Operation Plug The Leak

I absolutely hate to say this, but for once, Double G was actually correct. Why yes, the Trump regime did want the CIA to kidnap WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from London's Ecuadorian Embassy where he had been hiding for years, and some of then CIA Director Mike Pompeo's ghouls wanted to outright assassinate him.

In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation.

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”

The conversations were part of an unprecedented CIA campaign directed against WikiLeaks and its founder. The agency’s multipronged plans also included extensive spying on WikiLeaks associates, sowing discord among the group’s members, and stealing their electronic devices.

While Assange had been on the radar of U.S. intelligence agencies for years, these plans for an all-out war against him were sparked by WikiLeaks’ ongoing publication of extraordinarily sensitive CIA hacking tools, known collectively as “Vault 7,” which the agency ultimately concluded represented “the largest data loss in CIA history.”

President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. Pompeo and other top agency leaders “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7,” said a former Trump national security official. “They were seeing blood.”

The CIA’s fury at WikiLeaks led Pompeo to publicly describe the group in 2017 as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” More than just a provocative talking point, the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services, former intelligence officials told Yahoo News. Within months, U.S. spies were monitoring the communications and movements of numerous WikiLeaks personnel, including audio and visual surveillance of Assange himself, according to former officials.

This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.

The CIA declined to comment. Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment.

 

I think Mike Pompeo needs to testify to Congress about this, and then enjoy a nice vacation in his own small room for eight or nine years. 

I have my problems with Assange, he's definitely a Russian disinformation asset, willing or otherwise, and he should be rounded up and allowed to alk his heart out about his Fancy Bear friends in the GRU, but sending the CIA to assassinate him is something entirely else.

I'm way more interested in seeing Pompeo answer for that. As Marcy Wheeler notes, there's historical context here, and it's long and complex.

As to the discussions of kidnapping Assange, both the UK and NSC nixed those ideas, though White House Counsel lawyer John Eisenberg (who is presented as the hero of the Yahoo story, and who was a national security lawyer at DOJ during the Bush Administration when such things did get approved) worried that CIA would do it without alerting him and others, and so pressed DOJ to indict Assange if they were going to.

There's a lot here to absorb, and a lot here to probe. Add it to the list, I guess.

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

BuzzFeed News's lawsuit to get unredacted Mueller report passages finds that yes, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Cohen all told Mueller's team that Roger Stone absolutely knew WikiLeaks had the stolen 2016 DNC emails, and that yes, Roger Stone absolutely told Trump that the leaks were coming.

Donald Trump was told in advance that Wikileaks would be releasing documents embarrassing to the Clinton campaign and subsequently informed advisors that he expected more releases would be coming, according to newly unredacted portions of special counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
In July 2016, political consultant Roger Stone told Trump as well as several campaign advisors that he had spoken with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing the documents in a matter of days. Stone told the then-candidate via speakerphone that he "did not know what the content of the materials was," according to the newly unveiled portions of the report, and Trump responded "oh good, alright" upon hearing the news. WikiLeaks published a trove of some 20,000 emails Russians hacked from the Democratic National Committee on July 22 of that year.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told federal investigators that he overheard the phone call between Stone and Trump. Agents were also told by former campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates that Stone had spoken several times in early June of something “big” coming from WikiLeaks. Assange first mentioned having emails related to Clinton on June 12.

The new revelations are the strongest indication to date that Trump and his closest advisors were aware of outside efforts to hurt Clinton’s electoral chances, and that Stone played a direct role in communicating that situation to the Trump campaign. Trump has publicly denied being aware of any information being relayed between WikiLeaks and his advisors. 

Allegations of communications between Stone and Trump to discuss WIkiLeaks first surfaced early last year, when Cohen testified to a congressional committee about the June 2016 conference call. At the time, Stone denied any such involvement. “Mr. Cohen’s statement is not true,” he told BuzzFeed News.

But based on the interviews it conducted with those three men and other officials, Mueller’s report concluded it had "established that the Trump Campaign displayed interest in the WikiLeaks releases, and that former Campaign member Roger Stone was in contact with the Campaign about those releases, claiming advance knowledge of more to come."

The newly unredacted portions of the Mueller report also show that after the initial dump by WikiLeaks, Trump personally asked Manafort to keep in touch with Stone, who in turn told the then-campaign chairman to keep him “apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks.” Investigators were also told by Gates that Trump had multiple phone conversations with Stone during the campaign and that, following one call held en route to LaGuardia airport, “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.”

In written testimony to Mueller’s team in November 2018, Trump denied being aware of any communications between Stone, Manafort, Gates, or Donald Trump Jr and WikiLeaks or Assange. Yet according to the newly public portions of the Special Counsel’s report, “Trump knew that Manafort and Gates had asked Stone to find out what other damaging information about Clinton WikiLeaks possessed, and that Stone's claimed connection to WikiLeaks was common knowledge within the Campaign."

Considering the contradictory evidence, the special counsel’s office weighed the possibility that Trump “no longer had clear recollections” of what happened two years earlier, but also wondered whether “the President's conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President's denials and would link the President to Stone's efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks." The investigators stopped short of suggesting that the President may have lied or otherwise misled the special counsel, however.

It doesn't really change much, Stone has been convicted and will almost certainly be pardoned by Trump along with Flynn and Manafort, Trump's impeachment failed to garner a conviction, and Joe Biden will leave prosecuting Trump to the state of New York.

Of course after last night, maybe things are quite different in SDNY land.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Oh the Richard Grenell story just keeps getting better, because now there's the claim he's tied to Julian Assange and the DNC email hack in 2016 and I just cannot.

Attorneys for Julian Assange, who is fighting a U.S. extradition request on espionage and computer hacking charges, plan to introduce evidence in the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition hearing involving President Donald Trump’s new intel chief Richard Grenell.
Gareth Peirce, a lawyer representing Assange in his extradition proceedings in London, plans to argue this week that the process to try to extradite her client was abused from early on. Representatives for Assange’s defense team say they expect to introduce recordings and screenshots of communications of a close Grenell associate, including a secondhand claim that Grenell was acting on the president’s orders.

Grenell’s sudden embroilment in Assange’s extradition fight comes at an inconvenient time, as Democrats and national security veterans criticize him as ill-suited and unqualified to be the acting director of national intelligence. And it threatens to spotlight his close relationship with President Trump, feeding the widespread perception that the president is politicizing intelligence work for partisan ends.

At the heart of the Assange team’s argument is an ABC News report from last April alleging that, while serving as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Grenell told Assange’s Ecuadorean hosts that the U.S. government would not pursue the death penalty for Assange if Ecuador allowed British officials to enter its embassy in London and arrest him.
Assange’s legal team will claim that Grenell’s role was more extensive than previously known, and that it corrupted the extradition process early on. The suggestion will be that the U.S. was so desperate to get Assange in its custody that American officials, via Grenell, agreed in advance to take a particular sentence off the table before even allowing a trial and sentencing to play out.

The WikiLeaks founder’s attorneys are also expected to present evidence that they believe shows Trump explicitly tasked Grenell with making the offer, thereby politicizing the process. One of Assange’s lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald, hinted at this argument in his opening statement on Monday, when he said that Assange’s prosecution was “not motivated by genuine concerns for criminal justice but politics.”

The evidence submitted this week will include new materials submitted to Assange’s legal team by political activist and journalist Cassandra Fairbanks, a staunch defender of Assange who has worked for the Russian state-run news site Sputnik and the far-right outlet Gateway Pundit. She is expected to be listed as a formal witness in the case.

I swear to god if Assange blows open the whole DNC email hack by calling a network of paid operatives as witnesses to connect Trump to Russia through his new acting DNI crony in order to save his own ass, I may expire from uncontrollable laughter.

This is a fight where everyone involved should be going to prison and I can't wait to watch.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

As I said last night, the story that Julian Assange was offered a pardon by Trump if he would denounce the fact that Russia was behind the 2016 DNC email hack was a huge deal if it was true.  Supposedly former GOP Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was the intermediary who offered the deal to Assange in 2017.

It's looking more and more like it's true as Rohrabacher confirmed the story to Yahoo News.

Former California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher confirmed in a new interview that during a three-hour meeting at the Ecuadorian Embassy in August 2017, he told Julian Assange he would get President Trump to give him a pardon if he turned over information proving the Russians had not been the source of internal Democratic National Committee emails published by WikiLeaks.
In a phone interview with Yahoo News, Rohrabacher said his goal during the meeting was to find proof for a widely debunked conspiracy theory: that WikiLeaks’ real source for the DNC emails was not Russian intelligence agents, as U.S. officials have since concluded, but former DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered on the streets of Washington in July 2016 in what police believe was a botched robbery.

A lawyer for Assange in London on Wednesday cited the pardon offer from Rohrabacher during a court hearing on the U.S. government’s request to extradite the WikiLeaks founder.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham immediately denounced the claim about a pardon discussion with Assange as a “complete fabrication,” adding that the president “barely knows Dana Rohrabacher” and has “never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject.”

Rohrabacher said that not only did talk of a Trump pardon take place during his meeting, but he also followed up by calling then White House chief of staff John Kelly to discuss the proposal. He did not, however, ever speak to Trump about it, he said.

“I spoke to Julian Assange and told him if he would provide evidence about who gave WikiLeaks the emails I would petition the president to give him a pardon,” Rohrabacher said. “He knew I could get to the president.”

When he spoke to Kelly, the then chief of staff was “courteous” but made no commitment that he would even raise the matter directly with the president. “He knew this had to be handled with care,” Rohrabacher said, and that it could be spun by the news media in ways that would be “harmful” to the president. In fact, Rohrabacher said he never heard anything further from Kelly about the matter, nor did he ever discuss the subject directly with Trump.

Rohrabacher, who was defeated when he ran for reelection in 2018 and is now a consultant to the cannabis industry, long had a reputation as one of the few members of Congress willing to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin.

So at least now the story looks like Rohrabacher, not Trump, was behind the effort to defend Putin by using Assange to advance the ridiculous and ghoulish Seth Rich conspiracy theory, he talked to then White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and it never got any further than that.

This is completely in-line for Rorhabacher, who has long been Putin's best friend in the House until he lost his usefulness to him along with his House seat in 2018.

Of course, Rohrabacher could be lying and Trump absolutely had him make the offer.  That would be in-line for him too.  John Kelly would know for sure.  Maybe somebody should, I dunno, ask him.

And speaking of Russian operatives...

President Trump erupted at his acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, in the Oval Office last week over what he perceived as disloyalty by Maguire’s staff, which ruined Maguire’s chances of becoming the permanent intelligence chief, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump announced on Wednesday that he was replacing Maguire with a vocal loyalist, Richard Grenell, who is the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Maguire had been considered a leading candidate to be nominated for the post of DNI, White House aides had said. But Trump’s opinion shifted last week when he heard from a GOP ally that the intelligence official in charge of election security, who works for Maguire, gave a classified briefing last Thursday to the House Intelligence Committee on 2020 election security.
It is unclear what the official, Shelby Pierson, specifically said at the briefing that angered Trump, but the president erroneously believed that she had given information exclusively to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the committee chairman, and that the information would be helpful to Democrats if it were released publicly, the people familiar with the matter said. Schiff was the lead impeachment manager, or prosecutor, during Trump’s Senate trial on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

The president was furious with Maguire and blamed him for the supposed transgression involving Pierson when the two met the next day.

“There was a dressing down” of Maguire, said one individual, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “That was the catalyst” that led to the sidelining of Maguire in favor of Grenell, the person said.

What information could have set Trump off like that, pray tell?  Why, the fact that Russia is openly helping Trump in 2020.

Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him.

The day after the Feb. 13 briefing to lawmakers, Mr. Trump berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place, people familiar with the exchange said. Mr. Trump cited the presence in the briefing of Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who led the impeachment proceedings against him, as a particular irritant.

During the briefing to the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Trump’s allies challenged the conclusions, arguing that he has been tough on Russia and strengthened European security. Some intelligence officials viewed the briefing as a tactical error, saying that had the official who delivered the conclusion spoken less pointedly or left it out, they would have avoided angering the Republicans.

That intelligence official, Shelby Pierson, is an aide to Mr. Maguire who has a reputation of delivering intelligence in somewhat blunt terms. The president announced on Wednesday that he was replacing Mr. Maguire with Richard Grenell, the ambassador to Germany and long an aggressively vocal Trump supporter.
Though some current and former officials speculated that the briefing may have played a role in the removal of Mr. Maguire, who had told people in recent days that he believed he would remain in the job, two administration officials said the timing was coincidental. Mr. Grenell had been in discussions with the administration about taking on new roles, they said, and Mr. Trump had never felt a kinship with Mr. Maguire.

Spokeswomen for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its election security office declined to comment. A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

So yes, as I said earlier today, Maguire is being ousted because he was actually doing his job.  Trump will never allow that, as he wants an intelligence apparatus that is to be used exclusively against his political enemies.  And under Grenell and Barr, it will be.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

So if this is true, and it's a damn big if considering the subject matter is Julian Assange, then the Trump regime offered him a full pardon in exchange for denouncing the DNC email hack was Russian in origin.

A lawyer for Julian Assange has claimed in court that President Donald Trump offered to pardon Assange if the WikiLeaks founder agreed to help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Assange’s lawyers said on Wednesday that former Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher offered Assange the deal in 2017, a year after emails that damaged Hillary Clinton in the presidential race had been published. WikiLeaks posted the stolen DNC emails after they were hacked by Russian operatives.

The claim that Rohrabacher acted as an emissary for the White House came during a pre-extradition hearing in London.

Assange has argued that he should not be extradited to the U.S. because the American case against him is politically motivated. He spent almost seven years hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in Central London claiming that he would be jailed in the U.S. if he wasn’t granted asylum. He was kicked out of the embassy last year.

His lawyers told the court that Trump’s alleged offer to pardon Assange proved that this was no ordinary criminal investigation.

Edward Fitzgerald, who was representing Assange in court, said he had evidence that a quid pro quo was put to Assange by Rohrabacher, who was known as Putin’s favorite congressman.

Fitzgerald said a statement produced by Assange’s personal lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, included a description of “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”

Rohrabacher weighed in on Wednesday afternoon, insisting he never spoke to Trump about Assange prior to his personally-funded “fact finding mission” to London. He said he told Assange that he would “call on” Trump to pardon him if he was able to say who gave him the hacked emails.

“I was not directed by Trump or anyone else connected with him to meet with Julian Assange,” he said in a statement. “At no time did I offer Julian Assange anything from the President because I had not spoken with the President about this issue at all.”

Rohrabacher said he spoke briefly with then chief of staff John Kelly after the trip to let him know that Assange would provide information about the hacked DNC emails in exchange for a pardon. “No one followed up with me including Gen. Kelly and that was the last discussion I had on this subject with anyone representing Trump or in his Administration,” he said.

50% of me says this is absolutely Russian disinformation.  50% of me says this is all true and Assange has been sitting on this for years waiting for the right moment to shove the knife into Trump.  I don't know which, and America needs to know pretty much right away as to whether or not it's true.

Because if it is true, it's time to impeach this orange asshole again for pardon quid pro quo.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Why yes, Julian Assange absolutely was a Russian asset working to throw the 2016 election to Trump, and CNN has the receipts to prove it.

New documents obtained exclusively by CNN reveal that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange received in-person deliveries, potentially of hacked materials related to the 2016 US election, during a series of suspicious meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. 

The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy. 

The surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command center and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. 

Despite being confined to the embassy while seeking safe passage to Ecuador, Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical moments, frequently for hours at a time. He also acquired powerful new computing and network hardware to facilitate data transfers just weeks before WikiLeaks received hacked materials from Russian operatives. 

These stunning details come from hundreds of surveillance reports compiled for the Ecuadorian government by UC Global, a private Spanish security company, and obtained by CNN. They chronicle Assange's movements and provide an unprecedented window into his life at the embassy. They also add a new dimension to the Mueller report, which cataloged how WikiLeaks helped the Russians undermine the US election. 

An Ecuadorian intelligence official told CNN that the surveillance reports are authentic. 

The security logs noted that Assange personally managed some of the releases "directly from the embassy" where he lived for nearly seven years. After the election, the private security company prepared an assessment of Assange's allegiances. That report, which included open-source information, concluded there was "no doubt that there is evidence" that Assange had ties to Russian intelligence agencies. 

UC Global did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

To recap, Assange met with Russian agents and hackers, received packages from them, and was responsible for the DNC leaks that helped to cost Clinton the White House in 2016.  I've been saying for years this was true, and now we have some pretty damning proof.

This should be a much bigger story, and Democrats should be screaming about it, but here we are.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Two things we did learn from the redacted Mueller report this week, one, that Russia definitely interfered with the 2016 elections, and two, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were a part of that interference and Assange used the tragic death of DNC staffer Seth Rich to further his conspiracy.

Julian Assange not only knew that a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer wasn’t his source for thousands of hacked party emails, he was in active contact with his real sources in Russia’s GRU months after Seth Rich’s death. At the same time he was publicly working to shift blame onto the slain staffer “to obscure the source of the materials he was releasing,” Special Counsel Robert Mueller asserts in his final report on Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.

“After the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that Russia was behind the hacking operation, Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking,” the report reads. “According to media reports, Assange told a U.S. congressman that the DNC hack was an ‘inside job,’ and purported to have ‘physical proof’ that Russians did not give materials to Assange.”

Thursday’s long-anticipated release adds new details about Assange’s interactions with the officers in Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate. Still, it leaves one question unanswered: Why was Assange so determined to exonerate the Russian intelligence agents who gave him the material?

As laid out by Mueller, Assange’s involvement in Russia’s election interference began with a June 14, 2016 direct message to WikiLeaks’ Twitter account from “DC Leaks,” one of the false fronts created by the Russians to launder their hacked material.

“You announced your organization was preparing to publish more Hillary's emails,” the message read, according to Mueller’s report. “We are ready to support you. We have some sensitive information too, in particular, her financial documents. Let's do it together. What do you think about publishing our info at the same moment? Thank you.”

A week later, WikiLeaks reached out to a second GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0, and pitched WikiLeaks as the best outlet for the hacked material. On July 14, 2016, GRU officers used a Guccifer 2.0 email address to send WikiLeaks an encrypted one-gigabyte file named “wk dnc link I .txt.gpg.” Assange confirmed receipt, and on July 22 he published 20,000 DNC emails stolen during the GRU’s breach.

By then, it was no secret where the documents came from. The computer security firm CrowdStrike had already published its technical report on the DNC breach, which laid out a trail leading directly to Moscow and the GRU. Analysts at ThreatConnect independently presented evidence that Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks were fictional creations of that agency.

But rather than refuse to comment on his sources, as he’s done in other cases, Assange used his platform to deny that he got the material from Russians, and make statements at an alternative theory. On August 9, 2016, WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed announced a $20,000 reward for “information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.”

We'll run this back one more time for the folks in the cheap seats:

• The Russians stole the DNC emails.
• The Russians gave them to WikiLeaks to disseminate them.
• The plan was to do as much damage to Clinton as possible.
• Donald Trump knew the leaks of the stolen emails were coming before they happened.
• After the leaks happened, Assange continued to stay in contact with his Russian sources.
• Assange covered for them by lying and saying Seth Rich was his source.

Any questions?

Russian To Judgment, Con't

So it turns out that Russian hackers hit voter registration systems in all 50 states during the 2016 campaign and not just the 21 states previously disclosed.  Surprise!

A joint intelligence bulletin (JIB) has been issued by the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation to state and local authorities regarding Russian hacking activities during the 2016 presidential election. While the bulletin contains no new technical information, it is the first official report to confirm that the Russian reconnaissance and hacking efforts in advance of the election went well beyond the 21 states confirmed in previous reports.

As reported by the intelligence newsletter OODA Loop, the JIB stated that, while the FBI and DHS "previously observed suspicious or malicious cyber activity against government networks in 21 states that we assessed was a Russian campaign seeking vulnerabilities and access to election infrastructure," new information obtained by the agencies "indicates that Russian government cyber actors engaged in research on—as well as direct visits to—election websites and networks in the majority of US states." While not providing specific details, the bulletin continued, "The FBI and DHS assess that Russian government cyber actors probably conducted research and reconnaissance against all US states’ election networks leading up to the 2016 Presidential elections."

DHS-FBI JIBs are unclassified documents, but they're usually marked "FOUO" (for official use only) and are shared through the DHS' state and major metropolitan Fusion Centers with state and local authorities. The details within the report are mostly well-known. "The information contained in this bulletin is consistent with what we have said publicly and what we have briefed to election officials on multiple occasions," a DHS spokesperson told Ars. "We assume the Russian government researched and in some cases targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states in an attempt to sow discord and influence the 2016 election."

In fact, DHS Assistant Secretary Jeanette Manfra told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in April of 2018 that Russia had likely at least performed reconnaissance on election infrastructure in all 50 states. The bulletin raises the confidence in that estimate, however, saying:

Russian cyber actors in the summer of 2016 conducted online research and reconnaissance to identify vulnerable databases, usernames, and passwords in webpages of a broader number of state and local websites than previously identified, bringing the number of states known to be researched by Russian actors to greater than 40. Despite gaps in our data where some states appear to be untouched by Russian activities, we have moderate confidence that Russian actors likely conducted at least reconnaissance against all US states based on the methodical nature of their research. This newly available information corroborates our previous assessment and enhances our understanding of the scale and scope of Russian operations to understand and exploit state and local election networks.

Please keep in mind the Trump regime has done everything possible to weaken US defenses against Russian hacking, including shutting down defense efforts at both the Pentagon and in the White House since taking office.

And if you don't think current Russian efforts to hack state voter registration rolls in order to help Trump purge Democrats aren't already underway right now, you've not been paying attention.

And speaking of Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 election, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange finally got tossed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London into the waiting arms of UK police and Justice Department espionage charges.

The dramatic expulsion follows a year of ratcheting tension between Assange and his Ecuadorian hosts, culminating in Wikileaks publicizing a leak of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails mysteriously stolen from the inboxes of Ecuador’s president and first lady. It was this last move that finally set Ecuador’s government firmly against Assange, who was by then already being treated less like a political refugee than an inmate—albeit one who was free to leave at any time.

“The patience of Ecuador has reached its limit on the behavior of Mr. Assange,” said Ecuador’s president Lenín Moreno on Thursday.
Assange, who has an outstanding warrant for jumping bail in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, was taken into custody after officers were invited inside by embassy officials. It’s a relatively minor charge, but Assange’s imminent freedom is far from assured.

British police confirmed a few hours after the initial arrest that Assange was arrested for a second time on behalf of U.S. authorities on an extradition warrant. The U.K. government didn't reveal much, only saying Assange is “accused in the United States of America of computer related offences.”

CNN reported that the U.S. Justice Department will soon announce charges against Assange and the cause for the extradition request.

Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, have been working to build a case against the Australian cypherpunk for nearly a decade, and a paperwork error last year revealed they have a sealed criminal complaint at the ready in anticipation of this moment.

That complaint was unsealed today as domestic political pressure on President Moreno from an exposed Chinese corruption deal (lot of those going around) made Assange an albatross around his neck, and weight was finally too much for him to bear.  In fact, Moreno blames WikiLeaks for the documents that Moreno's opponents magically seemed to get their hands on.

Assange is facing conspiracy charges for working with convicted whistleblower Chelsea Manning.  What Assange isn't facing is charges of publishing classified material.  It seems Bill Barr isn't willing to go that far on carrying out Trump's media "enemies of the people" plan quite yet.

For now.  Let's remember that WikiLeaks helped Trump and Roger Stone leak the Russian-provided hacked Podesta DNC memos in 2016.  It's perfectly understandable that they want to toss Assange in a hole before he can bury Trump in one.

It's Mueller Time, Rolling Stone Edition, Con't

As I mentioned on Sunday, one of the theories on why Roger Stone found an FBI SWAT team and CNN at his door at 4 AM last week was that Robert Mueller believed Stone was a risk to destroy evidence implicating him with the Trump regime, WikiLeaks, and more. Cato's Julian Sanchez:

Of course, as the indictment also makes clear, the special counsel has already managed to get its hands on plenty of Mr. Stone’s communications by other means — but one seeming exception jumps out. In a text exchange between Mr. Stone and a “supporter involved with the Trump Campaign,” Mr. Mueller pointedly quotes Mr. Stone’s request to “talk on a secure line — got WhatsApp?” There the direct quotes abruptly end, and the indictment instead paraphrases what Mr. Stone “subsequently told the supporter.” Though it’s not directly relevant to his alleged false statements, the special counsel is taking pains to establish that Mr. Stone made a habit of moving sensitive conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp — meaning that, unlike ordinary emails, the messages could not be obtained directly from the service provider.

The clear implication is that any truly incriminating communications would have been conducted in encrypted form — and thus could be obtained only directly from Mr. Stone’s own phones and laptops. And while Mr. Stone likely has limited value as a cooperating witness — it’s hard to put someone on the stand after charging them with lying to obstruct justice — the charges against him provide leverage in the event his cooperation is needed to unlock those devices by supplying a cryptographic passphrase.

Thursday in a court filing asking for more time to examine evidence taken from Stone's home (and all but confirmed by a Stone press conference), the Mueller team strongly indicated that Sanchez's theory is 100% correct.

Federal investigators probing Roger Stone, the former Trump campaign official indicted last week in the Russia probe, have seized multiple hard drives containing years of communication records from cellphones and email accounts, the special counsel's office said Thursday.

Robert Mueller's prosecutors, in a new court filing, described the evidence as "voluminous and complex" in asking a judge to delay his trial to give them more time to sift through the seized devices.

The court papers said investigators grabbed hard drives containing several terabytes of information, including "FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives)."

The FBI is doing what it calls a "filter review" of the devices, setting aside any evidence that cannot be admissible in court because it is considered privileged.

During a press conference Thursday, Stone agreed that evidence is voluminous and complex, and said both parties had agreed to the language in the government's filing.

Mueller's team also filed motions to stop Stone from discussing the case and the evidence with the media, but the big news is that now we know why the Mueller team insisted on an FBI wake-up call last Friday morning for Stone.  Cohen's electronic evidence went all the way to a special master to determine what was admissible and what was privileged, but that didn't save Cohen and he flipped like a pancake.

I expect Stone will do the same, and sooner rather than later.  Mueller has his receipts, and they are going to ring Stone up.

It's Mueller Time, Stone Cold Edition

Long-time Trump adviser Roger Stone has been predicting his indictment by Robert Mueller for a while now, and in a glorious return to Mueller Fridays, the hammer finally dropped.

Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, was charged as part of the special counsel investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization behind the release of thousands of stolen Democratic emails during the 2016 campaign, in an indictment unsealed Friday.

Mr. Stone was charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements and witness tampering, according to the special counsel’s office.

F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Stone before dawn on Friday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and he was expected to appear in a federal courthouse there later in the morning. F.B.I. agents were also seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem.

The indictment is the first in months by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with Trump campaign associates. Citing details in emails and other forms of communications, the indictment suggests Mr. Trump’s campaign knew about additional stolen emails before they were released and asked Mr. Stone to find out about them.

Mr. Stone’s lawyer, Grant Smith, dismissed the charges, calling them “ridiculous,” and said, “this is all about a minor charge about lying to Congress about something that was apparently found later.”

Mr. Stone, a self-described dirty trickster, began his career as a campaign aide for Richard M. Nixon and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back. He has spent decades plying the political dark arts including scandal-mongering to help influence American election campaigns, and has long maintained that he had no connection to Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. He sometimes seemed to taunt American law enforcement agencies, daring them to find hard evidence to link him to the Russian election interference.

According to the indictment, between June and July of 2016, Mr. Stone told “senior Trump campaign officials” about the stolen emails in WikiLeaks’ possession that could be damaging to Mrs. Clinton. On July 22, WikiLeaks released its first batch of Democratic emails. After that, according to the indictment, the Trump campaign sought more.

“A senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had regarding the Clinton campaign,” the indictment said, referring to WikiLeaks. The indictment did not make clear who directed the senior campaign official to reach out to Mr. Stone, though it left open the possibility that it was Mr. Trump.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sought to broadly distance Mr. Trump from the charges. The charges brought against Mr. Stone have nothing to do with the president,” she told CNN. Asked whether he directed a campaign aide to contact Mr. Stone about the WikiLeaks emails, she repeated that the charges did not involve the president.

The full indictment is here.

Needless to say, the indictment straight up accuses Stone of knowing WikiLeaks had the stolen DNC emails and was going to drop them online, Stone was Trump's contact to WikiLeaks to get more of them, and that Stone was directed to do so by the Trump campaign.  Marcy Wheeler reminds us the "high-ranking Trump campaign official" who asked Stone about more emails was Steve Bannon but for now, we don't know who ordered Stone to contact WikiLeaks in July 2016, although Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman then, so why not name him since he's already in the bag?  My guess is as with the NY Times article, the person is Trump himself, and that's deadly for him.

The "high-ranking campaign official" is Bannon (who was Campaign Manager at the time).

NYT covered these exchanges here:https://t.co/55yZlDFi6D pic.twitter.com/jzyWFkNheu

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 25, 2019

The bigger problem for Trump is that obstruction of justice charge, too.  This is as close as we've come to a case for impeachment against Trump yet.

Stay tuned.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Special Counsel Robert Mueller laid down the law late Monday in a court filing that will pretty much guarantee the beginning of the endgame to the whole mess. It seems our boy Paulie Walnuts has been a naughty, naughty boy.

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to federal investigators in breach of a plea agreement he signed two months ago, the special counsel’s office said in a court filing late on Monday.

Prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, said Mr. Manafort’s “crimes and lies” about “a variety of subject matters” relieve them of all promises they made to him in the plea agreement. But under the terms of the agreement, Mr. Manafort cannot withdraw his guilty plea.

Defense lawyers disagreed that Mr. Manafort has violated the deal. In the same filing, they said that Mr. Manafort has met repeatedly with the special counsel’s office and “believes he has provided truthful information.”

But given the impasse between the two sides, they asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to set a sentencing date for Mr. Manafort, who has been in solitary confinement in a detention center in Alexandria, Va.

The 11th-hour development in Mr. Manafort’s case is a fresh sign of the special counsel’s aggressive approach in investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race and whether anyone in the Trump campaign knew about or assisted Moscow’s effort.

Striking a plea deal with Mr. Manafort in September potentially gave prosecutors access to information that could prove useful to their investigation. But their filing on Monday, a rare step in a plea deal, suggested that they think Mr. Manafort was withholding details that could be pertinent to the Russia inquiry or other cases.

Marcy Wheeler lays out Manafort's game and how Mueller just beat him at it.

Now, it is true that Trump can pardon Manafort (though that probably won’t happen right away). That’s the only sane explanation for Manafort doing what he did, that he is still certain he’ll be pardoned. But many of these charges can still be charged in state court.

Just about the only explanation for Manafort’s actions are that — as I suggested — Trump was happy to have Manafort serve as a mole in Mueller’s investigation.

But Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.

And that “detailed sentencing submission … sett[ing] forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies” that Mueller mentions in the report?

There’s your Mueller report, which will be provided in a form that Matt Whitaker won’t be able to suppress. (Reminder: Mueller included 38 pages of evidence along with Manafort’s plea agreement, which I argued showed how what Manafort and Trump did to Hillary was the same thing that Manafort had done to Yulia Tymoshenko.)

So bottom line, Mueller knew all along that Manafort was going to renege on his plea deal.  He had every suspicion that Manafort was going to relay any information right back to Trump, and then after Trump used that information to answer his questions to submit to Mueller, Manafort was going to drop the deal and Trump was going to pardon him.

Only Mueller knew this the entire time, deliberately fed Manafort misinformation which went right back to Trump, and then beat Trump and Manafort to the punch and filed today that Manafort was lying.

It also means Mueller can, in a future open court filing, lay out exactly what Manafort was lying about, which will basically consist of a copy and paste text of Mueller's final report.

There's nothing Acting AG Matt Whitaker can do about it, either.  By lying, Manafort assured that the report can't be buried, because Trump and Manafort really are this stupid.

It's checkmate when the other guy was playing Go Fish.  It's hardly even fair.  And it's one of the greatest counter-cons in history if Wheeler is correct, and I'm pretty sure she is.

And today we already know one thing Manafort was lying about: he secretly met with Julian Assange months before the DNC email leaks.

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is “100% false”. His lawyers declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the visits.

Stay tuned.  Mueller knows all of this.  Manafort visited Assange in London as Trump's campaign chair in order to have him smear Clinton using Russian leaks.  The last piece of the puzzle, Manafort's visit to Assange before the DNC leak, while being part of Trump's campaign, just fell into place.  Assange's involvement as Putin's intelligence front was screamingly obvious, and it all was tied to Trump's campaign.  Manafort knew exactly what he was getting from Assange and Putin, and so did Trump.

The collusion happened.  Trump is toast.

It all will go down very soon.

A Heaping Helping Of Julian Fries, Or Wacky Leaks

The DoJ is coming for WikiLeaks founder (and Russian disinformation peddler) Julian Assange.  And we know this because the Justice Department appears to have...well...leaked...the information.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under seal, prosecutors inadvertently revealed in a recently unsealed court filing — a development that could significantly advance the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election and have major implications for those who publish government secrets.

The disclosure came in a filing in a case unrelated to Assange. Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, wrote that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.” Later, Dwyer wrote the charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

Dwyer is also assigned to the WikiLeaks case. People familiar with the matter said what Dwyer was disclosing was true, but unintentional.

Joshua Stueve, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, said, “The court filing was made in error. That was not the intended name for this filing.”

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have long been investigating Assange and, in the Trump administration, had begun taking a second look at whether to charge members of the WikiLeaks organization for the 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents that the anti-secrecy group published. Investigators also had explored whether WikiLeaks could face criminal liability for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cybertools.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III also has explored WikiLeaks’ publication of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton’s then-campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. Officials have alleged that the emails were hacked by Russian spies and transferred to WikiLeaks. 

So I'm not sure if this was an amazingly dimwitted accident, or something done on purpose to give Assange a major heads up that he should get gone.  If this is the first really big leak out of the Mueller probe, more indictments and charges could be coming, but something about this entire mess stinks.

We'll see.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Everything seems to be pointing to some major indictments very soon in the Mueller probe.  CBS News was reporting that the charges could be unsealed as early as last Tuesday, but so far, it's been 48 hours and nothing new.  We head into Thursday with two stories indicating that when Mueller does drop the hammer, it will be epic.  First up, I keep telling people that Roger Stone is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that's because his friends are idiots.

Six days before WikiLeaks began releasing Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, Roger Stone had a text message conversation with a friend about WikiLeaks, according to copies of phone records obtained exclusively by NBC News.

“Big news Wednesday,” the Stone pal, radio host Randy Credico, wrote on Oct. 1, 2016, according to the text messages provided by Stone. “Now pretend u don’t know me.”

“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replied.

“Great,” Credico wrote back. “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.” 

Credico turned out to be wrong on one count — nothing incriminating about Clinton came out that Wednesday. But two days later, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released its first dump of emails stolen from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the 2016 presidential election.

Stone, a confidante of then-candidate Donald Trump and notorious political trickster, has denied any collusion with WikiLeaks.

But the text messages provided by Stone to NBC News show that Credico appeared to be providing regular updates to Stone on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans in the days before the hacked emails were released. In the texts, Credico told Stone he had insights into Assange's plans through a longtime friend, who was also Assange’s lawyer, according to the text messages.

Reached Wednesday, Credico downplayed the text exchanges. “There's absolutely nothing there that I had any knowledge of anything that Assange was going to do because I didn't,” he told NBC News.

"Where's the smoking gun?" he added.

I'll let Robert Mueller handle that.  But trust me when I say Stone will die in prison.  Because if he doesn't go under for being the Trump regime's conduit to the Russian spy operation at WikiLeaks, he's going down for witness intimidation of Credico.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office is exploring whether longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone tried to intimidate and discredit a witness who is contradicting Mr. Stone’s version of events about his contacts with WikiLeaks, according to people who have spoken to Mr. Mueller’s investigators.

In grand jury sessions and interviews, prosecutors have repeatedly asked about emails, text messages and online posts involving Mr. Stone and his former friend, New York radio personality Randy Credico, the people said. Mr. Stone has asserted that Mr. Credico was his backchannel to WikiLeaks, a controversial transparency group, an assertion Mr. Credico denies.

Mr. Mueller’s investigators are probing whether Mr. Stone had direct contact with WikiLeaks and knew ahead of time about its release of stolen Democratic emails, as he claimed during the campaign and now denies. Mr. Stone says he is angry at Mr. Credico because his ex-friend has “refused to tell the truth” about being his conduit to WikiLeaks.

Filmmaker David Lugo, who knows both men, said in an interview he has testified before Mr. Mueller’s grand jury about a blog post Mr. Stone helped him draft that was harshly critical of Mr. Credico. Another witness, businessman Bill Samuels, said he was questioned by Mr. Mueller’s team about Mr. Credico’s reaction to allegedly threatening messages sent by Mr. Stone.

Prosecutors also are examining messages between Messrs. Stone and Credico that involve the radio personality’s decision to assert his Fifth Amendment before Congress, according to a person familiar with the probe.

Ahh, what tangled webs we weave, when we leave text messages on our phones.

Stay tuned.  Stone's going in a box very, very soon.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Once again, I guarantee that GOP operative Roger Stone is going to be indicted after the midterms by the Mueller probe, and it's going to get very ugly, very quickly.  There's a reason that the bizarre and ultimately fruitless right-wing hatchet job that emerged this week of paying former associates of Mueller to fabricate sexual assault allegations, and it was a last-ditch effort to save Roger Stone from the dock as Mueller's trap jaws close in.

The special counsel investigation is pressing witnesses about longtime Trump ally Roger Stone’s private interactions with senior campaign officials and whether he had knowledge of politically explosive Democratic emails that were released in October 2016, according to people familiar with the probe.

As part of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III appears to be focused on the question of whether WikiLeaks coordinated its activities with Stone and the campaign, including the group’s timing, the people said. Stone and WikiLeaks have adamantly denied being in contact.

On Friday, Mueller’s team questioned Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, about claims Stone is said to have made privately about WikiLeaks before the group released emails that prosecutors say were hacked by Russian operatives, according to people familiar with the session.

In recent weeks, Mueller’s team has also interviewed several Stone associates, including New York comedian Randy Credico and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi. Both testified before the grand jury.

Investigators have questioned witnesses about events surrounding Oct. 7, 2016, the day The Washington Post published a recording of Trump bragging about his ability to grab women by their genitals, the people said.

Less than an hour after The Post published its story about Trump’s crude comments during a taping of “Access Hollywood,” WikiLeaks delivered a competing blow to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by releasing a trove of emails hacked from the account of her campaign chairman John Podesta.

The group trickled out new batches of Podesta’s private messages nearly daily through the campaign’s final weeks, ensuring the stolen documents would vex Clinton’s campaign until Election Day.

Investigators have been scrutinizing phone and email records from the fall of 2016, looking for evidence of what triggered WikiLeaks to drop the Podesta emails right after the “Access Hollywood” tape story broke, according to people with knowledge of the probe.

In an interview this week, Stone vehemently denied any prior knowledge of the Podesta emails. He said he did not play any role in determining the timing of their release by WikiLeaks or suggest they be used to blunt the impact of the “Access Hollywood” tape.

It is unclear whether the special prosecutor has evidence connecting Stone to WikiLeaks’s activities. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, could have concluded on his own that releasing the emails on that day would benefit Trump.

The results of Mueller’s inquiry could answer the central question of his probe: whether there was coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian activities. Trump has repeatedly declared there was “no collusion.”

Again, if Steve Bannon is being questioned about Stone, and if you somehow don't believe Bannon will give up Stone to save his own slovenly hide, November is going to be a fun education for a lot of people.  There's always the chance Trump will pull the trigger sometime next week and make his move trying to get rid of Mueller, but I don't think he'll beat Mueller to the punch when it comes to saving Stone.

Still, anything's possible once the midterms are done with.  We'll see.

 

It's Mueller Time, Con't

It's starting to look more and more like right-wing operative Roger Stone is the link between Russian intelligence actions to influence the 2016 contest and the Trump campaign, and that he's most likely going to prison for the rest of his life.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office has obtained communications suggesting that a right-wing conspiracy theorist might have had advance knowledge that the emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman had been stolen and handed to WikiLeaks, a source familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

Mueller's team has spent months investigating whether the conspiracy theorist, Jerome Corsi, learned before the public did that WikiLeaks had obtained emails hacked by Russian intelligence officers — and whether he passed information about the stolen emails to Donald Trump associate Roger Stone, multiple sources said.

Mueller's investigators have reviewed messages to members of the Trump team in which Stone and Corsi seem to take credit for the release of Democratic emails, said a person with direct knowledge of the emails.

The source and other people familiar with the matter say they have seen no evidence suggesting either man played any role in the hacking or release of the emails. Stone adamantly denies doing anything but passing on information already in the public domain.

Mueller's spokesman, Peter Carr, said the office had no comment. Corsi and his lawyer, David Gray, declined to comment.

There is zero doubt at this point that WikiLeaks was used by Putin's merry band of saboteurs as a clearing house for Russian intelligence operations and information.  There is zero doubt at this point that the Russians stole DNC emails through phishing.  There is zero doubt at this point that WikiLeaks was given those emails to distribute in order to cost Hillary Clinton the election.

If Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone knew these stolen DNC emails were coming from WikiLeaks beforehand, then they are the connection between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign.

We also now know that Stone wanted to reward WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with a Trump pardon, and that Stone was pushing Trump to give Assange one in direct exchange for WikiLeaks' help in winning the election.

In early January, Roger Stone, the longtime Republican operative and adviser to Donald Trump, sent a text message to an associate stating that he was actively seeking a presidential pardon for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—and felt optimistic about his chances. “I am working with others to get JA a blanket pardon,” Stone wrote, in a January 6 exchange of text messages obtained by Mother Jones. “It’s very real and very possible. Don’t fuck it up.” Thirty-five minutes later Stone added: “Something very big about to go down.”

The recipient of the messages was Randy Credico, a New York-based comedian and left-leaning political activist who Stone has identified as his backchannel to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign—a claim Credico strongly denies. During the election, Stone, a political provocateur who got his start working for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, made statements that suggested he had knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to publish emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other Democrats, and his interactions with WikiLeaks have become an intense focus of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian election interference. As Mueller’s team zeroes in on Stone, they have examined his push for an Assange pardon—which could be seen as an attempt to interfere with the Russia probe—and have questioned at least one of Stone’s associates about the effort.

Assange has not been publicly charged with a crime in the United States, though the Justice Department has investigated WikiLeaks over its publication of classified material and and role in releasing emails pilfered from Democratic targets by hackers working for Russian intelligence. Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions described arresting Assange, who for the last six years has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy to evade criminal charges in Sweden stemming from a rape allegation, as a “priority.” Justice Department prosecutors have considered charges against Assange since 2010, when WikiLeaks released more than a quarter million diplomatic cables.

Credico says that Stone repeatedly discussed his effort to win a pardon for Assange. At one point, he notes, Stone claimed that he was working with Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News personality and former New Jersey Superior Court judge, on a plan in which Napolitano would float the idea on his show or directly to President Donald Trump. Napolitano said in a statement that he “categorically denies” working with Stone to secure a pardon for Assange.

Stone confirmed the pardon effort, though declined to answer specific questions. “I most definitely advocated a pardon for Assange,” he said in an email. He also said that he had “most certainly urged my friend Andrew Napolitano” to support an Assange pardon.

This is about as obvious as a conspiracy gets:  Russia steals DNC (and RNC!) emails, they give the emails to WikiLeaks, they inform Stone what's coming, Stone tells Trump.  When the Access Hollywood tapes drop, within hours the counterattack is the DNC email leak that wipes the story of Trump's massive history of criminal sexual assault off the front page.  Trump goes on to win the election, and in return Stone works to get WikiLeaks founder Assange a pardon.

That's just part of the huge mess, but a big part.  And Mueller has all this evidence on Stone, Corsi, and WikiLeaks.  Obstruction of justice abounds, Stone is in the middle of it all.

Stay tuned.

Shutting Off The Leaks

The Trump regie's relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has taken a decidedly sour turn now that our old buddy Vlad is using them to keep Trump in line, and Trump has decided that the "deep state" is useful to him after all when it serves his purposes.

Federal prosecutors charged a former CIA employee Monday with violations of the Espionage Act and related crimes in connection with the leak last year of a collection of hacking tools that the agency used for spy operations overseas.

Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment with illegally gathering and transmitting national defense information and related counts in connection with what is considered to be one of the most significant leaks in CIA history.

The indictment accused Schulte of causing sensitive information to be transmitted to an organization that is not named in the indictment but is thought to be WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks posted the hacking tools online last year in a release it called “Vault 7.” Prosecutors alleged Schulte stole the information in 2016.

Schulte had long been a suspect of investigators exploring the leak, but before Monday, he had been held on separate child pornography charges. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement that investigators looking into Schulte found the pornography in his residence. His personal computer, federal prosecutors alleged, held more than 10,000 images and videos of such material, protected under three layers of passwords.

Schulte was arrested on charges stemming from the porn in August 2017.

“As alleged, Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims,” William F. Sweeney Jr., the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said in a statement. “As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of Classified Information. To further endanger those around him, Schulte allegedly received, possessed, and transmitted thousands of child pornographic photos and videos.”

An attorney for Schulte did not respond to an email seeking comment Monday night. In a statement reviewed by The Washington Post previously, Schulte claimed that he reported “incompetent management and bureaucracy” at the CIA to the agency’s inspector general and to a congressional oversight committee. He asserted that cast him as disgruntled and that when he left the CIA, he became a suspect in the leak as “the only one to have recently departed [the CIA engineering group] on poor terms.”

The indictment accuses Schulte, 29, of exceeding his authorized access to CIA computer systems and altering systems to delete records of his activities and deny others access. Added together, the charges against him carry a statutory maximum penalty of 135 years in prison. Some officials have compared the leak of which he is accused to that of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who also revealed details about U.S. capabilities to spy on computers and phones around the world.

I've talked about WikiLeaks extensively on ZVTS as well as Julian Assange and their involvement with Russia as Putin's information clearing house, and how Russia has been yanking the strings of the website since Ed Snowden took his treasure trove to Moscow.

These guys were an integral part of Russia's operation to attack the 2016 US elections and help Donald Trump, and it worked better than anyone in Moscow could have hoped.  Now that WikiLeaks is a potential liability to Trump, or rather, now that Trump realizes that WikiLeaks was always going to be used against him by Putin, Trump is having the CIA go after the leakers.

We'll see where this goes, but my guess is that Schulte has already caused extensive damage to the CIA, meaning that both the NSA and CIA have been fatally compromised in the last several years, and Russia has reaped the benefit.  Like it or not, Putin has been holding all the cards on our counterintelligence services for quite some time now, and he has the Oval Office to boot.

Trump will at least go far enough to try to protect himself from WikiLeaks, but there's no way we can expect the US government to fix the massive Russian damage to the country with Trump at the helm.

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

The question rattling around Washington is who Mueller's next big indictment will be, and while I still believe the next major link in the chain is Jared Kushner, you can make the case that Roger Stone is now directly in Mueller's crosshairs too.

Special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into claims made by Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone that he met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. 

WikiLeaks released thousands of documents during the 2016 campaign that U.S. intelligence agencies believe came from Russian operatives and were aimed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. 

In an email to fellow former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg dated Aug. 4, 2016, Stone claims that he “dined with Julian Assange last night,” according to the Journal.
Nunberg told The Washington Post earlier this month that investigators working for Mueller asked him to describe his conversation with Stone about meeting with Assange.
Stone has said that the email was a joke and that he never spoke with Assange.

Mueller’s team investigating Russia's election meddling has asked about the email during testimony before a grand jury, a source familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Stone said he was flying out to Los Angeles the night before he sent the email. The Journal confirmed that a flight from Miami to Los Angeles matches a screenshot of the flight information Stone provided, but could not confirm he was on it. 

Stone has been inconsistent about any contact he has had with Assange and WikiLeaks. He previously stated that he communicated with Assange but told the Journal on Friday that was not the case.

The Roger Stone/Julian Assange connection is bad news for Trump, and at this point Stone has lied so many times about it that he's not sure which story he has to keep straight anymore in order to avoid Mueller.  You can bet Stone's already been contacted, and Sam Nunberg has already given Stone up.

There's no real doubt that WikiLeaks is being used as a Russian front for intelligence laundering at this point, and since we now know that the Guccifer 2.0 hack was a product of Russian intelligence as well, the release of John Podesta's emails in order to attack the Clinton campaign was no accident.

But that was just the warm-up.  We now know why Trump has been attacking Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos on Twitter, Bezos owns the Washington Post, and the paper just dropped this bombshell this evening.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III informed President Trump’s attorneys last month that he is continuing to investigate the president but does not consider him a criminal target at this point, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

In private negotiations in early March about a possible presidential interview, Mueller described Trump as a subject of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors view someone as a subject when that person has engaged in conduct that is under investigation but there is not sufficient evidence to bring charges.

The special counsel also told Trump’s lawyers that he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

Mueller reiterated the need to interview Trump — both to understand whether he had any corrupt intent to thwart the Russia investigation and to complete this portion of his probe, the people said.

Mueller’s description of the president’s status has sparked friction within Trump’s inner circle as his advisers have debated his legal standing. The president and some of his allies seized on the special counsel’s words as an assurance that Trump’s risk of criminal jeopardy is low. Other advisers, however, noted that subjects of investigations can easily become indicted targets — and expressed concern that the special prosecutor was baiting Trump into an interview that could put the president in legal peril.

John Dowd, Trump’s top attorney dealing with the Mueller probe, resigned last month amid disputes about strategy and frustration that the president ignored his advice to refuse the special counsel’s request for an interview, according to a Trump friend.

Trump’s chief counsel, Jay Sekulow, and Dowd declined to comment for this report. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders referred questions to White House attorney Ty Cobb.

“Thank you, but I don’t discuss communications with the president or with the Office of Special Counsel,” Cobb said Tuesday.

If you want to know the reason for "Trump's war on Amazon" it's because of this story, 99.997% chance.  Trump actually wants this interview, his ego won't allow him not to talk to Mueller, and his lawyers know full well if he does he's going to be screwed.

The problem is of course is if he doesn't, he's still screwed.

Stay tuned.  I told you things were moving quickly and they are.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

Robert Mueller is getting closer to the smoking gun in the Trump/Russia collusion matter, and that path goes through the data analytics firm that Trump was using in order to launder Russian intelligence.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the Trump campaign’s data operation in the months leading up to the election, The Wall Street Journal reporter Friday. 

Mueller reportedly asked the data firm, Cambridge Analytica, to provide his investigative team with emails of employees who worked with the Trump campaign, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke with the WSJ. 

The House Intelligence Committee, which is also probing Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the foreign power, also requested similar documents from the data firm earlier this year. Cambridge Analytica’s CEO Alexander Nix was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, the people familiar with the investigation told WSJ. 

Mueller’s request for the emails was earlier this year, before it was widely reported that Nix was in contact with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange in 2016. 

Cambridge Analytica began working for the Trump campaign in mid-May 2016 after former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon introduced Nix to then-candidate Trump. The firm provided the campaign with data, polling and research, WSJ reported.

With Mueller now investigating Trump Organization money laundering of Russian cash and data laundering of Russian intelligence, it's no wonder that the false attacks on the FBI and Mueller as "biased" and "compromised" are coming in hard and fast this week.

The Republican Party has spent the last two days in a frenzy of indignation over the disclosure that an FBI agent who worked on the Clinton and Trump investigations (and has since been removed) sent texts to another agent, whom he was reportedly dating, criticizing Trump. The story was driven by the curious decision by Trump’s Department of Justice to leak partial excerpts of the texts. It produced sensational headlines like, “In texts, FBI agents on Russia probe called Trump an ‘idiot’; Messages could fuel GOP claims that bias tainted Clinton and Trump investigations,” (Politico) and “In Texts, F.B.I. Officials in Russia Inquiry Said Clinton ‘Just Has to Win’” (New York Times). 

The main problem with this pseudo-scandal is that nobody has ever previously expected FBI agents not to privately express political viewpoints. Indeed, to prosecute liberal bias at agencies that lean rightward and kept the Republican nominee’s very serious investigation private while publicizing the trivial investigation into the Democratic nominee is perverse in the extreme. 

There turns out to be another flaw in the “scandal.” The main agent in question also wrote text messages criticizing Democrats, reports Del Quentin Wilber. His messages included calling Chelsea Clinton “self-entitled,” and mocking Eric Holder. He wrote, “I’m worried about what happens if HRC is elected.” Of course, we don’t know the context of that any more than we know it for the other texts. If the administration had leaked these texts instead or in addition, the narrative would have been completely different.

So it's smoke and mirrors as with HILLARY'S EMAIL SERVER SCANDAL™ but the con is starting to work on the American people.

A majority of polled voters say special counsel Robert Mueller has a conflict of interest because of his past ties to former FBI Director James Comey, according to the latest Harvard CAPS-Harris survey. 

When asked if Mueller has a conflict of interest “as the former head of the FBI and a friend of James Comey,” 54 percent responded that the “relationship” between the two amounts to a conflict of interest, including 70 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of independents and 40 percent of Democrats. 

Comey succeeded Mueller as FBI director and the two have been described as “brothers in arms” for their working relationship, which dates back to the early 2000s, although the extent of their personal relationship is unclear.

The Republicans have been wrking very hard this week to destroy Robert Mueller's credibility.  Indeed, the person who appointed Mueller to the post, current DoJ Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, testified this week before Congress that Mueller has Rosenstein's full confidence, but that story has been drowned by the noise machine.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation into whether President Trump’s team assisted Russian meddling in last year’s campaign, pushed back strongly Wednesday against Republican accusations that the probe is infected with partisan bias and steadfastly defended special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. 

“The special counsel’s investigation is not a witch hunt,” Rosenstein told a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing, specifically rejecting the phrase that President Trump has used to denounce the case. He said Mueller has managed the case “appropriately.” 

Rosenstein also said he would not fire Mueller unless the former FBI director had violated Justice Department guidelines or the law. “If there were good cause, I would act,” he said. “If there were no good cause, I would not.”

The Trump regime continues to set up the possible firing of Mueller.  This week has been the clearest evidence yet that such an attempt to undermine Mueller to the point where he "has" to be fired is underway.  Don't buy the nonsense, and spread the word that this is going on.