for the Egyptian bank’s records in closed-door court proceedings following a grand jury subpoena. The probe, which closed this summer with no charges filed, has never before been described publicly.

Prosecutors suspected there could be a link between the Egyptian bank and Trump’s campaign contribution, according to several of the sources, but they could never prove a connection.

Shortly after the investigation was killed, Barr went up to Hillsdale College and ranted about prosecuting corruption.

This criminalization of politics is not healthy. The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct — conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment, up to and including being locked away in a cage. These tools are not built to resolve political disputes and it would be a decidedly bad development for us to go the way of third world nations where new administrations routinely prosecute their predecessors for various ill-defined crimes against the state. The political winners ritually prosecuting the political losers is not the stuff of a mature democracy.

The Justice Department abets this culture of criminalization when we are not disciplined about what charges we will bring and what legal theories we will bless. Rather than root out true crimes — while leaving ethically dubious conduct to the voters — our prosecutors have all too often inserted themselves into the political process based on the flimsiest of legal theories. We have seen this time and again, with prosecutors bringing ill-conceived charges against prominent political figures, or launching debilitating investigations that thrust the Justice Department into the middle of the political process and preempt the ability of the people to decide.

This criminalization of politics will only worsen until we change the culture of concocting new legal theories to criminalize all manner of questionable conduct. Smart, ambitious lawyers have sought to amass glory by prosecuting prominent public figures since the Roman Republic. It is utterly unsurprising that prosecutors continue to do so today to the extent the Justice Department’s leaders will permit it.

Even at the time — with the Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort cases — it was clear that Barr was engaged in fairly unprecedented corruption of DOJ to protect Trump. Since then, we’ve learned of more. Most notably, as we await a potential Bragg indictment, Geoffrey Berman described how, after Cohen pled guilty in the hush payment case, Barr not only shut down any investigation of Trump on the charge, but attempted to reverse Cohen’s own prosecution.

While Cohen had pleaded guilty, our office continued to pursue investigations related to other possible campaign finance violations. When Barr took over in February 2019, he not only tried to kill the ongoing investigations but—incredibly—suggested that Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed.

Barr summoned Rob Khuzami in late February to challenge the basis of Cohen’s plea as well as the reasoning behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals. Khuzami was told to cease all investigative work on the campaign finance allegations until the Office of Legal Counsel, an important part of Main Justice, determined there was a legal basis for the campaign finance charges to which Cohen pleaded guilty—and until Barr determined there was a sufficient federal interest in pursuing charges against others.

Barr even attempted to put supervision of the case in the hands of Richard Donoghue, as he did do with the Rudy Giuliani case.

Given that Barr didn’t think Trump should be prosecuted for the Cohen illegal contribution case, there’s no telling what he thought of the suspected Egyptian bank donation. Certainly, he was in complete control of DC USAO at the time, if he wanted to shut down an otherwise viable investigation.

We are, as Howell herself said, likely to know much of what she has been doing for the last two years. But her biggest secret is whether Bill Barr prevented DOJ from fully attempting to learn whether Donald Trump was beholden to Egypt or some other foreign country for the entirety of the time he served as President.

Evan Corcoran: You’re the Next Contestant on Trump’s Crime-Fraud Reality Show

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Multiple outlets are reporting that Judge Beryl Howell, in what may be her last ruling as Chief Judge, has ruled that Evan Corcoran must testify about his conversations with Trump.

This follows the news, from ABC, that Jack Smith’s team is particularly interested in a conversation Trump and Corcoran had on June 24, 2022, after prosecutors sent a subpoena to Trump Organization for surveillance footage that would show Walt Nauta moving boxes out of the storage room where the FBI would later find 70 classified documents. As I noted last year, in the early weeks of Trump’s efforts to stall the investigation, there was a discrepancy about what date this subpoena was served, which I suspected might suggest DOJ had to file subpoenas to two different entities before Trump agreed to comply.

So now we’ve ended up where it was clear we were going to end up in September, with another of Trump’s lawyers whose communications with him are found to be crime fraud excepted.

Corcoran is in good company. He is probably at least the fourth Trump lawyer whose comms were deemed crime-fraud excepted in the last five years. The others are:

Indeed, the first such instance, the conversation Cohen recorded of Trump agreeing to a hush payment, will likely lead to the first (or possibly second, depending on what Fani Willis is doing) indictment of Trump, perhaps early next week.

With both Cohen and Rudy, the lawyers withdrew objections after Special Master Barbara Jones deemed the comms not to be privileged.

Corcoran should feel pretty good, though. He may be the first Trump crime-fraud contestant who manages to avoid legal exposure himself.

That’s got to count for something in the Trump Crime-Fraud Reality Show, right?

 

The New Investigation into Bannon and Boris Buried Under Bannon’s Bluster

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For at least six years — from Rick Gates sharing stuff with Maggie as a way to share it with Roger Stone, to Stefan Passantino sharing Cassidy Hutchinson’s damaging testimony because “Maggie’s friendly to us. We’ll be fine” — people in Trump’s camp explicitly state they go to Maggie Haberman because she’s useful to their goals. The results are obvious, such as the time when Maggie buried the news that Trump had spoken to Vladimir Putin about adoptions immediately before crafting a bullshit cover story for the June 9 meeting that claimed it was all about adoptions; Maggie buried the story by repeating Trump’s threats to fire Jeff Sessions first.

That’s why it’s useful to look at two damaging details Maggie buried in what purports to be a profile of Boris Epshteyn, the non-Breaking News parts of which I covered here and other parts that WaPo covered in November.

First, NYT buried the news that SDNY has opened an investigation into the crypto currency scam Epshteyn and Steve Bannon grifted loyal Trump supporters with beneath not one, not two, but three flashy quotes about Epshteyn from Bannon himself, followed by 22 paragraphs, many focused on how Boris charged campaigns for keeping them on Trump’s good side, then one  paragraph that included 17 words of tortured Enhanced Euphemism Techniques in an 83 word paragraph, only then to reveal that Bannon is under investigation for the crypto currency scheme, too.

A cryptocurrency with which [Epshteyn] is involved has drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors.

[snip]

“Boris is a pair of heavy hands — he’s not Louis Brandeis,” said Stephen K. Bannon, a close ally of Mr. Epshteyn and former adviser to Mr. Trump, referring to the renowned Supreme Court justice. But Mr. Trump, he said, “doesn’t need Louis Brandeis.”

“You need to be a killer, and he’s a killer,” Mr. Bannon added.

But Mr. Epshteyn’s attacking style grates on other people in Mr. Trump’s circle, and he has encouraged ideas and civil lawsuits that have frustrated some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, like suits against the journalist Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Prize committee. His detractors see him as more of a political operative with a law license than as a provider of valuable legal advice.

“As soon as anybody starts making anything happen for Trump overall, the knives come out,” Mr. Bannon said. He described Mr. Epshteyn as “a wartime consigliere.”

[21 paragraphs, many focused on Epshteyn’s dodgy consulting gig]

[This paragraph, in which 17 tortured words out of 83 are Enhanced Euphemism Techniques:

]

More recently, a pro-Trump cryptocurrency that Mr. Epshteyn and Mr. Bannon are involved with managing is facing an inquiry from federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Breaking: A key source for this story, Steve Bannon, is under investigation for the shameless grift of printing pro-Trump money, then bilking Trump supporters every time they bought it.

Compare how ABC reported the same story when they covered it a few hours later:

A cryptocurrency linked to former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn has caught the attention of federal prosecutors in New York, who have started looking into it, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

News of federal prosecutors’ interest in the Bannon and Epshteyn-fronted cryptocurrency comes on the heels of an ABC News investigation into the cryptocurrency, which looked at allegations of internal chaos and mismanagement by the two high-profile Trump associates over the past year, including accusations that they’ve failed in their commitment to continue to donate portions of the coin’s proceeds to charities.

The New York Times was the first to report the news of the inquiry from federal prosecutors.

MORE: Internal chaos plagues Bannon-fronted $FJB cryptocurrency, critics say
The cryptocurrency — dubbed $FJB from the shorthand version of the vulgar MAGA expression “F— Joe Biden” and now officially said to stand for Freedom Jobs and Business — has lost 95% of its value amid internal turmoil, at least in part due to an industry-wide downturn.

Critics say $FJB represents the latest in a string of ill-fated efforts to leverage MAGA support for financial returns — particularly on the part of Bannon, who in September pleaded not guilty to unrelated charges that he defrauded donors with the promise of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Acquired by Bannon and Epshteyn from original lead creator Grant Tragni and two other co-founders in late 2021, $FJB was promoted as a rejection of President Joe Biden and an alternative financial institution for conservatives by the two MAGA influencers — who also emphasized that part of the currency’s 8% transaction fee would go to charities including the Wounded Warriors Project, Tunnels To Towers, Semper Fi and Patriot Freedom Project.

But according to a spokesperson for the Wounded Warriors Project, as of January this year, no donations had been made by $FJB to the organization since Bannon and Epshteyn took over in December 2021. Wounded Warriors told ABC News that they had only received the one donation from $FJB in November 2021 — prior to Bannon and Epshteyn’s involvement.

NYT, apparently, thought it more important to string out a bunch of quotes from a suspected serial fraudster — “heavy hands — he’s not Louis Brandeis,” … “You need to be a killer, and he’s a killer,” … “a wartime consigliere” — rather than ask the serial fraudster if he had knowingly defrauded a bunch of MAGAts or at least describe how he exploited Trump’s loyal followers. (Note, this scam is also covered in Denver Riggelman’s The Breach, which is better than I thought it’d be.)

The other thing buried twelve paragraphs into a story covering stuff many people have already covered is that Ephsteyn tried to retroactively claim he was providing legal advice after the search of Mar-a-Lago.

After the search last summer of Mar-a-Lago by F.B.I. agents looking for classified documents still in Mr. Trump’s possession, Mr. Epshteyn retroactively changed his agreement with the political action committee. The agreement, which had been primarily for communications strategy, was updated to include legal work, and to say it covered legal work since the spring of last year, a campaign official said. His monthly retainer doubled to $30,000.

But he dropped a separate effort to have Mr. Trump sign a letter retroactively designating him as a lawyer for Mr. Trump personally, dating to March of last year, soon after Mr. Trump’s post-presidency handling of classified documents became an issue. The letter specifically stated that their communications would be covered by attorney-client privilege, multiple people familiar with the request said.

Now, credit where credit is due. As I noted when I described Maggie’s recent solo foray into campaign finance journalism, after a slew of stories in which Maggie called Epshteyn Trump’s “in-house counsel,” once she looked at the FEC documents, she described that Boris had billed all this as strategic consulting.

NYT has, in various stories including Maggie in the byline, described Epshteyn’s role in the stolen documents case as “an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Mr. Trump’s legal efforts,” “in-house counsel for the former president who has become one of his most trusted advisers,” and “who has played a central role in coordinating lawyers on several of the investigations involving Mr. Trump.” Another even describes that Epshteyn “act[ed] as [a] lawyer [] for the Trump campaign.” The other day, Maggie described his role instead as “broader strategic consulting.”

In this story, the story that reveals that after the search of MAL Epshteyn attempted to retroactively declare that he had been providing legal advice all along, Maggie calls him the, “self-described in-house counsel.”

I guess we know who was describing him as “in-house counsel” for all those stories stating as fact that he was the in-house counsel?

Epshteyn’s attempted retroactive claim that he had been providing legal services is not a minor detail.

Effectively what Epshteyn did was, after playing a key role in Trump’s coup attempt followed by a year of grifting off his access to Trump, he swooped back into Trump’s orbit when it became public that Trump had been fighting to withhold documents from the government; who knows what more details Ephsteyn had about all the highly sensitive documents stored in a leatherbound box in his office when he swooped in. And over the course of the next five months, Ephsteyn brought in a group of lawyers who are highly inappropriate to advise on a classified documents case, including Evan Corcoran, who treated a potential Espionage Act case as an 18 USC 1924 case, Chris Kise, fresh off his work for the Maduro regime, and, for a bit part playing the fall gal, former OAN host Christina Bobb. Some of these people are accomplished lawyers, but they’re not remotely appropriate to this investigation.

It’s unclear whether Epshteyn assembled such an inappropriate team because he wants Trump to go down, with all the chaos that will cause, because he’s stupid and wildly unsuited to this role, or because Trump was desperate. But after ensuring there was no one who could be called an adult in the terms of Espionage Act investigations left in the room, Epshteyn then reportedly masterminded a shell game on June 3 in which Trump boarded his jet to Bedminster at the moment that Corcoran handed over a packet of documents that Bobb claimed, with no way of knowing, constituted everything Trump had left.

“Wartime consiglieres,” as Bannon called his brother in cryptocurrency scam, don’t orchestrate such transparently stupid schemes.

And then after DOJ called Trump’s bluff with a search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, according to this story, Epshteyn attempted to make all the conversations he had in the run-up to that search privileged, retroactively. Epshteyn appears not to have considered this legal advice until the moment it became clear his shell game had failed.

And given that some of Maggie’s best sources — including some of the sources who’ve long had the knives out for Epshteyn — have chatted with prosecutors since the search, prosecutors likely know that Epshteyn only belatedly decided he had been playing a lawyer all along. Maybe they even found it out before they seized Ephsteyn’s phone in early September under a January 6 warrant. Or maybe some of the recent activity in the stolen documents case, including the effort to get crime-fraud testimony from Corcoran, aims to shore up a warrant for stolen documents-related Epshteyn phone content that the FBI already has in its possession.

Indeed, this new detail explains something else in the story, something that NYT and others have already covered. Among the questions that Bobb and Corcoran and others have gotten from prosecutors pertains to Epshteyn’s attempt to set up a common-interest agreement.

Prosecutors investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of classified material have looked at whether Mr. Epshteyn improperly sought a common-interest agreement among witnesses as a shield against the investigation, the people familiar with the matter said.

Til now, this detail has always been reported without explanation of why it would be wrong — why it would deviate from normal white collar practice. The line of questioning didn’t make sense to me. It makes far more sense, however, if Epshteyn did so after his shell game blew up on him. It makes more sense if Epshteyn was trying to shield his own behavior, just as retroactively declaring his advice legal advice would do.

The question is why. Why Epshteyn advised Trump to take such a catastrophically stupid approach to stolen classified documents. By embedding this breaking news in a profile about the way Epshteyn monetized access to Trump, NYT seems to suggest that’s the motive (and I’ve heard similar descriptions from others): Epshteyn was just giving Trump what he wanted when no one else would as a way to make sure his other grift could continue.

That’s not the only possible motive, though: there are other more obvious reasons someone who failed to get clearance, even in Trump’s White House, might want to help Trump hoard highly classified documents (NYT reports that “the issue has been resolved”).

The question of why Epshteyn did all this has likely become closely intertwined with prosecutors’ attempts to assess why Trump withheld the documents in the first place, as well as attempts to understand why two separate searches found 47 empty classified document folders.

Tim Parlatore — another lawyer who is woefully ill-suited for a stolen documents case — is quoted by the NYT stating that the rest of the lawyers Epshteyn has assembled will be good so long as Epshteyn, himself, doesn’t become a target, as if the seizure of his phone is not some kind of tip off.

“Boris has access to information and a network that is useful to us,” said one of the team’s lawyers, Timothy Parlatore, whom Mr. Epshteyn hired. “It’s good to have someone who’s a lawyer who is also inside the palace gates.”

Mr. Parlatore suggested that he was not worried that Mr. Epshteyn, like a substantial number of other Trump lawyers, had become at least tangentially embroiled in some of the same investigations on which he was helping to defend Mr. Trump.

“Absent any solid indication that Boris is a target here, I don’t think it affects us,” Mr. Parlatore said.

I don’t even know what to make of Parlatore’s quote explaining that Boris’ network “is useful to us.” To do what? Isn’t the goal to keep Trump out of prison?

But I do know that none of these people seem to be sufficiently worried about 18 USC 793(g), the built-in conspiracy clause in the Espionage Act. Even if Epshteyn’s motives are no more ignoble than attempting to monetize his access to Trump — and, again, his motives are likely as much a focus as Trump’s at this point — that doesn’t exempt him from exposure to conspiracy charges himself if he agreed to help Trump hoard the classified documents. Indeed, adding Epshteyn as a co-conspirator might have several advantages for prosecutors.

Epshteyn is, as this profile and others have laid out, someone monetizing access to Trump. The more salient detail, for the investigation, is why Epshteyn only retroactively tried to protect his own involvement in the alleged attempt to withhold classified documents.

Jenna Ellis Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied and Lied

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In an attempt to settle the Colorado challenge to her law license, Jenna Ellis stipulated that she made ten “misrepresentations” in public statements she made about the election in 2020.

Those, um, lies were:

  • On November 13, 2020, Respondent claimed that “Hillary Clinton still has not conceded the 2016 election.”
  • On November 20, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated: “We have affidavits from witnesses, we have voter intimidation, we have the ballots that were manipulated, we have all kinds of statistics that show that this was a coordinated effort in all of these states to transfer votes either from Trump to Biden, to manipulate the ballots, to count them in secret . . .”
  • On November 20, 2020, Respondent appeared on Spicer & Co. and stated, “with all those states [Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia] combined we know that the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that.”
  • On November 21, 2020, Respondent stated on Twitter under her handle @JennaEllisEsq., “ . . . SECOND, we will present testimonial and other evidence IN COURT to show how this election was STOLEN!”
  • On November 23, 2020, Respondent appeared on The Ari Melber Show on MSNBC and stated, “The election was stolen and Trump won by a landslide.”
  • On November 30, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated, “President Trump is right that there was widespread fraud in this election, we have at least six states that were corrupted, if not more, through their voting systems. . . We know that President Trump won in a landslide.” She also stated, “The outcome of this election is actually fraudulent it’s wrong, and we understand than when we subtract all the illegal ballots, you can see that President Trump actually won in a landslide.”
  • On December 3, 2020, Respondent appeared on Mornings with Maria on Fox Business and stated, “The outcome of this election is actually fraudulent it’s wrong, and we understand than when we subtract all the illegal ballots, you can see that President Trump actually won in a landslide.”
  • On December 5, 2020, Respondent appeared on Justice with Judge Jeanine on Fox News and stated, “We have over 500,000 votes [in Arizona] that were cast illegally . . .”
  • On December 15, 2020, Respondent appeared on Greg Kelly Reports on Newsmax and stated, “The proper and true victor, which is Donald Trump . . .”
  • On December 22, 2020, Respondent stated on Twitter, through her handle @JennaEllisEsq, “I spent an hour with @DanCaplis for an in-depth discussion about President @realDonaldTrump’s fight for election integrity, the overwhelming evidence proving this was stolen, and why fact-finding and truth—not politics—matters!” [my emphasis]

Remarkably, Ellis told four of these lies on Fox, the same shows that feature prominently in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox. But because the lies Ellis was telling weren’t about Dominion, they don’t show up in the Dominion lawsuit. They’re just more instances of lies that Fox broadcast unchallenged.

The presiding disciplinary judge in the case, Byron Large, only censured Ellis in response to her admitted lies, because she didn’t tell those lies in her function as lawyer. (Politico reported on the decision here.) She didn’t stipulate to making these false claims to Trump or as the attorney of record in any of the lawsuits that Trump filed, and so, according to a standard adopted by the CO Supreme Court, she should only be censured, not disbarred.

Although ABA Standard 7.2 seemingly fits the fact pattern at hand, the Colorado Supreme Court’s opinion in In re Rosen counsels against relying on that Standard outside the context of lawyers’ misrepresentations while executing their professional duties. Rosen further counsels against imposing a sanction in the gap left between ABA Standards 5.11(b) and 5.13. Indeed, the Rosen court addressed at length the appropriate Standards to apply when faced with instances of lawyer misrepresentation:

Unless deceit or misrepresentation is directed toward a client, see ABA Standard 4.6, a tribunal, see ABA Standard 6.1, or the legal profession itself (as, for example, by making false representations in applying for admission to the bar), see ABA Standard 7.0, it is considered by the ABA Standards to be the violation of a duty owed to the public, see ABA Standard 5.0. As the violation of a duty owed to the public (as distinguished from a client, a court, or the profession), even conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation, as long as it falls short of actual criminality or comparable intentional conduct seriously adversely reflecting on one’s fitness to practice law, should generally be sanctioned only by reprimand, or censure. [emphasis original; citations omitted]

So long as Ellis is not found to have committed a crime with her lies, she can keep her law license.

Therein lies the rub.

Also as part of the stipulation, Ellis described her role on the Trump campaign this way:

From February 2019 to January 15, 2021, Respondent was a senior legal advisor to the then-serving President of the United States. She “was a member of President Trump’s legal team . . . that made efforts to challenge President Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential Election.”1 Though Respondent “was part of the legal team . . . she was not counsel of record for any of the lawsuits challenging the election results.”2

As it is, there was actually some dispute among witnesses to the January 6 Committee about whether Ellis was playing a legal role or a media one.

For example, Alyssa Farrah described that at one point, Mark Meadows considered Ellis to become White House spokesperson.

[W]hen Meadows brought me to the White House — well, he physically brought me tothe West Wing to ask if I would come back. He asked me to be press secretary. I said no, I am not — I would not be a good face for Donald Trump, I cannot defend a lot of what he’s doing, but I can professionalize the comms operation.

He said, okay, if its not you, it’s between Kayleigh McEnany and Jenna Ellis, And said, I mean, that’s not an embarrassment of riches, but between the two, I would go with Kayleigh McEnany.

[snip]

Q When you interacted with Ms. Ellis, did it seem like she was exercising more of a communications function or a campaign surrogate for television?

A Campaign surrogate for television, yeah. I didn’t get the sense that she was particularly up to speed on what we were working on in the White House or even what the campaign was. She was just sort of floating around the broader Trump orbit.

Here, though, Ellis has invoked a legal role that would protect great swaths of her communications under attorney-client privilege.

But among the communications turned over to the J6C not covered by privilege are a number that show Ellis advocating for Pence to break the law — including one email sharing that strategy with Jeanine Pirro. She was involved in the pressure campaign in the fake elector plot. Ellis invoked the Fifth Amendment over and over in her testimony to J6C.

Those actions weren’t included in the complaint against Ellis. Large emphasized that his decision was based only on, “the limited information before the Court—which includes only the four corners of the parties’ stipulation and their arguments supporting this outcome at the hearing on March 1, 2023.”

But to get there — to get to a place where Ellis was censured rather than disbarred — she had to admit to knowingly lying when she made false claims that served actions she took that may be criminal, convincing both electors and Pence to violate their duty under the law.

This decision, by itself, will not affect Jenna Ellis much. But the admission, in addition to all the evidence that Jack Smith has in hand, could.

Trophy Documents: The Entire Point Was to Make FBI Obedient

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Those who didn’t follow John Durham’s trials closely undoubtedly missed the parade of scarred FBI personnel whose post-Crossfire Hurricane vulnerability Durham attempted to exploit to support his invented claims of a Clinton conspiracy.

Sure, lots of people wrote about Jim Baker’s inability to provide credible answers about the meeting he had with Michael Sussmann in September 2016. Fewer wrote about the credible case that Sussmann’s attorneys made that a prior Durham-led investigation into Baker — for sharing arguably classified information with a reporter in an attempt to forestall publication of a story — made Baker especially quick to cooperate with Durham in 2020. Fewer wrote about Baker’s description of the stress of Jim Jordan’s congressional witch hunts.

It sucked because the experience itself, sitting in the room being questioned the way that I was questioned, was, as a citizen of the United States, upsetting and appalling, to see members of Congress behaving the way that they were behaving. It was very upsetting to me.

[snip]

It sucked because my friends had been pilloried in public, my friends and colleagues had been pilloried in public, improperly in my view; that we were accused of being traitors and coup plotters. All of this was totally false and wrong.

Such a circus was the kind of thing that might lead someone like Baker to prefer the “order” of a prosecutor chasing conspiracy theories, someone whose memory was seared by the firing of Jim Comey.

[Sean Berkowitz]. And this is a pretty terrible experience as well. Right?

A. It’s more orderly.

Q. (Gestured with hand to ear.)

A. This is more orderly. It’s terrible but orderly.

Q. And you’re doing the best you can. Right, sir?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. But it’s hard to remember events from a long time ago, 1snre sez

A. It depends on what the event is. I remember Jim Comey being fired, for example. That’s a long time ago and I have a clear recollection of that. So it depends on what you’re talking about.

But Baker wasn’t the only one who discussed the years of scrutiny. Counterintelligence Special Agent Ryan Gaynor, who worked in DC on the Russian investigations during 2016, described how in October 2020, after he revealed to Durham’s team that he knew a DNC lawyer had brought in the Alfa Bank tip, Durham’s team told him they were no longer treating him as a witness, but as a subject of the investigation.

A. Yeah. There were two thoughts. The first one was that I felt like I had woefully ill prepared for the meeting, because I didn’t know what the meeting was honestly going to be about with this investigation.

The second thought was that I was in significant peril, and it was very concerning as a DOJ employee to be told that now the Department of Justice is interested in looking at you as a subject instead of a witness.

Sussmann lawyer Michael Bosworth got Gaynor to explain that after he told a story more to Durham’s liking, he was moved back to the status of witness.

During his testimony, Curtis Heide (who played a key role in the George Papadopoulos investigation) explained how the FBI Inspection Division investigation into Crossfire Hurricane Agents, including him, remained pending, 6 years after the events in question. He noted that, three years after the DOJ IG Report, he was still being investigated even though he, “didn’t author any of the affidavits or any of the materials related to the applications in question.”

The same was true in the Danchenko case. Brian Auten, a key intelligence analyst on Crossfire Hurricane, described how, after having met with agents from DOJ IG four times, having done a long report for FBI’s Internal Affairs Division, and having met with the Senate Judiciary Committee — all with no concerns raised about his own conduct — the first time he met with Durham’s team, he was told he was a subject of the investigation. After Auten gave testimony that confirmed Danchenko’s reliability — seriously damaging his case — Durham himself raised investigations that undermined his own witness’ testimony.

Q. Do you recall that there was a reporter that the OIG had written concerning the Carter Page FISAs?

A. Yes.

Q. And how would you characterize that report?

A. The report was quite extensive and it discussed characterizing a number of errors and omissions.

Q. And with respect to the errors and omissions, were they tick-tacky kinds of omissions or were they significant omissions and errors that had been committed?

A. I believe the OIG described them as significant.

Q. And then with respect to the investigation done by the OIG, separate and apart from that, would it be a fair statement that you and your colleagues were under investigation by the inspection division by the FBI?

A. Yes.

Q. And would it be a fair statement that your conduct in connection with that is, you, yourself, based on the investigation done by the inspection division of the FBI, have some issues, correct?

A. I — be a little bit more specific. I’m sorry. I don’t — I have issues?

Q. Isn’t it, in fact, true that you’ve been recommended for suspension as the result of the conduct?

A. It is currently under appeal.

That line of testimony immediately preceded a hilarious failed attempt from Durham to get Auten to agree that George Papadopoulos was simply a young man with no contact to Trump who was only investigated for his suspect Israeli ties, not for his Russian ties. But it was a palpable example of the way that Trump’s minions used criminalizing FBI investigations into Trump as a way to create a makebelieve world that negates real evidence of Trump’s corruption.

About the only two FBI agents who weren’t portrayed as somehow tainted by the events of 2016 in Durham’s two failed prosecutions were two agents who fucked up investigations: Scott Hellman, who correctly told a junior agent that she would face zero repercussions of she botched the Alfa Bank investigation, and Ryan James, an FBI agent who started his career in Connecticut, who nevertheless failed to pull the evidence necessary to test Sergei Millian’s claims.

Durham rewarded the incompetence that served his purpose and attempted to criminalize what he considered the wrong answers or at least to use the threat of adverse consequences to invent a false record exonerating Trump.

And Durham came in after Jim Comey, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and Bruce Ohr had already been fired, and Lisa Page, with Strzok, deliberately humiliated on a global stage serially. He came in and exploited the uncertain status — the Inspection Division review left pending while Durham worked — of everyone involved. Such efforts didn’t end with the conclusive acquittals debunking Durham’s theories of conspiracy. Since then, Jim Baker has been dragged back through the mud — publicly and in Congress — as part of Twitter Files, Chuck Grassley passed on “whistleblower” complaints about Auten identifying Russian disinformation as such, and Timothy Thibault was publicly berated because some of the same so-called whistleblowers feeding Jim Jordan shit had complained to Chuck Grassley he was discouraging GOP conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.

It was never just Strzok and McCabe. The entire Republican Party has relentlessly focused on punishing anyone involved in the Trump investigation, using both unofficial and official channels. When Trump promised “retribution” the other day at CPAC, this kind of relentless effort to criminalize any check on Trump’s behavior is what he was talking about.

That kind of background really helps to understand the WaPo story that described Washington Field Office FBI agents quaking at the prospect of searching Donald Trump’s beach resort.

[P]rosecutors learned FBI agents were still loath to conduct a surprise search. They also heard from top FBIofficials that some agents were simply afraid: They worried takingaggressive steps investigatingTrump could blemish or even end their careers, according to somepeople with knowledge of the discussions. One official dubbed it “the hangover of Crossfire Hurricane,” a reference to the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible connections to the Trump campaign, the people said. As president, Trump repeatedly targeted some FBI officials involved in the Russiacase.

[snip]

FBI agents on the case worried the prosecutors were being overly aggressive. They found it worrisome, too, that Bratt did not seem to think it mattered whether Trump was the official subject of the probe. They feared any of these features might not stand up to scrutiny if an inspector general or congressional committee chose to retrace the investigators’ steps, according to the people.

Since I wrote my piece wondering whether the FBI hesitation gave Trump the chance to steal 47 documents, Strzok himself, Joyce Vance, and Jennifer Rubin have weighed in.

Rubin, I think, adopts the position of someone who hasn’t followed the plight of all the people not named Strzok who were targeted for investigating Donald Trump. She attributes the reluctance to investigate Trump (and the intelligence failures leading up to January 6, which I’ll return to) to Wray.

After a debacle of this magnitude, that sort of passivity should alarm all Americans. Imagine if, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the national security community did not evaluate how it missed the telltale signs of an imminent attack. The failure of leadership in the Jan. 6 case is inexcusable. Yet Wray has never been held to account for this delinquency.

[snip]

[O]ne is left wondering why the FBI seems disinclined to stand up to right-wing authoritarian movements and figures. Whatever the reason, the pattern reveals an unmistakable lack of effective leadership. And that in turn raises the question:Why is Wray still there?

It is absolutely the case that Wray did far too little to protect FBI agents in the face of Trump’s attacks. Wray created the opportunity for pro-Trump FBI agents and Durham to criminalize investigating Trump. I think Wray attempted to avoid rocking the boat at all times, which led the FBI to fail in other areas (including the investigation of Brett Kavanaugh). Though I’m also cognizant that if Wray had been fired during the Trump administration, he might have been replaced by someone like Kash Patel, and having a Trump appointee in charge right now may provide cover for the ongoing investigations into Trump.

But you could fire Wray tomorrow and not eliminate the effects of this bureaucratic discipline, the five year process to teach everyone in the FBI that investigating Trump can only lead to career disaster, if not criminal charges.

Also under Wray, though, the Bureau had already increased its focus on domestic terrorism, with key successes both before and after January 6. Steven D’Antuono, the chief voice of reluctance to search Mar-a-Lago, presided over the really troubled but ultimately successful effort to prevent a kidnapping attempt targeting Gretchen Whitmer, a plot that arose out of anti-lockdown protests stoked by Trump (though unusually, D’Antuono let a subordinate take credit for the arrests).

I think the specific failures in advance of January 6 lay elsewhere. Wray has not done enough in the aftermath to understand the FBI’s failures, but FBI has also been overwhelmed with the case load created by the attack. But, as I hope to return to, I think the specific failure in advance of January 6 lies elsewhere.

Whatever the merit in blaming Wray for FBI’s failure to prepare for January 6, there’s a bigger problem with Rubin’s attempt to blame him on the MAL search. Strzok sketched out in great detail something I had seen, too. The dispute about searching Trump’s house wasn’t between the FBI and DOJ. It wasn’t just what Vance and Strzok both describe as a fairly normal dispute between the FBI and DOJ with the former pushing the latter to be more aggressive.

It was between the WFO on one side and DOJ and FBI HQ on the other.

[A] careful reading of the Post’s reporting (insofar as the reporting is complete) reveals this was not so much a conflict between DOJ and the FBI as much as a conflict between DOJ and FBI headquarters, on the one hand, and the management of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, on the other.

Indeed, a key part of the drama surrounding the pre-August search meeting described by the WaPo involved the conflict between FBI General Counsel Jason Jones — whom WaPo makes a point of IDing as a Wray confidant, thereby marking him as Wray’s surrogate in this fight — and WFO Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono.

Jason Jones, the FBI’s general counsel who isconsidered a confidant of FBI Director Christopher A.Wray, agreed the team had sufficient probable cause to justify a searchwarrant.

[snip]

Jones, the FBI’s general counsel, said he planned to recommend to Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate that the FBI seek a warrant for the search, the people said. D’Antuono replied that he would recommend that they not.

This, then, was partly a fight within FBI, one in which Wray’s surrogate sided with prosecutors.

Strzok makes a compelling argument that this story may have come from pushback necessitated by people at WFO floating bullshit claims, not dissimilar from — Strzok doesn’t say this, but I will — the leak by right wing agents to Devlin Barrett about the Clinton Foundation investigation in advance of the 2016 election, which led Andrew McCabe to respond in a way that ultimately gave Trump the excuse he wanted to fire him.

Indeed, Strzok’s post includes a well-deserved dig on the WaPo’s claim about, “the fact that mistakes in prior probes of Hillary Clinton … had proved damaging to the FBI,” an unsubstantiated claim I also called out.

[E]ven journalists can be imprecise or inaccurate. The Post’s article isn’t, for example, the type of comprehensive accounting you’d get in a report produced by an Inspector General, who can compile the statements of everyone involved and review and compare those statements to the written record in all its various forms.

Strzok right suggests that DOJ IG’s Report disproved WaPo’s claim about the Hillary investigation, but he seems to have forgotten that the DOJ IG Report into McCabe’s response on the Clinton Foundation didn’t fully air the FBI spox’s exculpatory testimony.

All of which is to say that, in the same way that WFO agents have an understandable visceral concern about getting involved in an investigation targeting Trump, people at HQ might have an equally visceral concern about stories seeded to Devlin Barrett alleging internal conflict that might create some flimsy excuse for firing.

But there’s something still unexplained about the WaPo story. Vance notes, as I did, that D’Antuono may have given Trump the opportunity to steal 47 documents.

[T]he delay couldn’t be undone. We still don’t know whether that resulted in the permanent loss of classified material. It did result in a delay in the timeline for making prosecutive decisions, ultimately extending the investigation into the period where Trump announced his 2024 candidacy, leading to the appointment of a special counsel to continue the investigation and determine whether to prosecute.

But Vance still accepts WaPo’s specious claim about timing, the claim that the delay (from June to August) in searching Trump’s resort led the investigation to bump up against a Trump campaign announcement that would surely have happened earlier had Trump not gotten an injunction. There’s nothing to support that temporal argument, and the public record on the injunction (which, again, lasted until almost a month after Jack Smith’s appointment) disproves it.

The timing issue is one of many reasons why I keep thinking about this earlier Devlin Barrett story, one that did bump up against the appointment of a Special Counsel. On November 14, the day before Trump formalized his 2024 run and so four days before the appointment of Jack Smith, Barrett and WaPo’s Mar-a-Lago Trump whisperer, Josh Dawsey, published a story suggesting that maybe Trump shouldn’t be charged because he just stole a bunch of highly classified documents to keep as trophies.

Federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe former president Donald Trump’s motive for allegedly taking and keeping classified documents was largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos, according to people familiar with the matter.

As part of the investigation, federal authorities reviewed the classified documents that were recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club, looking to see if the types of information contained in them pointed to any kind of pattern or similarities, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

That review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump’s possession, these people said. FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property, these people said.

[snip]

The analysis of Trump’s likely motive in allegedly keeping the documents is not, strictly speaking, an element of determining whether he or anyone around him committed a crime or should be charged with one. Justice Department policy dictates that prosecutors file criminal charges in cases in which they believe a crime was committed and the evidence is strong enough to lead to a conviction that will hold up on appeal. But as a practical matter, motive is an important part of how prosecutors assess cases and decide whether to file criminal charges.

As I showed, that story, like this one, simply ignored stuff in the public record, including:

  • Trump’s efforts, orchestrated in part by investigation witness Kash Patel, to release documents about the Russian investigation specifically to serve a political objective
  • The report, from multiple outlets, that Jay Bratt told Trump’s lawyers that DOJ believes Trump still has classified documents
  • Details about classified documents interspersed with a Roger Stone grant of clemency and messages — dated after Trump left the White House — from a pollster, a book author, and a religious leader; both sets of interspersed classified documents were found in Trump’s office
  • The way Trump’s legal exposure would expand if people like Boris Epshteyn conspired to help him hoard the documents or others like Molly Michael accessed the classified records

Since then, other details have become clear. Not only was that story written after DOJ told Trump they believed he still had some classified documents, but it was written in the period between the time Trump considered letting the FBI do a consensual search and the time he hired people to do the search for him, a debate inside the Trump camp that parallels the earlier investigative fight between WFO and DOJ. Indeed, when DOJ alerted Trump’s lawyers in October that they believed Trump still had classified documents, that may have reflected WFO winning the debate they had lost before the August search: to let Trump voluntarily comply.

That’s important background to where we are now. Trump’s team has misrepresented to the press how cooperative they have been since. First, Trump’s people misleadingly claimed that Beryl Howell had decided not to hold Trump in contempt (rather than just deferred the decision) and Trump lied to the press for several months, hiding the box with documents marked classified and the additional empty classified folder. Those public lies should only make investigators wonder what Trump continues to hide.

We know Trump blew off the subpoena that WFO agents were sure would work in June, and there’s good reason to believe DOJ finds Trump’s more recent claims of cooperation to be suspect as well.

So let’s go back to that earlier Devlin story. As I noted at the time, I don’t dispute that the most classified documents have the appearance of trophies, but that’s because of the Time Magazine covers they were stored with, not because of any halfway serious scrutiny of Trump’s potential financial goals. Particularly given the presence of 43 empty classified folders in the leatherbound box along with the most sensitive documents, no thorough investigator could rule out Trump already monetizing certain documents, particularly given Trump and Jared Kushner’s financial windfalls from the Saudi government, particularly given the way that Trump’s Bedminster departure coincided with Evan Corcoran’s turnover of classified documents, particularly given that the woman who carted a box including some marked classified around various offices had been in Bedminster with Trump during the summer. I don’t dispute that’s still a likely explanation for some — but in no way all — of the documents, but no competent investigator could have made that conclusion by November 14, when Devlin published the story.

Unless Devlin’s sources — perhaps the same or similar to the sources who know that WFO agents were cowed by the treatment of Crossfire Hurricane agents — were working hard to avoid investigating those potential financial ties.

Unless the timing of the story reflected an attempt to win that dispute, only to be preempted by the appointment of Jack Smith. The earlier dispute could not have been impacted by the appointment of Jack Smith. If there was a later dispute about how to make sure Trump wasn’t still hoarding classified documents, though, it almost certainly was.

Someone decided to leak a story to Devlin Barrett suggesting that investigators had already reached a conclusion about Trump’s motive, even though as the story acknowledged, “even the nonclassified documents” — better described as documents without classification marks that not only hadn’t been reviewed yet, which could have included unmarked classified information — “taken in the search may include relevant evidence.” (Note, these are the same unclassified documents that, the recent story  describes D’Antuono, insanely from an investigative standpoint, scoffing at collecting because, “We are not the presidential records police.”) Devlin’s sources decided to leak that story at a time when DOJ was trying to figure out how to get the remaining documents from Trump, and yet his sources presented a working conclusion that it didn’t matter if DOJ got the remaining documents: it had already been decided, Devlin’s sources told him, that Trump was just a narcissist fighting to keep his trophies from time as President and probably that shouldn’t be prosecuted anyway.

The story of the earlier dispute is alarming because it confirms that WFO agents remain cowed in the face of the prospect of investigating Trump, as some did even six years ago. The later story, though, is alarming because leaks to Devlin have a habit of creating political firestorms that are convenient for Trump. But it is alarming because it suggests even after the August search proved the WFO agents’ efforts to draw premature conclusions wrong, someone still decided to make — and force, by leaking to Devlin Barrett — some premature conclusions in November, an effort that genuinely was thwarted by the appointment of Jack Smith.

Two of Jim Jordan’s So-Called Whistleblowers Are Under Investigation for Improper Treatment of FBI Files

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As a number of outlets have covered (Rolling Stone did a particularly good story), Democrats on the Insurrection Protection Committee released a report on the only three witnesses — whom Jim Jordan dubiously claims are whistleblowers — who have yet to be formally deposed by the committee. Not only does the report seriously question their claims to be whistleblowers (in part because they have little, if any, firsthand knowledge of the issues about which they claim to be reporting), but the report shows that all three are pro-insurrection conspiracy theorists.

I’ve already written about one, Stephen Friend, who balked that some Three Percenters with ties to the Oath Keepers and Kremers were being treated as a domestic terror threat.

The other two are George Hill, a recently retired Supervisory Intelligence Analyst whose embrace of false flag theories around January 6 should invite defendants in the Boston area to ask for discovery on his potential involvement in any cases, and Garret O’Boyle, an anti-vaxer who refused to take an investigative step against two apparent January 6 leads but suffered no consequences as a result.

I’d like to point out two functional details of the report: as the report describes, two witnesses are under investigation for mishandling FBI files, and those same two witnesses received payments from Trump-related funds, funds that are likely part of the larger January 6 investigation.

Jim Jordan’s witnesses are alleged to be accessing or sharing information not necessary for their job

First, the substance of this testimony involves records that were either improperly accessed or outside the witnesses’ job description.

Friend, for example, admitted that he was suspended, in part, for improperly removing parts of the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide and other internal documents from the FBI system.

Friend has publicly stated that his security clearance was suspended because he improperly accessed material on FBI computer systems, 220 and during his testimony, he admitted that while a Special Agent at the Daytona Beach Resident Agency, he accessed and removed documents marked “For Official Use Only” from a classified FBI system.221 Specifically, he admitted that in September 2022, he accessed the classified system to get “information about the employee handbook and disciplinary processes,” “a flow chart of the way the Inspection Division works and the OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility] process works,” and “copies of the last five OPR quarterlies as a go by for precedent for punishment for my situation.”222 He also accessed and removed elements of the then-current version of the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.223

Remember that Intercept source Terry Albury did prison time, in part, for taking and leaking the DIOG; so any complaint that Friend is disciplined for this amounts to a complaint that he’s being subjected to the same standard as Albury was.

Similarly, O’Boyle was suspended  last year based on allegations he was leaking to the press.

He applied for and was accepted to a new unit in Virginia and was scheduled to begin work there on September 26, 2022.90 His security clearance was suspended that day.91

O’Boyle told the Committee that his suspension notice stated that “an unidentified person … made an allegation that [he] had been making unprotected disclosures to the media,” and that because of this he was “no longer deemed fit to hold a security clearance.”92 He denied having made such disclosures, and he explained that instead he believed that he had been retaliated against because he “had been coming to Congress… for nearly a year.”93 He described this as being a “weaponization of the [security] clearance” process.94 He has appealed that suspension and, to his knowledge, the appeal process is still ongoing.95

[snip]

O’Boyle did confirm that he corresponded with staff of both Rep. Ron Estes and then-Ranking Member Jim Jordan probably “more than 20” times in 2022 and produced “maybe around” 50 documents to them.104 O’Boyle’s attorney advised him “not to talk about specifics of any of his disclosures to Congress … because those are confidential” and in fact prohibited him from describing the substance of any of his communications with the offices of Rep. Estes or then-Ranking Member Jordan.105

O’Boyle has some unspecified role in material that got forwarded from an eGuardian tip, possibly via Jim Jordan, to Project Veritas. PV’s coverage falsely claimed that the FBI had labeled a group called American Contingency a Domestic Violent Extremism group. In reality, the FBI investigated the group’s founder, Mike Glover, and concluded he did not present a threat.

Nevertheless, Jordan cited PV’s coverage in a complaint to Christopher Wray.

O’Boyle admitted that, even though he had no role in this investigation, he was involved somehow in the dissemination of information about it.

Q Did you know anything about the investigation or what has been described as an investigation into him [Mike Glover] prior to having this letter put in front of you today?

A I did.

Q And what did you know?

A Pretty much mostly what’s in here.

Q And that – how did you learn that information?

BINNALL: Prior to our previous instructions, you can answer to the extent it’s appropriate.

A This is one of the protected disclosures that I made.

Q Okay. And it involves Mr. Glover?

A Uh-huh.

Q But you … were not personally involved in any matters involving Mr. Glover in your capacity as an FBI employee?

A Right. I never investigated him.

Q Okay. And what about American Contingency?

A Correct. No.

Q Okay. So you don’t have firsthand knowledge of anything that the FBI may have – may or may not have done?

BINNALL: You can answer to the extent that it doesn’t violate my previous instructions.

A I mean, I guess, in accordance with my work and my protected disclosure, I had some knowledge of what the FBI had done.

BINNALL: And don’t go any further than that.135

It’s unclear whether this is the leak investigation that led him to lose his security clearance. When asked about it, O’Boyle claimed he was set up by someone irked that he was feeding information to Congress for the prior year, but he did not take that complaint through proper channels, to the DOJ IG or Inspection Division. He refused to tell Democrats on the committee what the allegations about leaking pertain to.

Instead, he went to Donald Trump’s lawyer, Jesse Binnell.

Among the claimed whistleblower complaints O’Boyle shared (the other involves vaccine denialism) is that a WFO Special Agent sent him two leads, one based on an anonymous tip, apparently of January 6 suspects.

But I received a lead about someone based on an anonymous tip, and in law enforcement anonymous tips don’t hold very much weight, especially without evidence that you can corroborate pretty easily.

I wasn’t able to corroborate anything they said, even after speaking with the person they alleged potential criminal behavior of.

While I’m trying to figure all that out, I get another lead from the same agent who sent me that lead.108

He explained that he decided to call the agent who had sent him the lead:

Q [A]fter talking to her, my mind was blown that she was still trying to get me to do some legal process on the guy that I got the anonymous tip on. … And so I ended up writing that all up and denying it. …

When we got off the phone, I was like, “I’m just going to close this.” She still wanted me to do what she wanted me to do in the lead, and I was like, no. I can’t…

Q So, to your knowledge, that case was closed?

A To my knowledge, yeah.109

To suggest that anonymous tips related to January 6 were particular unreliable does not hold up against the record of the investigation. This exchange makes him sound just like Friend — someone who refused to investigate suspected perpetrators of January 6, and is trying to launch a career as a far right celebrity as a result.

Finally, there’s Hill, the retired Supervisory Intelligence Analyst who adheres to conspiracy theories about Ray Epps. He reported to the committee on matters he was not personally involved — what sounds like a tip or Suspicious Activity Report from a financial institution pertaining to January 6.

Hill claimed that a financial institution provided a self-generated customer list to the FBI of its own volition, that the Boston Field Office had been asked to conduct seven preliminary investigations based on that list, and that FBI field offices around the country were also asked to open preliminary investigations—according to Hill, the “least-intrusive method” of investigation—based on that list. 32

As noted, Hill explained that he himself did not handle any cases, so his knowledge of the investigations was limited by his role. Moreover, he revealed that he had no information about the origins of the list, he did not recall which entity uploaded the list to the FBI’s system, and, while he viewed an electronic communication referencing the list in the FBI’s case management system, he never opened or viewed the actual list itself. 33

To the committee, attempting to weigh whether there’s merit to Hill’s allegations, this simply reeks of someone reporting on an investigation he was not part of. But it raises real questions why he was monitoring an investigation he was not part of.

In all three cases, people tangentially involved with the January 6 investigation balked at pretty minor investigative steps. And all three at least accessed information outside their job to do so — and in two cases, there are allegations of improper access.

Trump-related organizations paid two of these witnesses

The allegations that at least some of these men may have improperly accessed investigative information to which they were not privy is all the more alarming given the detail that two of them — Friend and O’Boyle, the two under more formal investigation by the FBI — have received financial benefits from Trump-related organizations.

Witnesses Garret O’Boyle and Stephen Friend both testified that they have received financial support from Patel, with Friend explaining that Patel sent him $5,000 almost immediately after they connected in November 2022. Patel has also promoted Friend’s forthcoming book on social media.

But Patel’s assistance has not just been financial. He arranged for attorney Jesse Binnall, who served as Donald Trump’s “top election-fraud lawyer” when Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, to serve as counsel for Garret O’Boyle. When Committee Democrats asked O’Boyle about this financial connection, Binnall appeared to surprise his client with an announcement that he was now representing O’Boyle pro bono. Committee Democrats infer that Binnall hoped to distance his connection to Patel and others.

Patel also found Friend his next job. Friend now works as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America, which is run by former Trump official Russell Vought and is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which itself is run by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Senator Jim DeMint.

This is where the Insurrection Protection Committee more directly ties into Trump’s own defense against charges for his coup attempt.

Jesse Binnall is Trump’s lawyer; he was even interviewed as part of obstruction inquiry related to the stolen document investigation. His firm has been receiving hundreds of thousands in payments from Trump’s two PACs, over $130,000 in both November and December. This is some of the spending that Jack Smith is reportedly investigating for misuse of campaign funds. So there’s the real prospect that O’Boyle, under investigation for leaking details of FBI investigations against January 6 and other right wing figures, is being paid from funds raised by lying about voter fraud.

Similarly, Trump’s Save America PAC gave $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute. Again, that payment is almost certainly part of the Jack Smith investigation. As the Democratic report notes, Vought’s organization has been focusing on precisely this false weaponization claim.

CRA’s President, former Trump administration official Russ Vought, has embraced many of the themes laid out by the witnesses George Hill, Garret O’Boyle, and Stephen Friend, and Vought reportedly pushed Republican leadership to establish the Weaponization Subcommittee at the start of the 118th Congress.397 In the forward to CRA’s 2023 budget proposal for the federal government, entitled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government,” Vought wrote,

On the heels of this wrenching national experience is the growing awareness that the national security apparatus itself is arrayed against that half of the country not willing to bend the knee to the people, institutions, and elite worldview that make up the current governing regime. Instead of fulfilling their intended purpose of keeping the American people safe, they are hard-wired now to keep the regime in power. And that includes the emergence of political prisoners, a weaponized, SWAT-swaggering FBI, the charges of “domestic terrorism” and “disinformation” in relation to adversaries’ exercise of free speech, and the reality that the NSA is running a surveillance state behind the protective curtain of “national security.” The immediate threat facing the nation is the fact that the people no longer govern the country; instead, the government itself is increasingly weaponized against the people it is meant to serve.398

Committee Democrats find the connections between Patel, CRA, and CPI deeply concerning. Evidence suggests that these entities were not just a driving force for creating the Weaponization Subcommittee, but are actively propelling its efforts to advance baseless, biased claims for political purposes. This evidence seriously discredits the work done by Committee Republicans and casts further doubt on the reliability of the witnesses they have put forth.

That suggests the prospect that Trump-related figures are violation campaign finance law to fund an NGO to, in turn, pay for FBI agents under investigation for improperly accessing FBI files to spread conspiracy theories about the investigation into Trump and his supporters.

Jordan’s imaginary friends

The combination of alleged leaks with payments from funds raised using false claims of vote fraud makes me even more worried about the witnesses that Jordan won’t let be questioned by the Democrats on the committee.

As the Democratic report notes, Jordan says he has spoken to — and received materials from — dozens of other people claiming tobe whistleblowers.

This partisan investigation, such as it is, rests in large part on what Chairman Jordan has described as “dozens and dozens of whistleblowers… coming to us, talking about what is going on, the political nature at the Justice Department.”1 To date, the House Judiciary Committee has held transcribed interviews with three of these individuals. Chairman Jordan has, of course, refused to name any of the other “dozens and dozens” who may have spoken with him. He has also refused to share any of the documents which these individuals may have provided to the Committee.

Jordan recently sent Christopher Wray a list of 16 Special Agents he demands to interview.

Our need to obtain testimony from FBI employees is vital for carrying out our oversight and for informing potential legislative reforms to the operations and activities of the FBI. From the documentary and testimonial information that we have obtained to date, we have identified several FBI employees who we believe possess information that is necessary for our oversight. Accordingly, we ask that you initially make the following FBI employees available for transcribed interviews with the Committee in the near future:

[16 names redacted]

We anticipate that we may require testimony from additional FBI employees as our oversight continues, and we expect your cooperation in facilitating these future interviews as well.

We are aware that the Justice Department has preemptively indicated that it intends to limit the scope and nature of information available to the Committee as part of our oversight.3
You should know, however, that despite the Department’s assertions to the contrary, congressional committees have regularly received testimony from non-Senate-confirmed and line-level Justice Department employees, including FBI employes [sic], in the past. We expect this past precedent to apply to our oversight as well.

Jordan’s list includes 17 names, including Jack Smith. Eleven of those — including Lisa Page — appear to be related to Mark Meadows’ own investigation of the Russian investigation. Jordan is effectively saying he has the right to interview line agents because Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr let him do so, to undermine the last investigation into Donald Trump.

Jordan provides no basis for needing to interview these people. He doesn’t provide any explanation about how they might provide evidence of improper FBI activity.

According to Breitbart, which claimed to have seen transcripts of the Jordan witnesses interviews, said the 16 people “had been named by the three witnesses in the closed-door interviews.” In other words, three disgruntled FBI agents, two under investigation for wrong-doing, are leading Jim Jordan by the nose to make life hell for their former colleagues.

But those two other details make this different.

These people are being given financial benefits from Trump-related sources, financial benefits that may themselves be part of the crime under investigation.

And at least two of these people — the same two on the grift train — are under investigation for inappropriately removing or leaking sensitive FBI documents.