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

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

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

The dossier appendix didn’t help in 2020

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

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

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

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

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

The ICA annex proves right wing lies now

It’s clear why Grassley never released the document.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The near-miss looks like a direct hit

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

Here’s that defensive briefing section:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

On July 11, 2017, I noted that we had proof that Trump’s claims he had been wiretapped were false. That’s because, if the Intelligence Community had found an exchange like the one Don Jr released that day — in which someone working for Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov offered Don Jr, “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” and he responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” then the confidence level for the Intelligence Community Assessment that Russia had affirmatively tried to help Donald Trump get elected would have been high, even for the NSA (which said it only had moderate confidence).

And yet we’re still arguing over whether that judgement was fair eight years later.

The HPSCI report released the other day — which is dated September 18, 2020, but which right wing HPSCI Chair Rick Crawford misleadingly released alongside a statement pretending it was done in January 2017, and which the architect of the case for the Iraq War, Fred Fleitz, says was done in 2018 —  seems to have been a response to a more rigorous SSCI Report released weeks earlier that confirmed Putin did want Trump to win. (Indeed, Fleitz offers a garbage explanation to claim this HPSCI Report is more credible than the SSCI one.)

The HPSCI report manages to challenge the SSCI conclusion by revisiting a different question: Not, did Russia take actions to help Trump win the election that created a grave counterintelligence threat (the SSCI report included, but went far beyond, the evidence released in the Mueller Report) but, did the IC claim that Putin did want Trump to win, made in a rushed report published in the first days of 2017, have enough evidence behind it at the time?

The report accuses John Brennan of having made up his mind to that question, yes, Putin aspired to help Trump, and thereby influenced the result. Fair enough (though as I read it I wondered whether Brennan knew of the advance notice of the email leak that George Papadopoulos got, and so had a source of confidence not reflected in the report; and the nature of the claim in the HPSCI report differs from the nature of the claim in a report John Ratcliffe released last week). But the HPSCI report does the exact same thing, delivering up the result that Donald Trump wanted, and it did so, in part, by intentionally remaining dumb to many, but not all, of the things that had been learned since.

Just as one example, the report asserts,

[T]he available intelligence showed: No Putin orders directing or suggesting operations intended to elect Trump (by contrast, Intelligence on Russian operations on German elections specifically mentioned Putin’s goal of defeating Chancellor Merkel).

This refers to this ICA judgment predicting that Germany would be the next country in whose elections Russia would interfere. Only, that judgement turned out to be wrong; Russia conducted the same kind of hack-and-leak campaign targeting Emmanuel Macron in May 2017 (with the help of pro-Trump influencers), so while that might be a good argument in January 2017, it fails after May 2017, to say nothing of September 2020.

More importantly, it only references the intelligence available through December 29, 2016, so wouldn’t include the damning email to Don Jr disclosed in July 2017. Because the ICA didn’t include ongoing FBI investigations, it wouldn’t include Papadopoulos’ brags about Russian interference that the FBI knew about, but didn’t, couldn’t, include in the report. It wouldn’t include the intercepts between Mike Flynn and Sergei Kislyak discovered in that very period as the IC sought to explain why Putin decided not to retaliate against US sanctions.

The HPSCI report concluded there was not enough intelligence to back a high confidence conclusion that Putin wanted to help Trump win by focusing only on the time before FBI started looking in earnest.

In any case, as I’ll show, in several places, the report breaks the conceit that they’re evaluating only the information available to the IC on December 29, 2016.

The HPSCI Report, then, is not so much a useful piece of analysis, but a time machine, an attempt, weeks before the 2020 election, to set the clock back for candidate Donald Trump to the time before it became clear he really did benefit from help from Russia.

And it doesn’t even do that very well.

The report structure

As laid out below, the report doesn’t hide that its sole goal is to erase the judgment that Putin wanted to elect Trump. Its first finding is that everything else in the ICA is sound, followed by seven poorly-organized findings ostensibly explaining why the assessment that Putin aspired to help Trump was unsound.

  • Finding 1: The bulk of the ICA judgements were sound.
  • Finding 2: Significant tradecraft failures cast doubt on the ICA judgments of Putin’s intentions, claiming that only on the judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump, the ICA tradecraft failed.
  • Finding 3: The ICA failed to acknowledge that key judgements were based on raw intelligence that did not meet tradecraft standards: This claims that of 15 sources behind the judgment, 12 were unremarkable, but three “contained flawed information and these became foundational” to the claim Putin aspired to help Trump win.
  • Finding 4: The ICA excluded significant intelligence that contradicted its judgment. This section discusses Russia explaining why there were downsides to both candidates.
  • Finding 5: The ICA disregarded Russian behavior that undermined its judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump win. This section, which notes that Moscow was receiving reports on US polling but doesn’t mention (!!!) that some came from Trump’s campaign manager, argues that since the election got close in its final weeks, you would have expected Putin to dump all the other derogatory intelligence he had on Hillary. That argument provides an opportunity to parrot the SVR documents discussed here. It also looked at what it claimed were Russian leaks (really, just one) that it said made Trump look bad. Finally, it ludicrously suggested that the disparate hacking of Hillary is just attributed to her being an easier target.
  • Finding 6: The ICA misrepresented documents on Putin’s intention. This pertains significantly to advice Putin got (it may also rely on the SVR documents). A 10-page attack on the dossier is put in here for contrived reasons, which I’ll return to in another post.
  • Finding 7: The ICA failed to consider alternate explanations. This section significantly revisits the SVR documents.
  • Finding 8: The ICA was unnecessarily rushed.

Some of this is quite reasonable. For example, Finding 4 notes that Russia was going to be unhappy with either candidate; I think Trump opponents often forget that Putin didn’t want a strong Trump, he wanted a Trump whose narcissism would create more problems than Hillary.

In Finding 8, sure this report was rushed. It had to be.

Some of the criticism of Brennan — if accurate, but as noted the complaint here is different from the complaint in more recent reports — seems fair.

The flawed reports (Finding 4)

In several other areas, the analysis only survives by relying on that time machine effect.

The report claims that of 15 pieces of intelligence to back the Putin finding, three were not just substandard, but were pushed through by Brennan.

The first I address here. Brennan pushed to include a report that Putin approved the DNC leak because he was “counting on” a Trump victory. The CIA, years later, stands by the quality of the source and the fact that the interpretation in the ICA, “was most consistent with the raw intelligence.”

The second of these three reports is far more interesting. It describes a report from Kyiv (the Republicans spell it Kiev) laying out a plan, starting in February 2016, to place someone pro-Russian on Trump’s campaign team. The analysis of this lead focuses on questionable sourcing and potential Ukrainian bias.

But the time machine effect of this report frees Republicans from accounting for the fact that Trump, starting in February 2016, in fact did place a pro-Kremlin official on his “election team,” Paul Manafort, and Manafort sought to monetize his role there by getting pro-Russian Ukrainians and a Russian oligarch to pay him.

And Konstantin Kilimnik, in Ukraine, seemed to know of that plan before Manafort was installed. This report may have looked problematic for inclusion in December 2016 (though by that point Manafort’s cover-up of his Russian ties was public). But it looked prescient by 2020.

The third report is similar. HPSCI’s response begins a long focus of the report attempting to debunk the underlying intelligence — a claim that Russia perceived Republicans to be less supportive of human rights — with a bunch of whataboutism. How dare you call the party of torture less supportive of human rights, the right wingers wail. Did you know that Reagan said, “tear down this wall”? All the while ignoring that Trump ran on an affirmatively pro-torture platform.

“They’re both poison” (Finding 5, 7)

In other words, a central pillar of the report is to complain that intelligence analysts didn’t consider alternative explanations for the intelligence they were looking at.

This was about the stage of reading this report where I could get not get the scene from Princess Bride where Vizzini attempts to outsmart the Dread Pirate Roberts out of my head.

 

That’s true because some of the arguments — and they go on for pages and pages — sound just as stupid as Vizzini does. Republicans tie themselves in knots trying to come up with alternative explanations. Republicans refuse to consider that the SVR hacks, which I wrote about here, were meant for intelligence collection but the foot-stomping GRU ones were not. They treat all the SVR reports — including the ones that, FBI had decided years before 2020 were objectively false or the one that Ratcliffe released days before this report warning it “may reflect exaggeration or fabrication” — as true and damning. They obsess about the derogatory claims about Hillary’s health and mental fitness without even considering the report Hillary released in real time after her pneumonia scare. They actually believe a claim that European leaders doubted Hillary could lead. These reports obviously play on right wing biases, and sure enough HPSCI’s Republicans cling to those Russian spy claims in the report, just as they have since Tulsi emphasized them. In a report that wails mightily (and correctly in at least one case, cited the parallel CIA report) about leaving out contrary information, HPSCI simply leaves out the Jim Comey allegation in one of the SVR reports, which if true, would explain why Putin wouldn’t have to (and didn’t) dump damning intel close to the election: Because Putin believed that “Comey is leaning more to the [R]epublicans, and most likely he will be dragging this investigation until the presidential elections,” something that turned out to be true. In other words, they cherry pick which Russian spy products they choose to parrot, one of the sins they accuse the ICA team of, but they do so with years of hindsight that made clear how foolish that was.

This report has an entire section on how Putin would have tracked polling and so knew he could get Trump over the line if he dumped opposition late in the campaign (which, of course, he did), without blushing about one source for that polling: Manafort’s regular provision of it via Kilimnik, something that became public between the ICA release in 2017 and this HPSCI report in September 2020.

Their claims get more ridiculous from there. Even in the face of the non-stop flood of Hillary emails released in 2016, right wingers cling to the single report from Colin Powell calling Trump “a national disgrace” as proof Putin doesn’t love Trump.

I mean, it’s pretty funny to me. But then ultimately it gets back to what Wesley, the Dread Pirate Roberts, said when Buttercup concluded that Wesley had put the poison in his own cup. He didn’t. He put poison in both glasses.

All the ICA did — and it’s worth reading how the “aspired to” section includes a lot of explanation as to why Putin would prefer Trump to which right wingers didn’t and don’t object, such as Trump’s willingness to partner with Russia on terrorism or make deals — all the ICA did was say that Putin wanted Trump to win. And right wingers have gone to all lengths, up to and including parroting Russian spies in the White House, to degrade the strength of that claim as it was made from high to moderate confidence years after it became clear the judgment was correct.

Ultimately the effort was intended and bound to drive more polarization. Which point the right wingers make but — oh my goodness look how they do it?!?! They point to the IRA’s activities after the election that claimed to oppose Trump’s election.

But they source that to the Robert Mueller IRA indictment, dated February 16, 2018, over a year after the ICA was completed.

By February 2018, there was abundant public evidence that Putin preferred Trump, including that letter to Don Jr as well as the guilty pleas of George Papadopoulos and Mike Flynn. By 2020, the date of this report, court filings were public describing Manafort’s lies that, Amy Berman Jackson judged, he told to cover up what happened at an August 2, 2016 meeting with alleged Russian spy where they discussed how Trump planned to win, how Manafort would get paid by pro-Russian Ukrainians and debt relief from Oleg Deripaska, and a plan to carve up Ukraine. But only here, only amid their desperate attempt to find proof that Vladimir Putin does too hate Donald Trump, do they confess they’ve read any of the charging documents from Mueller.

That is, the time machine was fake, just an attempt to make all the evidence laid out in the SSCI report go away.

As I’ll show, what HPSCI did with the dossier was even worse — so much worse I had to break it out as its own post. There, they don’t even try to maintain the illusion they were dumb to everything they learned since the ICA.

But as to their main report, claiming to assess the treatment of the intelligence in 2017 — a feigned ignorance that is central to their rebuttal of one of three “substandard” intelligence reports — they can’t even maintain that ploy as they attempt to whatabout proof that Putin wanted to help Trump win.

Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Doppelgänger Dossier

Yesterday, one day short of 60 days before the November election, the US government did four things:

  • Indicted two RT officials, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Mikhaylovna Afanasyeva, and in the process exposed some right wing influencers to be useful idiots paid indirectly by RT.
  • Unsealed the domain takedown affidavit for a bunch of sites used in a Russian fake news program, Doppelgänger.
  • Imposed Treasury sanctions on RT and Doppelgänger, among other entities.
  • Indicted Dmitri Simes and his spouse, Anastasia, on sanctions tied to Aleksander Udodov.

In this post, I want to lay out precisely what was included in the affidavit, before I have further comment on all four of these efforts.

Affidavit: The affidavit itself describes how Russia has been impersonating real media outlets, including the Washington Post and Fox News, that it uses to embed false stories supporting its attack on Ukraine. It bases the takedown on two claims. First, that by hiding the tie to top Putin aide, Sergei Kiriyenko, who was first sanctioned in March 2021, in response to the Aleksey Navalny poisoning, the propaganda effort violates sanctions regimes.The affidavit also alleges that these fake sites traffic in counterfeit goods, basically fake news sites and news articles infringing on the trademarks of three real US outlets (WaPo, Fox, and Forward, including content pretending to come from real journalists).

As the affidavit describes, Russia is using far better operational security than it did in 2016, with nesting sets of Virtual Private Servers and emails at Protonmail rather than Google (though the RT people are still using Google).

The affidavit describes what must be documents stolen from someone’s server, explaining several parts of the program, such as notes from meetings planning the operation, excerpts from western reporting on the Doppelgänger effort, and guidelines for how to accomplish the tasks, including via campaigns targeting Mexico and Israel.

About fifty pages of the affidavit lays out probable cause and lists the domains targeted. The affidavit was obtained on August 30.

Exhibit 1 Fake news stories: The first exhibit includes samples of the fake stories Russia used on their newsites, interspersed with stolen stories more detrimental to Russia. This fake story, published as Joe Biden tried to push a border bill tied to Ukraine funding, provides some idea of how closely this propaganda worked with US politics.

The stories in the fake Forward site show how Russia was trying to sow division regarding US involvement in Israel, which ties closely to two other documents included yesterday (Exhibits 12 and 13).

Exhibit 2 commentary on Doppelgänger: The Russians collected western commentary — from newspapers, security reports, and other NGOs. This includes excerpts that had been shared internally in Russian.

Exhibit 3 Work with Comments: This provides instruction on how to use comments to link back to the fake news sites.

Exhibit 4: Sample story: This is what the affidavit supposes is a story intended for one of the fake websites. It starts by claiming that “[Joe Biden’s] diplomacy has led the United States not only to the covert participation in the proxy war in Ukraine, but also to an open clash in the Middle East. [Joe Biden] destroyed the world he presented to the voters. It’s time for him to go.” The story comes with suggestions for how fake commenters on social media — pretending to be “an American living in a small town” — would pitch this story.

Exhibit 5: Recommended comments: Another example of a suggested comment from a fake American, starting with the claim that, “The U.S. is a house of cards that is about to collapse.”

Exhibit 6 Media plan: This is a longer, 26-page manual for targeting the Ukrainian public. It includes four goals:

  • Undermining military and political leadership
  • Discord among elites
  • Loss of morale in the Ukrainian Armed Forces
  • Sowing discord in the population

Exhibit 7 How to sow chaos in Germany and France: This document develops media strategies to maximize chaos in America’s NATO allies. The two most interesting suggestions pertain to internal political chaos: recommending that Alternative for Deutschland (Germany’s far right party) be treated as martyrs and stoking unhappiness after Emmanuel Macron raised the retirement age.

Exhibit 8 Good Old USA: One of two sections focusing primarily on the United States, this document lays out the stakes for magnifying MAGAt views:

The current international environment is known for, first and foremost, severe hostility of the US towards Russia. The USA has been trying to maintain “the global leadership” by strategically defeating Russia. This desire shapes the financial investment, weapons supply, and efforts to keep the conflict in Ukraine going.

In the meantime, the key question in the US domestic policy remains the same: how justified are these efforts? The further we go, the more politicians state that the US should target their effort towards addressing its domestic issues instead of wasting money in Ukraine and other “problem” regions.

This sentiment has become the centerpiece for the US 2024 presidential election campaign. While [Democrats] are still in power, they are trying to maintain the current foreign policy priorities. [Republicans,] still in opposition, have been criticizing these priorities.

It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the [Republicans’] point of view, first and foremost, the opinion of [Trump’s] supporters) wins over the US public opinion. This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.

Public opinion polling results in the US indicate that the politics which we consider correct has a real chance to get approval of the majority of the US voters. [emphasis original]

It sets goals for polling percentage (for example, trying to move opposition to supporting Ukraine from 41% to 51%).

It treats Texas among the states (with Alabama, Kansas, Wyoming, and Louisiana) that it believes have traditional values that should support Republicans, and targets US citizens of Hispanic descent — and American Jews — specifically. It also identifies American gamers, as if they’re a big percentage of voters.

Aside from the misunderstanding of how close to purple Texas could become, this document matches what Trump is doing, down to the focus on right wing podcasters (who would be favored by gamers) rather than traditional outlets. This document is one of several that made me ask if Paul Manafort has still been working with his Russian buddies.

Exhibit 9 Guerrilla media: This is another document targeting the US. It notes that Biden at that point (the precise dates of these documents is not entirely clear) had approval lower than 40%, but doesn’t mention Trump’s approval, which would be little better. It also repeats right wing claims that the media is 75% skewed to the Democratic party. As I’ll return to, this document repeatedly claims that social media moderation amounts to censorship of Republicans.

Exhibit 10 Social Media influencers: This document proposes setting up a network of 200 fake Xitter accounts, four each in every state, to push Russian propaganda.

Exhibit 11 A Mexican pass to Trump: This document proposes creating artificial tension on the border by stoking (alleged) Mexican opposition to the US.

The [Trump] who was building a border wall; the [Trump] who talked about the problem of migrants coming from the South pretty much all the time throughout his presidency; and the [Trump], to whom the ball needs to be passed conveniently in order to switch the American political discussion — that [Trump] is so much in need of an exacerbated confrontation with Mexico.

Yet the document bemoans that the growth of the US economy is the biggest problem for Trump’s campaign.

Exhibit 12 The Comprehensive Information Outreach Project in Israel: This attempts to stoke fear of Nazis to lead Israelis to side with Russia over Ukraine. It likens opposition to Bibi Netanyahu to Maidan. It doesn’t appear to mention that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.

Exhibit 13 Disaster 23: The US will soon have its hands full with issues other than Israel: This document purports to pose as an Israeli worried that civil war in the US (in response to the effort to boot Trump off the ballot in Colorado) is inevitable, which would leave Israel isolated.

Update: Corrected translation for AfD party.

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Manufactured Horseshit: Paul Manafort Returns to the Scene of the Crime

Vaughn Hillyard caught Paul Manafort in a victory lap on the floor of the RNC the other day.

Hillyard: Mr. Manafort, how is it to be back?

Manafort It’s great to be back.

And so it is that eight years after getting advance warning of the DNC release from his long time buddy Roger Stone, almost eight years after Stone emailed Manafort telling him he had a way to win the race, and just short of eight years after Manafort met with Konstantin Kilimnik in a cigar bar and discussed the outlines of a quid pro quo: campaign information for debt relief in exchange for a commitment to carve up Ukraine (Manafort insists he rejected the plan to carve up Ukraine, though the plan nevertheless remained active until at least 2018).

Aside from Hillyard and Robert Costa’s tweets marking Manafort’s arrival, his presence made barely a blip in the news coverage.

Why should it?

Among all the other criminals and insurrectionists, Manafort no longer sticks out.

And with JD Vance’s selection as VP, Manafort’s support for a pro-Russian Ukraine also looks banal, rather than alarming.

But there is likely a backstory few want to pursue.

Back in May, when Paul Manafort’s return was first reported and then denied, 24sight described how (as he had done in 2016), Paulie had been and kept working the back channel.

Manafort has quietly been passing strategic advice back to Trump through co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, the Republican sources said. Manafort has been analyzing polling results and advised on the organization of state Republican parties and selecting delegates to the Republican nominating convention — one of his specialties — according to two Republicans familiar with the dealings.

But LaCivita and other Trump campaign officials vehemently denied Manafort’s involvement.

LaCivita called questions about huddling with Manafort for Trump’s benefit “manufactured horseshit,” in a text message to 24sight News. Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes endorsed LaCivita’s reply, adding some context to the pushback.

“There was clearly a moment of consideration about using Manafort specifically for the convention,” Hughes said Wednesday. “But Manafort very publicly withdrew himself.”

Asked if Manafort had discussions with Fabrizio about helping steer the campaign, Hughes said he was unaware of everything that people talk about outside the campaign.

Three Republicans familiar with the dealings said that LaCivita met with Manafort in suburban Washington last fall. LaCivita denied details of the meeting to 24sight News, but declined to answer additional questions.

LaCivita was denying Manafort’s centrality as vigorously as he is now attempting to deny the (Orbán-aligned) Project 2025, as vigorously as Steve Bannon denied Manafort’s ongoing role in 2016, in spite of receiving plans on how to secure the victory, plans which led Bannon to worry about the appearance of Russian involvement in the victory.

But all these pieces go together.

That is, Trump is running not just as someone who explicitly wants to be a Dictator from Day One, someone who supports all the same policies as a Project that targets divorce and birth control along with the very idea of civil service.

He is running with Russian help on a plan to give Russia what it wants, starting, but not ending, with Ukraine on a silver platter.

Trump, and the guy Trump pardoned for lying about what happened with Russia in 2016, are simply picking up where things left off.

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How the Steele Dossier Broke MAGAts’ Brains

The Steele Dossier broke America.

Not literally. Nearly three decades of Fox News, increasing wealth inequality, and unlimited money in politics likely did that.

But there are MAGAts who blame much of it on the dossier. There are MAGAts who situate their own shift in allegiance from the country to Trump based on a false belief that the dossier was part of a devious plot between Hillary Clinton and the Deep State to frame Donald Trump. That’s a key part of this thread from a right wing podcaster excusing January 6, which went viral just days after the attack.

Such views — mixing accurate criticism of the dossier with wild conspiracy theories — really did play a key role in polarizing the US. Phil Bump explained how the adoption of such conspiracy theories (which he fact checked) worked in real time. And I noted that if, as virtually all Republican members of Congress who spent years investigating the dossier concluded, it was riddled with Russian disinformation, it means MAGAts attacked their own country in response to Russian disinformation.

This didn’t happen by accident. Instead, it likely involved a brilliant multi-step disinformation campaign victimizing everyone: Hillary, Paul Manafort and Trump, and even the Deep State.

The first step was a brutal double game Oleg Deripaska deployed: using his tie to Christopher Steele to add to Paul Manafort’s legal insecurity — or perhaps to hide his own role in election interference by offering himself as a potential cooperator — even while using that insecurity to win cooperation from Trump’s campaign manager on the election attack.

The next step was, apparently, injecting garbage into the Steele dossier, some near misses that obscured the real attack and made Trump’s people less secure.

The third was an effort, partly deliberate and then later partly organic (albeit often on the part of credulous people who published obviously false claims from Konstantin Kilimnik), to conflate the dossier with the entire Russian investigation. Along the way MAGAt politicians, both right wing and quasi-lefty influencers, and even established journalistic institutions would join this effort. Because the dossier was unreliable, because it was used in the investigation of Carter Page (a guy already under scrutiny when he joined the Trump campaign) — this sustained propaganda campaign insisted — all the reporting on the Russian attack, the FBI investigation into it, and the results must be nought.

By substituting the dossier for the rest of the Russian investigation, this propaganda effort flipped Trump’s enthusiasm for foreign interference in democracy on its head, and allowed him — the guy who invited Russia to hack his opponent — to play the victim.

Deripaska’s double game

The first part of this process has gotten the least attention (indeed, Republican conspiracy theories covered it up).

There were two parts of the intelligence collection on Trump and his associates: with a few notable exceptions, accurate open source research done by Fusion GPS itself, and raw HUMINT collection from former MI6 officer Christopher Steele that may have been injected with disinformation. It has long been public that right wing billionaire Paul Singer indirectly paid for the open source research during the GOP primary, only to have the Democrats pick up the project during the general election.

What’s not widely known is that starting in March — the same month Manafort was publicly hired by the campaign (though, according to Sam Patten, Konstantin Kilimnik expected that to happen before it was public) — Deripaska paid Steele, through an attorney, to collect on Manafort.

[Steele’s] initial entree into U.S. election-related material dealt with Paul Manafort’s connections to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. In particular, Steele told the FBI that Manafort owed significant money to these oligarchs and several other Russians. At this time, Steele was working for a different client, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

And Steele paid Fusion to help with this effort. So before May, Deripaska paid Steele, who paid Fusion. After May, Democrats paid Fusion, which paid Steele.

But, as Igor Danchenko described, that earlier effort to collect on Manafort met with little success.

[H]e may have asked friends and contacts in Russia [for information on Manafort], but he couldn’t remember off-hand. He added that, for this topic, his friends and contacts in Russian couldn’t say very much because they were “too far removed” from the matter.

It was after that, on a trip Danchenko took to Russia, when Steele asked Danchenko to “look for information dealing with the US presidential election, including compromising materials on Donald Trump.”

Probably as a result of this close relationship, by July, intelligence reporting later assessed, one of Deripaska’s associates was probably aware of the DNC dossier project. Similarly, reporting found that, “two persons affiliated with [Russian Intelligence Services] were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early 2016.” As I have, John Durham linked these two reports, suggesting a likelihood that the Russian spooks had ties to Deripaska (though in making that link, Durham obscured Deripaska’s identity). Given Deripaska’s own alleged ties to Russian intelligence, if his lawyer knew and he knew, spooks close to him — including, allegedly, Kilimnik — would likely have known. Durham also described that Russian intelligence had identified Steele’s subsource network.

Paul Manafort’s former boss, Oleg Deripaska, probably knew about the dossier project in close to real time.

Christopher Steele denies that’s the case.

If Deripaska did know of the project, though, it dramatically changes the significance of a meeting Christopher Steele had with Bruce Ohr, then a top lawyer coordinating DOJ’s effort to combat multinational organized crime, in late July 2016. Steele had been trying to pitch Ohr to recruit oligarchs purportedly willing to cooperate against Russia. He had, earlier in 2016, assured Ohr that Deripaska had distanced himself from Putin. Earlier in July, he contacted Ohr about Deripaska.

Steele thought Deripaska could be trusted.

And on July 30, between the time Konstantin Kilimnik flew to Moscow to prepare for his Paul Manafort meeting and when he arrived in New York for that meeting, Steele met with Ohr in DC.

For years, Republicans claimed that this was an instance of Steele working every contact he had at FBI and DOJ to make sure his dossier reports got shared. Except Steele did more than share dossier leads at that meeting (one, about what Russian spooks had reportedly said about Trump, the other about whom Carter Page might have met with in Moscow). In addition, he shared information about Russian doping, a topic on which Steele reportedly had a good track record.

And most importantly, Steele pitched information from Deripaska about Paul Manafort (this is from Ohr’s testimony to Congress).

Mr. Ohr. So Chris Steele provided me with basically three items of information. One of them I’ve described to you already, the comment that information supposedly stated and made by the head, former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

He also mentioned that Carter Page had met with certain high-level Russian officials when he was in Moscow. My recollection is at that time, the name Carter Page had already been in the press, and there had been some kind of statement about who he had met with when he went to Moscow. And so the first item that I recall Chris Steele telling me was he had information that Carter Page met with higher-level Russian officials, not just whoever was mentioned in the press article. So that was one item.

And then the third item he mentioned was that Paul Hauser, who was an attorney working for Oleg Deripaska, had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Oleg Deripaska, had stolen a large amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, and that Paul Hauser was trying to gather information that would show that, you know, or give more detail about what Paul Manafort had done with respect to Deripaska.

[snip]

Q Were there any other topics that were discussed during your July 30, 2016, meeting?

A Yes, there were. Based on my sketchy notes from the time, I think there was some information relating to the Russian doping scandal, but I don’t recall the substance of that.

When I first understood how this worked together, I thought that Deripaska was primarily doing this to increase Paul Manafort’s legal exposure, making Manafort more vulnerable when Deripaska, via Kilimnik, started making asks in a cigar bar days later. It certainly may have increased the chance that the FBI would develop the criminal investigation into Manafort.

But it likely did another thing: it likely made the FBI more interested in treating Deripaska as a source, rather than a subject. And sure enough, in September 2016, the FBI interviewed Deripaska, at which interview (John Solomon parroted in advance of Robert Mueller’s testimony, during the period Solomon was a key player in Rudy Giuliani’s information operation) he scoffed that Manafort would have any tie to Russia.

“I told them straightforward, ‘Look, I am not a friend with him [Manafort]. Apparently not, because I started a court case [against him] six or nine months before … . But since I’m Russian I would be very surprised that anyone from Russia would try to approach him for any reason, and wouldn’t come and ask me my opinion,’ ” he said, recounting exactly what he says he told the FBI agents that day.

“I told them straightforward, I just don’t believe that he would represent any Russian interest. And knowing what he’s doing on Ukraine for the last, what, seven or eight years.”

As I’ve written, much of the outreach to Trump’s associates in 2016 involved people who had served as FBI sources. Deripaska knew Steele spoke with the FBI. People like Sergei Millian and Felix Sater had been FBI sources. More recently, of course, Alexander Smirnov allegedly attempted to frame Joe Biden.

A key tactic of this effort was to exploit FBI’s HUMINT efforts, to use FBI’s informants against it. So much so that Deripaska even feigned cooperation with the FBI himself!

The dossier would become an important part of — largely constructed — stories about the Russian investigation. But that all lay on top a foundation of efforts Deripaska made to use Christopher Steele to set up (and maybe even obscure) his asks of Paul Manafort.

A series of near misses

The knowledge that Deripaska and Russian spooks had of Steele’s network and the ongoing Fusion GPS project would have provided the means to plant disinformation.

As noted above, for a period, every one of the Republicans who examined the dossier at length concluded that Russia had succeeded in filling the dossier with disinformation. Lindsey Graham — who conducted an investigation into the circumstances of the Carter Page FISA — said it did. Chuck Grassley — who led the investigation into the dossier — said it did. Ron Johnson — who also made a show of investigating these things — said it did. Chuck Ross — the chief scribe of the dossier on the right — said it did. The high gaslighter Catherine Herridge said it did. Fox News and all their favorite sources said it did. WSJ’s editorial page said it did.

Then, they stopped saying it.

Maybe they thought through the implication of it being Russian disinformation. Maybe they started looking to John Durham’s efforts to blame Hillary Clinton by fabricating conspiracy theories instead.

Because, think about it: Unlike Rudy Giuliani, there’s no hint that Hillary set out to collect dirt that would be easily identifiable to the campaign as disinformation. She had no reason to seek inaccurate information; the reality was already damning enough.

“For us to go out and say a bunch of things that aren’t true, you know, can cause a lot of damage to the campaign,” Hillary Campaign Manager Robby Mook testified in the Michael Sussmann trial.

Hillary gained nothing by paying a lot of money for a project riddled with disinformation. Russian spooks simply took advantage of something every politician does — collect oppo research — to harm her, harm Carter Page, and harm the US.

Consider the effect it may have had (I examine the reports one by one here).

One effect possible disinformation may have had was to make Hillary complacent as she struggled to deal with a hack during the height of the campaign. For example, several of Steele’s reports said any kompromat Russia had on Hillary consisted of very dated intercepts, not recently-stolen emails. One report falsely claimed Russia hadn’t had success at hacking Western targets. Later reports provided purported updates on the hack-and-leak campaign, suggesting Russia was dropping any further efforts, that directly conflict with ongoing developments. Subsequent investigation showed those reports were all false.

And every one of those reports might have led Democrats (and the FBI) to be complacent about ongoing risks posed by the hack they had IDed in April (and indeed, they didn’t expect the files stolen from the DNC to be released).

Another report which could be disinformation (but which, if you can believe Danchenko, may also be Steele exaggeration of very tepid things he said about someone he believed to be Sergei Millian), would be to shield Konstantin Kilimnik’s role in the election interference. One of the most important reports for what came afterwards alleged that the,

“well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump’s team and Russian leadership “was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE and others as intermediaries.

If Page was Manafort’s go-between, no one would look at what Kilimnik was doing.

To be sure, this could be Steele’s doing. It appears in a report that misrepresented what Danchenko claims to have told Steele about his contacts with Sergei Millian.

And as the Senate Intelligence Committee Report noted — I hope, sardonically — nothing about Manafort’s ties to Deripaska (or Kilimnik) ever made it into the dossier.

Steele and his subsources appear to have neglected to include or missed in its entirety Paul Manafort’s business relationship with Deripaska, which provided Deripaska leverage over Manafort and a possible route of influence into the Trump Campaign.

Steele mentions Paul Manafort by name roughly 20 times in the dossier, always in the context of his work in Ukraine; and, in particular, Manafort’s work on behalf of then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Deripaska, who had a long-standing business relationship with Manafort, is not mentioned once. Neither is Kilimnik, Manafort’s right-hand man in Kyiv, who himself has extensive ties to Deripaska. 5885 Despite Steele’s expertise on Ukraine and Russia, particularly on oligarchs, the dossier memos are silent on the issue.

Whatever the explanation — Danchenko’s failures to get dirt, Steele’s efforts to protect another contract, or disinformation — the dossier’s failure to note Kilimnik’s role (along with its silence about Natalia Veselnitskaya’s pitch of dirt to Don Jr. and George Papadopoulos’ shenanigans in London) effectively distracted from the most glaring signs of Trump ties with Russia. It served as camouflage. The things that don’t show up in the dossier that Fusion and Steele should have learned were almost as useful to the Russian project as the near-misses that did.

Perhaps the best established case of disinformation, however, is a tribute to its usefulness. Starting in October 2016 (in the period Michael Cohen was frantically cleaning up Trump’s Stormy Daniels problem), Steele produced first three (one, two, three), and then, in December 2016, a fourth report alleging that Michael Cohen was instead cleaning up the alleged coordination between Manafort and the Russians. Each report got progressively more inflammatory, with the last one alleging that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August or September for secret discussions with the Kremlin and its hackers; the discussion allegedly involved cash payments to operatives and plans to cover up the operation.

If true, this would have been a smoking gun.

Within weeks of the last report, on January 12, 2017 — two days after Buzzfeed published the dossier — the Intelligence Community got intelligence assessing that it was disinformation.

January 12, 2017, report relayed information from [redacted] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen. The [redacted] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.

Of course, that was not made public for over three years. As a result, even as the story of Mike Flynn’s attempts to undermine Obama’s foreign policy rolled out, even as Cohen was accepting big payments from Viktor Vekselberg, the Cohen-in-Prague story became the measure of so-called collusion.

From the start of the public accounting of Trump’s ties to Russia, then, something the IC already understood to be likely disinformation was the yardstick of the Russian investigation.

Two aspects of the story make it especially ripe to be intentional disinformation, in form and content.

First, according to Danchenko, the Cohen story came from his childhood friend, Olga Galkina, who knew he worked in some kind of intelligence collection and who even tried to task him to collect information after the dossier came out.

In March of 2016, Danchenko had introduced PR executive Chuck Dolan to her. Dolan and Danchenko traveled the same DC-based circles of Russian experts, and she was looking for the kind of public affairs consulting that Dolan offered, on behalf of her company. Over the course of two trips to Cyprus as part of that business, Dolan and Galkina developed an independent relationship. Dolan’s company was at the same time working on a business development project for the Russian government, in which he directly interacted with Dmitry Peskov’s office. Through that networking, on July 13, 2016, Galkina claimed that Dolan had recommended her for a job with Peskov’s office (he told Durham’s prosecutors he didn’t remember this when they asked). And on October 15, 2016 — in the same week that she first shared the Cohen story with Danchenko — Galkina gossiped about knowing something via Peskov’s office.

On October 15, 2016, Galkina communicated with a Russia-based journalist and stated that because of her [Galkina] “acquaintance with Chuck Dolan and several citizens from the Russian presidential administration,” Galkina knew “something and can tell a little about it by voice. ” 882

As Danchenko told the FBI, when he asked Galkina if she knew anything about several people on whom Steele had tasked him to collect, Michael Cohen’s name was the single one she recognized.

[Danchenko] began his explanation of the Prague and Michael Cohen-related reports by stating that Christopher Steele had given him 4-5 names to research for the election-related tasking. He could only remember three of the names: Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. When he talked to [Galkina] in the fall of 2016 — he believes it was a phone call — he rattled off these names and, out of them, he was surprised to her that [Galkina] [later [Danchenko] softened this to “almost immediately] recognized Cohen’s name. [bold brackets original]

After that initial conversation, Danchenko asked Galkina to go back to her sources for more detail, which resulted in several more reports.

In other words, the source for the allegation that Michael Cohen, in an attempt to cover up a Trump scandal, had direct ties to the Presidential Administration — the Kremlin — is someone who had developed direct and lucrative ties to Dmitry Peskov’s office, and had been bragging about having dirt involving Peskov’s office that very week.

And Dmitry Peskov is one person who undoubtedly knew that Michael Cohen had called the Kremlin nine months earlier, because Trump’s fixer had called Peskov’s own office.

In the wake of Trump’s public denial on July 27 that he had any ongoing business with Russia, and in the period when Cohen was busy covering up other Trump scandals, a story arose that alleged Cohen’s cover-up involved ties to the Kremlin.

As Robert Mueller would substantiate two years later, Cohen’s cover-up did involve a ties to the Kremlin, a call in which he solicited Putin’s help for a business deal involving a sanctioned bank and the GRU. But those were entirely different ties, in time and substance, from the ties claimed in the dossier.

This is the kind of near miss story — a story that approximated Cohen’s real contact with the Kremlin, which he and Trump were lying to hide, a story that approximated Cohen’s real efforts to cover up Trump’s scandals — that could serve both to distract and raise the risks of the public lies Cohen and Trump were telling to hide that Trump Tower deal, the lies that Dmitry Peskov knew Trump was telling.

It also proved useful when Cohen doubled down on his lies, in 2017. As I pointed out in real time, as the Trump Tower deal started to get leaked to the press (though without the most damning detail, that Cohen did succeed in reaching the Kremlin; Trump Organization withheld the email that proved that from Congress) Cohen used denials of the dossier allegations as a way to deny the burgeoning Trump Tower scandal as well. Because there was nothing to substantiate the Cohen-in-Prague story, Cohen’s then lawyer claimed, it meant there was no story at all.

The entire letter is pitched around the claim that HPSCI “included Mr. Cohen in its inquiry based solely upon certain sensational allegations contained” in the Steele dossier. “Absent those allegations,” the letter continues, “Mr. Cohen would not be involved in your investigation.” The idea — presented two weeks before disclosure of emails showing Cohen brokering a deal with Russians in early 2016 — is if Cohen can discredit the dossier, then he will have shown that there is no reason to investigate him or his role brokering deals with the Russians. Even the denial of any documents of interest is limited to the dossier: “We have not uncovered a single document that would in any way corroborate the Dossier’s allegations regarding Mr. Cohen, nor do we believe that any such document exists.”

With that, Cohen’s lawyers address the allegations in the dossier, one by one. As a result, the rebuttal reads kind of like this:

I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague

Cohen literally denies that he ever traveled to Prague six times, as well as denying carefully worded, often quoted, versions of meeting with Russians in a European capital in 2016. Of course that formulation — He did not participate in meetings of any kind with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016 — stops well short of other potential ties to Russians. And two of his denials look very different given the emails disclosed two weeks later showing an attempt to broker a deal that Felix Sater thought might get Trump elected, including an email from him to one of the most trusted agents of the Kremlin.

Mr. Cohen is not aware of any “secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship.”

Mr. Cohen is not aware of any indirect communications between the “TRUMP team” and “trusted agents” of the Kremlin.

As I said above, I think it highly likely the dossier includes at least some disinformation seeded by the Russians. So the most charitable scenario of what went down is that the Russians, knowing Cohen had made half-hearted attempts to broker the Trump Tower deal Trump had wanted for years, planted his name hoping some kind of awkwardness like this would result.

That is, Cohen used his true denial of having been to Prague to rebut the equally true claim that he had contact with the Kremlin.

Manafort’s plan

There’s good reason to believe that Cohen’s focus was not an accident.

That’s because, after meeting with a Deripaska associate, Paul Manafort advised Trump to use precisely this approach.

In early January, Manafort met in Madrid with a Deripaska associate, Gregory Oganov. Manafort’s explanations to Mueller’s team about the purpose of the meeting vacillated (it was one of the topics about which Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled he had lied). But according to a text from Kilimnik, the meeting was about recreating the old relationship he had had with Deripaska.

A May 2017 story from Ken Vogel (yeah, I know), described how after that trip, Manafort called Reince Priebus and told him that the dossier was full of inaccuracies, and that those inaccuracies — and the FBI’s reliance on Steele, the guy paid by a lawyer for Deripaska who brought claims about Manafort to DOJ — discredited the Russian investigation generally.

It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties among Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a person close to Manafort.

[snip]

According to a GOP operative familiar with Manafort’s conversation with Priebus, Manafort suggested the errors in the dossier discredited it, as well as the FBI investigation, since the bureau had reached a tentative (but later aborted) agreement to pay the former British spy to continue his research and had briefed both Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier.

Manafort told Priebus that the dossier was tainted by inaccuracies and by the motivations of the people who initiated it, whomhe alleged were Democratic activists and donors working in cahoots with Ukrainian government officials, according to the operative. [my emphasis]

Priebus shared Manafort’s comments with Trump.

Priebus did, however, alert Trump to the conversation with Manafort, according to the operative familiar with the conversation and a person close to Trump.

Notably, along with disputing that anyone with ties to Steele would know what Yanukovych would say to Putin, Manafort also debunked the claim that he was managing relations with Russia because he didn’t know Page.

In his conversation with Priebus, Manafort also disputed the assertion in the Steele dossier that Manafort managed relations between Trump’s team and the Russian leadership, using Page and others as intermediaries.

Manafort told Priebus that he’d never met Page, according to the operative.

As with Cohen’s later debunking of the Prague story to distract from the Trump Tower story, Manafort used a near miss in the dossier  to discredit the larger true claim, that he had been working with someone in Russia.

Manafort met with Kilimnik personally in February, and according to Rick Gates, at Manafort’s behest, Kilimnik kept hunting down the other sources for the dossier. Of course, according to later intelligence reporting, Russian spooks already knew that.

How about that?

Within a day after the release of the dossier, at a time when he was meeting with an Oleg Deripaska deputy, Manafort came up with a strategy to discredit the entire Russian investigation by discrediting the dossier. How was Manafort so prescient about the faults of the dossier?

But Deripaska had almost certainly known about the dossier project for six months by that point, and had funded an earlier collection effort targeting Manafort himself.

And Republicans followed that strategy — to discredit the Russian investigation by discrediting the dossier and FBI’s decision to rely on Steele, a strategy Manafort shared after a meeting with a top Deripaska aide — for three years.


This post is part of a series describing how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law. Earlier posts include:

LOLGOP and I are doing a podcast series that closely follows this series.

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The series builds on this background.

 

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Hunter Biden Prosecutor Leo Wise Aspires to Be the James Comer of John Durhams

In a filing submitted last week opposing Hunter Biden’s [surely doomed] bid for a continuance of his California trial until September, Leo Wise argued that this is just a garden variety tax case that doesn’t merit any more time to prepare than the week between the Delaware case and the California case.

The defendant claims that he requires only “a small amount of additional time to adequately prepare” ECF 97, p. 5 (emphasis added). However, he asks for this “limited reprieve,” ECF 97, p. 4, of 77 days without providing any details about how those two and half months would be utilized. His filing is simply unclear about what the defendant would actually do with any additional time. His perception of this case as “uniquely challenging and high-profile,” ECF 97, p. 5, is unlikely to change if a continuance is granted. The fact that there may be more press coverage of this trial than others does not affect the preparation required by counsel in any way. This is a straightforward tax case, and the defendant has not alleged otherwise. He is not above the rule of law and should be treated like any other defendant. Every case has pretrial deadlines; the fact that they exist here cannot support a continuance request. Given the complete lack of specificity as to what needs to happen between now and trial (other than compliance with the usual pretrial deadlines which the defendant has known about since January), the factor of usefulness does not support a continuance. [my emphasis]

But a motion in limine filed by Hunter Biden reveals that claim is false.

Wise has no intention of treating this as a straightforward tax case.

After Hunter Biden agreed, in response to Weiss’ own motion in limine, not to mention how Leo Wise had been badly duped by Alexander Smirnov and instead of dropping the case, continued to give Russia what it intended all along, a political hit job on Joe Biden during the 2024 election, Hunter asked David Weiss’ team if they would likewise agree not to make this a trial about influence-peddling.

Weiss refused.

Defendant Robert Hunter Biden, by and through his counsel of record, hereby files this Motion in Limine to exclude from trial reference to any allegation that Mr. Biden (1) acted on behalf of a foreign principal to influence U.S. policy and public opinion, (2) violated FARA, (3) improperly coordinated with the Obama Administration, (4) received direct compensation from any foreign state, (5) received compensation for actions taken by his father that impacted national or international politics, or (6) funneled money to his father or any related alleged corruption (together, allegations of “improper political influence and/or corruption”). This evidence should clearly be excluded under the Federal Rules of Evidence 403 balancing test, as the risk of unfair prejudice is significantly outweighed by any marginal probative value. On May 17, 2024, Mr. Biden’s counsel asked for the Special Counsel’s position on this proposed motion in limine. On May 20, 2024, the Special Counsel indicated that he opposes this motion.

[snip]

Although the Special Counsel’s filed exhibit list (DE 88) contains upwards of forty descriptions that are totally insufficient to identify what document is being referred to (see, e.g., “Text Messages” (#073), “Notes” (#318)), it is clear that many exhibits the Special Counsel intends to introduce relate to allegations of improper political influence and/or corruption that are wholly outside of the scope of the Indictment. See, e.g., “Email from Eric Schwerin to Antony Blinken re: My Remarks In Latvia” (GX-267), “Email from Eric Schwerin to Sally Painter re: Amos Hochstein” (GX-262). Allowing in evidence or testimony related to the unsubstantiated claims of improper political influence and/or corruption run a real risk of the jury convicting Mr. Biden based on facts and allegations outside of the Indictment.

Defense counsel notes that it is ironic that the Special Counsel has filed a motion in limine to exclude evidence “alleging the prosecution of the defendant is somehow due to or part of a Russian malign election influence campaign,” which Mr. Biden did not object to. (DE 92 at 4.) Yet, the Special Counsel opposes the instant motion, which would preclude him from putting forward similar politically charged information to the jury. To prevent this trial from becoming a trial on politics rather than a trial on the charges in the Indictment, this Court should grant both the Special Counsel’s motion as it relates to a “Russian malign election influence campaign” and this Motion.

Having investigated for six years, David Weiss never substantiated a FARA case. But (as the exhibit list makes clear) he wants to drag that into what he claims is a straightforward tax case anyway.

The scope of Leo Wise’s aspirations to use the tax case as a vehicle to air James Comer’s fevered fantasies is made clear by something else Wise revealed in that same filing: The reason giving Hunter Biden more than a week between trials would harm the government is because they plan to make more than thirty people from around the country fly to California to testify against Joe Biden’s kid.

The defendant is not seeking a modest delay of a few days to obtain a piece of evidence or to procure a witness. He seeks a 77-day delay in a case the government has extensively prepared for following a detailed and lengthy investigation. This will inconvenience the United States. For instance, the government anticipates calling more than thirty witnesses, most of them out-of-state. See Declaration of Leo J. Wise, at ¶4 . Trial subpoenas began being sent to these witnesses over a month ago. Id. Many of these individuals are represented; the witnesses and their counsel have planned their summer schedules to account for this trial commencing in June and concluding in July.

You don’t need to call 30 witnesses to present your tax case against Hunter Biden!!

The key witnesses will be Hunter’s ex-wife, Katie Dodge, no more than eight people Hunter paid out of Owasco funds and then wrote off (including, it seems, Hallie Biden, whose testimony Weiss is compelling), maybe a sex worker or two to titillate Matt Gaetz (Weiss has similarly refused to exclude the sex workers), the accountant who filed Hunter Biden’s taxes in 2020, former Hunter business partners Rob Walker and Eric Schwerin, and some law enforcement witnesses to present all the paperwork. That’s around 16 witnesses.

If Weiss really does call over 30 witnesses, it will make this “straightforward tax case” into the largest Special Counsel trial in recent years (as laid out by the list below).

The sheer overkill of Leo Wise’s aspirations is clear when you compare Hunter’s case — for a failure to pay taxes from income that all came through the US — to Paul Manafort’s EDVA trial. Like the Hunter Biden case, that was a tax case, one for which tax evasion was charged for five years, not one, and one for which the scope of income was at least an order of magnitude larger. Because Manafort’s tax evasion involved keeping his Ukraine income offshore in Cyprus, that case also included charges of FBAR violations. It also included nine counts of bank fraud. So tax evasion, plus hiding his funds overseas, plus trying to cheat some banks in the US. Prosecutors called a bunch of local Alexandria vendors, because one way Manafort shielded his income was by wiring money directly to US vendors to pay for things like Ostrich-skin vests.

And for all that, at this stage of the proceedings, prosecutors estimated they would call 20 to 25 witnesses; they ultimately called 27.

Leo Wise wants to do something more spectacular than the Paul Manafort case — and given his close ties to Rod Rosenstein, I wouldn’t rule out the grandiosity of his aspirations as some kind of payback. Of course, there’s a straight through-line between the Manafort case and the Russian-backed effort to fuck over Joe Biden, so Leo Wise is giving Russia precisely what they wanted.

Leo Wise was sure he was smarter than Lesley Wolf and so chased the Alexander Smirnov allegation only to discover he was participating in an attempt to frame Joe Biden. Having been duped there, Leo Wise now refuses to back down. He will stage the most spectacular Special Counsel trial yet!

Update: My apologies to Judge Scarsi. He has apparently granted the continuance to September 5.

Other Special Counsel prosecutions

Scooter Libby: 10 Government Witnesses (plus three CIA briefers not called)

Roger Stone: 5 Government Witnesses (plus Andrew Miller, Michael Caputo, and Jerome Corsi, not called)

Michael Sussmann: 25 Government Witnesses (about 5 not called)

Igor Danchenko: 6 Government Witnesses

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The Cultivation of Don Jr: A Framework to Think of the Russian Attack

Months ago, I started laying out a framework to provide background to explain how Trump has trained the GOP to hate rule of law, a key part of how he has brought us close to fascism. My weekend post on Bill Barr’s obfuscation about his role in Ukrainian matters (to which there will be a follow-up) started to fill in another of the remaining bullets.

Today, and in parallel, LOLGOP and I will begin to release some podcasts as we explain the important part: how all this brings us to where we are, with both Aileen Cannon and SCOTUS taking active measures [heh] to help Donald Trump avoid accountability.

So I need to explain how I think of the Russian attack.

Generally, people think of the Russian attack in the same way Robert Mueller set up Volume I of his Report:

  • Volume I Section II: [Dead] Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s social media campaign
  • Volume I Section III: GRU’s hack and leak campaign
  • Volume I Section IV: Russian Government contacts to the Trump campaign

Remember, his report was an explanation of prosecutorial decisions. It was only intended to determine whether things were crimes. It only included the prosecutorial decisions that had been concluded by Mueller. So, for example, the report itself didn’t describe the referrals sent to other districts, such as SDNY’s prosecution of Michael Cohen for financial crimes and hush money payments or EDNY’s prosecution of Tom Barrack on foreign agent crimes, which ended in acquittal; it remains unclear how much of these referrals show up in the referral section. Mentions of ongoing investigations, such as into the suspected $10 million payment to Trump from an Egyptian bank or evidence that Roger Stone conspired with Russian in the hack-and-leak, were relegated to the appendix or a footnote.

The SSCI Report instead considered whether these things posed a counterintelligence risk, rather than a crime. As such, they considered a long list of possible compromises, categorized both by people (like Paul Manafort or Maria Butina — the latter of whom was not included in scope of Mueller Report) and events (like the June 9 meeting). Viewed from that framework, having a guy who spent years implementing influence operations for Russian allies Manafort, work for “free” on the campaign looks quite different, like a grave counterintelligence risk to Donald Trump. Great swaths of that report — such as a section on Andrii Telizhenko’s influence operations, which may even have incorporated Bill Barr — remain redacted.

But as this effort to interfere in the US election proceeded, Russia conducted at least two (and, I argue, at least a third) devastating attacks on US intelligence, which had ties to the election year attack itself.

  • The Shadow Brokers release of NSA’s hacking tools, which (I was told but have not reconfirmed) shared one forensic link and has several human infrastructure links to the election attack
  • The Vault 7/Vault 8 release of CIA’s hacking tools, which in implementation continued a pressure campaign by Julian Assange rooted in the election year attack
  • A concerted campaign against the FBI, largely focused but not exclusively reliant on the Steele dossier

The Solar Winds attack, discovered in the last year of Trump’s presidency, could be another such attack, one used by Sidney Powell’s team (including Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne) in their attack on democratic elections, one that stole Chad Wolf’s emails as he helped Trump discredit election integrity efforts, one Trump is using in his attack on rule of law. The attack was first initiated years earlier, possibly as early as 2016. But so little is known about the attack — aside from that it targeted a number of government agencies and court filing systems — that I will bracket that for now.

This sets up a structure something like this:

What Mueller includes in his contacts with Russia section is possible (and in some cases, definite) attempted recruitment. That kind of thing is a constant.

In advance of the Russian attack, however, Russian entities may have been behind a number of efforts focused on Trump and his associates. Deripaska worked a brutal double game that made it more likely to get Manafort’s cooperation, witting or not. Joseph Mifsud brokered ties to Russian officials for George Papadopoulos — leading to an (aborted) plan to set up a meeting with Putin’s team in London. A former GRU officer and two sanctioned banks got involved in Felix Sater’s pitch of a Trump Tower to Cohen, resulting in Dmitry Peskov collecting proof of Trump’s willingness to work with GRU before the Hillary hack was ever revealed. Someone dangled stolen emails before Roger Stone, ultimately giving him an advance peek — in exchange for what, we don’t know — but Stone started pursuing a pardon for Julian Assange no later than November 15 (and probably as early as October 3).

With the exception of the Manafort pitch (which leveraged his financial desperation), none of those pitches from Russia — whether they were backed by Russian spooks or not — would have required anything more than recklessness and venality from the Trump side. For example, in January, when Cohen called Dmitry Peskov to ask for Putin’s help finalizing the Trump Tower deal, Trump probably doubted he was going to win and there was no reason to be particularly alarmed by the GRU tie; but after the revelation that GRU hacked the DNC, after Trump got the nomination, the existence of the January call became potentially devastating. The Coffee Boy bragged to diplomats from three different countries that Russia was going to attack Hillary, which looked dramatically different when WikiLeaks released the stolen DNC emails (which is when the Australians shared their knowledge of it).

If I’m right that Russia deliberately used some of the same infrastructure in the hack-and-leak and the Shadow Broker operation, it would serve as a stick unveiled at precisely the moment Roger Stone bit on the carrot of advanced access to John Podesta emails, basically tying Stone’s outreach to an attack on the NSA.

Similarly, the unveiling of the Vault 7 release, which WikiLeaks (or an intermediary between Josh Schulte and WikiLeaks) sat on from May 2016 until March 2017, made Stone’s sustained commitment to winning a pardon for Assange all the more damaging. It is unknown whether Russia got an advanced look at those files (which would have provided a way to identify CIA’s assets in Russia), but Assange used a Deripaska-linked attorney to try to negotiate immunity in advance of releasing the files, tying its release to Russia.

Along with Stone, this entire operation came to a focus on Don Jr.

Obviously, there’s the June 9 meeting pitch, which again requires nothing more than recklessness from Don Jr, but which resulted in him receiving a pitch for sanctions relief in exchange for dirt on Hillary. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Maria Butina similarly tried to pitch Trump’s son.

Don Jr, who joined some of the most rabid Trumpsters in validating the Prigozhin’s trolls, likewise would have represented an overlap between those trolling operations and the ones run by right wing extremists.

At least as interesting is the way Assange repeatedly incorporated Don Jr into his pitch. On September 20, WikiLeaks alerted Don Jr to an anti-Trump campaign and provided a password.

59. On or about September 20, 2016, at approximately 11 :59PM, Target Account 1 sent a private message to a high level individual associated with the Campaign (the “high-level · Campaign individual”). 4 The message stated: “A PAC run anti-Trump site ‘ ‘ is about to launch. The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war·PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘. See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”

Jr passed it onto the campaign, making it clear he had accessed the site. This was the basis of the (totally appropriate) prosecution declination for Jr. only disclosed after years of FOIA challenge by Jason Leopold.

In October, at a time when WikiLeaks was rebuffing Stone’s outreach, WikiLeaks repeatedly suggested Don Jr push out links (and recommend his father do so too). A figure in the Douglass Mackey DM threads by the name of P0TUSTrump kept pushing those links as if in response.

The day of the election, WikiLeaks pushed Don Jr to convince his dad not to concede.

Hi Don; if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred–as he has implied that he might do. He is also much more likely to keep his base alive and energised this way and if he is going to start a new network, showing how corrupt the old ones are is helpful. The discussion about the rigging can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption etc. We don’t like corruption ither [sic] and our publications are effective at proving that this and other forms of corruption exists.

On December 16, 2016, WikiLeaks pushed Jr to convince his dad to give Assange an Ambassadorship (which would amount to immunity).

Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well! In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC “That’s a really smart tough guy and the most famous australian you have! ” or something similar. They won’t do it, but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons. Background: justice4assange.com

As news of the June 9 meeting broke, WikiLeaks advised Jr to release his emails via WikiLeaks and also advised he reach out to Margaret Kunstler.

When these DMs were released on November 14, 2017, Assange tweeted out a follow-up to the December 2016 one, adding a threat by hashtagging, Vault8, the source code to the CIA files, a single example of which WikiLeaks had just released on November 9, 2017.

I read this as a concerted effort to shift from Stone to Don Jr. Whether Don Jr was actively soliciting this help or not, WikiLeaks made sure to tie Trump’s son to their plight, both publicly and privately.

Whatever else may have gone on between WikiLeaks and the failson, around the time that Mueller’s questions would have alerted Trump that he knew of the pardon pitches, at a time when WikiLeaks’ ties with Russia were under far greater scrutiny, Jr’s buddy Arthur Schwartz went after Cassandra Fairbanks, disabusing her of any hopes Trump would pardon Assange. She ultimately flew off to London to tell him.

None of this says that Don Jr conspired with Russia on the 2016 attack. What is says is that Russian assets systematically viewed him as an idiot that could be and was often useful. And Jr ended up connecting all the through-strands: he bridged the hack-and-leak and social media campaigns with the right wing lists, he reliably got his dad to act on his instructions, and then — as the cost of all this went up — Assange repeatedly targeted Jr as he increased the cost of the hack of the CIA, effectively extorting Jr as he started releasing CIA source code.

Even before I turn to the dossier, viewed this way, the Russian operation in 2016 isn’t so much about getting Trump elected. Rather, it’s about sowing irreparable polarization in the US that deliberately tied Trump’s people to the twin attacks on the Deep State — Shadow Brokers and Vault 7/8.

With little involvement beyond predictable recklessness and venality (and Don Jr’s stupidity), then, Russian assets implicated Trump’s people in attacks on the Deep State that raised the cost of their openness to Russian help in 2016, but which would have made any admissions by Trump all the more costly.

Russia didn’t need cooperation from Trump’s people (though they got it from at least Manafort and Stone and a certain idiot who proved useful). They just needed to make any already improbable conciliation impossible, impossible politically and impossible for a Narcissist like Trump to do. That would practically guarantee that Trump would attack the country to defend himself, his son, his ego.

That, in turn, would make the aftermath of the 2016 attack far more fertile for recruitment, because it would prioritize allegiance to Trump over allegiance to country.

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Another Maggie Haberman NYT Story Covers Up Oleg Deripaska’s Role

The reason it matters that Trump brought in Paul Manafort to work on his campaign again for “free” this year is that in 2016, Manafort shared the campaign’s strategy with his long-time business associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who (according to the Treasury Department) is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with [that] sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”

The reason it matters that Manafort — as he did in 2016 — claims he has stepped aside from that “free” job to find other ways to help Donald Trump is that he continued to coach the campaign even after he lost, projecting Trump and Russia’s own voter fraud claims onto Hillary Clinton. It also matters because after Trump won, Manafort met with a key Oleg Deripaska deputy to “recreat[e] old friendship.” After that meeting, he advised Reince Priebus to discredit the Russian investigation by focusing on the Steele dossier (recall that Deripaska had paid Steele to collect intelligence about Manafort before Fusion asked Steele to collect more broadly). That strategy worked spectacularly well, with every Russigate conspiracy theorist both making false claims about dossier reporting and, at the same time, claiming that because the dossier turned out to be false, everything else must be too.

The reason it matters that — even as he threatens to abandon NATO much less Ukraine — Trump welcomed Manafort onto his campaign again is that both at the meeting where Trump’s former campaign manager shared campaign strategy and for several years after, Manafort and Kilimnik kept talking about plans to carve up Ukraine. Kilimnik even told Manafort, in December 2016, that they could have peace in Ukraine within a few months with just a wink from Trump. Trump makes similar boasts all the time now.

You’ll find none of that in the NYT story reporting on Manafort’s announcement that he will help Trump in an unofficial role (or WaPo or CNN’s story either).

Seven paragraphs in, Maggie (writing with Jonathan Swan) describes that Manafort went to prison, but doesn’t bother to explain that he laundered money and violated FARA to hide that his influence peddling was backed by Russian-aligned oligarchs.

Mr. Manafort helped stave off efforts to thwart Mr. Trump’s nomination at the 2016 convention, went to prison for various financial crimes and was pardoned by Mr. Trump.

Hell, even just the thought of letting a massive tax cheat play a role in his campaign should be a key focus; instead, NYT brushes that off as, “various financial crimes.”

Three paragraphs later Maggie suggests some tie between those pro-Russian oligarchs and Manafort being “ensnared” by Mueller, but doesn’t describe what Mueller found.

In August 2016, he was ousted in part over headlines about his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Later, Mr. Manafort was ensnared in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

Two paragraphs latter, Maggie and Swan suggest that five advisors, most quite senior (George Papadoloulos, Gates, Manafort, Michael Cohen, and Roger Stone) who were sentenced to prison equate to a “few,”

Mr. Manafort was one of only a few Trump advisers who were sentenced to prison, for crimes unrelated to the campaign.

That doesn’t count the two other advisors from 2016 (Mike Flynn and Elliot Broidy) who were pardoned before they were sentenced, and the three (Allen Weisselberg, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navarro) who have more recently been sentenced to prison.

I mean, sure, compared to the dozens of senior GOP officials currently facing prosecution for allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election and the hundreds of Trump devotees already sentenced for 2020, five or seven or whatever is teeny, but “few”? Since when did having even a few — much less seven — advisors from one campaign get convicted merit the word, “only”?

Maggie (and Swan) never mention that Amy Berman Jackson found that Paul Manafort lied to cover up the details of his relations with Kilimnik in 2016, a lie about something directly related to the election, but that Mueller simply chose not to prosecute those lies.

The sole mention of Mueller’s focus pertained to something that Mueller found Manafort didn’t orchestrate: the change in the platform on Ukraine.

[I]n a controversy that received little attention at the time, language was inserted into the platform watering down language supporting Ukraine with military aid against Russian incursions. That language change was among the issues Mr. Mueller sought information about during his investigation.

In other words, Maggie and Swan buried the real reason why Manafort threatened — and still threatens, given past history — to discredit Trump’s campaign or undermine US democracy: Wittingly or not — we don’t know because of the lies and the pardon — he was at the center of a key part of the Russian attack on American democracy.

Journalists should not simply bury that.

Worse, too, this is not the first time that a story bearing Maggie’s byline has covered up Manafort’s tie to Deripaska in all this. This story not only tried to shift the timing of the August 2 meeting Manafort had with Kilimnik, but it took out language describing Kilimnik sending Deripaska polling data as well as to Manafort’s Ukranian benefactors. (Since that story, a bunch of files liberated by Jason Leopold have shown Manafort’s efforts to suck up to Deripaska.)

A correction was made on Jan. 9, 2019:

A previous version of this article misidentified the people to whom Paul Manafort wanted a Russian associate to send polling data. Mr. Manafort wanted the data sent to two Ukrainian oligarchs, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, not to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin.

The story remains a source of disinformation and confusion five years later.

As I showed in this post, that change was made in the same period that Rick Gates, immediately after Bill Barr’s confirmation, started to revert his story to what it had been when he was still getting caught in false stories in interview after interview.

I get that outlets telling this story (WaPo and CNN were no better) want to avoid relitigating the Russian investigation. I get that Trump always complains when journalists report on the actual facts disclosed by the Russian investigation and the open questions his pardons guaranteed would never be answered.

That’s not a reason to bury it all. Burying these facts is nothing more than capitulating to a bully.

Holding Trump accountable for his past documented abuses should be the easy part of journalism.

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How Josh Dawsey Downplays Paul Manafort’s Ties to Alleged Russian Spies

Josh Dawsey’s report that Trump plans to hire convicted money launderer and former business partner of an alleged Russian spy Paul Manafort to work on his campaign — possibly to help fundraising!!! — makes all the years of shitty coverage of the Russian investigation an urgent problem again.

The job discussions have largely centered around the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee in July and could include Manafort playing a role in fundraising for the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.

Dawsey gets big and little things wrong in his report. For example, he claims that Manafort was sentenced to around four years in prison after which he was released under COVID protocols.

Manafort was found guilty of hiding millions he made lobbying on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians in overseas bank accounts, then falsifying his finances to get loans when his patrons lost power. He was originally sentenced to about four years in prison but was released early to home confinement due to the coronavirus before he was pardoned by Trump.

In reality, Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Manafort to 73 months (60 months concurrent with his EDVA sentence, and 13 months consecutive to that; his release to home confinement did not adhere to the priorities for release at the time).

 For the reasons stated on the record in open Court Defendant’s 540 Motion for Reconsideration is DENIED. Count 1ssss: Sentenced to Sixty (60) months incarceration. The sentence is to run concurrent to Thirty (30) months of the sentence previously imposed by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia which has already accounted for the credit defendant is due for time served. Special Assessment of $100.00 was imposed. Count 2ssss: Sentenced to Thirteen (13) months incarceration, to be served consecutively to the sentence on Count One (1).

Predictably, though, it is in downplaying the import of Manafort’s ties to Russian spies where Dawsey really fails.

During the 2016 campaign, Manafort also allegedly shared Trump campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian who the U.S. government said had ties to Russian intelligence. The special counsel accused Manafort of lying to the FBI about his interactions with Kilimnik, even after Manafort had said he would cooperate and provide truthful information.

Manafort also allegedly worked with Kilimnik to spread Russian disinformation that it was actually Ukraine who interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

In a report issued in 2020, the Senate bipartisan committee that investigated Russian interference found that “Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.”

First, there is absolutely no dispute that Manafort sent campaign data to Kilimnik to share with his Ukrainian backers and Oleg Deripaska. Manafort simply maintained that he only instructed Rick Gates to share public data (Kilimnik’s other business partner, Sam Patten, said Manafort shared internal data). But the polling data has never been the key point. They key point was, weeks before the Russians started stealing Hillary’s internal modeling, Manafort told Kilimnik how he planned to win the race in the swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and also Minnesota — where Trump ultimately did win it.

Dawsey of course is silent about the other two undisputed aspects of the August 2, 2016 meeting. Kilimnik pitched Manafort on a plan to carve up Ukraine (Manafort ultimately admitted that Kilimnik did; he just claimed he didn’t buy into the plan at that point). And Manafort talked about how to get paid by his Ukrainian backers and get his debt with Oleg Deripaska relieved.

That is, the meeting at least maps the outline of a quid pro quo: a commitment to carve up Ukraine in exchange for millions and help winning the election.

And Robert Mueller didn’t just accuse Manafort of lying during the period when he was supposed to be cooperating. Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that he had.

Paul Manafort lied to cover up what really happened between him and Konstantin Kilimnik, and Donald Trump pardoned Manafort to reward those lies.

Finally, it’s not that, “U.S. government said [Kilimnik] had ties to Russian intelligence.” In 2021, after Kilimnik allegedly interfered in a second US election, Treasury stated as fact that Kilimnik was Russian intelligence.

Konstantin Kilimnik (Kilimnik) is a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant and known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2018, Kilimnik was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice regarding unregistered lobbying work. Kilimnik has also sought to assist designated former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. At Yanukovych’s direction, Kilimnik sought to institute a plan that would return Yanukovych to power in Ukraine.

Kilimnik was designated pursuant to E.O. 13848 for having engaged in foreign interference in the U.S. 2020 presidential election. Kilimnik was also designated pursuant to E.O. 13660 for acting for or on behalf of Yanukovych. Yanukovych, who is currently hiding in exile in Russia, was designated in 2014 pursuant to E.O. 13660 for his role in violating Ukrainian sovereignty. [my emphasis]

We also know, from the Charles McGonigal sentencing materials, that by 2017, the Intelligence Community had judged Oleg Deripaska to be “associated” with a Russian intelligence agency, too.

Among other things, in May 2017, McGonigal received a then-classified email stating that Deripaska was associated with a Russian intelligence agency, and possibly involved in that agency’s coup attempt in another country. (PSR ¶ 19).

By context, the agency must be GRU and the attempted coup must be Montenegro, a country implicated in McGonigal’s other prosecution — one where Manafort had an extensive history with Deripaska and one mentioned in Andrew Weissmann’s Team M report.

Donald Trump is considering hiring the former business partner of two alleged Russian spies, admitted money launderer Paul Manafort, to help with fundraising.

Way back in 2021, Avril Haines committed to declassifying parts of the SSCI Report that remained then, and still remain, redacted. It’s time to unseal those details describing why the spooks were so convinced that Kilimnik was, himself, a Russian spy.

Related posts

Deza: Oleg Deripaska’s Double Game

The Ongoing Investigation into Paul Manafort’s Handlers

Four Stories about Paul Manafort from Andrew Weissmann’s Team M

Paul Manafort Remains a Bigger Scandal than Hunter Biden

 

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But Her Emails: How Trump Trained the GOP to Hate Rule of Law 1

Note: I haven’t quite finished spinning my Ball of Thread out of which I will explain how Trump trained the GOP to hate rule of law. But for a number of reasons — this great Heather Cox Richardson piece marking the Maidan anniversary and Paul Manafort’s role in it, the arrest of Alexander Smirnov in conjunction with a 2020 attempt, assisted by Bill Barr, to frame Joe Biden, and the heightened urgency of the fate of Ukraine — I thought I’d publish this now.

In an alternate reality, the final report laying out how Trump knowingly requested and accepted help — help he may have denied, but which did come from Russia — to win the 2016 election might have started with a nod to these exhibits, submitted in conjunction with Paul Manafort’s guilty plea on September 14, 2018.

The criminal information and exhibits describe Manafort’s efforts to help Viktor Yanukovych neutralize his pro-Western female opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, first by prosecuting her for corruption, then by launching an increasingly complex transnational influence operation to “plant some stink on Tymo” to justify the prosecution. The exhibits describe how Manafort tried to spin a Skadden Arps report finding that Tymoshenko’s criminal intent “is almost non-existent,” and then how Manafort criminally covered up that effort at spin. There’s even a passage describing how Manafort manufactured a claim that Tymoshenko was antisemitic by getting an Israeli to make a statement to the NYPost.

“Bada bing bada boom,” Manafort bragged about his success in manufacturing a fake election scandal.

It was all an effort, Manafort described, to claim Ukraine was building a “‘rule of law’ democracy” so the EU and US would ignore Yanukovich’s human rights violations.

In that same alternate reality, Manafort would have honored his plea deal, and in the days following Manafort’s September 14 plea, he would have elaborated on the things he told prosecutors in the days leading up to it and some others they likely wanted to know. He might have explained how his Ukrainian backers and probably Konstantin Kilimnik — who a number of people, but not Manafort, admitted might be a Russian spy — seemed to know by December 2015 that Manafort would run Donald Trump’s campaign. Manafort might have revealed more about his meeting with Kilimnik on August 2, 2016, at which he reviewed polling that showed the key to winning was driving up Hillary’s negatives; Manafort might also have explained the relationship between that election discussion and two other topics discussed that night: how he would get paid millions and Kilimnik’s plan to carve up Ukraine for Russia’s benefit. If Manafort had fulfilled his plea deal, he might have explained what his long-time friend Roger Stone pitched to him on August 3, the day after that secret cigar bar meeting, as a way to “save Trump’s ass.”

He might have said more than he otherwise did about how Stone learned, within a few weeks after that August 3 conversation, that WikiLeaks would be dropping emails stolen from John Podesta that would show, Stone hoped, that Hillary’s campaign manager had the same kind of Russian exposures that Manafort did.

Manafort would be vindicated because he had to leave the campaign for being too pro-Russian, and this would show that Podesta also had links to Russia and would have to leave.

None of that happened.

Manafort seems to have decided — perhaps after a conversation his attorney had with Rudy Giuliani around the same day he flipped — to string out Mueller’s prosecutors until after the midterms. After the election Trump fired Jeff Sessions and ultimately replaced him with someone who would shut down the investigation and see to it that Manafort’s imprisonment remained comfortable, and not just comfortable, but amenable to further collusion with Rudy on schemes that would frame Hunter Biden for tax and influence peddling crimes in Ukraine, until such time as Trump could pardon his former campaign manager for tax and influence peddling crimes in Ukraine.

In this alternate reality, then, the story of how Trump taught Republicans to hate rule of law might start with a story of how his campaign manager had spun corruption as rule of law in the past, in Ukraine, and how the 2016 election did something similar in the US.

But then, Republicans didn’t need Paul Manafort’s help to demonize Hillary Clinton. That had been a core focus of the Republican party since her spouse’s presidency. That unrelenting focus on criminalizing the Clintons (and via that narrative, dehumanizing Democrats, thereby heightening polarization) had been nourished over three decades in an increasingly airtight Fox News bubble, one newly challenged by even sloppier, more radical propaganda outlets.

In the years before the election contest with Trump, the right wing propaganda machine manufactured two criminal investigations into Hillary to “plant some stink” on her.

In January 2016 — fifteen years after DOJ first investigated the Clinton Foundation  — three different FBI offices opened investigations into the Clinton Foundation based entirely or substantially on Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. Notably. At least one of the FBI agents handling an informant on that investigation was affirmatively pro-Trump. “I saw a lot of scared MFers on … [my way to work] this morning,” one gloated the day after the election. “Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.” As NYT first reported, that investigation remained open until after Trump left office.

And by the time Manafort joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016, House Republicans were three years into their endless Benghazi investigations. After years of pushing, that had morphed into the investigation into Hillary’s private server, which would merge right into the public and private pursuit of Hillary’s deleted emails. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump begged a hostile country to find those deleted emails for him, even as his ascendant National Security Advisor worked with a Senate staffer to find out of hostile powers had gotten copies.

Details of both investigations into Hillary leaked, with a slew of stories (one, two, three) fed through Devlin Barrett (then still at WSJ) in the days before the election.

Of course it was Jim Comey who did the real damage, first by usurping DOJ’s authority to issue a prosecutorial decision and then planting some stink on Hillary while doing so. That led to a series of congressional hearings, and ultimately to the reopening of the investigation, predictably leaking days before the election.

Among the many but-fors that decided that election, Comey’s actions were easily the most important. Comey did this — made repeated attempts to stave off claims of partisanship — in a naive bid he could convince the hoards chanting “Lock her up!” of the legitimacy of the decision not to charge.

We’ll never know, but that effort, the orchestrated campaign to criminalize Hillary followed by a ham-handed effort to convince right wingers of the legitimacy of a considered prosecutorial decision, by itself, may have been enough to carry Trump to victory.

This, then, was the raw material Russia exploited in 2016 — stoking both sides of a deep partisan divide fueled by two decades of a propaganda focused on criminalizing Hillary Clinton.

The Republicans proved in that election (or reconfirmed the Whitewater test) that if only they repeated allegations often enough, loudly enough, preferably over and over again in Congress, eventually some criminal investigation would result, a criminal investigation that Republicans could then amplify.

The Republicans came to that election with an unshakeable belief that Hillary was a criminal and if DOJ said she wasn’t, there must be something wrong with DOJ, not any shortcomings in the evidentiary case.

And then Russia dropped a match on that already flaming bonfire.

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