Saturday, June 1, 2019

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Last month a federal judge ordered the Justice Department to turn over transcripts of former Trump National Security Adviser (and convicted felon) Michael Flynn's wiretaps involving his dealings with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

The Justice Department said no and directly refused a judge's order.

Federal prosecutors rebuffed a judge’s order to release by Friday highly classified transcripts of discussions that Michael T. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, had with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

The transcripts between Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, formerly Russia’s top diplomat in the United States, were expected to show that they talked in December 2016 about sanctions that the Obama administration had just imposed on Russia. Mr. Flynn initially denied those exchanges about sanctions both to Trump administration officials and the F.B.I. in the weeks after the discussions.

The conversations prompted concerns among senior Obama administration officials about whether the Trump transition team was flouting norms about holding off on making policy until after taking office. The phone calls were also at the center of the scandal that eventually prompted Mr. Flynn’s ouster just weeks into President Trump’s term.

The order this month from the judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, was unusual. The transcripts came from a secret F.B.I. wiretap of Mr. Kislyak, and their release would have provided an extraordinarily rare look at the fruits of the government’s eavesdropping. Agents routinely listen to wiretaps of foreign officials, but they remain among the government’s most closely held secrets.

The calls between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak were referenced repeatedly in court documents and the special counsel’s report on Russian election interference but never released, and prosecutors have not acknowledged the existence of the wiretap. Judge Sullivan, who is overseeing Mr. Flynn’s case, ordered that audio recordings of his conversations with Mr. Kislyak be made public along with a voice mail message made by the president’s lawyer.

The Justice Department’s refusal to comply with the judge’s ordermade clear that prosecutors had no interest in confirming the wiretap, which was approved by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“This would be a rare step to make public” such intelligence collection, said Joshua Geltzer, a former Justice Department official. “What you see in today’s filing is the government trying to avoid disclosing that material.”

Instead, prosecutors asserted that they did not need to provide the transcripts because they were, in the end, not vital to the prosecution of Mr. Flynn. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the F.B.I. after agents interviewed him about what was said on those calls.

“The government further represents that it is not relying on any other recordings, of any person, for purposes of establishing the defendant’s guilt or determining his sentence, nor are there any other recordings that are part of the sentencing record,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing responding to Judge Sullivan’s order
.

Please spare me the "Obama administration defied federal judges too!" stuff as well.  Yes, the Obama administration was at best 50-50 when it came to losing federal cases before the courts, and it defied judicial orders (or dragged their feet on compliance for years) when it came to immigration and climate change.

But not when it came to obstructing justice in an investigation into itself.

Checking The Tech Wreck Spec

It's definitely one of those "the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but is serving a purpose" things here, but the Trump regime is coming to break up Google.

The U.S. Justice Department is preparing an investigation of Alphabet Inc’s Google to determine whether the tech giant broke antitrust law in operating its sprawling online businesses, two sources familiar with the matter said.
Officials from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission, which both enforce antitrust law, met in recent weeks to give Justice jurisdiction over Google, said the sources, who sought anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The potential investigation represents the latest attack on a tech company by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has accused social media companies and Google of suppressing conservative voices on their platforms online.

One source said the potential investigation, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, focused on accusations that Google gave preference to its own businesses in searches.
A spokesman for the Justice Department said he could not confirm or deny that an investigation was being considered. Google declined comment.

Early in 2013, the FTC closed a long-running investigation of Google, giving it a slap on the wrist. Under FTC pressure, Google agreed to end the practice of “scraping” reviews and other data from rivals’ websites for its own products, and to let advertisers export data to independently assess campaigns.

Google’s search, YouTube, reviews, maps and other businesses, which are largely free to consumers but financed through advertising, have catapulted it from a start-up to one of the world’s richest companies in just two decades.

Along the way, it has made enemies in both the tech world, who have complained to law enforcers about its market dominance, and in Washington, where lawmakers have complained about issues from its alleged political bias to its plans for China.

Now let's be honest here, the Trump regime is coming for Google solely because they don't want to share the kind of data manipulation power that it has with a company that it doesn't control.  It's taking out a threat to Trump's autocratic rule of our crumbling republic.

Having said that, Google is far too powerful and is definitely violating antitrust rules on its search engines and ad business.  Google is far from being alone in a world with trillion-dollar tech giants like Amazon and Apple, but breaking it up is a nice start.