Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Justice Department response to Trump announcing his candidacy after the midterms will apparently be another Special Counsel, because the last one went so well.

As Donald Trump inches closer to launching another presidential run after the midterm election, Justice Department officials have discussed whether a Trump candidacy would create the need for a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations related to the former president, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

The Justice Department is also staffing up its investigations with experienced prosecutors so it’s ready for any decisions after the midterms, including the potential unprecedented move of indicting a former president.

In the weeks leading up to the election, the Justice Department has observed the traditional quiet period of not making any overt moves that may have political consequences. But behind the scenes, investigators have remained busy, using aggressive grand jury subpoenas and secret court battles to compel testimony from witnesses in both the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at his Palm Beach home.

Now federal investigators are planning for a burst of post-election activity in Trump-related investigations. That includes the prospect of indictments of Trump’s associates – moves that could be made more complicated if Trump declares a run for the presidency.

“They can crank up charges on almost anybody if they wanted to,” said one defense attorney working on January 6-related matters, who added defense lawyers have “have no idea” who ultimately will be charged.

“This is the scary thing,” the attorney said.

Trump and his associates also face legal exposure in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State and expects to wrap her probe by the end of the year.

Indicting an active candidate for the White House would surely spark a political firestorm. And while no decision has been made about whether a special counsel might be needed in the future, DOJ officials have debated whether doing so could insulate the Justice Department from accusations that Joe Biden’s administration is targeting his chief political rival, people familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Special counsels, of course, are hardly immune from political attacks. Both former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe came under withering criticism from their opponents.

The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

 

I'm not totally being fair to Robert Mueller, his investigation did result in convictions, and those convictions were pardoned by Trump. That wasn't Mueller's fault, because he wasn't allowed to pursue Trump when he was in the Oval Office and never would have been able to under any circumstances.

On the other hand, Trump is no longer in the White House, and the Justice Department continues to signal that they will play by the rules that increasingly don't matter to Trump, the GOP, the Supreme Court, or ten of millions of their voters and supporters.

We'll see.  I still believe an indictment is coming, but if Trump announces his candidacy on, say, November 9th, all bets are off.

The Return Of The Revenge Of Mueller Time

Meanwhile, in other Trump legal catastrophe news:

A federal appeals court has ordered the release of a secret Justice Department memo discussing whether President Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The unanimous panel decision issued Friday echoes that of a lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, who last year accused the Justice Department of dishonesty in its justifications for keeping the memo hidden.

Department officials argued that the document was protected because it concerned internal deliberations over whether to charge Trump with obstructing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of the 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. But the judges agreed with Jackson that the record clearly showed that Mueller had already concluded that a sitting president could not be charged with a crime.

Instead, the panel ruled, the March 2019 memorandum concerned what then-attorney general William P. Barr would say to Congress in advance of the Mueller report’s release about the evidence of obstruction.

“A charging decision concededly was off the table and the agency failed to invoke an alternative rationale that might well have justified its invocation of the privilege,” the judges wrote.

The court said that if the government had accurately described to Jackson the motivations behind the memo, the ruling might be different. But “any notion that the memorandum concerned whether to say something to the public went entirely unargued — and even unmentioned” until the appeal.

Barr ultimately told lawmakers that since Mueller had declined to reach a conclusion, he and his deputy made their own determination that the evidence was lacking. When the full report was released weeks later, it said there was “substantial evidence” that Trump obstructed justice.

The memo was written by two senior Justice Department officials who argued that the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team did not rise to the level of a prosecutable case, even if Trump were not president. A redacted version was released last year but left under seal the actual analysis of that question.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the nonprofit that sued for the document’s release, celebrated the ruling on Twitter.

“We’re going to get the secret memo Barr used to undercut the Mueller Report and claim it was insufficient to find Trump obstructed justice,” the ethics watchdog wrote. “And we’re going to make it public.”

 

The Justice Department I guess kind of thought this would go away, and it's entirely possible that the DoJ might actually not appeal the ruling now that it has become pretty clear that Donald Trump will be indicted by at least one of the four investigations into his criminality: the Georgia election interference, the Manhattan Trump Organization tax fraud, the Mar-a-Lago document mess, and the NY state Trump property civil case.

On the other hand, the DoJ may have to sit on it given the ongoing investigations. 

We'll see where this goes, but the DoJ is going to have to act quickly either way, or CREW will be able to make the Barr memo on the Mueller report public.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

For like the thirtieth time, yes the Russian collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was real, yes it affected the outcome of the election, and yes Trump's margin of victory in five states that gave him the electoral college win was less than the thrid party vtes stripped from Hillary Clinton, in 2016, Jesus hell.

In an interview with Insider, Paul Manafort, who served as Donald Trump's campaign chairman, made his first public admission that in 2016 he shared polling data from the Trump campaign with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime business associate with suspected ties to Russian intelligence.

Kilimnik then passed the data on to Russian spies, according to the US Treasury Department, which has characterized the data as "sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy."

Manafort's acknowledgment contradicts his earlier denials, during the investigation into election interference conducted by the special counsel Robert Mueller, that he had anything to do with the transfer of sensitive campaign data. It also differs from the account he gives in his forthcoming memoir, "Political Prisoner," in which he concedes only that he presented Kilimnik with "talking points" on polling data that was already public.

In his interview with Insider, Manafort reiterated that at least some of the data was public. "The data that I shared with him," he said, "was a combination of public information and stuff for the spring that was — it was old." It's one of Manafort's primary lines of defense — that the data he funneled to Kilimnik was essentially worthless.

In fact, in an email seized by Mueller, Manafort ordered his deputy Rick Gates, just a few hours before the two men met with Kilimnik in person, to print out four pages of internal campaign polling data showing Trump's city-by-city strength in 18 swing states. Contrary to Manafort's claim, that data was not from the spring. It was collected by the campaign in mid-July — two weeks before the meeting with Kilimnik.

Manafort denied to Insider that the printouts were given to Kilimnik. But he said he directed Gates to feed Kilimnik polling data via email, to "keep Konstantin informed." He also worked hard to keep his dealings with Kilimnik a secret. In its report on Russian interference in the election, the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote that it "had limited insight into Kilimnik's communications with Manafort" because the men relied on "sophisticated communications security practices." These included encryption, burner phones, and "foldering" — writing emails as drafts in a shared account.

Gates told the FBI that, at Manafort's direction, he began sending Kilimnik internal polling data in the spring of 2016 over WhatsApp and continued updating it periodically. He deleted his messages to Kilimnik daily. All told, according to court filings, he sent 75 pages of polling data to Kilimnik. Other than the four pages from August 2, the data itself has never been made public.

Manafort told Insider the purpose of sending the polling data to Kilimnik was not to help elect Trump by aiding the Russians in their attempts to undermine the election but rather to lay the groundwork for future business deals. "It was meant to show how Clinton was vulnerable," he said. By his account, he was trying to use his influence with the future US president to extract money from pro-Russia oligarchs.

 

Yes, Manafort and Gates broke the law, yes they were convicted, yes Donald Trump pardoned them for it, yes Manafort is openly bragging about breaking the law, no, nobody can do anything about that because it would be double jeopardy.

 

That's where we are. 

Manafort and Gates got away with it.

Last Call For Return To Mueller Time, Con't

The Justice department is really, really trying to be too cute by half with the order by federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson to release the memo former Trump AG bill Barr used to justify not charging Trump with any federal crimes. On one hand, the DoJ is protecting their own. On the other hand, America needs justice on this.

The Justice Department late Monday night released part of a key internal document used in 2019 to justify not charging President Donald Trump with obstruction, but also signaled it would fight a judge’s effort to make the entire document public.

The filing comes after a federal judge excoriated former U.S. attorney general William P. Barr — and the Justice Department more broadly — for their explanations of how and why it decided not to pursue a criminal case against Trump over possible obstruction of the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The Justice Department filing is likely to both fuel and frustrate Trump’s biggest critics, particularly Democrats who have long argued that Barr stage-managed an exoneration of Trump after Mueller submitted a 448-page report into his findings about his investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the election, and whether Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.

The central document at issue is a March 2019 memo written by two senior Justice Department officials arguing that aside from important constitutional reasons not to accuse the president of a crime, the evidence gathered by Mueller did not rise to the level of a prosecutable case, even if Trump were not president.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a scathing opinion saying that she had read the memo and that it showed that Barr was disingenuous when he cited the document as key to his conclusion that Trump had not broken the law. On Tuesday, Jackson ordered the public release of the still-secret portions of her opinion discussing the Justice Department's Trump memo.

In that ruling, the judge also accused department lawyers of misleading her about the internal discussions that surrounded the memo and ordered the memo be released, though she gave the government several weeks to decide whether to appeal.

As that deadline neared, the government filed papers seeking both to appeal the ruling and to appease the court by offering a partially unredacted version of the document — making the first two pages public, while filing an appeal to try to keep the other half-dozen pages secret.

“In retrospect, the government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused. But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the Court,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in asking the judge to keep the rest of the document under seal while they appeal her ruling.

The parts of the memo released Monday night offer a deeper glimpse into why the judge was angry — and indicate that the decision not to accuse Trump of a crime had been the subject of previous conversations among Justice Department leaders.

The memo written by Steven A. Engel, then the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and Edward O’Callaghan, then a senior department official closely involved in supervising the Mueller investigation, was addressed to Barr, then the U.S. attorney general.

“Over the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation, we have previously discussed these issues within the Department among ourselves, with the Deputy Attorney General, and with you since your appointment, as well as with the Special Counsel and his staff. Our conclusions are the product of those discussions, as well as our review of the Report,” the lawyers wrote in the newly public section.

 

In other words, the DoJ really, really does not want to reveal to the country what Barr was advised to do, when Judge Berman makes it obvious in her opinion that the problem is the advice was written at the same time as Barr's decision not to prosecute, which is CYA justification after the fact.  The usual suspects on the right are howling victory chants, saying it proves that there was never anything Trump would have ever been charged with, even if he wasn't in the Oval Office.

But that's the entire point. The memo was written in order to support a conclusion Barr had already reached.

The whole memo would help to prove that, which is why we'll never see it. Merrick Garland could stop it. He will not. His entire staff would quit.

That's unfortunate.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Former Trump White House Counsel Don McGahn has reached a deal with the Justice Department on testifying about his former boss, to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee in a closed door session.

Former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn will testify before the House Judiciary Committee behind closed doors about then-President Donald Trump's attempts to obstruct the Russia investigation, the House and the Justice Department announced in a court filing Wednesday night. 

The interview will happen "as soon as possible," and a transcript will be released in the days after, the court filing said. 

The committee members who interview McGahn can ask him about the incidents documented in the Mueller report of Trump's attempts to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and block the Russia investigation, and about the Mueller investigation's accuracy. 

The Justice Department can assert executive privilege or McGahn can decline to answer on other topics, which would essentially block House Democrats from learning details McGahn might know about other major scandals during Trump's presidency.
McGahn served as the top lawyer on Trump's 2016 campaign and served as White House counsel until fall 2018. 

The agreement is a major concession from the executive branch after the Trump administration sought to broadly block former and current officials from testifying to Congress, and McGahn's recalcitrance ended up in court as the most potentially consequential case over testimony. Yet the agreement comes after much of the political jeopardy Trump faced as president passed -- leaving House Democrats with far less momentum in their investigations of Trump related to obstruction. 

"When the former President vowed to fight 'all of the subpoenas' aimed at his Administration, he began a dangerous campaign of unprecedented obstruction. We begin to bring that era of obstruction to an end today," Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. 

The agreement will put an end to the two-year standoff in court over McGahn's congressional testimony, which Democrats sought after Mueller documented multiple instances of Trump's obstructive acts. The Mueller investigation relied on McGahn as one of its most significant witnesses against Trump.

 

Could McGahn;s testimony be the key to a criminal referral of Trump to the DoJ?  Possibly, but I remain extremely skeptical of any federal charges for Trump, as I have said.

It's the right thing to do, but the price will be extraordinary.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Donald Trump's reality has collapsed so completely in the wake of his election loss to Joe Biden that he's now openly blaming Attorney General Bill Barr for his "Deep State!" conspirator-laden loss.

 

Despite having finally assented to allowing his administration to cooperate with the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden, President Trump on Sunday continued to spout baseless voter fraud claims in his first interview since Election Day, including suggesting that the FBI and Department of Justice were involved in rigging the election against him.

“This is total fraud,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo during the interview on Fox Business’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” adding: “And how the FBI and Department of Justice—I don’t know—maybe they’re involved, but how people are getting away with this stuff—it’s unbelievable.”

The president offered no evidence to back up this claim, and then went on to complain at length about how the two agencies had been “missing in action” in investigating his voter fraud claims.

The DOJ and FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Forbes.

The heads of both the FBI and DOJ were picked by President Trump. FBI Director Christopher Wray was appointed by the president in 2017, while Attorney General William Barr was nominated in late 2018. Barr has been criticized for actions that have been perceived as overly partisan toward the president, including recently clearing the DOJ to investigate voting irregularities before the results are certified, a reversal of longstanding guidance to avoid the appearance of federal intervention in elections that prompted the head of the department’s Election Crimes Branch Richard Pilger to step down from his position in protest.

Almost all of the dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign in battleground states have been dismissed by judges—including GOP appointees. However, on Sunday morning, Trump claimed: “We’re trying to put the evidence in and the judges won’t allow us to do it.”

 

Trump also seems to think he can order Barr to appoint a special prosecutor to go after...everyone.  Including, apparently, Barr himself.

 

“Where is the DOJ and the FBI in all of this, Mr. President?” Bartiromo asked of Trump’s claims of voter fraud. “You have laid out some serious charges here. Shouldn’t this be something that the FBI is investigating? Are they? Is the DOJ investigating?”

“Missing in action. Missing in action. Can’t tell you where they are. I ask, ‘Are they looking at it?’ Everyone says, ‘Yes, they’re looking at it.’ Look, where are they with Comey, McCabe, and all these other people? You know, I said I’ll stay out of it. I wish I didn’t make that statement. There’s no reason, really, why I have to,” Trump said. “But where are they with Comey, with McCabe, with Brennan, with all these people. They lied to Congress. They lied, they leaked, they spied on our campaign. I see Carter Page is bringing a lawsuit, that’s good news. Where are they with all of this stuff? And, you know, what happened to Durham? Where’s Durham?”

Former Trump campaign associate Carter Page filed a lawsuit on Friday against Comey, McCabe, the FBI, the Justice Department, and others seeking $75 million in damages related to the “unjustified and illegal actions” and “unlawful spying” against him.

“Before we leave the subject of Durham, I feel like something happened in September. I don’t know what happened, but we were all expecting Durham to come out and A.G. Barr to be aggressive,” Bartiromo said, adding, “Will you appoint a special counsel to investigate and to continue the investigating into what took place in the 2016 election? You mentioned Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe not facing accountability — will you appoint a special counsel?”

“By the way, Comey, McCabe — that’s the least of it. You talk about the Logan Act, they used the Logan Act on General Flynn, who I was very proud to pardon. But they wanted to use and they did use the Logan Act on General Flynn, and you know where that started. Look, this whole thing is a terrible situation. This should’ve never been allowed to happen,” Trump claimed.

He added, “And yeah, I would consider a special prosecutor. Because you know this is not a ‘counsel’ — it sounds so nice. I went through three years of a special counsel prosecutor — I call it ‘prosecutor’ because it’s a much more accurate term. They spent $48 million, Weissmann and all Trump haters, they spent $48 million. That was the Mueller investigation. They went through taxes, they went through everything — for $48 million you look at everything, and they found no collusion, no nothing.” 

 

Again, it's easy to dismiss Trump's schizoid break as something piteous or sad, but the reality is at some point very soon, probably after the Supreme Court delivers the final blow by (hopefully) refusing to take up any of Trump's ridiculous lawsuits, Trump will openly tell his supporters to take up arms and get him his presidency back by any means necessary, and a non-zero percentage of them will take him up on the offer.

 

Civil wars throughout history have started over less, the kind that end up with hundreds of thousands of casualties.  

You know, on top of the hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths so far this year in America.

Last Call For The Pursuit Of Justice

The usual suspects are blowing fuses over this NBC News article that finds Joe Biden doesn't want to dedicate the Justice Department to prosecuting Trump.

 

President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn't want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration.

Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations.

They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he "just wants to move on."

Another Biden adviser said, "He's going to be more oriented toward fixing the problems and moving forward than prosecuting them."

Any decisions by Biden's Justice Department regarding Trump, his staff, his associates, his business or his policies wouldn't affect investigations by state officials, including Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who has fought to obtain Trump's tax returns.

As Biden tries to balance his own inclinations with pressures from within his party, his advisers stressed that he is seeking to reset the dynamic between the White House and the Justice Department from what it has been under Trump.

Biden wants his Justice Department to function independently from the White House, aides said, and Biden isn't going to tell federal law enforcement officials whom or what to investigate or not to investigate.

"His overarching view is that we need to move the country forward," an adviser said. "But the most important thing on this is that he will not interfere with his Justice Department and not politicize his Justice Department."

 

OK, so what does this mean? If you're getting SEE BIDEN REFUSES TO SEND TRUMP TO PRISON HE'S COMPLICT out of this, you're not getting the point.

 

The point is Biden wants an independent Justice Department again, who operates under federal law.

 

The point is Trump will almost certainly pardon everyone he can, including himself. 

 

The point is the NY state investigations from Cyrus Vance and Letitia James will proceed.

 

Trump was never going to be prosecuted by the Justice Department, guys.  Trump was always going to issue pardons, and as Marcy Wheeler reminds us:

New York state already has a tax investigation into Trump, so a federal one would be duplicative. And the pardon power is absolute; there’s little likelihood DOJ could investigate the pardons that Trump grants, because doing so would be constitutionally suspect.

 

But there are still a number of federal investigations at the DoJ that are ongoing.  If Barr kills them or Trump pardons everyone involved as a subject of those investigations, that's not Biden's fault.

 

The money was always on Trump facing state charges, and I'm sure red states will be licking their chops to return the favor. Biden's right about it being divisive.

It doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done, but Biden does have to go on record as saying that the DoJ does have to be returned to independence here, and most importantly that he want no appearance of Biden ordering new investigations or charges against Trump.

This has got to happen, guys.  Good for Biden getting it out of the way now.

Trump Like A Egyptian

So not only did the Muller team suspect and investigate Russian, Ukrainian, Saudi, Cypriot and German money laundering for Team Trump, turns out the most egregious example was Egyptian money laundering too. And all of it was blocked by the Justice Department and in the case of the Egyptian money laundering, we now know it was the Supreme Court that refused to hear the case on a subpoena of financial records.

 

By summer 2017, Mueller's office was handling the Egypt investigation gingerly, with the team of prosecutors and FBI personnel often working without sharing full details with the other teams in the office, according to multiple accounts of the office's dynamics.
CNN sent Mueller detailed questions about the Egypt investigation for this story. He declined to comment. 

One official familiar with the work said some investigators believed the Egypt inquiry presented a more direct avenue for Mueller's team to examine Trump's finances, in part because it did not have an obvious tie to Russia. 

Diving into Trump's finances, however, was highly sensitive -- so much so that Mueller suspected the President would fire him if the White House learned his finances were being probed, crossing a so-called "red line" Trump set early in the Mueller investigation.
Yet understanding Trump's finances was crucial to the Egypt investigation -- especially regarding the $10 million he gave to his campaign. 

Needing a final push before Election Day as the polls tightened in 2016, the Trump campaign was running low on cash. Trump's top campaign officials scrambled to convince Trump to inject money, according to memos of witness interviews from the investigation and contemporaneous news reports. 

Trump lagged well behind a pledge he made to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Trump wrote his campaign a $10 million check, publicly calling it a loan. Campaign finance records showed it as his single largest political contribution, by far, and not one the campaign would reimburse him for.
Federal law enforcement officials suspected, in part because of intelligence information, that there was money moving through the Egyptian bank that could connect to Trump's campaign donation, according to the sources. Yet untangling the web of Trump's complex business interests ultimately remained out of reach. 

Campaign finance law prohibits foreign political contributions to campaigns for public office. A financial tie between a sitting president and a foreign country could also have explosive national security consequences. 

Mueller's office pressed witnesses to explain how the Trump-Sisi meeting in late 2016 came about. Ahmad, whose aims on the investigation were cloaked in secrecy, was repeatedly present in interviews touching on both Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign and the campaign's ties to Egypt. 

For instance, in one witness interview in November 2017, Ahmad and the FBI pressed an unnamed former staffer on the Trump campaign, transition and National Security Council about Trump's meeting with Sisi and her interactions with Egyptian nationals. Another witness, according to the interview memos, spoke to investigators in August 2018 about the Trump-Sisi meeting and Egypt's stance on US presidential elections. 

Mueller's team repeatedly asked witnesses questions about Trump foreign policy campaign adviser Walid Phares and his ties to Egypt, after intelligence pointed them toward him. The New York Times first reported in June about the special counsel's investigation into Phares' suspected role in an Egyptian influence effort. It led to no charges. The FBI has not made public records that show Mueller's team interviewing Phares, though the former Trump adviser has said he spoke to investigators. Phares' assistant declined to comment. 

In an initial interview with the special counsel's office, senior campaign official and White House adviser Stephen Bannon also discussed his role in setting up the meeting between Trump and Sisi. 

In a session months later, Bannon was asked about Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign, according to another recent release of Mueller's interview memos. 

Bannon explained to Mueller's investigators how Trump initially resisted cutting his campaign such a large check, and that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner doubted that Trump would do so, saying, "that was not going to happen," according to Bannon. But Trump was talked into providing the last-minute money by future Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Kushner, Bannon said. Mnuchin described the money as a "cash advance," Bannon said, and Trump eventually agreed to wire the money. "Trump was convinced the cash would be there," Bannon said, according to the interview summary. 

A spokesperson for Mnuchin at the Treasury Department confirmed Bannon's description of convincing Trump to make the loan, and said that Mnuchin had no knowledge of how Trump had $10 million available to him. 

Records of the special counsel's office interviews, which remain heavily redacted, do not make clear whether witnesses were asked directly about money connected to Egypt. At the same time, investigators may have sought not to tip their suspicions to witnesses -- especially those like Bannon who were close to the President. 

Representatives for Bannon didn't respond to CNN's requests for comment.

 

Donald Trump took a $10 million bribe from Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

So who's he taking money from now in this campaign cycle?

 

Why, you and me.

The farther behind Donald Trump has fallen in the competition for campaign dollars, the more he’s milked government resources to make up the difference.

Millions of boxes of food doled out to needy families — with letters signed by the president taking credit stuffed inside. An $8 billion program for drug-discount cards to seniors featuring Trump branding — intended to arrive before the Nov. 3 election. A $300 million advertising blitz to "defeat despair" over the coronavirus pandemic — the biggest threat to Trump’s reelection.

Each of those initiatives have two things in common: They’re paid for with taxpayer money, and they are plainly intended to help Trump’s flagging reelection campaign. The actions are just the latest examples of how the president has eviscerated the traditional boundaries separating politics from government.

His heavy reliance on federal resources and his own executive powers to win reelection come as Trump has fallen more than $100 million behind Joe Biden in TV ad spending, and slipped to a double-digit deficit in national polls.

As the election approaches, Trump has moved beyond using his control over federal resources to deploying government officials to carry out his political messaging. Last week, Trump suggested that his attorney general prosecute some of his political enemies. Days ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed he would release Hillary Clinton’s emails “before the election,” moving to resurrect a volatile issue from the 2016 race. And Attorney General William Barr has put the weight of the Justice Department behind Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud.

“The president is increasingly using all the levers he’s got for political purposes,” says Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general under George H.W. Bush who has endorsed Biden. “You can wonder whether he’s getting a bit desperate … It appears to me that the president is making increasingly outrageous demands and comments as time goes along.”

 

It's always about the grift.

A Taxing Explanation, Con't

Here's an interesting scenario from Just Security's Martin Sheil: the court fight over Trump's tax returns between Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance and the Trump regime isn't over the returns themselves, but the fact that what Vance subpoenaed was the copy of Trump's returns filed by accounting firm Mazars USA. 

The goal here isn't what's in the federal returns, but what's not in them, mainly any defense that Trump could use to blame Mazars themselves for his tax issues. Sheil proposes that the state tax returns are a huge, huge clue that there's fraud, and that the Mazars copy is needed to prove the accountant didn't do it...and that Trump did.

This term, the Supreme Court declined President Donald Trump’s attempts to shield personal financial records from congressional and judicial subpoena. The ruling’s impacts on executive powers and attorney-client privilege have been widely reported, and litigation over access to the documents will likely soon reach critical mass.

But Cy Vance Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney (DA), may have already obtained the pertinent New York state tax returns for the Trump Organization and its executives, including Trump and his family.

Should this be the case, then why the fuss over the Mazars USA subpoena that has already been appealed and opined upon by the Supreme Court and sent back to the federal District Court in Manhattan for further argument and appeal? What other surprises can the public expect?

It is a routine internal procedure for agents of the New York state tax authority assigned to criminal tax investigations authorized by the New York Attorney General’s (AG) office (of which the Manhattan DA is a part) to obtain business and personal state tax returns that are material to their inquiry. It is likely that the experienced criminal tax investigator on the DA’s team has followed this routine protocol, and obtained the state tax returns early in their investigation.

But the tax returns alone would not be sufficient to establish criminal tax fraud. Criminal tax investigators for New York traditionally include retired Internal Revenue Service (IRS) criminal investigators working towards a second pension. These experienced forensic accountants would be most concerned with the classic tax fraud defense historically posed by the accused, wherein the taxpayer attempts to shift responsibility for the alleged fraud to the accountants who prepared the tax returns in question. Tax crooks have long raised their hands in innocence and then pointed their fingers at the hired hands claiming, “it was all their idea” with regard to any alleged tax fraud.
A viable tax fraud indictment cannot proceed until this defense is cut off. This may explain the intense legal struggle over the Mazars USA subpoena. The Mazars USA files will include much more than completed tax returns. Draft tax returns, financial statements, correspondence, emails, texts, and notes to the file containing direction from the taxpayer client to the preparer will likely be found in the Mazars USA files accompanied by the accountant’s work papers and notes to the file.

This type of evidence will not only cut off a potent defense of the taxpayer but it will also likely provide the investigators with a trove of evidence of intent or mens rea, demonstrating to a potential jury that the fraud committed was, in fact, intentional and not some type of accident, negligence, or innocent mistake. Paul Manafort’s accountant testimony at trial was so devastating that his attorney famously cried out in open court “only a fool would provide their accountant this type of information.” It is precisely this type of information that Vance is seeking from the Mazars USA subpoena.

If the investigative team has pursued normal protocols, then we can make the rebuttable presumption that the Manhattan DA has already outlined a potential tax fraud indictment based on tax returns already in their possession and evidence previously obtained.

And the key to all this is Michael Cohen.

The DA’s team likely has all the grand jury information (documents and testimony) generated by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) investigation of Michael Cohen. All that would be needed to obtain the above SDNY grand jury evidence would be for an individual from the office of the Manhattan DA or New York AG to be placed on what is known as the 6(e) list which is a record of individuals authorized for disclosure of grand jury information. The prosecutor maintains this listing and adds individuals who are needed as the inquiry progresses.

Indeed, information sharing between federal and state prosecutors has already been established in related cases. Early in his investigation, Robert Mueller traveled to New York to meet with state prosecutors and to establish cooperation between the offices (likely including adding state prosecutors to the 6(e) list) – thus ensuring that state inquiries could continue even if the New York-based targets of Mueller’s investigations were federally pardoned or if Mueller were fired. Cohen was part of the Mueller investigation and it is likely that the 6(e) list for his grand jury included authorized officials from the New York AG’s offices.

Additionally, and notably, Deutsche Bank has cooperated with Vance’s subpoena for critical bank documents which can be used by the Manhattan DA to further corroborate tax fraud allegations. The DA may also look to use the records to pursue bank fraud violations that were referenced in Cohen’s congressional testimony; Cohen stated that the Trump Organization had submitted falsified financial statements to banks when applying for loans. The material gathered from a successful Mazars USA subpoena may also be used to corroborate these potential bank fraud charges as Mazars USA reportedly refused to certify the financial statements provided by the Trump Organization that were then submitted to the bank. Instead, Mazars USA included an unusual disclaimer with the financials: “Users of this financial statement should recognize that they might reach different conclusions about the financial condition of Donald J. Trump.”

Clearly, the Vance team will want to drill down on just why Mazars USA would include such a disclaimer with any financial statement that the company prepared for the Trumps.

Which may mean that the bulk of what Cyrus Vance's office already needs to make the case on Trump came from the Cohen investigation, shared by Mueller.

Vance likely possesses substantial evidence and investigative leads gathered in the Mueller and SDNY inquiry into Cohen. This would no doubt include information as to who directed Cohen to submit false invoices to the Trump Organization; these false invoices led to Cohen receiving checks totaling $420,000 to reimburse him for his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels et al, a total which was “’grossed up’ for tax purposes,” according to SDNY.

The inclusion of taxes in the reimbursement payments by the Trump Organization indicates that these payments were treated as a business expense on the Trump business records, which would then flow through to the tax returns unless flagged by some executive prior to submission to the relevant tax authorities. If the deduction were not corrected then, flagrantly false tax returns would have been prepared, subscribed to, and submitted, based on the prior falsification of the business deduction for legal expenses.

Thus, the alleged tax fraud was committed in association with the cooking of the books of the Trump Organization stemming from the posting of the false invoices. This fraud elevates the state misdemeanor of falsification of business books and records to felony status since it is in coordination with the commission of another felony – tax fraud. Mail fraud and/or wire fraud charges could also be contemplated since the false invoices were either mailed or wired as were the reimbursement payments.
Trump signed one reimbursement check while in the White House. He further misrepresented these payments as ‘personal’ on his 2018 financial disclosure form in an attempt to characterize these payments as both business expenses (in the tax returns) and as personal expenses (in his financial disclosure form). This misrepresentation adds to the evidence of deliberate intent to defraud in any prospective Vance prosecution.

Vance has also referenced ‘patterns’ of illegal conduct when justifying the Mazars USA subpoena which requested Trump-related tax returns going back eight years. Patterns of financial impropriety have long been held to be evidence of ‘intent’ on the part of the defendant. Pro Publica published an analysis pointing out tax and loan discrepancies on the part of the Trump Organization relative to the 40 Wall St. building going back to 2012 and 2013. Cohen’s congressional testimony suggested that the falsification of business expense invoices was not an isolated case but part of a pattern on the part of Trump and his business to alter his business records at will.

Cooking the books to hide Trump's payoffs to Stormy Daniels is felony fraud at the state level, not just the federal one.  If Cyrus Vance gets his hands on the Mazars USA copy of Trump's tax returns, and Mazars is able to provide the documentation that they followed the law in preparing the returns and that the Manhattan DA's office can crunch the numbers Trump gave them, finding they were fraudulent, it's prison time for the Tangerine Tyrant.

Without the Mazars returns specifically, Trump's defense is that "the accountants ripped me off".

That's why this fight has literally gone to the Supreme Court.

This makes an amazing amount of sense to me.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

In a story based on NY Times reporter Michael Schmidt's book on the Mueller probe, "Donald Trump v The United States" out this week, we find that the more we find out about the Mueller probe, the more it appears that Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein tied Robert Mueller's hands to sabotage the investigation from Day 1.

The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia.

The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry.

But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere.
A bipartisan report by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released this month came the closest to an examination of the president’s links to Russia. Senators depicted extensive ties between Trump associates and Russia, identified a close associate of a former Trump campaign chairman as a Russian intelligence officer and outlined how allegations about Mr. Trump’s encounters with women during trips to Moscow could be used to compromise him. But the senators acknowledged they lacked access to the full picture, particularly any insight into Mr. Trump’s finances.

Now, as Mr. Trump seeks re-election, major questions about his approach to Russia remain unanswered. He has repeatedly shown an openness to Russia, an adversary that attacked American democracy in 2016, and refused to criticize or challenge the Kremlin’s increasing aggressions toward the West. The president has also rejected the intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered in 2016 to bolster his candidacy and the spy agencies’ assessment that Russia is trying to sabotage this year’s election again on his behalf.

Mr. Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary. Mr. Rosenstein determined that the investigators were acting too hastily in response to the firing days earlier of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, and he suspected that the acting bureau director who approved the opening of the inquiry, Andrew G. McCabe, had conflicts of interest.

Mr. Rosenstein never told Mr. McCabe about his decision, leaving the F.B.I. with the impression that the special counsel would take on the investigation into the president as part of his broader duties. Mr. McCabe said in an interview that had he known Mr. Mueller would not continue the inquiry, he would have had the F.B.I. perform it.

“We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” Mr. McCabe said. “I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.”

Rod Rosenstein killed the FBI's investigation into Trump's Russia financial ties more than three years ago, and since then all kinds of evidence have emerged showing that Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were deep in the pockets of Russian oligarchs with a huge money laundering scheme, posing an unprecedented national security risk due to financial blackmail.

And speaking of Kushner, he's just as much of a national security threat as Trump is, if not more.

On Feb. 23, 2018, White House counsel Don McGahn sent a two-page memo to Chief of Staff John Kelly arguing that Jared Kushner's security clearance needed to be downgraded, the New York Times' Michael Schmidt reports in his forthcoming book, "Donald Trump v. The United States."

Driving the news: Schmidt reports directly from the confidential McGahn memo for the first time, describing how Kelly had serious concerns about granting Kushner a top-secret clearance in response to a briefing he had received related to the routine FBI investigation into Kushner’s background. 

"The information you were briefed on one week ago and subsequently relayed to me, raises serious additional concerns about whether this individual ought to retain a top security clearance until such issues can be investigated and resolved," McGahn wrote in the memo to Kelly. 

The details of the highly sensitive intelligence that raised alarms with Kelly are not revealed in the McGahn memo or in Schmidt's book. 

McGahn wrote that he had been unable to receive the briefing or "access this highly compartmented information directly" about Kushner, Schmidt reports. 

"Interim secret is the highest clearance that I can concur until further information is received," McGahn concluded, referring to the level of classified information Kushner would be able to access.

Between the lines: "By reducing Kushner's clearance from top secret to secret, McGahn and Kelly had restricted Kushner's access to the PDB, the closely held rundown provided by the intelligence community six days a week for the president and his top aides, and other highly sensitive intelligence that exposed sources and methods."

Trump directly gave Kushner the highest security clearance so he could be briefed on top intelligence matters...so Trump didn't have to deal with it.

And on top of all that, Schmidt's book reveals that after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, he offered to give the job to then DHS head John Kelly on the condition that his loyalties remained solely with Trump.

The day after President Trump fired FBI boss James Comey, the president phoned John Kelly, who was then secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, and offered him Comey's job, the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Michael Schmidt reports in his forthcoming book, "Donald Trump v. The United States."

Driving the news: "But the president added something else — if he became FBI director, Trump told him, Kelly needed to be loyal to him, and only him." 

"Kelly immediately realized the problem with Trump's request for loyalty, and he pushed back on the president's demand," Schmidt writes. 

"Kelly said that he would be loyal to the Constitution and the rule of law, but he refused to pledge his loyalty to Trump."

Why it matters: This previously unreported conversation sheds additional light on the president's mindset when he fired Comey. Special counsel Robert Mueller never learned of this information because the president's lawyers limited the scope of his team's two-hour interview with Kelly. 

"In addition to illustrating how Trump viewed the role and independence of senior officials who work for him, the president's demand for loyalty tracked with Comey's experience with Trump," Schmidt writes.

We knew Muller was sabotaged, now we know why.

Donald Trump has moved mountains and suborned an entire political party, not to mention the American judiciary to protect his financial records from any scrutiny. The DoJ failed to look into his fiances. The Senate failed to look into Trump's finances. The House was blocked by years of lawsuits.

We're about to find out the truth.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Senate Intelligence Committee released their fifth and final counter-intelligence volume of their bipartisan report on Donald Trump's Russian collusion and finds that not only was the Mueller report right, but that it didn't go nearly far enough to describe the damning actions by Trump and his campaign.

A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government undertook an extensive campaign to try to sabotage the 2016 American election to help Mr. Trump become president, and some members of Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers were open to the help from an American adversary.
The report drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory, one that the president and his allies have long tried to discredit as part of a “witch hunt” designed to undermine the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s stunning election nearly four years ago.

Like the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report for the first time identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer. Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.

Putin ordered the DNC hacking, and ordered an operation to help Donald Trump win. At the very least, Paul Manafort passed and received information from Russian intelligence, the report finds.

Democrats highlighted those ties in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.

Democrats also laid out a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the G.R.U.’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”

The assertion was a sign that even though the investigation was carried out in bipartisan fashion, and Republican and Democratic senators reached broad agreement on its most significant conclusions, a partisan divide remained on some of the most politically sensitive issues.

The Senate report said that the unusual nature of the Trump campaign — staffed by Mr. Trump’s longtime associates, friends and other businessmen with no government experience — “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

And yes, that now infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Trump's campaign and Russian nationals was every bit as shady as we suspected.

The Senate investigation found that two other people who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son — had “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”

The report said that the connections between the Russian government and one of the individuals, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”

Since the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, Attorney General William P. Barr and numerous Republican senators have tried to discredit the special counsel’s work — dismissing the investigation into the 2016 election as “Russiagate.”

Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, lawmakers hope it will refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.

The report is the product of one of the few congressional investigations in recent memory that retained bipartisan support throughout. Lawmakers and committee aides interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, including intelligence reports, internal F.B.I. notes and correspondence among members of the Trump campaign. The committee convened blockbuster hearings in 2017 and 2018, but much of its work took place in a secure office suite out of public view.

The Senate Intel report concludes that the Russians were behind the DNC email theft, that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were given that information, and that Roger Stone told WikiLeaks to release the DNC information to blow the Access Hollywood tapes out of the news cycle, which it did in the space of hours.

Oh, but it gets worse once we get to the appendices of the document. Specifically, Appendix A notes that were a number of criminal referrals made to the Justice Department of Trump campaign officials that were of course ignored by Jeff Sessions and later Bill Barr.  We now know who these referrals indicate.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019, passing along their suspicions that the men may have misled the committee during their testimony, an official familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The official confirmed reports in the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, which reported on the matter last week. A criminal referral to the Justice Department means Congress believes a matter warrants investigation for potential violation of the law.

The committee detailed its concerns in a letter to the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., in June 2019, the official said.

The Post reported that the letter was divided into two sections. One named those suspected of making false statements, The Post said: Bannon; Clovis, a co-chair of the Trump campaign in 2016; and Prince, a private security contractor.

A second section raised concerns about the testimony of other witnesses, including Trump Jr. and Kushner, whose statements were contradicted by Trump campaign aide Richard Gates, although it did not pointedly make a false-statements allegation, The Post reported.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the committee questioned whether Bannon lied about his interactions and conversations with Prince about a meeting in the Seychelles between Prince and a top Russian official. Prince told special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors that he briefed Bannon on the January 2017 meeting, but Bannon said the conversation never happened. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump's son and son-in-law, a former Trump adviser, and a former Trump campaign co-chair, and the brother of the Education Secretary. They were not prosecuted by the Justice Department, nor were they even investigated as a result.

It's obstruction of justice, all the way down.

The nearly 1000-page report confirms what I've been saying for years:

Trump took Russian help to win in 2016 and then lied about it at every opportunity to the American people.

Ahem.

This is the report that Robert Mueller should have released last year. This is the report that should have gotten Trump impeached. Several people in the campaign should be in prison, including Trump's own son and son-in-law.

And this is the report that should cost the GOP everything in 2020 at the polls.

Sunday Long Read: Why It Was Never Mueller Time

Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin goes over the autopsy report of the Mueller Report's death on arrival in this week's Sunday Long Read , and how the Justice Department was able to defuse it from his first day on the job. In hindsight it was clear how Mueller's careful, by-the-book actions were doomed from the start, and all of them, save Michael Cohen's conviction, will be undone by the time Trump leaves office.

Robert Mueller submitted his final report as the special counsel more than a year ago. But even now—in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Administration’s tragically bungled response to it, and the mass demonstrations following the killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others—President Trump remains obsessed with what he recently called, on Twitter, the “Greatest Political Crime in the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt.” In the past several months, the President has mobilized his Administration and its supporters to prove that, from its inception, the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government was flawed, or worse. Attorney General William Barr has directed John Durham, the United States Attorney in Connecticut, to conduct a criminal investigation into whether F.B.I. officials, or anyone else, engaged in misconduct at the outset. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has also convened hearings on the investigation’s origins.

The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a “scam” and a “hoax.” Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, “a grave injustice” that was “unprecedented in American history.” According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true. Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report. In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller—he should be thanking him.

The events that led to Mueller’s appointment began shortly after Trump took office, when he met several times with James Comey, the director of the F.B.I. Over dinner at the White House, on January 27, 2017, Trump said that he expected “loyalty” from Comey—specifically, as he would later make clear, he wanted an announcement from the F.B.I. that he was not under suspicion for misconduct with Russia during the campaign. At the time, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, was being investigated for lying to the F.B.I. As Comey later testified, on February 14th, at a meeting in the Oval Office, the President told everyone else to leave, then asked Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said. “He is a good guy.”

Comey declined either to publicly clear Trump of wrongdoing or to close the investigation of Flynn, and the President resolved to fire him. On May 8, 2017, Trump told Rod Rosenstein, who had recently been confirmed as the Deputy Attorney General, to write a memo describing Comey’s performance as the F.B.I. director, in particular his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail. The following day, Rosenstein submitted the memo and Trump fired Comey. Sean Spicer, the President’s press secretary, told reporters that the President had done so for the reasons stated in Rosenstein’s memo, but, as Trump soon confirmed in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and in a conversation with visiting Russian officials, the real reason was related to the Russia investigation.

Rosenstein was distraught over how the White House had used his memo. Concerned about Trump’s firing of Comey, he named an independent prosecutor, now known as a special counsel, to look into a possible connection between the Trump campaign and Russia. (Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, had recused himself from matters relating to Russia.) Rosenstein didn’t consider anyone except Mueller for the post. Mueller had both the skills and the bipartisan credibility that the job required. Having worked in the Justice Department during the Cold War, he hardly needed lessons on the malign intentions of the government in Moscow. Mueller had been a federal prosecutor in the nineteen-eighties, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division during the George H. W. Bush Administration, and then, starting in 2001, the F.B.I. director for twelve years. Until May 17th, when Rosenstein named him as the special counsel, Mueller knew very little about the state of the Russia investigation. Andrew McCabe, who, as Comey’s former deputy, was the acting director of the F.B.I., invited Mueller to the J. Edgar Hoover Building for a briefing.

At the first Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Russia investigation, on June 3, 2020, Graham opened the proceedings by saying, “It’s important to find out what the hell happened.” He wanted to know whether, when Mueller was appointed, there was any evidence that Trump’s campaign had been colluding with the Russians. McCabe’s briefing of Mueller, along with a subsequent meeting between Mueller and Rosenstein—neither of which has been previously reported—begin to address Graham’s question. These meetings demonstrate that, from the beginning, Mueller was instructed to conduct a narrow, fact-based criminal investigation.

The new information here is the mettings between Mueller and Andrew McCabe, and Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, with the express intent of limiting the scope of Mueller's investigation in order to make sure there was no indication of impropriety.  Mueller of course had no defense against being constantly accused of it, and the investigation found nothing on Trump himself that he could reveal. Toobin goes on to reveal that as most of us suspected, the Mueller team was handcuffed from day one because they didn't know how to deal with cheaters like Trump and especially Barr.

In other words, Mueller was told not to exceed his mandate.  He didn't.  And it cost the country everything, as the regime has been able to hide all the evidence since then, including the grand jury testimony, from House Democrats.  It's entirely possible that we'll never know the full story of what Trump did with Russia for years, if ever.

In all honestly think Joe Biden's first act as President should be to declassify the entire Mueller report and make it public. It won't happen, but it needs to.

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.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

The outside judge that Judge Emmet Sullivan asked to take a look at Justice Department's obviously corrupt request to drop all charges against Michael Flynn has come back with a blistering report that nails Flynn for perjury and all but concludes that Attorney General Bill Barr must resign.

Michael Flynn committed perjury, and his guilty plea of lying to the FBI should not be dismissed, a court-appointed adviser argued to a federal judge Wednesday, calling the Justice Department’s attempt to undo the conviction corrupt, politically motivated and “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power.”

In a formal briefing to the judge overseeing Flynn’s case, former New York federal judge John Gleeson said Flynn’s guilt “could hardly be more provable.” He issued a sharp rebuke of the Justice Department’s move to abandon the long-running case and called out President Trump for refusing to accept “settled foundational norms of prosecutorial independence.”

“The Government has engaged in highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the President,” Gleeson wrote in an 82-page brief to U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.

Gleeson argued that though Flynn committed perjury by first admitting under oath to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts and then seeking to rescind his guilty plea, Trump’s former national security adviser should not face a contempt hearing but instead be punished as part of his sentence.

“Flynn has indeed committed perjury in these proceedings, for which he deserves punishment, and the Court has the authority to initiate a prosecution for that crime,” Gleeson wrote. However, Gleeson said, moving Flynn’s case to sentencing “— rather than a separate prosecution for perjury or contempt — aligns with the Court’s intent to treat this case, and this Defendant, in the same way it would any other.”

Sullivan has paused Flynn’s case to hear from outside groups and appointed Gleeson to argue against the Justice Department’s May 7 motion to immediately drop its prosecution of the retired three-star general. Flynn was the highest-ranking Trump adviser convicted in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Sullivan has set a July 16 hearing to weigh the unusual request, which came after Attorney General William P. Barr ordered a review of Flynn’s case. In the Justice Department’s motion, which is supported by Flynn and prompted a career department prosecutor to quit the case, the agency said it concluded that Flynn’s January 2017 FBI interview was unjustified. The Justice Department also said the interview was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis,” so any lies Flynn told about his contacts with Russia and other foreign governments were immaterial to any crime.

The department cited newly uncovered FBI records showing the bureau had decided to close a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn before learning of his calls with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The Justice Department said FBI officials also knew that the calls probably did not give rise to a crime by themselves and differed over how to handle or interpret his actions.

 It won't matter much in the end, either way, Flynn will be pardoned if Sullivan refuses to drop the charges. But it does matter that we still have a judicial interested in preserving the rule of law, if only to serve as an example as to what is at stake in November.

Last Call For Stone Cold Pardon, Con't

And on top of everything else, Donald Trump is now openly boasting that Roger Stone won't serve time for his crimes, committed in the name of Donald Trump's 2016 election.

President Donald Trump on Thursday promised his longtime informal political adviser Roger Stone would not serve time in prison, revealing the convicted Republican provocateur “can sleep well at night” and reprising his fiery criticisms of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

The pledge from the president came on Twitter, after Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA, wrote Tuesday that Stone “will serve more time in prison than 99% of these rioters destroying America” — referring to the ongoing nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by a Minneapolis police officer.

“This isn’t justice,” Kirk added. “RT for a full pardon of Roger Stone!”

Trump went on to share the tweet Thursday morning, writing in his own accompanying message: “No. Roger was a victim of a corrupt and illegal Witch Hunt, one which will go down as the greatest political crime in history. He can sleep well at night!”
The president’s social media post represents his latest intervention in Stone’s case and comes after Trump and Attorney General William Barr were widely rebuked by congressional Democrats and career Justice Department officials for involving themselves in the federal law enforcement matter just a few months ago.

Federal prosecutors had urged in February that Stone be sent to prison for roughly seven to nine years for impeding congressional and FBI investigations into connections between the Russian government and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

But after Trump blasted the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation in a tweet as a “horrible and very unfair situation,” the Justice Department submitted a revised filing that offered no specific term for Stone’s sentence and stated that the prosecutors’ initial proposal “could be considered excessive and unwarranted.”

The four attorneys who shepherded Stone’s prosecution proceeded either to resign or notify the court that they were stepping off the case.

Last month, about 2,000 former Justice Department officials signed a letter urging Barr to resign over his actions in the federal cases of Stone and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was also ensnared by Mueller’s probe.

Although Barr’s Justice Department has moved aggressively to quash the case against Flynn, it is unclear how the attorney general will respond to the president’s interference Thursday. Despite his efforts to lessen Stone’s sentence, Barr described the case in a February interview as a “righteous prosecution” and said, “I was happy that he was convicted.”

I'd say that we'd see Barr give yet another series of interviews that would calm the storm here as he has several times in the last few months, but he's too busy running Trump's paramilitary response in the streets of DC.

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.