Hunting The Hunter, Con't

The right-wing "Biden bribery scandal" noise is now loud enough to reach the big newspapers, with the Washington Post calling the allegations by IRS investigator Gary Shipley "potentially damning" if any of it is actually true.

 

An IRS agent who supervised the investigation into President Biden’s son Hunter told lawmakers that Justice Department officials slowed and stymied the investigation, whittling away the most serious evidence of alleged tax crimes, according to a transcript of his account released Thursday.

The agent, Gary Shapley, offered a detailed and potentially damning account of prosecutors who were either timid or uninterested when it came to examining the financial misdeeds of Hunter Biden, which Shapley said included instances in which the president’s son treated prostitutes and their travel costs as his business expenses.

The agent’s account to the House Ways and Means Committee also directly challenged congressional testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland, in which he said that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss — a holdover from the Trump administration — had full authority to lead the investigation into Hunter Biden and could do whatever he wanted in the case.

A Justice Department spokesman stood by Garland’s previous comments, and the lead Democrat on the House committee said the allegations should not have been released publicly while lawmakers are still vetting them.

The transcript almost certainly will fuel criticism of the Justice Department’s five-year investigation of Hunter Biden, which this week led to a proposed plea agreement on two misdemeanor charges that will probably allow him to avoid jail time. Biden is due in federal court in Wilmington, Del., on July 26 to enter his guilty plea, which must be approved by a judge.

The criminal probe of Biden was given the code name Sportsman, Shapley told lawmakers, and it was “an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”

His account offers a host of new allegations, including a text message that Biden allegedly sent on July 30, 2017, that invoked his father — at that time a former vice president — as he tried to get a business partner to fulfill some expected promise.

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

It is unclear what specific commitment the message refers to. A spokeswoman for Hunter Biden’s legal team did not immediately comment.

 

Here's the thing though:

 

If all this is true, then yes, Biden, Merrick Garland, Chris Wray, they're done. 

But "If this is all true" is carrying about the mass of Jupiter on its shoulders though. We have the word of the IRS agent, but the great thing about "The President ordered a cover up to protect his criminal son and ordered the AG to make it happen" is that there's nothing anyone can do to disprove it: any evidence of reality just becomes more cover up.

Republicans are creating this scandal in order to hurt Biden going into 2024. They did it before with Benghazi and Hillary Clinton's emails.

I fully expect the Village to fall for this shitshow again.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Apparently, Attorney General Merrick Garland fielded calls from his own to slow-walk Trump on January 6th for more than a year after taking office, with Chris Wray and the FBI openly refusing to go directly after Trump.

Hours after he was sworn in as attorney general, Merrick Garland and his deputies gathered in a wood-paneled conference room in the Justice Department for a private briefing on the investigation he had promised to make his highest priority: bringing to justice those responsible for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021

In the two months since the siege, federal agents had conducted 709 searches, charged 278 rioters and identified 885 likely suspects, said Michael R. Sherwin, then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, ticking through a slide presentation. Garland and some of his deputies nodded approvingly at the stats, and the new attorney general called the progress “remarkable,” according to people in the room.

Sherwin’s office, with the help of the FBI, was responsible for prosecuting all crimes stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. He had made headlines the day after by refusing to rule out the possibility that President Donald Trump himself could be culpable. “We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Sherwin said in response to a reporter’s question about Trump. “If the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”

But according to a copy of the briefing document, absent from Sherwin’s 11-page presentation to Garland on March 11, 2021, was any reference to Trump or his advisers — those who did not go to the Capitol riot but orchestrated events that led to it.

A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election. Even then, the FBI stopped short of identifying the former president as a focus of that investigation.

A wariness about appearing partisan, institutional caution, and clashes over how much evidence was sufficient to investigate the actions of Trump and those around him all contributed to the slow pace. Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department while some prosecutors below them chafed, feeling top officials were shying away from looking at evidence of potential crimes by Trump and those close to him, The Post found.

In November, after Trump announced he was again running for president, making him a potential 2024 rival to President Biden, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

On June 8, in a separate investigation that was also turned over to the special counsel, Smith secured a grand jury indictment against the former president for mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Trump was charged with 31 counts of violating a part of the Espionage Act, as well as six counts arising from alleged efforts to mislead federal investigators.

The effort to investigate Trump over classified records has had its own obstacles, including FBI agents who resisted raiding the former president’s home. But the discovery of top-secret documents in Trump’s possession triggered an urgent national security investigation that laid out a well-defined legal path for prosecutors, compared with the unprecedented task of building a case against Trump for trying to steal the election.

Whether a decision about Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 could have come any earlier is unclear. The delays in examining that question began before Garland was even confirmed. Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature, according to five individuals familiar with the decision. Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.

The strategy was embraced by Garland, Monaco and Wray. They remained committed to it even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.

In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021, The Post found. The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022, about 15 months after the attack.

The Justice Department’s painstaking approach to investigating Trump can be traced to Garland’s desire to turn the page from missteps, bruising attacks and allegations of partisanship in the department’s recent investigations of both Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Inside Justice, however, some have complained that the attorney general’s determination to steer clear of any claims of political motive has chilled efforts to investigate the former president. “You couldn’t use the T word,” said one former Justice official briefed on prosecutors’ discussions.

This account is based on internal documents, court files, congressional records, handwritten contemporaneous notes, and interviews with more than two dozen current and former prosecutors, investigators, and others with knowledge of the probe. Most of the people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal decision-making related to the investigation.

Spokespeople at the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment or make Garland, Monaco or Wray available for interviews.

 

Garland had to be dragged kicking and screaming into investigating Trump because that's where all the evidence of the J6 small fry that they prosecuted led to. Trump forced Garland's hand. 

And as Marcy Wheeler notes, the story means former FBI Washington Field Office head Steve D'Antunio was the biggest purveyor of protecting Trump.

 

The WaPo has a story that many Merrick Garland attackers claim confirms their fears about the DOJ investigation. Except the story has really important gaps, most importantly in its portrayal of the fake electors investigation, which is the damning part of the story about Garland or Lisa Monaco’s direct decisions (as opposed to those of FBI).

Moreover, the one thing it proves definitively is that former FBI Washington Field Office head Steve D’Antuono repeatedly shot down investigative prongs of this investigation, just like he did the stolen documents investigation. That the head of the WFO was running interference for Trump raises key questions about FBI missteps with people like Brandon Straka, someone arrested early who had direct ties to the scheme in the Willard, to say nothing about WFO’s ineptitude in advance of the attack.

Here are the main disclosures.

The story describes that — after such time as Brandon Straka was being treated as a cooperative witness — JP Cooney pitched an idea to get to Stone through the Oath Keepers, not the Proud Boys.

But a group of prosecutors led by J.P. Cooney, the head of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, argued that the existing structure of the probe overlooked a key investigative angle. They sought to open a new front, based partly on publicly available evidence, including from social media, that linked some extremists involved in the riot to people in Trump’s orbit — including Roger Stone, Trump’s longest-serving political adviser; Ali Alexander, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot; and Alex Jones, the Infowars host.

[snip]

According to three people who either viewed or were briefed on Cooney’s plan, it called for a task force to embark on a wide-ranging effort, including seeking phone records for Stone as well as Alexander. Cooney wanted investigators to follow the money — to trace who had financed the false claims of a stolen election and paid for the travel of rallygoers-turned-rioters. He was urging investigators to probe the connection between Stone and members of the Oath Keepers, who were photographed together outside the Willard hotel in downtown Washington on the morning of Jan. 6.

[snip]

D’Antuono called Sherwin. The two agreed Cooney did not provide evidence that Stone had likely committed a crime — the standard they considered appropriate for looking at a political figure. Investigating Stone simply because he spent time with Oath Keepers could expose the department to accusations that it had politicized the probe, they told colleagues.

D’Antuono took the matter to Abbate, Wray’s newly named deputy director. Abbate agreed the plan was premature.

It’s genuinely hard to believe this was the plan. To be sure, FBI did investigate Stone’s ties to the Oath Keepers, starting no later than March 2021. But that wasn’t the obvious route to get to Trump.

The route to get there, importantly, was via a route that Bill Barr had affirmatively dismissed in advance of the attack: through the Proud Boys, not the Oath Keepers. Stone’s ties to the Oath Keepers was not obviously criminal; it still may not be. His ties to the Proud Boys are central.

In any case, Steve D’Antuono — who stalled the stolen documents case investigation last summer — shot down this angle of the investigation early on. 

 

So it wasn't Garland's direct call, but he was in charge of the mess that followed. Bill Barr and Chris Wray protected Trump, and stalled out Garland for months.

 

Still a lot of questions to be answered, including when Trump gets J6 charges.

 

If ever.

Last Call For The Black Hole Of Justice Kegstand

So, turns out the FBI passed along more than four thousand tips on Justice Brett Kavanaugh before his confirmation hearing to the Trump White House, and the Trump White House dumped the entire file into the garbage can.

Nearly three years after Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s tumultuous confirmation to the Supreme Court, the F.B.I. has disclosed more details about its efforts to review the justice’s background, leading a group of Senate Democrats to question the thoroughness of the vetting and conclude that it was shaped largely by the Trump White House.

In a letter dated June 30 to two Democratic senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Chris Coons of Delaware, an F.B.I. assistant director, Jill C. Tyson, said that the most “relevant” of the 4,500 tips the agency received during an investigation into Mr. Kavanaugh’s past were referred to White House lawyers in the Trump administration, whose handling of them remains unclear.

The letter left uncertain whether the F.B.I. itself followed up on the most compelling leads. The agency was conducting a background check rather than a criminal investigation, meaning that “the authorities, policies, and procedures used to investigate criminal matters did not apply,” the letter said.

Ms. Tyson’s letter was a response to a 2019 letter from Mr. Whitehouse and Mr. Coons to the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, posing questions about how the F.B.I.’s review of Mr. Kavanaugh was handled.

In an interview, Mr. Whitehouse said the F.B.I.’s response showed that the F.B.I.’s handling of the accusations into misconduct by Mr. Kavanaugh was a sham. Ms. Tyson’s letter, Mr. Whitehouse said, suggested that the F.B.I. ran a “fake tip line that never got properly reviewed, that was presumably not even conducted in good faith.”

Mr. Whitehouse and six of his Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee replied to the F.B.I.’s letter on Wednesday with demands for additional details on the agreement with the White House that governed the inquiry. They also pressed for more information on how incoming tips were handled.

“Your letter confirms that the F.B.I.’s tip line was a departure from past practice and that the F.B.I. was politically constrained by the Trump White House,” the senators wrote. Among those signing the letter were Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee’s chairman, Mr. Coons and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Donald F. McGahn, the White House’s general counsel at the time, and the F.B.I. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

 

I could see this becoming the impetus for the removal of FBI Director Chris Wray down the road, but frankly that's going to be a wildly political move, something that not even Trump dared to do. It's certainly not going to get Kavanaugh to resign, so other than this being a rather stark reminder of Democrats' utter failure in the last ten years on Supreme Court issues, I don't see what the point of this is at all.

Move on.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Capitol police are so concerned about the domestic terrorism chatter involving another Trump cultist attack on Democratic lawmakers that the House is not in session today as a precaution.

U.S. Capitol Police have intelligence that shows “a possible plot to breach the Capitol by an identified militia group” on Thursday, nearly two months after a mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the iconic building to try to stop Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's victory.

The threat appears to be connected to a far-right conspiracy theory, mainly promoted by supporters of QAnon, that Trump will rise again to power on March 4. That was the original presidential inauguration day until 1933, when it was moved to Jan. 20.

Capitol Police are “aware of and prepared for any potential threats towards members of Congress or towards the Capitol complex,” they said in a statement Wednesday.

Capitol Police already have upgraded security and increased patrols, they said. No specific information on the threat was released.

The U.S. House on Wednesday was working to wrap up for the week given the threat of violence at the Capitol. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer notified lawmakers late Wednesday of the sudden schedule change.

The decision was made given the threats on the Capitol, according to a Democratic aide granted anonymity to discuss the matter. The House had been scheduled to be in session Thursday, but moved up consideration of its remaining legislative item, the George Floyd Justice in Police Act, to Wednesday night.

Capitol Police received “new and concerning information and intelligence” on Tuesday afternoon indicating “additional interest in the Capitol for the dates of March 4th – 6th by a militia group,” Acting House Sergeant at Arms Timothy Blodgett said in a message Wednesday morning to members of Congress.

Blodgett said earlier this week that additional personnel would be posted on Capitol grounds as a precaution on Thursday because of a conspiracy theory about the significance of the date. He said at the time that there was no indication that groups would travel to D.C. or commit acts of violence.

Members of Congress and staff members were asked to carry identification, report any threats or suspicious activity, and keep emergency numbers on hand.

 

As FBI Director Chris Wray warned on Tuesday, the threat of white supremacist domestic terrorism remains both real and widespread.

FBI Director Chris Wray bluntly labeled the January riot at the U.S. Capitol as “domestic terrorism” Tuesday and warned of a rapidly growing threat of homegrown violent extremism that law enforcement is scrambling to confront through thousands of investigations.

Wray also defended to lawmakers his own agency's handling of an intelligence report that warned of the prospect for violence on Jan. 6. And he firmly rejected false claims advanced by some Republicans that anti-Trump groups had organized the deadly riot that began when a violent mob stormed the building as Congress was gathering to certify results of the presidential election.

Wray's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, his first before Congress since the insurrection, was the latest in a series of hearings centered on the law enforcement response to the Capitol insurrection. Lawmakers pressed him not only about possible intelligence and communication failures ahead of the riot but also about the threat of violence from white supremacists, militias and other extremists that the FBI says it is prioritizing with the same urgency as the menace of international terrorism organizations.

“Jan. 6 was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon,” Wray told lawmakers. “At the FBI, we’ve been sounding the alarm on it for a number of years now.”

The violence at the Capitol made clear that a law enforcement agency that remade itself after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to deal with international terrorism is now laboring to address homegrown violence by white Americans. President Joe Biden’s administration has tasked his national intelligence director to work with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to assess the threat. And in applying the domestic terrorism label to conduct inside the Capitol, Wray sought to make clear to senators that he was clear-eyed about the scope and urgency of the threat.

Wray said the number of domestic terrorism investigations has increased from around 1,000 when he became FBI director in 2017 to about 2,000 now. The number of white supremacist arrests has almost tripled, he said.

 

Everyone knew this was coming. Now that it's here, Republicans are doing their dead level best to pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, their cultist minions circle like sharks, looking for opportunities to ambush Democratic lawmakers.  It won't be long before the attacks start mounting outside the Beltway, too.

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr says he would of course like to stick around in a Trump second term and finish the transition from representative oligarchical democracy to authoritarian dictatorship over the next four years.

Attorney General William P. Barr — who has recently faced criticism from President Trump for not prosecuting his political rivals — has told friends and advisers in recent weeks that he hopes to stay on for some time in the next term, if Trump wins the election.

The assertion from the president’s top law enforcement official might otherwise be unsurprising, if not for the public pressure Trump has put on Barr in recent months to deliver results from an investigation Barr specially commissioned to review the FBI’s 2016 probe of possible coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign.

Trump also has openly discussed with advisers firing FBI Director Christopher A. Wray after Election Day, even though Wray is only a little more than three years into what is normally a 10-year appointment. Barr has generally sought to shield Wray from Trump’s wrath, though his friends believe he would not resign in protest were the FBI director ousted, people familiar with the matter said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the politically sensitive topic.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

Even amid the president’s attacks, the attorney general has conveyed to friends he would like to stay on the job.

“Barr told me recently he supports the president and would be inclined to stay if the president wanted him to,” said Richard Cullen, a lawyer and longtime friend of Barr who represented Vice President Pence.

It is less clear what Trump wants to do.

In August, Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that Barr “can go down as the greatest attorney general in the history of our country, or he can go down as an average guy,” depending on the results of the investigation, led by U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut, into the FBI’s 2016 probe of Trump’s campaign. Trump has agitated for criminal charges or investigations for those he considers political rivals — including former FBI director James B. Comey, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe and even former vice president Joe Biden, his opponent in the 2020 race.

More recently, after news reports that results from Durham’s investigation would not be made public before the election, Trump told conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh: “I think it’s a terrible thing. And I’ll say it to [Barr’s] face.”

Trump has called publicly for his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, and declined to say whether he would want Barr around in a second term.

A person familiar with the matter said previously that while Barr understands Trump’s frustration about the Durham probe, his pressure was “not going to change anything.” Barr has said previously that Biden was not under investigation in that case. The person said that Barr wants to stay on to see the end of Durham’s work, though it is unclear how long he envisioned his tenure lasting.

 

If Trump wins, it's going to be because of Barr's work organizing and shepherding the legal arguments that allow SCOTUS  to give the election to Trump. And Barr will point to that and say "Now here's what else we can do with the Supreme Court in our pocket."

It's possible that Barr will even be smart enough to continue to not actually arrest Democrats and make martyrs out of them to rally the resistance around, but instead to use the constant investigations into Trump's political enemies in order to grind the opposition down slowly.

Either way, I expect Barr to definitely stick around in a second Trump term, should that scenario come to pass.

Barr will make himself architect of that win, and he'll get to stay and do far worse to us in the future.

 

And keep in mind, Nate Silver's 10% chance for Trump to win or not, this election will ultimately be decided by how Trump's 6-3 conservative Roberts Court decides to respond (or not to respond) to the election results.

Retribution Execution, Con't

A Trump second term means the replacement of much of his cabinet with yes men who will aid the republic's transition to a fascist autocratic police state, starting with law enforcement, intelligence services, and the military.

If President Trump wins re-election, he'll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, two people who've discussed these officials' fates with the president tell Axios.

The big picture: The list of planned replacements is much longer, but these are Trump's priorities, starting with Wray. Wray and Haspel are despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump's inner circle. He would have fired both already, one official said, if not for the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3.

Why it matters: A win, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies. Trump last week signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order "is a really big deal" that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials. 

There could be shake-ups across other departments. The president has never been impressed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for example. But that doesn't carry the urgency of replacing Wray or Haspel. The nature of top intelligence and law enforcement posts has traditionally carried an expectation for a higher degree of independence and separation from politics.

Be smart: While Trump has also privately vented about Attorney General Bill Barr, he hasn't made any formal plans to replace him, an official said. Trump is furious that Barr isn't releasing before the election what Trump hoped would be a bombshell report by U.S. Attorney John Durham on the Obama administration's handling of the Trump-Russia investigation. 

Durham's investigation has yet to produce any high-profile indictments of Obama-era officials as Trump had hoped. "The attorney general wants to finish the work that he's been involved in since day one," a senior administration official told Axios.

Behind the scenes: "The view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field," one source with direct knowledge of the internal conversations told Axios. "It's bred a lot of suspicion of her motives." 

Trump is also increasingly frustrated with Haspel for opposing the declassification of documents that would help the Justice Department's Durham report. A source familiar with conversations at the CIA says, "Since the beginning of DNI's push to declassify documents, and how strongly she feels about protecting sources connected to those materials, there have been rumblings around the agency that the director plans to depart the CIA regardless of who wins the election.”

As for Wray, whose expected firing was first reported by The Daily Beast, Trump is angry his second FBI chief didn't launch a formal investigation into Hunter Biden's foreign business connections — and didn't purge more officials Trump believes abused power to investigate his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia. 

Trump also grew incensed when Wray testified in September that the FBI has not seen widespread election fraud, including with mail-in ballots. A senior FBI official tells Axios: "Major law enforcement associations representing current and former FBI agents as well as police and sheriff's departments across the country have consistently expressed their full support of Director Wray's leadership of the Bureau."

Trump soured on Esper over the summer when the Defense secretary rebuffed the idea of sending active-duty military into the streets to deal with racial justice protests and distanced himself from the clearing of Lafayette Square for a photo op at St. John's church. 

Trump indicated to Axios then that he "really wasn't focused on" firing Esper. One senior official cautioned that others who want the Pentagon job could be driving speculation to undercut Esper. But one source, who discussed options with Trump, told Axios he urged the president to wait until post-election to replace him. Chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement that Esper "has always been and remains committed to doing what is best for the military and the Nation.”

 

Both Trump and Bill Barr will have free reign to start arresting Democrats in a second term, especially if Mitch McConnell keeps control of the Senate.  The decent to fascism will come quickly should Trump prevail in the election.

For the first time, I think Biden will win, he's held on to a big lead for long enough and there's just too many battleground states for Trump to play defense in right now for him to win them all like he did in 2016, when he was on offense, and Biden's leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania continue to be statistically significant, and Biden is above 50% in all three states.  That's all he needs to pick up from 2016 in order to top 270 electoral votes, and the odds are he'll win at least one or two of the other six battleground states (GA, TX, OH, NC, AZ, and FL) on top of those three.

Trump is running out of time to win this, but if he does, America is absolutely out of time.

We're done as a free nation if Trump wins.

I implore you to vote if you haven't already.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

The FBI threw together a hasty press conference tonight to announce that both Iran and Russia have US voter registration information in hand, and that they are using it to run disinformation operations against US voters. Iran in particular was running an operation where Democratic voters in states like Florida and Alaska received emails from a group purporting to be white supremacist terrorist group Proud Boys, stating that if they did not vote for Trump, that the group would "come after" them.

The U.S. government has concluded that Iran is behind a series of threatening emails arriving this week in the inboxes of Democratic voters, according to two U.S. officials.

Department of Homeland Security officials told state and local election administrators on a call Wednesday that a foreign government was responsible for the online barrage, according to the U.S. officials and state and local authorities who participated in the call, all speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. A DHS officials also said they had detected holes in state and local election websites and instructed those participating to patch their online services.

The emails claimed to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group supportive of President Trump, but appeared instead to be a deceptive campaign making use of a vulnerability in the organization’s online network.

First identified on Tuesday by local law enforcement and elections officials in Florida and Alaska, the emails were soon turned over to federal authorities, according to U.S. officials.

The messages appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as “voter files,” some of which are commercially available. They told recipients the Proud Boys were “in possession of all your information” and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.

By suggesting the group had gained access to privileged data, and also possibly penetrated electronic systems to detect how people were voting, the emails seemed designed to create the appearance of an election breach, said cybersecurity researchers. Such a move may serve to undermine confidence in the integrity of the democratic process without posing a genuine risk to the election, these researchers said.

“You will vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you,” warned the emails, which by Tuesday night were said to have reached voters in as many as four states, three of them hotly contested swing states in the coming presidential election.

The domain enlisted for the misleading operation, officialproudboys.com, was recently dropped by a hosting company that uses Google Cloud services, according to Google Cloud spokesman Ted Ladd. Without a secure host, the domain stood vulnerable to exploitation, cybersecurity experts said. Voters using Comcast, Yahoo and Gmail accounts were affected.

In addition to reports from Florida and Alaska, a voter in Pennsylvania told The Washington Post she had received one such email, though she suspected it may have been linked to her previous registration in Alaska. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office had not received reports about the messages, a spokesman, Mark Shade, said Wednesday.

In the worlds of the great Peter Falk as Detective Columbo, "Just one more thing..."

And that thing is this: acting Director of National Intelligence John Ratliffe actually spent the press conference seemingly trying to both clear the "good name" of the Proud Boys and to pin the email attacks on Iran as targeting Trump, when Democratic voters were the ones targeted.

That seems wildly fishy to me. FBI Director Chris Wray followed up at the press conference with news that Russia also was running operations to "influence public opinion" as he put it. Now, Russia would greatly benefit from, say, hacking the Proud Boys domain and sending out these emails to 1) hurt Democrats and 2) allow the Trump regime to pin the blame on Iran.

I don't trust either Ratliffe or Wray. Ratliffe is a known liar, and Wray, in case we've all forgotten, was Chris Christie's lawyer on BridgeGate.

No, this all reeks to high heaven. Keep a weather eye out for the rest of this story. It involves Russia and the Proud Boys, I'm sure of it.

As for Wray himself, well, there are bigger problems.

President Trump and his advisers have repeatedly discussed whether to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray after Election Day — a scenario that also could imperil the tenure of Attorney General William Barr as the president grows increasingly frustrated that federal law enforcement has not delivered his campaign the kind of last-minute boost that the FBI provided in 2016.

The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but Barr as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, or other Biden associates are under investigation.

  

Wray won't pull a Comey, Barr was completely AWOL from this conference, and he's vanished for weeks actually, ever since Trump contracted COVID-19 earlier this month. The next two weeks could be as fateful in American history as they come.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The first heads are rolling in the FBI over the Trump regime's retribution over Michael Flynn and a lot more will follow.

After a 38-year career with the Justice Department, the FBI's top lawyer Dana Boente was asked to resign on Friday. Two sources familiar with the decision to dismiss Boente said it came from high levels of the Justice Department rather than directly from FBI Director Christopher Wray.
His departure comes on the heels of recent criticism by Fox News for his role in the investigation of former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

A spokesman for the FBI confirmed to NBC News that Boente did in fact resign on Friday.

Fox News has recently criticized Boente's role in the investigation of Flynn, whose criminal charge for lying to the FBI was recently dropped by the Justice Department based in part on the argument that his lies were not material to an underlying investigation.

Boente also said in a recently leaked memo that material put into the public record about Flynn was not exculpatory for the former national security advisor. The memo undermines the Justice Department's latest position that material about Flynn was mishandled by prosecutors.

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said on April 27 that, "Shocking new reports suggest F.B.I. General Counsel Dana Boente day was acting in coordination with F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray to block the release of that evidence that would have cleared General Flynn."

Wray formally asked for Boente's resignation, but the decision to end his tenure at the FBI came from Attorney General William Barr's Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, according to two sources.

A spokesman for the FBI said Boente announced on Friday his decision to retire, which will take effect June 30.

"Few people have served so well in so many critical, high-level roles at the Department," Wray said in a statement. "Throughout his long and distinguished career as a public servant, Dana has demonstrated a selfless determination to ensure that justice is always served on behalf of our citizens."

Boente has long been a target of Trump for his role in the Mueller probe, being involved in all stages of the investigation as both the FBI's top lawyer and as former assistant AG before Rod Rosenstein.  Barr cashiering him is a loud, unmistakable message that he is now officially collecting heads, and that nobody is safe.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

How long before FBI Director Chris Wray is told to drop this white supremacist terrorism assessment or lose his job?

The FBI has elevated its assessment of the threat posed by racially motivated violent extremists in the U.S. to a "national threat priority" for fiscal year 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray said Wednesday. He said the FBI is placing the risk of violence from such groups "on the same footing" as threats posed to the country by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and its sympathizers.
"Not only is the terror threat diverse — it's unrelenting," Wray said at an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, or domestic terrorists motivated by racial or religious hatred, make up a "huge chunk" of the FBI's domestic terrorism investigations, Wray said in statements before the Senate Homeland Security Committee last November. The majority of those attacks are "fueled by some type of white supremacy," he said.

Wednesday, Wray said combating domestic terrorism and its "close cousin," hate crimes, are at the "top of the priority list" for the FBI.

His statements indicate the FBI is just as concerned about racially-motivated violent extremists, including white supremacists, as it is about the threat posed by homegrown violent extremists inspired by foreign terrorist organizations. Wray said both pose a grave threat because the perpetrators are often "lone actors," self-radicalized online, who often look to attack "soft targets" such as public gatherings, retail locations or houses of worship.

In many cases, perpetrators can move quickly from rhetoric to violence, Wray said.

"They choose easily accessible weapons — a car, a knife, a gun, maybe an IED they can build crudely off the internet — and they choose soft targets," Wray said. "That threat is what we assess is the biggest threat to the homeland right now."

Racially-motivated violent extremists were the primary source of ideologically-motivated violence in 2018 and 2019 and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremists since 2001, Wray said in a statement Wednesday.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have evolved on the issue of threats posed by domestic extremists over the last year or so, reports CBS News' Jeff Pegues, and federal law enforcement officials have faced criticism that they've been sluggish in their response to the increased risk posed by white supremacists and other racially-motivated violent extremists. The public message from federal law enforcement has changed as the threats have intensified.

In March of 2019, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insisted Islamist militants such as al-Qaida and ISIS, and those inspired by them in the U.S., remained the country's "primary terrorist threat," but said the department was focused on all kinds of violent extremism.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Trump mentioned the fight against "radical Islamic terrorism" but not the terror threat fueled by other forms of hate.

I can't imagine Wray will still be FBI Director for too much longer.   House Republicans are already gunning for him, which means Senate Republicans will be too.

The head of the FBI on Wednesday batted back criticism from House Republicans that he hadn't done enough to reform the law enforcement agency after the release of a report that detailed the bureau's failures in the Russia investigation. 

In his first public testimony on Capitol Hill since the release of the Justice Department's inspector general report late last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray was critical of the officials accused of wrongdoing in the report, and outlined a number of steps he was making to change protocol at the agency as a result. 

But his response before the House Judiciary Committee was too tepid for a number of conservative lawmakers, who demanded a "thorough and complete public house cleaning" and a "clear, unambiguous expression of moral outrage." 

President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress have seized on the findings in the inspector general report about a series of errors made by the FBI as it sought a surveillance warrant on a former Trump campaign aide under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. 

The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has said that he did not have enough evidence to conclude the motivation behind those errors, and the attorney general has suggested they could have been made in "bad faith." 

Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, drew audible protests from lawmakers after declaring he'd lost trust in the agency after the findings of the Horowitz report. 

"I don't trust your agency anymore. And that's a profound thing for me to say, because I was raised to revere the FBI," McClintock said.

The FISA "mismanagement" will be the official reason Wray is fired, but the reality will be that Trump will want an FBI director completely loyal to him not the FBI rank and file or to law enforcement.  He needs somebody as crooked as Bill Barr, and Wray still has slivers of his soul.

No, Trump will dump Wray going forward.  He won't stop at retaliation against impeachment witnesses.  He'll need an FBI Director willing to send people to kick down doors of more powerful people on his enemies list.  Friday night was only the beginning.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

The FBI wants to talk to the Ukraine whistleblower, most likely about Rudy Giuliani, according to the Associated Press.

The FBI last month requested an interview with the whistleblower whose complaint fueled the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump and Ukraine, a person familiar with the situation said Wednesday.

An agent from the FBI’s Washington field office reached out to the whistleblower’s lawyers last month to seek an interview about the substance of the complaint, according to this person, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the request with The Associated Press.

The person said it was clear from the FBI that the whistleblower was not regarded as the target of any investigation but rather a potential witness. It was not immediately clear what specifically the FBI might be looking into. The requested interview has not taken place.

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment on the request, which was first reported by Yahoo News.

The whistleblower, a CIA officer, filed a complaint on Aug. 12 about Trump’s phone call weeks earlier with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. During the call, Trump pressed for investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden and into the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Considering Rudy's two Ukranian contacts have already been indicted and Rudy is almost guaranteed to be next, my guess is it's almost certainly involving the case against Giuliani.  What information the whistleblower has against Giuliani specifically, I don't know.

But let's not forget the FBI is under Chris Wray, who reports to Bill Barr these days.  I can certainly understand why the whistleblower's lawyer, Mark Zaid, might not want to give the feds in the DC FBI office the dirt on Rudy right now when the SDNY is already on the case.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The spy games between the Trump regime and the Kremlin continue, as The Guardian breaks an impressive story of a deep-cover Russian agent with access to the US embassy in Moscow.

US counter-intelligence investigators discovered a suspected Russian spy had been working undetected in the heart of the American embassy in Moscow for more than a decade, the Guardian has learned.

The Russian national had been hired by the US Secret Service and is understood to have had access to the agency’s intranet and email systems, which gave her a potential window into highly confidential material including the schedules of the president and vice-president.

The woman had been working for the Secret Service for years before she came under suspicion in 2016 during a routine security sweep conducted by two investigators from the US Department of State’s Regional Security Office (RSO).

They established she was having regular and unauthorised meetings with members of the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency.

The Guardian has been told the RSO sounded the alarm in January 2017, but the Secret Service did not launch a full-scale inquiry of its own. Instead it decided to let her go quietly months later, possibly to contain any potential embarrassment.

An intelligence source told the Guardian the woman was dismissed last summer after the state department revoked her security clearance. The dismissal came shortly before a round of expulsions of US personnel demanded by the Kremlin after Washington imposed more sanctions on the country.

The order to remove more than 750 US personnel from its 1,200-strong diplomatic mission is understood to have provided cover for her removal.

“The Secret Service is trying to hide the breach by firing [her],” the source said. “The damage was already done but the senior management of the Secret Service did not conduct any internal investigation to assess the damage and to see if [she] recruited any other employees to provide her with more information.

“Only an intense investigation by an outside source can determine the damage she has done.”

Asked detailed questions about the investigation into the woman, and her dismissal, the Secret Service attempted to downplay the significance of her role. But it did not deny that she had been identified as a potential mole.

In a statement, it said: “The US Secret Service recognizes that all Foreign Service Nationals (FSN) who provide services in furtherance of our mission, administrative or otherwise, can be subjected to foreign intelligence influence.

“This is of particular emphasis in Russia. As such, all foreign service nationals are managed accordingly to ensure that Secret Service and United States government interests are protected at all times. As a result, the duties are limited to translation, interpretation, cultural guidance, liaison and administrative support.

To recap, the US had identified a possible Russian mole in the USSS, who had been in the agency's employ for a decade.  The Trump regime was informed when Trump took office.  The USSS quietly let her go and pretended nothing was wrong.   Nobody would have suspected anything, but then this story hits.

On the same day that this story broke, yesterday, the White House press briefing was presented by not just press secretary Sarah Sanders, but by four cabinet officials who all just happened to be responsible for the executive branch's defense against Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections.

The top officials' presence in the White House briefing room amounted to the administration's most significant effort to date to convey that a whole of government effort is being undertaken to combat Russian attacks on US democracy, which Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said is "in the crosshairs." 

The briefing came on the heels of weeks of scorching criticism Republicans and Democrats have unleashed on the President following his refusal to back the US intelligence community's conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election over Russian President Vladimir Putin's denials.

"Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, and it has become clear that they are the target of our adversaries who seek ... to sow discord and undermine our way of life," Nielsen said. 

The briefing came on the heels of weeks of scorching criticism Republicans and Democrats have unleashed on the President following his refusal to back the US intelligence community's conclusions about Russian interference in the 2016 election over Russian President Vladimir Putin's denials. 

Trump has since reaffirmed his confidence in the US intelligence assessment, but his absence from the briefing room on Thursday and his ongoing branding of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as a "witch hunt" have only kept alive questions about whether Trump is serious about confronting ongoing Russian interference. 

That cognitive dissonance was on display during the briefing Thursday as Coats, national security adviser John Bolton and FBI Director Chris Wray were pressed about contradictions in the administration's messaging and the President's. 

"I think the President has made it abundantly clear to everybody who has responsibility in this area that he cares deeply about it and that he expects them to do their jobs to their fullest ability and that he supports them fully," Bolton said, adding that Trump opened his private meeting with Putin by raising election interference. 

Still, Coats said he is "not in a position to either understand fully or talk about what happened in Helsinki," despite being one of the US's top intelligence officials. 

And so the same day we find out about a major, major Russian mole in the USSS.

This is not a coincidence.  Maybe there's finally enough pressure from Republicans in Congress to motivate the Trump regime to fight back.

Maybe.  I have serious doubts, but we'll see.  

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

There's a number of developments today to review in the ongoing Trump/Russia probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and it starts with our old friend Erik "of Darkness" Prince and his interview with Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff.

[Woodruff]There’s been a lot of reporting that Mueller’s interested in some of the meetings you had in the lead-up to the campaign and after the election and I was just wondering if you could tell me if you’ve heard from anyone on Mueller’s team? 

[Prince]I certainly understand the intense interest in the investigation and certainly some of the wild-eyed reporting in the media. I have spoken voluntarily to Congress and I also cooperated with the special counsel. I have plenty of opinions about the various investigations but there’s no question some people are taking it seriously and I think it’s best to keep my opinion on that to myself for now. All I will add is that much of the reporting about me in the media is inaccurate, and I am confident that when the investigators have finished their work, we will be able to put these distractions to the side.

[W]You told the House intelligence committee that the Seychelles meeting [with Dmitriev] was unplanned, but ABC reported that George Nader briefed you on it beforehand. What do you make of that ABC reporting? 

[P]All I can say is, there’s been a lot of media reporting about me over the years and most of it is wrong. They get it wrong way more than they ever get it right. 

[W]What do you think the United States’ posture toward Russia should be? Do you support the president’s rhetoric about trying to thaw that relationship? 

[P]Absolutely. As I’ve said before, if Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin to defeat German fascism, Nazi fascism, national socialist fascism, then certainly Donald Trump can work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. And I think good statesmanship could even start to drive a wedge between Russian policy and Iran policy because we can disagree vehemently on their policy in Ukraine but we don’t have to be, certainly, their enemy in the Middle East. And even from a NATO perspective, I mean look, remember, 400,000 Americans died in World War II. Twenty-two million Russians died breaking the Nazi army. And from a Russian perspective, there are more unfriendly nations aligned on their borders now than at any time since May of 1940. So I don’t think we have to be provocative with NATO and I think it’s a good idea for the president to reach out diplomatically. I mean for heaven’s sakes, he’s sitting down and talking to Kim of North Korea. Putin is a much more rational actor and I think it’s totally appropriate for the president to sit down and try to thaw the situation.

Two things here:  Prince happily talked to both Mueller and Congress, and he's still convinced he's untouchable to the point of being fully available to advise the regime on coming military matters.  Nice guy.  Would hate for that notion to be disabused by a couple dozen US Marshals.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani now doing a 180 on calling for Mueller's head from last week.

President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said on Monday that he was actually just bluffing last week when he called for Justice Department leaders to suspend special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation within 24 hours. 

“I didn’t think it would,” Giuliani told POLITICO with a laugh when asked about the Mueller inquiry’s still being very much an active investigation. “But I still think it should be.”

So, apparently somebody had a nice long conversation with Rudy about his antics over the last week or so and is reining him in.  Whether it's Trump himself or somebody on his behalf I don't know, but the lesson to learn here is not to take anything Giuliani says at face value anymore, not that it should have happened in the first place.

That doesn't however mean that all of Trump's mouthpieces are easing off the Mueller probe, far from it as a matter of fact as the WSJ 's Bill McGurn is calling for Rod Rosenstein's head, as well as the head of Trump FBI Director Chris Wray.  It's a bit incongruous I know, but that's the Trump regime for you.  Hell, Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale is calling for Jeff Sessions's head along with Mueller.  These guys still want blood.

However, there's yet another piece of the money laundering/real estate puzzle in the Trump/Russia probe that has come to light this week as McClatchy's Anita Kumar explains.

Aleksandr Burman, a Ukrainian who engaged in a health care scheme that cost the federal government $26 million and was sentenced to a decade in prison, paid $725,000 cash for a condo at a Trump Tower I in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. in 2009. 

Leonid Zeldovich, who has reportedly done extensive business in the Russian-annexed area of Crimea, bought four Trump units outright at a cost of more than $4.35 million, three of them in New York City between 2007 and 2010. 

And Igor Romashov, who served as chairman of the board of Transoil, a Russian oil transport company subject to U.S. sanctions, paid $620,000 upfront for a unit at a building adorned with the future U.S. president's name in Sunny Isles Beach in 2010. 

Buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales — totaling nearly $109 million — at 10 Trump-branded properties in south Florida and New York City, according to a new analysis shared with McClatchy. Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.

Once again, buying real estate properties in all-cash sales through shell companies is classic, classic money laundering 101.  Russian buyers purchased more than $100 million in Trump real estate with cash in this way.  This isn't the first time we've heard of this happening with Trump's real estate assets, but the fact that this keeps coming up should be setting off major alarm bells that Trump and his sleazy family have been engaging with criminal activity with Putin and the Russians long before the 2016 election.

Mueller's on it, believe me.

In The Nixonian Moment

As I said Monday, by demanding that the DoJ investigate the ongoing investigation into the Trump regime, Donald Trump has crossed the Rubicon and is now well into "Here There Be Nixon" territory.  Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson makes it clear that we've entered the heart of darkness.

Stop waiting for the constitutional crisis that President Trump is sure to provoke. It’s here.

On Sunday, via Twitter, Trump demanded that the Justice Department concoct a transparently political investigation, with the aim of smearing veteran professionals at Justice and the FBI and also throwing mud at the previous administration. Trump’s only rational goal is casting doubt on the probe by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, which appears to be closing in. 

Trump’s power play is a gross misuse of his presidential authority and a dangerous departure from long-standing norms. Strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin use their justice systems to punish enemies and deflect attention from their own crimes. Presidents of the United States do not — or did not, until Sunday’s tweet: 

“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

Rather than push back and defend the rule of law, Justice tried to mollify the president by at least appearing to give him what he wants. The Republican leadership in Congress has been silent as a mouse. This is how uncrossable lines are crossed.

And it gets worse, not only did Trump meet with Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Chris Wray to directly order something be done about the investigation into his own campaign, he basically ordered that the FBI and DoJ turn over information on the investigation to Republicans in Congress.

The White House brokered an agreement on Monday with intelligence and law enforcement officials that will allow Republican congressional leaders to view some of the most highly classified information related to the Russia investigation, administration officials said. 

For months, a small group of lawmakers close to Mr. Trump have been in a pitched fight with the Justice Department over access to some of its most delicate case files, including documents detailing the scope of the Russia investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. 

They have trained their focus most recently on access to documents and information related to a secret informant used by F.B.I. agents to gather information from Trump associates who were overseas during the 2016 presidential campaign. Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and the House Intelligence Committee chairman, has threatened to hold Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who is overseeing the Russia inquiry, in contempt of Congress or to try to impeach him if he does not hand over the material. 

Until Monday, intelligence and law enforcement officials had strenuously resisted both demands, saying that the information was highly sensitive and that it was not appropriate to turn over the unredacted material to Congress, where they fear it could potentially become public or be used to undermine Mr. Mueller’s inquiry. They raised some of their concerns in a letter and then in a face-to-face meeting two weeks ago with Mr. Nunes.

It was not clear after Monday’s meeting how much of that information will now be shared with lawmakers and in what form, or who it will be shared with and in what venue. Democrats have typically been given the same access as their Republican counterparts to delicate files related to the case, but officials on Capitol Hill said they had been given few firm details on the apparent agreement.

White House officials said they expect the disclosure to happen quickly, most likely before the end of the week.

This is flat-out banana republic time, guys.  All I can say is I hope that Rosenstein playing along is a sign of his confidence in how ironclad the Mueller probe is, because we already know Rep. Devin Nunes will leak anything and everything he's shown.

The real problem is WH Chief of Staff John Kelly getting to see all this information.  That's basically letting the mafia don's consigliere sit in on the case meeting between the RICO unit and the DA.  It's full-on nuts, and Republicans are going along with it.

These are dark times this week.  I expect they will only get far worse.