A Case Of Information Insecurity

Heads are set to roll after a suspect entered Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan's home, having gotten past his Secret Service detail undetected.

 

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a man entered the home of President Biden’s national security adviser in the middle of the night roughly two weeks ago without being detected by agents guarding his house, according to three government officials.

The unknown man walked into Jake Sullivan’s home at about 3 a.m. one day in late April and Sullivan confronted the individual, instructing him to leave, two of the people briefed on the incident said. There were no signs of forced entry at the home, according to one of the people.

Sullivan has a round-the-clock Secret Service detail. But agents stationed outside the house were unaware that an intruder had gotten inside the home, located in the West End neighborhood of Washington, until the man had already left and Sullivan came outside to alert the agents, the two people said.

The intruder appeared to be intoxicated and confused about where he was, according to people briefed on the incident. There is no evidence the person knew Sullivan or sought to harm him, they said.

In a statement, the Secret Service said it has launched an investigation into the incident and how the intruder accessed Sullivan’s home undetected.

The agency said that it considered the security breach a matter of significant concern.

“While the protectee was unharmed, we are taking this matter seriously and have opened a comprehensive mission assurance investigation to review all facets of what occurred,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in the statement, in response to an inquiry from The Washington Post. “Any deviation from our protective protocols is unacceptable and if discovered, personnel will be held accountable.”

Guglielmi said the Secret Service has deployed additional security precautions for Sullivan and around his home, pending the completion of the investigation.

The White House declined to comment.

 

Pretty scary moment there and I'm glad nobody was hurt, but yes, the results of the investigation need to include the agents who allowed this to be put somewhere else. This is not a job you say "Well, oops" on especially when National Security Advisers have been targeted in the past.

Hopefully the investigation will offer improvements and better operational guideline for the next team.

Sunday Long Read: The Telegram Files

If you're still wondering why Elon Musk and Team Kremlin are breathlessly weaving fiction about how the CIA is reading every tweet looking for "enemies of the Biden regime", it's because they are distracting the world from the fact Putin is actually using "secure" social media app Telegram to hunt down and destroy dissidents.

ON THE CHILLY, clear afternoon of February 24, 2022—the day Vladimir Putin’s forces launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a handful of Russian opposition politicians gathered in front of Saint Petersburg’s palatial Law, Order, and Security building. They had come to officially request permission to hold a rally opposing the war, which they knew would be denied. Among the group was Marina Matsapulina, the 30-year-old vice chair of Russia’s Libertarian Party. Matsapulina understood that the gathering was a symbolic gesture—and that it posed serious risks.

Nine days later, Matsapulina was awoken around 7 am by someone banging at her apartment door. She crept up to the entrance but was too frightened to look through the peephole, and she retreated back to her bedroom. The pounding continued for two hours, as Matsapulina kept seven friends from her party apprised in a private Telegram group chat. “They’re unlikely to bust it down,” she wrote, wishfully.

But at 9:22 am, she heard a much louder noise. She had just enough time to lock her phone before the door caved in. Eight people surrounded Matsapulina’s bed. They included, she recalls, two city police officers, a two-person SWAT team wielding guns and shining flashlights in her face, and two agents from either the Center for Combating Extremism or the Federal Security Service or the FSB—the successor to the KGB. The officers told her to lie on the floor facedown.

They told Matsapulina she was suspected of emailing a police station with a false bomb threat. But when she was taken into the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ investigation department, she says, a police officer asked whether she knew the real reason she’d been arrested. She guessed that it was for her “political activities.” He nodded and asked, “Do you know how we knew you were home?”

“How?”

She says the officer told her that investigators had been following along with her private Telegram chats as she wrote them. “There you were, sitting there, writing to your friends in the chat room,” she recalls him saying. He proceeded to dispassionately quote word for word several Telegram messages she had written from her bed. “‘They’re unlikely to bust it down,’” he recited.

“And so,” he said, “we knew that you were there.”

Matsapulina was speechless. She tried to hide her shock, hoping to learn more about how they’d accessed her messages. But the officer didn’t elaborate.

When she was released two days later, Matsapulina learned from her lawyer that on the morning she was arrested, police had searched the houses of some 80 other people with opposition ties and had arrested 20, charging each with terrorism related to the alleged bomb threat. A few days later, Matsapulina gathered her belongings and boarded a flight to Istanbul.

In April, after having made it safely to Armenia, Matsapulina recounted the episode in a Twitter thread. She ruled out the chance that anyone in her close-knit group had been cooperating with security forces (they’d all also left Russia by then), which left two conceivable explanations for how the officers had read her private Telegram messages. One was that they had installed some kind of malware, like the NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus tool, on her phone. Based on what she’d gathered, the expensive software was reserved for high-level targets and was not likely to have been turned on a mid-level figure in an unregistered party with about 1,000 members nationwide.

The other “unpleasant” explanation, she wrote, “is, I think, obvious to everyone.” Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.

As we come upon the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with all evidence pointing towards a major escalation and new offensive from Moscow happening within the next few weeks or even days, it's important to remember that another war is being fought in the streets of Russian cities, one where Putin has all the advantages, and a people live in fear of their government.

Putin had everything ready to go in order to win that war. We're entering a very dangerous timeframe in world history now. The next few weeks, months, years may determine the path of the planet for decades to come.

The path Putin went down was obvious. The only question now is whether he takes Russia -- and the world -- down that dark channel.

Supremely Bad Security

Turns out not only is The Great Supreme Court Dodds Decision Leak™ still without a chief suspect because it's almost certainly one of the conservative justices (or a spouse like Ginni Thomas) who is being ignored because of the political fallout, trying to even track the method of the leak is also extremely difficult because document security at SCOTUS is "middle school teacher's lounge" level.

 

Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month.

New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of yearslong lax internal procedures that could have endangered security, led to the leak and hindered an investigation into the culprit.

Supreme Court employees also used printers that didn’t produce logs – or were able to print sensitive documents off-site without tracking – and “burn bags” meant to ensure the safe destruction of materials were left open and unattended in hallways.

“This has been going on for years,” one former employee said.

The problem with the justices’ use of emails persisted in part because some justices were slow to adopt to the technology and some court employees were nervous about confronting them to urge them to take precautions, one person said. Such behavior meant that justices weren’t setting an example to take security seriously.

The justices were “not masters of information security protocol,” one former court employee told CNN.

In a statement attached to the final report, the court called the leak a “grave assault” on the court’s legitimacy and the marshal of the court issued a road map to improve security.

The report and the new revelations of weak protocols come as the court is trying to protect its own legitimacy after an embarrassing leak and allegations (prompted by the recent rash of high profile cases breaking along familiar ideological lines) that it has simply become another political branch. The 20-page report and its still secret “Annex A” raised some questions as to whether the entire investigation should have been outsourced to someone without close ties to the court.

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff reviewed and endorsed the Supreme Court’s internal investigation into the leak. However, the court did not disclose Chertoff had been paid at least $1 million in recent years to perform security assessments for the court.

The court declined to comment.

 

Printer logs not tracking print jobs and open document disposal "burn bags" left in public areas are the kind of things that your company's Security IAM (Identity & Access Management) folks fired on the spot, but I suspect that "Security so bad that anyone could be a suspect" is a feature of SCOTUS, not a bug.

Also, it's entrirely possible that Michael Chertoff has been ripping off SCOTUS for years, or simply taking the equivalent of an "outside contractor job" as a working bribe to keep security that lax.

Lot to investigate here, but who's going to do it? Biden can't, and Republicans in Congress won't because they know what the truth is.

Last Call For Grays And Greens

The Pentagon isn't about to confirm the existence of aliens, but the Defense Department's new Office Of Weird Crap will go over all the reported encounters with unidentified "anomalies" just in case.

 

A new office at the Pentagon is scrutinizing hundreds of reports of unidentified objects in air, sea, space and beyond, senior U.S. defense officials said Friday, and while it has discovered no signs of alien life, the search is set to expand.

The issue has taken on increasing seriousness as a bipartisan group of lawmakers presses the Defense Department to investigate instances of unidentified phenomena and disclose publicly what they learn. Established in July, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is evaluating recent reports and soon could evaluate accounts that date back decades, officials said.

The Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Ronald Moultrie, told reporters during a news conference, the first to discuss the office and its ongoing work, that “At this time … we have nothing” to affirm the existence of space aliens.

The proliferation of drones, including those operated by foreign adversaries and amateur hobbyists, account for many of the reports, officials said.

“Some of these things almost collide with planes,” said Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the new office, who spoke to the media alongside Moultrie on Friday. “We see that on a regular basis.”

The U.S. government employs sophisticated sensors around the globe to collect data, and the office analyzes it for relevant information, they said, declining to elaborate.

While most of the reports the Pentagon investigates are about aerial objects, defense officials are increasingly concerned about unusual activity below the surface of the ocean, in space and on land. For that reason, the Pentagon now uses the term unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, rather than previous descriptions such as “unidentified flying object.”

Moultrie said that, “Unidentified phenomena in all domains … pose potential threats to personal security and operational security, and they deserve our urgent attention.”

Unidentified “trans-medium” objects, he said, is a class of phenomena that would jump between domains, like from the air to the sea. None has been documented yet, Moultrie noted.

The research is likely to expand next year. Congress wrote a provision into the next defense policy bill, which is awaiting President Biden’s signature, that requires the Defense Department to complete a “historical record report” about detailing unidentified phenomena observed and documented by the United States. If approved by Biden, the National Defense Authorization Act will then trigger “quite a research project, if you will, into the archives,” Kirkpatrick said.

Defense officials already are digging through old reports. Kirkpatrick, a physicist and career intelligence officer, said he will “adhere to the scientific method — and I will follow that data and science wherever it goes.” Some past reports, he acknowledged, may be highly classified and not yet known to him.

 

So yeah, Mulder and Scully are on the job in this era of instant information, deepfakes, drones and conspiracy theories. Even the Pentagon has to admit publicly now that the truth is out there.

Has to be a really wildly compelling job though if all my years watching X-Files, Special Unit 2, Warehouse 13 and Alien Nation meant anything.

 

 

Sunday Long Read: Spies Like Her

In this week's Sunday Long Read, Helen Warrell at the Financial Times gets the Brits to discuss the biggest unkept secret in espionage: Women make the best spies, because men have all the important information and are dumbasses.

 

My journey to the school for spies starts in the half-light of a waking city. I do not know where I am going and have only been instructed to meet my contact at a central London landmark. 

 

We travel by car, boat and train to a place where officers of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the overseas espionage agency known as SIS, learn their craft. I am not allowed to describe it to you, but I can tell you this: it is giant and austere and the slicing wind makes my eyes water. 

 

At the door, I am met by a small, cheerful woman with short, wavy blonde hair whose beaming welcome is at odds with the sterile eeriness of this place. Kathy, who is in charge of all intelligence operations by SIS officers and their agents around the world, ushers me over to a bank of armchairs next to a large window overlooking a paved landscape. 

 

She jokes that when she was first offered a job at the agency, also known as MI6, her mother questioned whether she wanted to commit herself to something so “wacky and unfamiliar”. “My dad just said, ‘Go for it.’” This self-effacing northerner says she is “not particularly brave”. But she is one of the most powerful spies in Britain. 

 

Kathy is one of four directors-general at SIS, each of whom reports to the chief, known as “C”. For the first time, three of them are women. They work in the most important and rapidly evolving areas of spycraft. Kathy is director of operations. Rebecca is the chief’s deputy, who oversees strategy. The most storied MI6 job of all belongs to Ada, who is the head of technology, known as “Q” after James Bond’s mastermind gadgeteer. I have spent six months interviewing them about how they reached the top in a traditionally male career and trying to understand what the life of a female spy is really like. 

 

Since the chief of MI6 is the only member of the agency who is named or permitted to speak in public, and because all of them have been men, this is the first time that female SIS officers have ever spoken on the record. I have agreed to change their names and omit certain details to protect them and the sources they work with. They agreed to speak to encourage women applicants and correct the perception of espionage as a man’s game.

The low profile of these three senior officers is in keeping with the history of women in British intelligence. In the past, women have been overlooked, relegated to secretarial roles or, before the SIS era, deployed as “honeytraps” to ensnare or blackmail enemies. When Vernon Kell co-founded MI6’s precursor in 1909, he identified as his ideal recruits men “who could make notes on their shirt cuff while riding on horseback”. His views on women were less well-known, but it is said that he once commented: “I like my girls to have good legs.” Despite having proved themselves with significant skill and bravery during the second world war, women in MI6 and its sister agency MI5 struggled to progress and were not regularly recruited as intelligence officers until the late 1970s.

 

This misogyny was repeated and exaggerated in popular novels written by former spies such as Ian Fleming and John le Carré. The fictional MI6 officer James Bond gropes his secretary, spices his operations with extravagant liaisons and encounters few female spies, the most famous being the dowdy Russian counter-intelligence officer Rosa Klebb. Film versions of Fleming’s books made famous an entire genre of “Bond girls”, conquests rather than fully drawn human beings. Le Carré, best known for the cold war spy chronicles starring a gnomic intelligence officer, George Smiley, expresses a similarly two-dimensional view. His women are sirens who exert a potent sexual hold over male protagonists but have little to say for themselves. The one exception, “Moscow-gazer” Connie Sachs, is a caricature in the opposite direction — an eccentric with an encyclopedic memory who succumbs to alcoholism after being sidelined from the job at which she excels. 

 

Sexist depictions are hardly confined to spy films, but they matter more in a profession in which mystery is encouraged and reality is classified. The perceptions built up through cultural references are, like so many aspects of the Bond legacy, double-edged. The films have built SIS a legendary brand, but their portrayal of ad-hoc killings and solo operations is far from accurate. For MI6, the historical absence of women is both a serious omission and a secret weapon. The UK’s main adversaries today — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — are repressive societies with few women in positions of power. For the female spy, this weakness in the enemy is exploitable. Precisely because they are so likely to be overlooked, women have the potential to be the best spies of all.

 

The countries of the world are more than happy to help spread the notion that spycraft is done by men, because the real work has been done by women for decades now, and will only continue to increase as more dumb, horny men get into positions of authoritarian power in strongman regimes all over the planet.

I'm good with that.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

So here's the kind of trenchant political analysis and pithy observation you've come to expect from ZVTS:

1. It has already been a horrific week for Donald Trump.
2. He cost the GOP another Senate seat last night with his personal pick of Herschel Walker.
3. It's only Wednesday.
4. Things have already gotten considerably worse for him tonight.

 

Former President Donald J. Trump hired people to search four properties after being directed by a federal judge to look harder for any classified material still in his possession, and they found at least two documents with classified markings inside a sealed box in one of the locations, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump’s search team discovered the documents at a federally run storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla., the person said, prompting his lawyers to notify the Justice Department about them.

The New York Times reported in October that Justice Department officials had told the former president’s lawyers that they believed he might have more classified materials that were not returned in response to a subpoena issued in May. The F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, in August for additional classified documents and other presidential records.

People close to Mr. Trump had said earlier on Wednesday that no classified material had been found during the searches, a claim that was later proved incorrect. The Washington Post first reported on the locating of the two additional documents, as well as the searches of the properties.

After the warning from the Justice Department, a debate ensued among Mr. Trump’s lawyers about whether to bring in an independent firm to conduct a search.

The discovery of the documents at the storage unit, maintained by the federal General Services Administration, came during a series of wider searches that were completed around Thanksgiving and conducted at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; at Trump Tower in New York; and in a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the events.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that the former president and “his counsel continue to be cooperative and transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted attack against President Trump and his family by the weaponized Department of Justice.”

The department is investigating the former president’s handling of thousands of government documents, including more than 300 classified ones, that were taken from the White House at the end of his term and were found at Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors are also seeking to determine whether Mr. Trump obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve the materials.

When the Justice Department warned that it believed Mr. Trump still had documents in his possession, a lawyer whom he had hired a short time earlier, Christopher M. Kise, suggested along with other lawyers working for Mr. Trump that they engage an outside firm, according to people familiar with the events.

A cadre of other Trump lawyers were resistant to the idea; among them was Boris Epshteyn, a communications adviser who has positioned himself as an in-house counsel on some of Mr. Trump’s legal entanglements. The dispute led to Mr. Kise’s standing in Mr. Trump’s circle diminishing for weeks, according to several people close to the former president.

More recently, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of Federal District Court in Washington, who oversees grand jury investigations, directed Mr. Trump’s lawyers essentially to search more carefully for any remaining documents. Other lawyers in Mr. Trump’s circle took on the issue and hired a firm, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

 

So, like everything else in this case, Trump lied, his lawyers said one thing, and the truth was entirely something else.  He can't stop lying. He knows he's going to get caught, and he does.

And this time it's going to cost him.

I hope, anyway.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Team Trump just got destroyed by judges he appointed as all three Republican picks on the 11th Circuit panel overseeing his case on the Mar-a-Lago document special master ordered Judge Aileen Cannon's previous decision vacated.

The three-judge panel of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed US District Judge Aileen Cannon’s order appointing a so-called special master to sort through thousands of documents found at Trump’s home to determine what should be off limits to investigators.

“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”

The 11th Circuit said that either approach would be a “radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations” and that “both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”

The opinion – which was issued jointly by the three-judge panel made up of all GOP appointees – dismantled Trump’s arguments for why a special master was necessary. The court said that only in extraordinary circumstances should courts intervene in Justice Department investigations that are still in their early stages, and that standard had not been met here.

“This restraint guards against needless judicial intrusion into the course of criminal investigations—a sphere of power committed to the executive branch,” the court wrote.

The ruling is a stinging rebuke of how Cannon inserted herself into the dispute. In addition to reversing the order, the appeals court is instructing her to dismiss the entire case.

The appeals court said that its new ruling will go into effect in seven days, unless a party in the case successfully seeks an order – known as a stay – pausing the ruling from going into effect while it is appealed.

 

Ahh, but that last part means Trump and the Roberts Court have a week to reinstate the order and take the case. We'll see if the Shadow Docket™ acts and puts the case in limbo for the next 8 months. After all, this is the court that decided to overturn precedent in Dobbs and turn half the country into wards of the states they are in. You think it won't protect Trump from legal peril at the federal level for as long as it can?

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Trump stolen document mess just went from "really bad for Trump" to "someone's getting indicted before the end of the year."

The Justice Department offered on Wednesday to allow Kash Patel, a close adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, to testify to a federal grand jury under a grant of immunity about Mr. Trump’s handling of highly sensitive presidential records, two people familiar with the matter said.

The offer of immunity came about a month after Mr. Patel invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination in front of the grand jury and refused to answer questions from prosecutors investigating whether Mr. Trump improperly took national security documents with him when he left the White House and subsequently obstructed attempts by the government to retrieve them.

During Mr. Patel’s initial grand jury appearance, one of the people familiar with the matter said, Judge Beryl A. Howell of Federal District Court in Washington acknowledged Mr. Patel’s Fifth Amendment claims and said that the only way he could be forced to testify was if the government offered him immunity.

The decision by the Justice Department to grant immunity in the case, the person said, effectively cleared the way for the grand jury to hear Mr. Patel’s testimony.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

The disclosure that Mr. Patel has received immunity for his testimony comes as prosecutors have increased their pressure on recalcitrant witnesses who have declined to answer investigators’ questions or have provided them with potentially misleading accounts about Mr. Trump’s handling of documents.

Kids, if Kash Patel just cut a deal to turn grand jury testimony, it has to be something that will make a case for charges, and pretty much the only bigger fish than Patel in this mess is Trump himself. If there was any doubt left that an indictment is coming after the midterms, it just got put to rest.

It's going to be a fun Thanksgiving, and the turkey is going to be orange, and very well cooked.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

As many have suspected, the stolen classified documents Trump kept in his Mar-a-Lago pool closet contained sensitive national security information about both Iran and China.

Some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter. If shared with others, the people said, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world.

At least one of the documents seized by the FBI describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Other documents described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China, they said.

Unauthorized disclosures of specific information in the documents would pose multiple risks, experts say. People aiding U.S. intelligence efforts could be endangered, and collection methods could be compromised. In addition, other countries or U.S. adversaries could retaliate against the United States for actions it has taken in secret.

The classified documents about Iran and China are considered among the most sensitive the FBI has recovered to date in its investigation of Trump and his aides for possible mishandling of classified information, obstruction and destruction of government records, the people said. The criminal probe is unfolding even as the Justice Department and a district attorney in Georgia investigate alleged efforts by Trump and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and as a House select committee has subpoenaed the former president seeking documents and testimony related to those allegations.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in having the documents at Mar-a-Lago, claiming in a recent television interview that he declassified any documents in his possession, and that a president can declassify information “even by thinking about it.” National security lawyers have derided those claims.

A spokesman for the former president did not respond to requests for comment Friday morning. But after this article published online, Trump posted on social media, decrying what he called leaks “on the Document Hoax” and suggesting that the FBI and the National Archives and Records Administration were trying to frame him.

“Who could ever trust corrupt, weaponized agencies, and that includes NARA,” Trump wrote. “ … Also who knows what NARA and the FBI plant into documents, or subtract from documents — we will never know, will we?”

 

Foreign agents certainly have seen these documents. There's no way they were kept secure with known Chinese, Russian, and Saudi nationals running around the place as Trump's guests, and probably even more infiltrating the resort as staff.

Even if Trump didn't sell these documents to the highest bidder, he almost certainly showed them off to brag. Trying to blame this on the FBI is just silly.

Trump is in real trouble, and even he knows it.

And The Meek Shall Inherit A Raid

A very bizarre story from Rolling Stone's Tatiana Siegel today, detailing the disappearance of former ABC News national security producer James Meek. The FBI raided his apartment in Virginia in April, and apparently he has dropped off the grid for the last six months as nobody seems to know where he went.

AT A MINUTE before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.”

The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces. Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.” But his track record of exclusives was undeniable, breaking the news of foiled terrorist plots in New York City and the Army’s coverup of the fratricidal death of Pfc. Dave Sharrett II in Iraq, a bombshell that earned Meek a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. With nine years at ABC under his belt, a buzzy Hulu documentary poised for Emmy attention, and an upcoming book on the military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 52-year-old bear of a man seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession.

Outside his Arlington, Virginia, apartment, a surreal scene was unfolding, and his storied career was about to come crashing down. Meek’s tweet marked the last time he’s posted on the social media platform.

The first thing Meek’s neighbor John Antonelli noticed that morning was the black utility vehicle with blacked out windows blocking traffic in both directions on Columbia Pike. It was just before dawn on that brisk April day, and self-described police-vehicle historian Antonelli was about to grab a coffee at a Starbucks before embarking on his daily three-mile walk. He inched closer to get a better vantage, when he saw an olive-green Lenco BearCat G2, an armored tactical vehicle often employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other law-enforcement agencies. A few Arlington County cruisers surrounded the jaw-dropping scene, but all of the other vehicles were unmarked, including the BearCat. Antonelli counted at least 10 heavily armed personnel in the group. None bore anything identifying which agency was conducting the raid. After just 10 minutes, the operation inside the Siena Park apartment complex — a six-story, upscale building for D.C. professionals, with rents fetching about $2,000 to $3,000 a month — was over.

“They didn’t stick around. They took off pretty quickly and headed west on Columbia Pike towards Fairfax County,” Antonelli recalls. “Most people seeing that green vehicle would think it’s some kind of tank. But I knew it was the Lenco BearCat. That vehicle is designed to be jumped out of so they can do a raid in that kind of time. It can return fire if they’re being fired upon.”

Multiple sources familiar with the matter say Meek was the target of an FBI raid at the Siena Park apartments, where he had been living on the top floor for more than a decade. An FBI representative told Rolling Stone its agents were present on the morning of April 27 “at the 2300 block of Columbia Pike, Arlington, Virginia, conducting court-authorized law-enforcement activity. The FBI cannot comment further due to an ongoing investigation.”

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval. (Gabe Rottman at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says, “To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a case [since January 2021].”)

In the raid’s aftermath, Meek, who frequently collaborated with ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir, has made himself scarce. None of his Siena Park neighbors with whom Rolling Stone spoke have seen him since, with his apartment appearing to be vacant. Siena Park management declined to confirm that their longtime tenant was gone, citing “privacy policies.” Similarly, several ABC News colleagues — who are accustomed to unraveling mysteries and cracking investigative stories — tell Rolling Stone that they have no idea what happened to Meek.

“He fell off the face of the Earth,” says one. “And people asked, but no one knew the answer.”

An ABC representative tells Rolling Stone, “He resigned very abruptly and hasn’t worked for us for months.”

Sources familiar with the matter say federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid. One investigative journalist who worked with Meek says it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.

“Mr. Meek is unaware of what allegations anonymous sources are making about his possession of classified documents,” his lawyer, Eugene Gorokhov, said in a statement. “If such documents exist, as claimed, this would be within the scope of his long career as an investigative journalist covering government wrongdoing. The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: they appear to come from a source inside the government. It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation. We hope that the DOJ [Department of Justice] promptly investigates the source of this leak.”

 

This story is extremely weird on its face and it get more strange by the minute. This guy was a well-known national security journalist and producer, he's worked in print, TV, and online. For someone like that to vanish and nobody really saying anything about it for six months, when he had ongoing book and Emmy campaign activities going on?

All of this smells like a head cheese, limburger and durian sandwich.

The other observation is "If you or I had classified documents in our homes" argument about Trump's Mar-a-Lago trove of stolen classified material. Meek apparently did. The FBI showed up as a result.

There's a hell of a lot more to this story, and I'd want to see what it is, but I don't like any of this. All of it sets off my alarm bells, the timing of the story, the disappearance of a national security journalist, the raid, the whole thing just doesn't make much sense without additional context and this story raises more questions than answers.

Keep an eye on this one.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

As I mentioned last month, Donald Trump's quixotic quest to block the Justice Department's investigation into his trove of illegally held classified documents will now be going to the Supreme Court, or it would, if Trump's lawyers were actually arguing that.

 

Former President Donald J. Trump asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to intervene in the litigation over sensitive documents that the F.B.I. seized from his Florida estate, saying that an appeals court had lacked jurisdiction to remove them from a special master’s review.

But Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not ask the Supreme Court to overturn the most important part of the appeals court’s intervention: its decision to free the Justice Department to continue using documents with classification markings in its criminal investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling of government records.

The new filing was technical, saying that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, had not been authorized to stay aspects of a judge’s order appointing a special master to review all materials that the F.B.I. had seized in its search of Mr. Trump’s residence, Mar-a-Lago.

“The 11th Circuit lacked jurisdiction to review the special master order, which authorized the review of all materials seized from President Trump’s residence, including documents bearing classification markings,” the application said.

The court requested a response from the Justice Department by 5 p.m. next Tuesday.

Even were Mr. Trump to prevail, his victory would be distinctly modest. It would merely allow the special master to review those documents even as the Justice Department continues its work.

Although the Supreme Court is dominated by six conservative justices, three of them appointed by Mr. Trump, it has rejected earlier efforts to block the disclosure of information about him, and legal experts said Mr. Trump’s new emergency application faced significant challenges.

Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said Mr. Trump was pursuing a limited and curious litigation strategy in trying to reinstate part of a ruling from Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida.

Mr. Trump’s application, Professor Vladeck said, presented “technical procedural questions on which the justices may be even less likely to be sympathetic to the former president.”

In other words, the Trumpies are arguing over how much should be included in Special Master Raymond Dearie's review, not over blocking the investigation. The former is likely to grant Trump additional months to delay the investigation, and the latter means nothing's going to happen until after the midterms.

We'll see how this shakes out, but don't be surprised if we get a shadow docket unsigned order from SCOTUS next week in Trump's favor.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump's personal federal court judge, Aileen "Loose" Cannon, continues to be a national embarrassment and enduring symbol of Trump corruption, this time proving beyond any doubt that the Trump regime's odious "Special Master" plan was just a delay tactic to prevent Trump from being indicted before the midterm elections.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon told Donald Trump’s lawyers Thursday that they did not need to comply with an order from special master Raymond J. Dearie and state in a court filing whether they believe FBI agents lied about documents seized from the former president’s Florida residence.

Thursday’s ruling was the first clash between Cannon, a Trump appointee who has generally shown the former president deference in litigation over the Mar-a-Lago investigation, and Dearie, a federal judge she appointed as an outside expert in the case, who appears to be far more skeptical of Trump.

After Trump’s lawyers requested a special master, Cannon chose Dearie to review approximately 11,000 documents seized Aug. 8 from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and residence and determine whether any should be shielded from investigators because of attorney-client or executive privilege.

An appeals court separately overruled Cannon’s decision that about 100 additional documents that the government says are classified — some of them top-secret — should be part of Dearie’s review.

Dearie last week told the former president’s legal team that it couldn’t suggest in court filings that the government’s description of the seized documents — including whether they were classified — was inaccurate without providing any evidence. He ordered them to submit to the court by Oct. 7 any specific inaccuracies they saw in the government’s inventory list of seized items.

It would have been a key test of Trump’s legal strategy, as his lawyers decided whether to back up Trump’s controversial public claims that the FBI planted items at his residence and that he had declassified all the classified documents before leaving office — or whether they would take a more conciliatory approach.

 

Dearie told the Trump team to submit evidence that the FBI "planted" documents at Mar-a-Lago during the August search because the main argument from Trump's legal eagles is that the FBI permanently tainted the investigation by doing so, and that Special Master Dearie was there to serve up justice for this foul misdeed.

 

Judge Cannon simply threw that order out.

 

But according to Cannon, who has the authority to overrule Dearie’s orders, such a decision is not required right now.

“There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its content,” Cannon wrote.

The Justice Department could appeal.

Trump’s legal team has argued that answering questions about the inventory list and whether the documents are classified could put them at a disadvantage in the face of a possible future criminal prosecution, or a future legal fight over getting the seized documents returned to Trump.

When Trump defense attorney James M. Trusty told Dearie earlier this month that he should not be forced to disclose declarations and witness statements yet, Dearie replied: “My view is you can’t have your cake and eat it.”

Cannon also addressed ongoing disputes Thursday over deadlines set by Dearie as part of his review, siding with Trump’s team and extending the special master review deadline to Dec. 16. She had originally said Dearie could have until around Thanksgiving to settle any disagreements the two parties had over privilege issues.

Dearie had suggested he could work on a more expedited schedule and told the parties they would need to finish their portions of the review by Oct. 21. Trump’s team had pushed back against that deadline, saying it was too fast and that they couldn’t find a vendor to scan the documents that was willing to work on that timeline.

“This modest enlargement is necessary to permit adequate time for the Special Master’s review and recommendations given the circumstances as they have evolved since entry of the Appointment Order,” Cannon wrote in her order.

 

Cannon is going to such stretching extremes for Trump, it's a wonder Disney isn't looking to cast her a Helen "Elastigirl" Parr for a live-action adaptation of The Incredibles. 

 

And now the investigation may be delayed into next year, where Trump is hoping a GOP Congress will interfere with, block, or even eliminate the investigation completely somehow.

All the while, Judge Cannon will do everything she can to bog the investigation down. It's the kind of thing that should lead to her removal as a judge, but the GOP will never allow that.

So on the farce goes, music, pratfalls, and all.

Spies Like Us, Con't

A married pair of American doctors, one from John Hopkins, the other an US Army Major, have been indicted for trying to sell US military medical info to an FBI Agent posing as a Russian embassy official.

 

A Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist and her spouse, a doctor and major in the U.S. Army, were federally indicted for attempting to provide medical information about members of the military to the Russian government.

Anna Gabrielian and Jamie Lee Henry, who had a secret security clearance as a doctor at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, communicated and met with an undercover FBI agent who they believed was from the Russian embassy, offering sensitive medical information on military members and their family, the indictment alleges.

During an initial Aug. 17 meeting in a Baltimore hotel room, Gabrielian told the undercover agent that “she was motivated by patriotism toward Russia to provide any assistance she could to Russia, even if it meant being fired or going to jail.”

Her spouse had access to not just medical information, she said, but insight into how the U.S. military establishes an army hospital in war conditions and about training the military provided to Ukrainian military personnel. Henry participated in a second meeting later that night.

“My point of view is until the United States actually declares war against Russia, I’m able to help as much as I want,” Henry told the undercover agent, according to the indictment. “At that point, I’ll have some ethical issues I’ll have to work through.”

“You’ll work through those ethical issues,” Gabrielian replied.

In an Aug. 24 meeting with the undercover agent at a Baltimore hotel room, Gabrielian called Henry a “coward” for being concerned about violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA,) a federal law that limits the disclosure of patients’ confidential medical information.

Gabrielian is listed as an instructor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at Hopkins, and her profile page says she speaks Russian. Henry received attention in 2015 after becoming the first known active-duty Army officer to come out as transgender. A Buzzfeed article from that time said she was also to her knowledge and to the knowledge of LGBT advocates the first and only active duty service member who had changed her name and gender within the United States military.

During an Aug. 31 meeting at a hotel in Gaithersburg, Gabrielian provided the agent with medical information related to the spouse of a person currently employed by the Office of Naval Intelligence, and medical information related to someone only described as a veteran of the Air Force.

“Gabrielian highlighted to the [undercover agent] a medical issue reflected in the records of [the military member’s spouse] that Russia could exploit.,” the indictment says.

During the same meeting, Henry also provided medical information related to five patients at Fort Bragg, including a retired Army officer, a current Department of Defense employee, and spouses of active and deceased Army veterans.

This...this is gonna be a hell of a movie.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

If Donald Trump thought his legal troubles were bad now, last night the 11th Circuit just ruled against his "special master" nonsense, all but tossing Judge Aileen Cannon's ruling out the window on appeal.

 

A federal appeals court is allowing the Justice Department to continue looking at documents marked as classified that were seized from former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home and resort. 

The emergency intervention upends a trial judge's order over those documents that blocked federal investigators' work on the documents. 

A special master's review of that subset of about 100 records, which would've allowed Trump's legal team to see them, is now partially stopped. The special master, Judge Raymond Dearie, is able to continue his work reviewing the rest of the material seized from Mar-a-Lago, to make sure records belonging to Trump or that he may be able to claim are confidential aren't used by investigators. 

"It is self-evident that the public has a strong interest in ensuring that the storage of the classified records did not result in 'exceptionally grave damage to the national security,'" the three-judge panel from the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals stated. "Ascertaining that necessarily involves reviewing the documents, determining who had access to them and when, and deciding which (if any) sources or methods are compromised." 

 

Team Trump of course will demand a full panel hearing (called en banc) from the entire 11th Circuit now,  but it turns out he can't get one.

 

Eleventh Circuit Rule 35-4 expressly prohibits en banc reconsideration of panel rulings on applications for stays.

In English, if Trump wants to continue to defend Judge Cannon's injunction, his only remaining option is #SCOTUS (where, IMHO, he'll lose):https://t.co/PbyNFqkNgq pic.twitter.com/9rQ4ApbuR9

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) September 22, 2022

 

We'll see. This was always going to go to SCOTUS anyway.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Turns out Donald Trump may have been keeping classified documents relating to his Russian collusion in his pool closet, in an effort to use them as leverage against the Justice Department investigation into his dealings with Moscow.

 

IN HIS FINAL days in the White House, Donald Trump told top advisers he needed to preserve certain Russia-related documents to keep his enemies from destroying them.

The documents related to the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged collusion with Trump’s campaign. At the end of his presidency, Trump and his team pushed to declassify these so-called “Russiagate” documents, believing they would expose a “Deep State” plot against him.

According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation and another source briefed on the matter, Trump told several people working in and outside the White House that he was concerned Joe Biden’s incoming administration — or the “Deep State” — would supposedly “shred,” bury, or destroy “the evidence” that Trump was somehow wronged.

Trump’s concern about preserving the Russia-related material is newly relevant after an FBI search turned up a trove of government documents at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

Since the search, Trump has refused to say which classified government papers and top-secret documents he had at Mar-a-Lago and what was the FBI had seized. (Trump considers the documents “mine” and has directed his lawyers to make that widely-panned argument in court.) The feds have publicly released little about the search and its results. It’s unclear if any of the materials in Trump’s document trove are related to Russia or the election interference investigation. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

But both Trump and his former Director of National Intelligence have hinted that Russia-related documents could be among the materials the FBI sought. “I think they thought it was something to do with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” Trump said during a Sept. 1 radio interview. “They were afraid that things were in there — part of their scam material.”

Former DNI John Ratcliffe told CBS days earlier that, while he had no knowledge of what was in the records, “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were records related to [Russia] there.” 

 

Yet another motive for Trump stealing classified documents. This keeps getting worse for him.

 

In a memo to the acting attorney general and intelligence officials sent the day before Trump left office, he claimed the Justice Department had sent him a binder of materials on the FBI’s so-called “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation in late December 2020. The department sent Trump that information, he claimed, “so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.”

The materials included “transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper,” according to John Solomon, Trump’s representative to the National Archives.

Trump White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows later wrote in his memoir that he “personally went through every page” of the documents to make sure the declassified portions didn’t “disclose sources and methods” and described his frustration by what he considered “push back” from the Department of Justice and FBI. 

Meadows and Trump worked to release the material up until “minutes before” Biden’s inauguration. Trump sent a memo on Jan. 19 accepting the FBI’s redactions and ordering declassification. Meadows sent a followup memo on Biden’s inauguration day. The material was never released publicly. But in a series of podcast interviews recorded before the FBI search, former Nunes and Trump official Kash Patel shed some light on the administration’s broader plans. He claimed Trump had asked him to help retrieve and publish so-called “Russiagate” material the White House counsel’s office had sent to the National Archives in the last days of the administration.

 

If Trump had "classified evidence" of a plot against him, don't you think he would have used it before now?

 

Just because he stole classified documents that he thinks are evidence, doesn't mean they are evidence.

But boy, suddenly this explains why Trump would refuse to give up his stolen goods, doesn't it?

Stealing documents like these is not an accident, not an oversight, not about a debate over whether they were Trump’s or not—which is how Trump’s defenders have sought to frame the discussion. There is simply no defense for this. The punishment for stealing such secrets (even if no one else ever saw them) is and should be severe.

The risk involved in taking these documents and then lying about having them is extraordinarily high. Therefore, the decision to do so must have been carefully made, even by a reckless narcissist like Trump. As such, there must have been a careful calculus made to take and hold these ultra-sensitive secrets.

It is essential that we find out why he took them, why he lied about having them, why he did not return them when subpoenaed, who may have seen them, whether copies were made, whether there are other such documents in his possession, and much much more. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Indeed, contrary to the measured pace of the investigation to date, when documents like these are stolen the issue must shift from caution and deference to a former president to swift containment of what could be a grievous national security breach. It is time for action and the severest penalties the law allows.

As a consequence, and given the gravity of Trump’s almost certain crimes, this moment presents a new and defining test for Attorney General Merrick Garland. It also presents one for President Joe Biden and for our justice system. There are no close calls here, and the costs of inaction, slow action, or tentativeness are incalculably high. Indeed, it is important to accept and acknowledge that these revelations, should they be true, make it clear that the “go slow” approach of the Department of Justice has proven to be ill-considered. Very ill-considered.

Much as Judge Cannon has erroneously argued should be done (a fact acknowledged even by Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr), the Justice Department has treated Trump as though he were due special treatment. The DOJ has gone slow. It has given him multiple opportunities to resolve the issues associated with these documents that would not be afforded to any of us.

Perhaps that would be understandable were Trump any other president. Perhaps that would be understandable had Robert Mueller not found a strong case to be made that Trump serially obstructed justice. Perhaps that would be understandable were Trump not responsible for a deadly coup attempt that culminated in an armed assault on the U.S. Capitol.

It seems far-fetched that such a man should be granted special courtesies, that his word and assurances should be accepted at face value, and that arguments that he had special prerogatives long denied other presidents by the courts should be considered. But once it became clear that he was likely in violation of the Espionage Act, likely obstructing justice, and likely putting the lives of our human intelligence assets at risk, it should have been clear that the time for deference to this one-man assault on our interests and values should have come to an end.

 

The issue remains that the kind of documents Trump supposedly stole would be worth, you know, billions to the right people as well.

We're in solid traitor territory, folks.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Why yes, Donald Trump had classified nuclear secrets lying around his pool closet, and they weren't just our nuclear secrets apparently.

A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

Documents about such highly classified operations require special clearances on a need-to-know basis, not just top-secret clearance. Some special-access programs can have as few as a couple dozen government personnel authorized to know of an operation’s existence. Records that deal with such programs are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location.

But such documents were stored at Mar-a-Lago, with uncertain security, more than 18 months after Trump left the White House.

After months of trying, according to government court filings, the FBI has recovered more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago this year: 184 in a set of 15 boxes sent to the National Archives and Records Administration in January, 38 more handed over by a Trump lawyer to investigators in June, and more than 100 additional documents unearthed in a court-approved search on Aug. 8.

It was in this last batch of government secrets, the people familiar with the matter said, that the information about a foreign government’s nuclear-defense readiness was found. These people did not identify the foreign government in question, say where at Mar-a-Lago the document was found or offer additional details about one of the Justice Department’s most sensitive national security investigations.

 

This alone should warrant, well, a warrant. If you had this document lying around your house, you would already be serving decades in jail.

 

The damage from all of this will be catastrophic, and that's before factoring in the very real possibility that Trump and his family saw these classified documents and that they may have been deliberately exposed to foreign governments in exchange for favors, money, or both.

 

Lock. Him. Up.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

 Yes, Trump had piles of classified documents lying around his desk at Mar-a-Lago.

 

The Justice Department sought a search warrant for former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida after obtaining evidence that highly classified documents were likely concealed and that Mr. Trump’s representatives had falsely claimed all sensitive material had been returned, according to a court filing by the department on Tuesday.

The filing came in response to Mr. Trump’s request for an independent review of materials seized from his home, Mar-a-Lago. But it went far beyond that, painting the clearest picture yet of the department’s efforts to retrieve the documents before taking the extraordinary step of searching a former president’s private property on Aug. 8.

Among the new disclosures in the 36-page filing were that the search yielded three classified documents in desks inside Mr. Trump’s office, with more than 100 documents in 13 boxes or containers with classification markings in the residence, including some at the most restrictive levels.

That was twice the number of classified documents the former president’s lawyers turned over voluntarily while swearing an oath that they had returned all the material demanded by the government.

The investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of government documents began as a relatively straightforward attempt to recover materials that officials with the National Archives had spent much of 2021 trying to retrieve. The filing on Tuesday made clear that prosecutors are now unmistakably focused on the possibility that Mr. Trump and those around him took criminal steps to obstruct their investigation.

Investigators developed evidence that “government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago after the Justice Department sent Mr. Trump’s office a subpoena for any remaining documents with classified markings. That led prosecutors to conclude that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation,” the government filing said.

The filing included one striking visual aid — a photograph of at least five yellow folders recovered from Mr. Trump’s resort and residence marked “Top Secret” and another red one labeled “Secret.”

But department officials are not expected to file charges imminently, if they ever do. And the specific contents of the materials the government recovered in the search remain unclear — as does what risk to national security Mr. Trump’s decision to retain the materials posed.

While the filing provided important new information about the timeline of the investigation, much of the information was mentioned, in less detail, in the affidavit used to obtain the warrant, which a federal magistrate judge unsealed last week.

 

Again, understand that the FBI has Trump dead to rights. His team materially lied about keeping unsecured classified documents in his home. Mar-a-Lago was rife with foreign agents looking for just such material, which was kept out in the open. The CIA screamed from the rooftops that assets were being compromised.

 

Trump damaged national security, he obstructed the investigation into the documents that he illegally kept, and if you or I did even a fraction of this, we'd already be in prison.

 

The issue is whether or not America is ready for the violent, nationwide backlash of lethal violence that will follow Trump's indictment.  We're not, we haven't even thought about it as a nation, and in a situation like this, we'll be told that quiet is better than justice.

At the very least, there will be no indictments before November, and if Republicans win the House, Senate, or both, promising to destroy the lives of everyone involved in this investigation while simultaneously impeaching every member of the Biden administration they can get their hands on, the indictments will most likely never happen.

Again, we've had Trump dead to rights before. Nothing came of it. I want to see him indicted, but understand that it will cost the country dearly.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Biden administration says it is conducting a full damage assessment of the nation's intelligence services from Donald Trump's criminal mishandling of classified documents at his non-secure Florida resort, including the possible exposure of identities of sources, spies, and agents.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has sent a letter to the House Intelligence and House Oversight committee chairs, saying the intelligence community is conducting a damage assessment of the documents taken from former President Donald Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago, according to a letter obtained by CNN. 

"The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) are working together to facilitate a classification review of relevant materials, including those recovered during the search," Haines wrote in her letter to House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff and House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney. 

Several members of Congress have called for an intelligence damage assessment of the documents. 

Politico was first to report on the letter. 

Haines also sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee saying her office would lead an assessment about the risks to national security, according to two sources familiar with the matter. 

In addition, the Justice Department sent a letter to the Senate panel saying that it would be sharing materials with the intelligence agencies while adhering to its longstanding tradition of not disclosing any non-public information during an active investigation, the sources said. 

Maloney and Schiff said in a joint statement that they were "pleased" that Haines has launched the intelligence damage assessment of classified documents found at Trump's home in Florida. 

The two chairs, who had called for the assessment after the FBI searched Trump's home earlier this month, also said that the assessment must move "swiftly." 

On Friday, Senate Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said in a statement following the release of the redacted affidavit that his panel had made a bipartisan request for "a damage assessment of any national security threat posed by the mishandling of this information."

 

Trump's team has, in the meanwhile, found a friendly Trump-appointed judge to buy their argument that the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago are protected by executive privilege and must be examined by a "special master" to determine if they must be returned to Trump.

A federal judge in Florida gave notice on Saturday of her “preliminary intent” to appoint an independent arbiter, known as a special master, to conduct a review of the highly sensitive documents that were seized by the F.B.I. this month during a search of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald J. Trump’s club and residence in Palm Beach.

In an unusual action that fell short of a formal order, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida, signaled that she was inclined to agree with the former president and his lawyers that a special master should be appointed to review the seized documents.

But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020, set a hearing for arguments in the matter for Thursday in the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach — not the one in Fort Pierce, Fla., where she typically works.

On Friday night, only hours after a redacted version of the affidavit used to obtain the warrant for the search of Mar-a-Lago was released, Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed court papers to Judge Cannon reiterating their request for a special master to weed out documents taken in the search that could be protected by executive privilege.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had initially asked Judge Cannon on Monday to appoint a special master, but their filing was so confusing and full of bluster that the judge requested clarifications on several basic legal questions. The notice by Judge Cannon on Saturday was seen as something of a victory in Mr. Trump’s circle.

 

Here's the hysterically obvious problem with this "executive privilege" argument: Trump is not President. Legally, this should be tossed into the nearest chipper/shredder. It's the current president who gets to decide what executive privilege means here, and the Biden administration has the final say. Trump doesn't get to determine what executive privilege is any more than you or I do.

From a legal and constitutional standpoint NARA was not only justified in denying Trump’s assertion of executive privilege, it really had no choice in the matter.

To understand why this is so, it is helpful to break down the question into three questions:

(1) Does a former president ever have the right to successfully assert executive privilege to prevent access to presidential records by the incumbent president or executive agencies acting under the incumbent’s authority?;

(2) If such a right exists, could it be successfully exercised under the current circumstances?; and

(3) Who decides the first two issues?

Executive Privilege by a Former President

First, the PRA makes clear that nothing in its provisions are to be interpreted as expanding or diminishing the former president’s constitutional rights. Indeed, both the statutory language and legislative history make clear that Congress has been extremely skeptical of the notion that a former president can successfully assert executive privilege under any circumstances without the support of the incumbent president. While the executive branch has taken a different view, that argument has never extended so far as to suggest that the former president can successfully assert the privilege in opposition to the incumbent, much less that he can do so when the incumbent himself is seeking access to presidential records for purposes of carrying out the constitutional functions of the executive branch.

For example, when in the 1980s the Office of Legal Counsel issued a much criticized opinion (later rejected by the D.C. Circuit) that an incumbent president should ordinarily defer to a former president’s assertion of executive privilege with regard to the latter’s presidential records, it nonetheless explained that “this principle must yield when it conflicts with the discharge of the incumbent’s constitutional responsibilities;” thus, “if the incumbent President believes that the discharge of his constitutional duties (e.g., investigation and prosecution of alleged crimes) demands the disclosure of documents claimed by the former President to be privileged, it may be necessary for him to oppose a former President’s claim.” (emphasis added). Similarly, the author of the opinion, Assistant Attorney General Charles Cooper, when summoned to defend it before Congress, explained that “an incumbent President need not respect a former President’s claim of privilege if the incumbent feels that it would interfere with his ability to execute his legal and constitutional responsibilities as he, alone, understands and perceives them.”

Whether a former president should ever have the unilateral power to assert executive privilege over the objection of the incumbent remains an unsettled issue, as the Supreme Court recently recognized in Trump v. Thompson. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this notion is in considerable tension with OLC’s general approach to executive privilege. At least one member of the Supreme Court (Justice Kavanaugh) nevertheless believes that “[a] former President must be able to successfully invoke the Presidential communications privilege for communications that occurred during his Presidency, even if the current President does not support the privilege claim.” In Thompson, however, Justice Kavanaugh was writing in the context of a congressional request (from the January 6th Committee) to access presidential records; it is by no means clear that he would maintain the same view where the incumbent president himself was seeking access to the records for purposes of carrying out the executive’s legal and constitutional functions.

Indeed, Kavanaugh, during his tenure in the White House counsel office, famously defended a controversial executive order on presidential records issued by President George W. Bush. That order made it extremely difficult for the public, Congress or the courts to access presidential records over the objection of a former president. However, the order explicitly provided that it did not address access by the incumbent president to those records, a fact somewhat bitterly noted by congressional critics at the time.

In short, the notion that a former president can block his successor from accessing presidential records that the incumbent believes he needs for purposes of carrying out executive functions would be the most extreme manifestation of a doubtful legal theory, and one that has no support in any legal authority to date.

 

But where Trump is winning here is the fact that he's successfully slowing the investigation into his mishandling of the documents. It could take "months" for the special master to complete their work, you see, and surely no indictments can be "legally" issued while this is going on. 

It's a solid stalling tactic that could buy Trump quite some time to both get the search warrant out of the news ahead of campaign season going into full swing next month, and to come up with more tactics to keep the feds off his case.

The problem for Trump is that the case against him here is pretty open and shut.

We'll see how this goes, but it's going to go badly for Trump.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump's camp demanded the release of the affidavit supporting the search warrant served at his Florida resort earlier this month, and a judge agreed to a heavily redacted version of the document being made public. I don't know what Trump was thinking however, because the document absolutely shows that he was an unprecedented national security threat to the nation.

Federal investigators obtained a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month by pointing to a raft of highly classified material they’d already obtained from there, according to a legal affidavit unsealed Friday.

Records the FBI obtained from Trump’s Florida home in advance of the Aug. 8 search bore indications they contained human source intelligence, intercepts under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and signals intelligence, as well as other tags indicating high sensitivity. Several of those tightly-controlled documents contained Trump’s “handwritten notes,” the partially-redacted affidavit detailing the Justice Department investigation says.

In those boxes, agents found 184 unique documents, 25 of which were marked “top secret,” 92 of which were marked “secret,” and 67 of which were marked “confidential”–the lowest level of national security classification. According to the affidavit, NARA officials found some of those “highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.”

Prosecutors also added in another court filing unsealed Friday that the ongoing criminal probe into government records stashed at Trump’s Florida home has involved “a significant number of civilian witnesses” whose safety could be jeopardized if their identities were revealed.

The court filings unsealed Friday also revealed that the magistrate judge who issued the warrant for the search of Trump’s residence received legal arguments from Trump’s attorneys before doing so.

Those arguments came in the form of a three-page, May 25 letter from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran. In the letter, Corcoran sought to discourage the Justice Department from proceeding with a criminal investigation or potential criminal charges over the presence of classified records at Mar-a-Lago.

“Public trust in the government is low. At such times, adherence to the rules and long-standing policies is essential,” Corcoran wrote. “President Donald J. Trump is a leader of the Republican Party. The Department of Justice (DOJ), as part of the Executive Branch, is under the control of a President from the opposite party. It is critical, given that dynamic, that every effort is made to ensure that actions by DOJ that may touch upon the former President, or his close associates, do not involve Politics.”

Notably, the letter came before a June 3 meeting between Trump, his attorneys and DOJ officials at Mar-a-Lago, where the department’s counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt and FBI agents viewed parts of the premises. Trump has repeatedly described his interactions with DOJ as cordial, with aides noting that he shook hands with Bratt during the meeting. But those accounts didn’t mention the heightened tensions reflected in Corcoran’s letter.

Similarly, Trump has described that DOJ asked him to install a lock on his storage facility after the June 3 meeting. But DOJ revealed in the affidavit that this request was delivered with far more alarm than Trump conveyed.

“As I previously indicated to you, Mar-a-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information,” DOJ wrote in a letter to Corcoran at the time. “As such, it appears that since the time classified documents [redacted] were removed from the secure facilities at the White House and moved to Mar-a-Lago on or around January 20, 2021, they have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location.”

Corcoran, in his May 25 letter, also argued that presidents have “absolute authority” to declassify documents, although he did not explicitly say that Trump had done so.

Some Trump allies have asserted that he explicitly or implicitly declassified materials by taking them from the Oval Office to the White House residence or other locations, though no evidence has emerged of a formal declassification order.

Indeed, the affidavit unsealed Friday contains a reference to former Trump adviser Kash Patel — one of Trump’s authorized representatives to the National Archives — claiming in a Breitbart News article that Trump had declassified many of the records at issue.

In a post on his social media site, Trump lashed out shortly after the affidavit was unsealed, complaining of heavy redactions and noting that the word “nuclear” wasn’t mentioned despite reports that documents related to America’s nuclear secrets were among the cache held at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, notably, didn’t say whether or not such documents were in fact among them, only that there was no reference to them.

 

Trump believes that he's won this round too. "See, there's nothing about nuclear secrets in that affidavit! The lying press was giving you FAKE NEWS!" That the documents were stolen by Trump of course isn't the fight Trump's having in the press. He'll shrug this off too. He's been doing it for years now.

Then his supporters in the press will move the goalposts again, and we'll fight this battle again next week, where Trump will invent a battle out of whole cloth and win it too.

 

He'll keep winning those battles that he's allowed to frame, too.

 

Right up until he's indicted and loses everything.