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On 702, NSA Wants to Assure You You’re Not a Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target Target

NSA just released a touchy-feely Q&A, complete with a touchy-feely image of the NSA, explaining “the Impact of Section 702 on the Typical American.”

I shall now shred it.

First note that this document deals with 702? It should be dealing with Title VII, because the entire thing gets reauthorized by 702 reauthorization. That means Sections 704 and 705(b), which are used to target Americans, will be reauthorized. And they have had egregious problems in recent years (even if the problems only affect some subset of around 300 Americans). Sure, Paul Manafort and Carter Page are not your “typical” Americans, but abuses against them would be problematic for reasons that could affect Americans (not least that they could fuck up the Mueller probe if FISA disclosure for defendants weren’t so broken).

The piece starts by talking about how the IC uses 702 to “hunt” for information on “adversaries,” which it suggests include terrorists and hackers.

The U.S. Intelligence Community relies on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the constant hunt for information about foreign adversaries determined to harm the nation or our allies. The National Security Agency (NSA), for example, uses this law to target terrorists and thwart their plans. In a time of increasing cyber threats, Section 702 also aids the Intelligence Community’s cybersecurity efforts.

Somehow, it neglects to mention the foreign government certificate — which can target people who aren’t “adversaries” at all, but instead foreign muckety mucks we want to know about — or the counterproliferation certificate — which can target businesses of all kinds that deal in dual use technologies. Not to mention the SysAdmins that it might target for all these purposes.

The piece then lays out in two paragraphs and six questions (I include just one below) the basic principles that 702 can only “target” foreigners overseas.

Under Section 702, the government cannot target a U.S. person anywhere in the world, or any person located in the United States.

Under Section 702, NSA can target foreigners reasonably believed to be located outside the United States only if it has a basis to believe it will acquire certain types of foreign intelligence information that have been authorized for collection.

[snip]

Q: Can I, as an American, be the target of Section 702 surveillance?

A: No. As an American citizen, you cannot be the target of surveillance under Section 702. Even if you were not an American, you could not be targeted under Section 702 if you were located in the United States.

Effectively, this passage might as well say, “target target target target target target target target target target
target target target target target target target target target,” which is how many times (19) the word is used in the touchy-feely piece. The word “incidental” appears just once, where it entertains what happens if one of “Mary’s” foreign relatives were in a terrorist organization.

Q: One of Mary’s foreign relatives in South America is a member of an international terrorist group. Could Mary’s conversations with that relative be collected under Section 702?

A: Yes, it’s possible, if the U.S. government is aware of the relative’s membership in a terrorist group and the relative is one of the 106,000 targets under Section 702. However, even if this scenario occurred, there would still be protections in place for Mary, a U.S. citizen, if her conversations with that target were incidentally intercepted. For example:

U.S. intelligence agencies’ court-approved minimization procedures are specifically designed to protect the privacy of U.S. persons by, among other things, limiting the circumstances in which NSA can include the identity of a U.S. person in an intelligence report. Moreover, even where those procedures allow the NSA to include the identity of a U.S. person in an intelligence report, NSA frequently substitutes the U.S. person identity with a generic phrase or term, such as “U.S. person 1” or “a named U.S. person.” NSA calls this “masking” the identity of the U.S. person.

There are also what’s known as “age-off requirements”: After a certain period of time, the IC must delete any unminimized Section 702 information, regardless of the nationality of the communicants.

I guess the NSA figured if they used “Fatima,” whose relatives were in Syria, this scenario would be too obvious?

Yet in this, the only discussion of “incidental” collection, the NSA doesn’t explain how it is used — for example to find informants (meaning Fatima might be coerced into informing on her mosque if she discussed her tax dodging with her cousin) or to find 2nd degree associates (meaning Fatima’s friend in the US, Mohammed, might get an FBI visit because Fatima’s cousin in Syria is in ISIS). It also doesn’t explain that the “age-off” is five years, if Fatima is lucky enough to avoid having the FBI deem her conversations with her cousin in Syria interesting. If not, the data will sit on an FBI server for 30 years, ready to provide an excuse to give Fatima extra attention next time some bigot gets worried because he sees her taking pictures at Disney World.

Curiously, while the NSA doesn’t address the disproportionate impact of 702 on Muslims, it does pretend to address the disproportionate impact on Asians or their family members — people like like Xiaoxiang Xi and Keith Gartenlaub.

Q: Could the government target my colleague, who is a citizen of an Asian country, as a pretext to collect my communications under Section 702?

A: No. That would be considered “reverse targeting” and is prohibited.

Thanks to Ron Wyden, we know how cynically misleading this answer is. He explained in the SSCI 702 reauthorization bill report that the government may,

conduct unlimited warrantless searches on Americans, disseminate the results of those searches, and use that information against those Americans, so long as it has any justification at all for targeting the foreigner.

Effectively, the government has morphed the “significant purpose” logic from the PATRIOT Act onto 702, meaning collecting foreign intelligence doesn’t have to be the sole purpose of targeting a foreigner; learning about what an American is doing, such as a scientist engaging in scientific discussion, can be one purpose of the targeting.

After dealing with unmasking, the NSA then performs the always cynical move of asking whether the NSA can query US person content.

Q: Can NSA use my information to query lawfully collected 702 data?

A: NSA can query already lawfully collected Section 702 information using a U.S. person’s name or identifier (such as an e-mail account or phone number) only if the query is reasonably designed to identify foreign intelligence information.

However, a U.S. person is still afforded protection. The justification for the query must be documented. The process for conducting a query is also subject to internal controls. Such queries are reviewed by the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to ensure they meet the relevant legal requirements. Additionally, if the query was subsequently identified as being improper, it would be reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and to Congress.

This passage is absolutely correct. But also absolutely beside the point, because NSA sends a significant chunk of its collection to the FBI where it can be searched to assess leads and search for evidence of crimes, and where queries get nowhere near the kind of oversight that NSA queries get.

Then the piece tries to explain the need for all the secrecy.

Q: Terrorists aim to hurt Americans and our allies, so why doesn’t the Intelligence Community share more Section 702 information about how the IC goes after them?

A: The Intelligence Community has dramatically enhanced transparency, especially regarding its implementation of Section 702. Thousands of pages of key documents have been officially released, and are available on IC on the Record. The public has more information than ever before on how the IC uses this critical foreign surveillance authority. That said, the IC must continue to protect classified information. This includes specifics on whether or not it has collected information about any particular individual.

If terrorists could find out that NSA had intercepted their communications, terrorists would likely change their communications methods to avoid further detection.

This is, partly, a straw man. People aren’t really asking to know NSA’s individual targets. They’re asking to know whether the government has back doored their iPhones via demands under FISA, or whether the NSA is collecting on the 430,000 Americans that use Tor every day, or if they’re also using this “foreign intelligence” collection program to hunt Americans buying drugs on Dark Markets or even BLM activists that our racist Attorney General has deemed a threat to national security. And in the name of keeping secrets from terrorists (who actually have the feedback mechanism of observing what gets their associates drone-killed to learn what gets collected), the government is refusing to admit that the answer to all those questions is yes: yes, the government has back doored our iPhones, yes, the government is spying on the 430,000 Americans that use Tor, and yes, for those who use Tor to buy drugs, they may even use 702 data to prosecute you.

Finally, the NSA pretends that everyone else in the world has a program just like this.

Q: Is the U.S. government the only one in the world with intercept programs like 702?

A: No. Many other countries have intelligence surveillance intercept programs, nearly all of which have far fewer privacy protections. Section 702 and its supporting policies and practices stand out in terms of strength of oversight, privacy protections, and public transparency.

It is true that other countries have “intercept programs,” but with the exception of China and Russia’s access to domestic Internet companies, no other country has a program “like 702” that, by virtue of the United States hosting the world’s most popular Internet companies, gives the US the luxury of spying on the rest of the world using a nice note to Google rather than having to hack users individually (or hack all users, as Russia did with Yahoo).

So, yes, the NSA has now offered a picture of itself, literally and metaphorically, that minimizes the scope, the thousands of spies it employs, and the reach, both domestic and global. But it’s a profoundly misleading picture.

The Bail Fight that Manafort and Gates Can’t Win

Three weeks after their indictment, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are still fighting over their bail conditions.

That was most recently demonstrated by the government’s response to Gates’ request for permission to (basically) serve as house husband, with leave to spend over two hours every day to ferrying his kids to school while purportedly under house arrest, a motion the court denied. The government objected to the request because “To date, only the defendant’s signature secures his bond (together with his house arrest),” though the problem might be more accurately described as Gates fucking around with bail negotiations, probably because he can’t substantiate his assets in such a way that they can be posted for bail.

In a telephone call late on the afternoon of November 15, 2017, defense counsel informed the government that they intended to make a bail modification motion and sought the government’s position. The government responded that it was not able to take a position until it had the opportunity to review the defendant’s motion.

[snip]

Although more than two weeks have passed since the defendant’s arrest, he has not completed any paperwork to post his house, or any other property, and has failed to answer a series of questions about his assets.

[snip]

Only yesterday did the defendant offer to arrange interviews of his two proposed non-family-member sureties, both of whom apparently live outside the Washington, D.C. area.3 Finally, the government continues to have concerns about the accuracy of the defendant’s account of his net assets, which has evolved from the representation that he had “limited assets that include only a single home,” ECF#21 at 5; to his most recent Personal Financial Statement, which included a securities/brokerage account valued at more than $1.3 million and a total net worth of more than $3.4 million.

3 Those interviews are now scheduled for Thursday, November 16, 2017. Counsel has noted that one proposed surety already serves as a surety for a relative who is currently charged in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, a circumstance that, at least at first blush, raises certain concerns.

Though it was even more clearly laid out in the government’s November 5 opposition to Manafort’s request to change his bail conditions, in which the government laid out the difficulties of finding $10 million that Manafort can post for bail. In that they laid out three different line items in Manafort’s assets, two of which he wants to post for bail, that the government believes are inflated.

A. 5th Avenue, New York, NY (claimed net asset value $3 million):

The government does not presently have sufficient information to assess the claimed net asset value of this property, or even to be confident that the property has equity in it at all. Based on communications with Manafort’s counsel, the government understands that the $3 million net asset value is based on a fair market value of $6 million, reduced by a $3 million mortgage on the property obtained from UBS. This fair market value is not, however, backed by an appraisal or even any open source estimates (which in many cases may not be particularly accurate). Rather, Manafort provided the government with an open source estimate for a different unit in the building, listed as approximately $4.5 million, which Manafort believes is below the fair market value of his own unit, which is on a higher floor. Meanwhile, the government has searched open source real estate value estimators and found one that lists the value of Manafort’s own unit as $2.5 million, and another that lists the value as $2.7 million.

Until an independent appraisal of the property is obtained, the government cannot agree that this property is appropriate as a security.

[snip]

C. St. James Drive, Palm Beach Gardens, FL (claimed net asset value $1.5 million):

Based on the information available to the government, we are comfortable with the use of this property as security, although the open source estimate provided to the government by Manafort shows a fair market value of $1.25 million rather than $1.5 million. As a condition of using this property as security, Manafort and his wife should be required to waive any homestead exemption that may be available under Florida law and to agree not to encumber the property in any way.

[snip]

Although Manafort has provided the government with a spreadsheet listing his total assets at approximately $28 million, the government has yet to substantiate Manafort’s net worth. Indeed, we continue to have questions about that sum. For example, with respect to a property held by Manafort in Brooklyn, he asserted the value at $9 million, when a recent appraisal comes in at substantially lower (in the $5 to $6 million range). The spreadsheet provided by Manafort also lists values of other assets, such as securities, that do not match information available to the government or that cannot be substantiated at this time. Additionally, in prior years, through at least 2014, Manafort reported a $6 million asset in Ukraine on his tax returns; Manafort has claimed that it lost all value. In short, the government seeks to further understand the full extent of Manafort’s wealth.

They’re doing this while appearing quite reasonable (for example, letting Manafort’s wife and daughter serve as sureties, not to mention letting them stay out of jail altogether). It seems increasingly clear why: because the very process of trying to negotiate bail, for both men, is involving a whole lot of disclosure — which presumably replicates documentation the government has collected on its own — of further money laundering. In just those three paragraphs, for example, the government has laid out almost $10 million in money that Manafort has either vanished or lost as his money laundering vehicles lose value.

Meanwhile Bloomberg has a piece — the long overdue counterpart to my (still) favorite piece of Manafort journalism, the Weekly Standard piece showing it is impossible to spend $1 million on antique rugs in Alexandria — that lays out the discrepancies between the amounts the indictment say Manafort spent on his homes in the Hamptons and Florida and what his contractors reported would be spent.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in his indictment, says that a Hamptons firm got $5.4 million in wire transfers from Cyprus over 71 payments. But building permits over the same period examined by Bloomberg show that renovations by Manafort’s Hamptons’ contractor were estimated to cost $1.2 million. That’s less than a quarter of what was ultimately sent—an apparent discrepancy that could draw scrutiny from investigators.

[snip]

Building permits in Southampton estimate that the cost of SP & C’s renovations would come to $687,000. In Brooklyn, the work is estimated to cost $527,900 though it isn’t clear whether SP & C or another contractor completed the project. Either way, the estimates fall more than $4 million short of the amount “Vendor A” was paid.

[snip]

During an inspection in April 2013, the Southampton assessor determined that the replacement cost of the pool house was $132,172, a less than a third of the quoted price. A pergola, estimated to cost $35,000, would cost $16,550 to replace by the assessor.

Lisa Goree, Southampton’s sole assessor, said renovation costs aren’t necessarily reflected in a home’s assessed value. “He could spend $1 million on a statue in front of the house,” she said. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to increase the assessment by a million dollars.”

There is also a gap between renovation estimates on Manafort’s Florida 3,300-square-foot house—located in a gated community overlooking a golf course and palm-lined canal—and the amount paid to a “Vendor J, a contractor in Florida,” according to the indictment. He wired $432,487 to the Florida contractor; building permits estimate that renovations on his Palm Beach Gardens house would cost about $140,000.

Incidentally, a friend told me one of her friends has been at the Hamptons property, and was led to believe it was actually owned by Manafort’s nephew.

I feel like Mueller’s prosecutors are playing with these two men as cats play with balls, just patiently batting them around, waiting for the inevitable admission that they can’t make bail because they don’t have assets they can put up because everything they own has been laundered. At which point, after getting the judge rule over and over that they’re flight risks, I suppose the government will move to throw them in the pokey, which will finally get them to consider flipping.

Update: Totally unrelated, but totally related, Global Witness has an investigation of how Trump has partnered with a whole lot of mobsters who use his Panama property as a laundering vehicle.

Update: Here we are Monday and Gates and Manafort still haven’t found anything liquid to put up as bail. Not only that, but in a filing raising a potential conflict with one of Gates’ money laundering expert lawyers, prosecutors reveal Gates is trying to have his partner from a movie-related firm’s brother serve as surety while also doing so for the partner.

Marc Brown, the brother of defendant Steven Brown, was proposed by Gates as a potential surety despite the facts that they seemingly do not have a significant relationship, they have not had regular contact over the past ten years, and Marc Brown currently serves as a surety for his brother Steven in his ongoing criminal prosecution in New York. In an interview with the Special Counsel’s Office on November 16, Marc Brown listed as a reason for seeking to support Gates that they belonged to the same fraternity (although they did not attend the same college) and that, as such, he felt duty bound to help Gates. Of note, Marc Brown’s financial assets were significantly lower, almost by half, than previously represented by Gates.

Be Wary of Jumping on the Changing Veselnitskaya Claims

Boy oh boy, Natalia Vesenitskaya continues to work the press.

Veselnitskaya reverses a previous claim that the June 9, 2016 meeting didn’t mention the election

Bloomberg has a story based on a two and a half hour interview — on an unspecified date — with the Russian lawyer who met with Don Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016. In it, she adds to the story she has told in the past to claim that Don Jr suggested the US might revisit the Magnitsky sanctions if his dad got elected.

A Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump’s oldest son last year says he indicated that a law targeting Russia could be re-examined if his father won the election and asked her for written evidence that illegal proceeds went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, said in a two-and-a-half-hour interview in Moscow that she would tell these and other things to the Senate Judiciary Committee on condition that her answers be made public, something it hasn’t agreed to. She has received scores of questions from the committee, which is investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Veselnitskaya said she’s also ready — if asked — to testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Here’s the line of the story that, if accurate, introduces a damning new aspect of the story.

“Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it,’’ Trump Jr. said of the 2012 law, she recalled. “I understand our side may have messed up, but it’ll take a long time to get to the bottom of it,” he added, according to her.

Perhaps my favorite detail of the story, however, is that she suggests Paul Manafort (the only one known to have taken contemporaneous notes from the meeting) appeared to have been asleep, leaving Don Jr as the only woke witness to what went down.

Kushner left after a few minutes and Manafort appeared to have fallen asleep. “The meeting was a failure; none of us understood what the point of it had been,’’ Veselnitskaya said, adding she had no further contacts with the Trump campaign.

As Bill Browder noted, this marks a change in her story, one which must be contextualized with recent events.

In the days immediately after the story broke, Veselnitskaya released a statement saying nothing about the presidential election came up.

Ms. Veselnitskaya said in a statement on Saturday that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” was discussed at the Trump Tower meeting. She recalled that after about 10 minutes, either Mr. Kushner or Mr. Manafort left the room.

She said she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”

Now, she’s claiming different. I’d suggest that this claim, like all that have gone before, should be treated really really skeptically — especially published in the wake of allegations that campaign officials would have walked into that meeting expecting “dirt” to mean emails, not to mention as Veselnitskaya makes another bid to come to the US and Trump prepares to meet directly with Putin.

Veselnitskaya makes this claim as she tries to come to the US and Agalarov attempts to shape the story

Here’s what the recent timeline looks like:

October 4: Burr was asked last month about Veselnitskaya, and suggested SSCI had already reached out.

Q: Is the Russian attorney going to come through, the Russian who met with Donald Trump Jr., she’s offered to come in open committee. Have you reached out to her? Is she one of the 25 on your list?

Burr: How do you know we haven’t already [heard from] her?

October 9: A CNN story produced with involvement of Scott Balber, who is currently representing Aras and Amin Agalarov (who set up the June 9 meeting in the first place), but who has represented Trump in the past, attempts to rebut the public comments and presumed testimony of Rod Goldstone on two points. First, that the meeting was about dealing dirt, and second, that it was about anything but the Magnitsky sanctions.

The documents were provided by Scott Balber, who represents Aras and Emin Agalarov, the billionaire real estate developer and his pop star son who requested the June 2016 meeting.

Balber, who went to Moscow to obtain the documents from Veselnitskaya, said in an interview with CNN that the emails and talking points show she was focused on repealing the Magnitsky Act, not providing damaging information on Clinton.
The message was muddled, Balber said, when it was passed like a game of telephone from Veselnitskaya through the Agalarovs to Goldstone.

Balber also suggested that Goldstone “probably exaggerated and maybe willfully contorted the facts for the purpose of making the meeting interesting to the Trump people.”

Goldstone declined to comment for this story.

“The documents and what she told me are consistent with my client’s understanding of the purpose of the meeting which was from the beginning and at all times thereafter about her efforts to launch a legislative review of the Magnitsky Act,” Balber said.

October 18: Chuck Grassley sends a long list of questions to Veselnitskaya, demanding a response to schedule a transcribed, non-public interview, by October 20. Incidentally, I find this to be the most curious of the questions.

Did Mr. Goldstone or anyone else discuss a proposal regarding Vkontakte (VK) during the June 9, 2016 meeting?

October 19: In remarks in Sochi, amid a complaint about Magnitsky sanctions, Putin tells listeners to look at American sources for details of Ziff political contributions, closely mirroring the talking points now claimed to derived from Veselnitskaya.

What do I think about what you have just said, about Canada joining or wanting to join, or about somebody else wanting to do it? These are all some very unconstructive political games over things, which are in essence not what they look like, to be treated in such a way or to fuss about so much. What lies underneath these events? Underneath are the criminal activities of an entire gang led by one particular man, I believe Browder is his name, who lived in the Russian Federation for ten years as a tourist and conducted activities, which were on the verge of being illegal, by buying Russian company stock without any right to do so, not being a Russian resident, and by moving tens and hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country and hence avoiding any taxes not only here but in the United States as well.

According to open sources, I mean American open sources, please look up Ziff Brothers, the company Mr Browder was connected with, which has been sponsoring the Democratic Party and, substantially less, the Republican Party during recent years. I think the latest transfer, in the open sources I mean, was $1,200,000 for the Democratic Party. This is how they protect themselves.

In Russia, Mr Browder was sentenced in his absence to 9 years in prison for his scam. However, no one is working on it. Our prosecution has already turned to the appropriate US agencies such as the Department of Justice and the Office of the Attorney General for certain information so we can work together on this. However, there is simply no response. This is just used to blow up more anti-Russian hysteria. Nobody wants to look into the matter, into what is actually beneath it. At the bottom of it, as usual, is crime, deception and theft.

October 27: Stories that note Veselnitskaya crafted the talking points on Browder and Ziff, which were then picked up by Russia’s prosecutor general Yuri Chaika, are used to suggest that that means Veselnitskaya got the talking points she wrote from Chaika. In conjunction, several iterations of the talking points are released (but not the ones she originally wrote). Also, Balber again weighs in to distance Agalarov.

Donald Trump Jr. has dismissed Mr. Goldstone’s emails as “goosed-up.” Mr. Balber blamed miscommunication among those arranging the meeting. “Mr. Agalarov unequivocally, absolutely, never spoke to Mr. Chaika or his office about these issues,” he said.

October 30: George Papadopoulos plea makes it clear that that Papadopoulos originally lied to the FBI to hide two things: 1) attempts in the weeks and months after March 31, 2016 to set up meetings with Russians, and 2) knowledge that Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. On the same day, Paul Manafort is indicted, raising the possibility he’ll flip on Trump. Also on same day, government informs SDNY that Prevezon has not paid its fine from May settlement, and asks for the case to be reopened.

October 31: Quinn Emanuel, representing Prevezon, asks that Veselnitskaya be given immigration parole for hearing.

November 2: Government objects to Prevezon request for immigration parole for Vesenitskaya, reiterating in the process they had objected to her entry in 2016, but that she got immigration parole in any case, which she used to attend the June 9 meeting.

The Government, however, has previously refused to extend immigration parole to Katsyv and Veselnitskaya during time periods when they were not to be witnesses. In particular, in the spring of 2016, then-counsel for Prevezon asked the Government to consent to parole for Katsyv and Veselnitskaya to prepare for and attend oral arguments in the Second Circuit on Hermitage’s motion to disqualify Prevezon’s counsel. Because there was no testimony to be given at a Second Circuit oral argument, the Government refused to grant parole to Katsyv or Veselnitskaya for that period. See Ex. A (March 9, 2016 letter to John Moscow).1

Subsequently, according to public news reports, Veselnitskaya obtained a visa from the State Department allowing her to enter the United States to attend the oral argument on June 9, 2016, a day on which she also reportedly engaged in a meeting with representatives of the Trump presidential campaign. See Brook Singman, Mystery Solved? Timeline Shows How RussianLawyer Got into U.S. for Trump Jr. Meeting, Fox News (July 14, 2017), available at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/07/14/mystery-solved-timeline-shows-how-russianlawyer-got-into-us-for-trump-jr-meeting.html. This Office had no involvement in the granting of that visa and has no knowledge of whether Veselnitskaya has attempted to obtain another such visa to enter the country for these proceedings.

[snip]

If a testimonial hearing is ultimately required, and if it features Veselnitskaya or Katsyv as witnesses, the Government can revisit its parole determination at that time.2

2 The Government may not, however, again admit Veselnitskaya into the country to assist in witness preparation if she is not herself a witness. Although the Government did so previously, Veselnitskaya’s reported meeting with presidential campaign officials in June of 2016 (of which this Office was not aware prior to its public reporting) or other factors may alter this assessment. In any event, it is premature to reach this issue where no testimonial hearing is currently scheduled, and none is likely ever to be scheduled.

November 3: Judge Pauley denies Prevezon’s bid for immigration parole for Veselnitskaya.

November 6: Bloomberg story for the first time says Don Jr said he might consider lifting Magnitsky sanctions. It also repeats Veselnitskaya’s promise to answer SJC questions if her answers can be made public.

Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, has sent her more than 90 questions concerning the meeting, asking whether she knows Putin, Manafort and Kushner, and requesting information about Russian hacking and interference, she said. “That I definitely don’t have!” the lawyer said. “I made up my mind a long time ago: My testimony must be honest, full and public.”

Taylor Foy, a Grassley spokesman, said, “We are encouraged that she is planning to cooperate and look forward to receiving the information.” He wouldn’t comment on whether the committee would comply with her request to make her answers public.

November 10-11: Trump and Putin will meet in Danang, Vietnam, purportedly to talk about North Korea.

This feels like a limited hangout

All of which is to say that the efforts of the last month feel like a limited hangout — an attempt to avoid potentially more damaging revelations with new admissions about Magnitsky. That’s not to say the Magnitsky discussion didn’t happen. It’s to say the potential admissions — down to Veselnitskaya’s claim that, “I definitely don’t have!” information on Russian hacking and interference — have gotten far more damaging since when, in July, she claimed the election didn’t come up.

At the very least, it seems the players — particularly the Trump sponsor Agalarovs  are concerned about what Rob Goldstone has had to say to whatever investigative body — and are now trying to cement a different more damning one, yet one that still stops short of what they might admit to.

In either case, another thing seems clear: Veselnitskaya attempted to come to the country, using the same method she did when she actually used her presence to pitch Don Jr. After that meeting was denied, Trump went from suggesting he might meet with Putin to confirming that he plans to.

Manafort’s Lawyers Will Challenge the Legitimacy of Prosecuting the Ukrainian Money Laundering

Over the weekend, I did a Twitter thread on the fun stuff in the latest filing from Paul Manafort’s lawyers asking (among other things) that he be let off his GPS monitor. Now that others are reviewing the filing, I’m seeing lots of people miss a key part of what his lawyers are doing.

As I noted, in a footnote, Manafort’s lawyers point out that the crimes he has been charged with all pre-date the election.

Of note, his work on behalf of the Ukrainian clients ended around two years before Mr. Manafort agreed to work as the campaign manager for then-candidate Donald Trump.

It’s a point they’ve made before. But it has been misunderstood as a bogus point.

It’s not. Here’s how the defense has said they’re going to defend against this indictment.

At this time, the defense anticipates that pretrial motions will be filed concerning the legal basis for and sufficiency of the charges, the suppression of evidence improperly obtained by search warrant, subpoena or otherwise (including the application of exceptions to common law privileges), as well as motions in limine based on discovery to be provided by the Government in preparation for trial.

To some degree, this is part of a challenge the defense will make to the charging of FARA crimes generally. As they rightly point out, that simply hasn’t gotten prosecuted.

The Government’s case also concerns whether Mr. Manafort was required to file a report as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice. The U.S. Department of Justice has only brought six criminal FARA prosecutions since 1966 and it has secured only one conviction during this period. It is far from clear what activity triggers a requirement to file a report as a foreign agent. In order to conceal this weakness in the Indictment, a façade of money laundering has been put forth using a tenuous legal theory. When the money laundering count is peeled back from the Indictment, the forecasted sentencing guidelines are reduced substantially to a fraction of those claimed by the Office of Special Counsel.

What they’re ignoring is that the FARA charges are tied to both the money laundering they want to dismiss (Weekly Standard quotes people saying “it doesn’t make sense” to have spent $1M on rugs in Alexandria) and to false statements charges that (as DOJ keeps pointing out) have already been validated in the process of getting Manafort’s lawyer to waive privilege to explain how she was lied to.

But it also suggests they’re going to go after not only the no-knock warrant from this summer (which obtained information proving that Manafort and Gates keep records longer than the six months they have claimed to DOJ in the past), but also other subpoenas and the legal basis for the changes. That is, it suggests they’re going to challenge Mueller’s authority for investigating these old crimes which, public reporting made clear, long preceded the authorization of the Special Counsel. The legitimacy of the new evidence collection and charges depends on the legitimacy of the exercise of the Special Counsel authority, which is in turn based on,

(i) any links and/or coordination bet ween the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and

(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation;

(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).

The entire point of noting that the crimes charged here predate the election is to lay the groundwork for legal challenges. Manafort’s lawyers are laying groundwork to claim that these charges 1) don’t pertain to coordination on the election and 2) can’t say to have arisen out of them, because they predated them. Again, that ignores that the 28 CFR §600.4(a) permits Mueller to investigate, “intent to interfere with, the Special Counsel’s investigation, such as perjury, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses,” which Manafort’s false statements about the FARA registration might certainly be construed as.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think such a challenge will succeed (in part because of those false statements charges, which are dated to November 23, 2016 and February 10, 2017; the conspiracy to defraud the US also continues through 2017 and in part because Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein approved the charges). I also think this Politico piece, which talks about such legal threats, overstates the legal danger of such a challenge (in part because it cites all number of Republican lawyers, including Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, who are being teed up to bitch about the legitimacy publicly).

But I do think it’s a legitimate tactic, one that will serve Manafort’s defense, even outside the world of the Sukulow spin.

First, the charges as laid out are designed to steer clear of the election related stuff so Mueller can get Manafort to flip and testify on those without laying out what he already knows. They’re also designed to parallel similar charges in NY that can be charged if Trump pardons Manafort. By challenging the legitimacy of the tie between the Ukraine consulting and the election, Manafort may force Mueller to show more of his hand, notably to include why he believes the lies Manafort told last November and in February are part of the election cover-up (I can easily imagine how Mueller would explain it, but imagine he doesn’t want to do so, yet). Alternately, to substantiate the ties, Mueller may choose to issue a superseding indictment, tying the Ukraine work more closely to the election stuff, but I suspect he doesn’t want to do that, yet.

Also, to the extent that the challenge gets litigated now rather than on appeal (when it will definitely get litigated, if this goes to trial), Manafort may test the guidelines for something the President very much wants to test: whether Mueller can prosecute old business corruption (that in the case of both men happens to implicate compromise by the Russians). Manafort will be taking logical steps for his own defense, but also doing the work of the man who ultimately holds Manafort’s ticket to freedom.

Finally, there is the entire point of propaganda. So long as Trump can claim that nothing substantial has been charged against his campaign, both by noting (as he has, repeatedly) that Manafort’s charges are unrelated to the election and George Papadopoulos is some random coffee boy, Republicans and Trump supporters will have more space to support him. Once that changes — and the moment that changes will be one of the most fraught legal moments in this case — things may get a lot harder for Trump.

But for now, Manafort is helping the PR case along, and will continue to to the extent that his lawyers continue to argue that the crimes ended well before the campaign.

Update: As Josh Gerstein notes in his story on the government’s latest filing, Manafort and the government are actually disputing how long his work in Ukraine lasted:

The parties do dispute one minor factual point: Manafort claims that his work in the Ukraine ended in 2014, ECF#32 at 3, while the indictment alleges his continued work through 2015 on behalf of the Opposition Bloc, after the flight to Russia of President Victor Yanukovych. Indictment ¶ 1.

I have a feeling that discrepancy could end up less minor than suggested.

Mueller Has Enough Prosecutors to Continue Walking and Chewing Gum While We’ve Been Watching Manafort

NBC has a clickbait story reporting that Robert Mueller has enough evidence to indict Michael Flynn that — by describing that Mueller is still interviewing witnesses about Flynn’s lobbying — undermines its headline.

Mueller is applying renewed pressure on Flynn following his indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

The investigators are speaking to multiple witnesses in coming days to gain more information surrounding Flynn’s lobbying work, including whether he laundered money or lied to federal agents about his overseas contacts, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

Remember: on high profile investigations like this, interested parties sometimes try to force a prosecutor’s hand by leaking stuff like this (we should also expect people to leak to the press to create pressure for pardons), and in this case the leaking is exacerbated because of the multiple congressional investigations.

Moreover, there’s good reason to doubt the notion that Mueller is moving from target to target sequentially, which some have interpreted the description of Mueller “renewing” pressure on Flynn to suggest. Remember: Mueller has 15 prosecutors, every one of whom is capable of leading this kind of investigation themselves. And there’s at least a hint that Mueller has separate teams working on separate parts of the investigation.

Consider this detail from the motion to unseal the Manafort docket. The motion specifically asked for the whole thing to be unsealed except for this redaction at the top of the indictment itself.

[T]he government respectfully moves for an order unsealing the docket, with the exception of the original indictment, which contains, at the top, administrative information relating to the Special Counsel’s Office.

There are a lot of things that the redaction might hide. One of those is some kind of marking that indicates the organization of the investigation, one which would disclose investigative strategy if it were disclosed now, but would be really useful for historians if it were unsealed after whatever happens happens.

Couple that with the fact that there is no overlap between the prosecutors appearing thus far in the Manafort docket, who are:

  • Andrew Weismann
  • Greg Andres
  • Kyle Freeny

Adam Jed, an appellate specialist, has appeared with these lawyers in grand jury appearances.

And the prosecutors appearing in the Papadopoulos docket, who are:

  • Jeannie Rhee
  • Andrew Goldstein
  • Aaron Zelinsky

It would make sense that the teams would be focused on different parts of the investigation. After all, Mueller has drawn on a fair range of expertise, which I laid out here (see this article for Carrie Johnson’s description of where these folks are on loan from); if I were to do this over, I’d add a special category for money laundering:

  1. Mob specialists: Andrew Weissman and [Lisa Page *] are mob prosecutors.
  2. Fraud specialists: Weissman and Rush Atkinson are also fraud prosecutors.
  3. Corporate crime specialists: Weissman also led the Enron Task force. One of Dreeben’s key SCOTUS wins pertained to corporate crime. Jeannie Rhee has also worked on white collar defense. [Kyle Freeny, who was the last attorney to join the team, is a money laundering expert.]
  4. Public corruption specialists: Mueller hired someone with Watergate experience, James Quarles. And Andrew Goldstein got good press in SDNY for prosecuting corrupt politicians (even if Sheldon Silver’s prosecution has since been overturned).
  5. International experts: Zainab Ahmad, who worked terrorism cases in EDNY, which has some of the most expansive precedents for charging foreigners flown into JFK (including Russia’s darling Viktor Bout), knows how to bring foreigners to the US and successfully prosecute them in this country. Aaron Zelinsky has also worked in international law. Elizabeth Prelogar did a Fulbright in Russia and reportedly speaks it fluently. And, as noted, [Greg] Andres has worked on foreign bribery
  6. Cyber and spying lawyers: Brandon Van Grack is the guy who had been leading the investigation into Mike Flynn; he’s got a range of National Security experience. Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s former chief of staff at FBI, also has that kind of NSD experience.
  7. Appellate specialists: With Michael Dreeben, Mueller already has someone on the team who can win any appellate challenges; Adam Jed and Elizabeth Prelogar are also appellate specialists. Mueller’s hires also include former clerks for a number of SCOTUS justices, which always helps out if things get that far.

In other words, the team that has thus far been involved in the Manafort prosecution have experience prosecuting corporate crime and money laundering, as well as flipping people. The team that has thus far handled Papadopoulos includes Goldstein, a top public corruption prosecutor (who curiously would have had visibility into Manafort related prosecutions in SDNY), Zelinsky, who has both mob and international law expertise, and Jeannie Rhee whose relevant experience includes time in Congress, prosecuting national security related conspiracies, and cybersecurity investigations. The experience of the latter team, in particular, suggests where they might be headed, probably including people in or recently in government, but Rhee’s ties to leaks and cybersecurity might suggest the emails are a bigger part of that investigation than most people have noticed.

Notably absent from these two teams is Brandon Van Grack, who started the prosecution of Mike Flynn and presumably has remained focused on that. So there’s no reason to believe Van Grack would have to renew pressure, aside from pointing to the example of Manafort to prove the seriousness of this investigation, because he probably has just kept up the pressure as we’ve been distracted.

Also of note: we’re still not seeing all the mob and international expertise on Mueller’s team.

All of which is to say we’ve only seen the involvement of at most 7 out of the 15 lawyers on Mueller’s team. I’m sure the remaining 8 haven’t been sitting idle while we’ve all been focusing on Manafort and Papadopoulos.

Update: Because it’s related, I’ll remind that in Papadopoulos’ plea deal, Zelinsky said they wanted to sustain the prohibition on FOIA because,

in the process of his ongoing efforts to cooperate, the Government has shared substantial information with the Defendant that has provided a road map of sorts, to information that might be sought on FOIA. And it will chill the Government’s ability to continue to have the Defendant cooperate if the information that’s being provided by the Defendant and the continued efforts to jog his memory are then used to create a road map to the ongoing investigation.

Update: When this post was first posted I accidentally swapped Weissman for Goldstein in one reference. My apologies.

*Update: As Peredonov notes below, Page left the SCO after I wrote the underlying post. I’ve marked it in the quote and adjusted numbers accordingly.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley Has Spent the Week Cowering from His Party’s Legal Problems

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Of all the Republicans responding their President’s increasing legal woes, Chuck Grassley — the Chair of the Judiciary Committee — has had the most appalling week.

On Monday (even before news of the George Papadopoulos plea broke), when reporters started asking about Paul Manafort’s indictment, Grassley used some American flags as cover to hide his escape.

On Wednesday, after it became clear that Papadopoulos told the FBI Grassley’s fellow Iowan, Sam Clovis, had prioritized chumming up to Russia on the campaign generally, and encouraged Papadopoulos to set up meetings with the Russians as late as August 2016 (two months after it was public they had hacked the DNC), the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair said the allegations would not be an issue in Clovis’ confirmation to US Department of Agriculture.

Grassley said he has reviewed emails provided by the Trump campaign that include a fuller account of Clovis’ interactions with Papadopoulos. According to those 80-some emails, Grassley said, Clovis does not appear to encourage any travel to meet with Russian officials.

“There’s an entirely different context than what was reported about Clovis and his relationship to this George P.,” Grassley told reporters.

The emails he reviewed cannot be released publicly, Grassley said, although some of them have been referenced in published newspaper accounts and are referred to in the court document from the Papadopoulos case.

When asked if he believes Clovis could face legal consequences over his role in the campaign, Grassley answered that it was “too early for me to say that.”

“But,” he went on, “reading these emails … that’s not an issue.”

Grassley was still prepared to introduce Clovis at his then planned confirmation hearing, even after the allegations.

Even the White House seems to disagree with Grassley’s assessment that these allegations are “not an issue” though, because Clovis has since withdrawn from consideration.

And then later on Wednesday, several days after I first showed that the Papadopoulos plea showed that Jeff Sessions had perjured himself yet again in Senate testimony, Chuck Grassley was still unsure whether he’d even call on the Attorney General to explain his serial lies before his committee.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley said Thursday he was still learning all the details about the Papadopoulos matter.
Asked if Sessions should amend his testimony before his committee, Grassley told CNN: “I’m looking into it.”

I’ve long defended Grassley’s legitimate questions about the investigation — most notably questions about the Steele dossier. But all week the senior Republican overseer of the Justice Department has been cowering from the clear implications of this scandal. Perhaps it’s because Grassley has a duty, here, to ensure the integrity of a department led by a serial perjurer, he has instead been hiding and dodging.

The False Statements George Papadopoulos Made about “Dirt” Were Designed to Hide Whether He Told the Campaign about the Emails

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Other outlets have now caught up to this post I wrote on Monday showing that a footnote in George Papadopoulos’ plea, describing a May 21, 2016 exchange between Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, probably means Manafort was trying to hide the campaign’s outreach to Russia rather than tamp it down via a low level staffer.

I want to turn now to some other details that become clear when similarly comparing Papadopoulos’ plea with the complaint, written two months earlier. In the plea, Papadopoulos’ false statements are listed as:

  1. PAPADOPOULOS met the professor and learned about Russian “dirt” before he joined the campaign
  2. PAPADOPOULOS’s contacts with the professor were inconsequential
  3. PAPADOPOULOS met the female Russian national before he joined the campaign, and his contacts with her were inconsequential

That is, the plea describes these false statements to pertain to the timing and significance of Papadopoulos’ communications with Professor Joseph Mifsud and the still unnamed woman that Papadopoulos once believed was the niece of Vladimir Putin (this WaPo story has the best descriptions of who is who in the documents). The plea disproves those three false statements by focusing on the timing of his meetings with the two (and his complete silence about Russian International Affairs Council program director Ivan Timofeev) and the sheer volume of his communications with the two. Significantly, the plea focuses on the impact of “omitt[ing] the entire course of conduct with the Professor and [Timofeev] regarding his efforts to establish meetings between the Campaign and Russian government officials.”

As I have noted, the grand jury testimony of at least one other person, Sam Clovis, appears to have downplayed that latter point, the assertiveness with which the campaign tried to set up meetings with the Russians. That and the limited hangout of these details shared with the WaPo in August suggests Trump people, collectively, know that email records show evidence the campaign was trying to set up meetings, and that more than one person has been lying to downplay how assertive they were.

The false statements as laid out in the affidavit supporting the complaint, however, have a significantly different emphasis. False statements 1 and 2 (as I’ve numbered them) were treated as one discussion under the heading “False Statements by PAPADOPOULOS Regarding Foreign Contact 1.” The first three paragraphs of the discussion look like this:

13. During the course of his January 27, 2017 interview with the FBI, GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS, the defendant, acknowledged that he knew a particular professor of diplomacy based in London (“Foreign Contact 1”). Foreign Contact 1 is a citizen of a country in the Mediterranean and an associate of several Russian nationals, as described further below. PAPADOPOULOS stated that Foreign Contact 1 told him that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton.

a. PAPADOPOULOS told the Agents that, in the early part of 2016, Foreign Contact 1 “actually told me that the Russians had emails of Clinton. That guy told me.” PAPADOPOULOS further stated that Foreign Contact 1 told him that the Russians “have dirt on her,” meaning Clinton, and that “they have thousands of emails.”

b. PAPADOPOULOS, however, claimed to have received this information prior to joining the Campaign. He told Agents: “This isn’t like [Foreign Contact 1 was] messaging me while I’m in April with Trump.”

c. PAPADOPOULOS stated that he did not tell anyone on the Campaign about the “dirt” on Clinton because he “didn’t even know [if] that was real or fake or he was just guessing because I don’t know, because the guy [Foreign Contact 1]  seems like he’s … he’s a nothing.”

Laid out this way, the description of the false statements makes the import of them far more clear (import that the Special Counsel seems to want to obscure for now). Papadopoulos lied about the circumstances of his conversations with Mifsud — the FBI appears to have believed when they arrested him in July — as part of a story to explain why, after having heard about dirt in the form of thousands of emails from Hillary, he didn’t tell anyone else on the campaign about them. Laid out like this, it’s clear Papadopoulos was trying to hide both when he learned about the emails (just three days before the DNC did, as it turns out, not much earlier as he seems to have suggested in January), but also how important he took those emails to be (which in his false story, he tied to to a false story about how credible he found Mifsud to be).

FBI found those lies to be significant enough to arrest him over because they obscured whether he had told anyone on the campaign that the Russians had dirt in the form of Hillary emails.

To be sure, nothing in any of the documents released so far answer the questions that Papadopoulos surely spent two months explaining to the FBI: whether he told the campaign (almost certainly yes, or he wouldn’t have lied in the first place) and when (with the big import being on whether that information trickled up to Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner before they attended a meeting on June 9, 2016 in hopes of obtaining such dirt).

I’m sure that’s intentional. You gotta keep everyone else guessing about what Mueller knows.

But we can be pretty sure what the answers are.

Between the time they arrested Papadopoulos and the time he pled guilty, he became more forthcoming about his extensive efforts to broker a meeting between the campaign and the Russians, something Mifsud made clear was a high priority for the Russians. Mueller is perfectly happy — after securing the testimony of people like Clovis — to let everyone know that.

But Mueller is still hiding the pretty obvious answer to the question about whether Papadopoulos lied about Mifsud specifically to hide that he told people on the campaign that Russians had emails to deal in conjunction with such meetings.

The Footnote Shows Manafort Was Hiding Willingness to Reach Out to Russia

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There is now some debate about what this footnote, from George Papadopoulos’ plea, means.

On or about May 21, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS emailed another high-ranking Campaign official, with the subject line “Request from Russia to meet Mr. Trump.” The email included the May 4 MFA Email and added: “Russia has been eager to meet Mr. Trump for quite sometime and have been reaching out to me to discuss.”2

2 The government notes that the official forwarded defendant PAPADOPOULOS’s email to another Campaign official (without including defendant PAPADOPOULOS) and stated:

“Let[‘]s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

The question is, does this mean the speaker was trying to agree to meetings, but keep it low level to hide the intent to cooperate with Russia, or send a low level person to reject the meeting.

As southpaw has noted, this exchange was actually included in a WaPo post this summer claiming that Papadopoulos was ignored by the campaign. The two campaign officials involved are … Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who were surely shocked to learn Papadopoulos had flipped on them three weeks ago as they pled not guilty today.

Several weeks later, Papadopoulos forwarded the same message from Timofeev to Manafort, the newly named campaign chairman.

“Russia has been eager to meet with Mr. Trump for some time and have been reaching out to me to discuss,” the adviser told Manafort.

Manafort reacted coolly, forwarding the email to his associate Rick Gates, with a note: “We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips.”

Gates agreed and told Manafort he would ask the campaign’s correspondence coordinator to handle it — “the person responding to all mail of non-importance” — to signify this did not need a senior official to respond.

Already, it’s clear that whoever shared this content with WaPo was spinning, hiding the context.

But the complaint against Papadopoulos written to support an arrest this July says something different. It shows that on July 14, Papadopoulos wrote Timofeev proposing an August or September meeting in the UK.

On or about July 14, 2016, PAPADOPOULOS emailed Foreign Contact 2 and proposed a “meeting for August or September in the UK (London) with me and my national chairman, and maybe one other foreign policy advisor and you, members of president putin’s office and the mfa to hold a day of consultants and to meet one another. It has been approved from our side.”

That is, less than two months later, Papadopoulous at least claimed that a meeting including Manafort had been approved, though not including Trump.

Mind you, back to the plea, by August 15 it was decided just Papadopoulous and an unnamed “another foreign policy advisor to the Campaign” [which WaPo has identified as Sam Clovis] should “make the trip[], if it is feasible.” But it then says that the meeting did not take place.

That’s likely not because at that time, August 15, Manafort was being ousted from the campaign because his corrupt ties to Ukraine (basically, the stuff he got indicted on today) was causing a scandal. Which is to say that particular meeting didn’t happen (though Papadopoulos remained on the campaign and — in Facebook messaging he tried to destroy after meeting with the FBI — remained in contact with his Russian handlers as late as October 1), but it didn’t happen not because Manafort wasn’t game, but because Manafort’s ties to Russia became toxic, precisely the kind of “signal” Manafort was trying to avoid in May.

And the connotation of that May 21 email is important because it shows Manafort’s mindset in the weeks before, on June 9, he met with a Russian lawyer hoping for dirt he likely expected to include stolen Hillary emails.

A Month and a Half before the June 9 Meeting, Trump Campaign Learned about Hacked Emails

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As I laid out here, the indictment against Paul Manafort is meant to embarrass him, but still pave the way for him to flip. That’s the carrot, if an indictment stripping the money laundered suits off Manafort’s back can be said to be good news.

The bad news is this guilty plea, for false statements, by campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, signed on October 5, but only unsealed today. That plea makes it clear that 1) the campaign had, as an explicit goal, making friends with Russia 2) a month and a half before the June 9 Trump Tower meeting, Russian handlers dangled the stolen Hillary emails 3) Papadopoulos has cooperated beyond what has been laid out in the guilty plea.

As the plea lays out, Papadopoulos learned in early March he’d be a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. Within weeks, a professor fresh off a trip to Moscow started cultivating him, and introduced him to a woman pretending to be Vladimir Putin’s niece. After meeting that handler, Papadopoulos attended a meeting with Trump and others where he explained “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.” The plea makes clear that Papadopoulos kept the campaign in the loop on his “outreach to Russia.”

And it makes it clear that on April 26 — three days before the DNC figured out Russia had hacked them — Papadopoulos’ handler told him Moscow had dirt on clinton.

The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that on that trip he (the Professor) learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on then-candidate Clinton. The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS, as PAPADOPOULOS later described to the FBI, that “They [the Russians] have dirt on her”; “the Russians had emails of Clinton”; “they have thousands of emails.”

After learning the Russians had emails on Clinton even before Clinton learned it, Papadopoulos “continued to correspond with Campaign officials,” including his Senior Policy Advisor and a High-Ranking Campaign Official. (One of these may be Manafort; another almost certainly is Jeff Sessions.)

In response, the campaign decided to send someone low level “so as not to send any signal.”

It turns out, Papadopoulos lied about some of this the first time he spoke with the FBI about it on January 27. For example, he claimed he learned about the emails before he joined the campaign, trying to pretend that he didn’t learn about them only because he had just been named a top advisor.

Papadopoulos must be a fucking idiot, because a number of his communications with his Russian handlers were on Skype, a PRISM provider. Though he tried to stop using his communications immediately after his second FBI interview, which is a bit too late.

My favorite part of the plea his the last paragraph:

On July 27, 2017, defendant PAPADOPOULOS was arrested upon his arrival at Dulles International Airport. Following his arrest, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions.

I’m betting the FBI asked him about this detail, from a March 31 meeting.

On or about March 31, 2016, defendant PAPADOPOULOS attended a “national security meeting” in Washington, D.C., with then-candidate Trump and other foreign policy advisors for the Campaign. When defendant PAPADOPOULOS introduced himself to the group, he stated, in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.

Here’s what that meeting looked like:

You’ll note that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was at the meeting as well. Just last week Jeff Sessions claimed to know nothing about collusion.

I’m guessing this plea is going to make flipped far more attractive to Paul Manafort.  Because Manafort now knows that the government knows that the campaign knew about Hillary’s emails well before that June 9, 2016 meeting.

 

Paul Manafort Indicted for Laundering 50 Times as Much Through Rugs as Through Household Labor

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One of the nifty things Robert Mueller did with his indictment of Paul Manafort was to lay out all the extravagances he used to launder his money into the US. The most amazing was his $1M antique rug bill.

Mueller also listed $1.4 million laundered through two different clothing stores.

Compare that with the mere $20,000 Manafort spent on the people who clear his NY property.

Admittedly, Manafort appears to have redone his Hamptons and FL properties routinely to launder more money. But it basically means he shorted his staff while spending big on magic carpets.

Which will make Trump’s efforts to give rich shits like Manafort more tax benefits this week even more difficult.

The money laundering through luxury goods isn’t the key crime in Manafort’s indictment. That has to do with serving as an unregistered foreign agent with regards to work from 2012. Importantly, that means Mueller got to point to Tony Podesta’s corruption prominently as one of these two unnamed firms.

The allegation is that by having one Republican and one Democratic lobbyist firm to do the work of pro-Russian Ukrainians, Manafort hid what was really going on.

Just as interesting, Mueller slapped a false statements charge onto the failure to report being a foreign agent, tied to these claims (they carry onto a second page).

That way, if the idea of actually enforcing foreign registry laws doesn’t fly (which is admittedly a novel idea in DC), they still have some crimes to charge Manafort with.

Hopefully, that false statements charge and the idea of charging for failure to register will send a chill through all of DC’s other corrupt influence peddlers.

Importantly, Mueller called for all these toys and much (but not all) of Manafort’s real estate to be forfeited. Which will make it harder for him to pay his lawyers and harder for him to look like a million dollars as he turns himself in.

The money laundering charges here (though not necessarily the foreign registry ones) can be punted down to NY State if Trump pardons Manafort.

Here’s what this does: it applies some pressure to Manafort (and serves as an object lesson to Mike Flynn, who can be charged tomorrow with the same registry related crimes). But it doesn’t yet get into the heart of the Russian influence crimes, which preserves Manafort’s ability to testify about them (that is, to flip).

It’s unclear whether it will work. My biggest question of the day is who is paying for Manafort’s legal bills and how long they’ll be willing to continue doing so.