The Huntering For The No-Prize

With Hunter Biden's laptop back in the news thanks to the NY Times, which turned "yes, some emails on the laptop were legit copies of emails" into "BIDEN'S UKRAINE SCANDAL!11!!", Washington Post reporter Philip Bump reminds us all why the laptop was at best a fantasy nothingburger, and at worst a deliberate Russian plant designed to sink Joe Biden.

When the New York Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, that it was in possession of emails between a Ukrainian businessman and Hunter Biden, son of the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it would have been hard to predict what followed. This was less than three weeks before the election itself, and the content of the report was soon subsumed to the odd way in which the paper obtained the information. Mainstream outlets and social media companies balked at elevating the story’s claims, triggering frustrations on the right that remain to this day.

New reporting has re-elevated questions about how the story emerged and was handled. In light of that resurrection, it seems useful to articulate exactly why there was suspicion about the story’s origins — suspicion that itself has not entirely been resolved.

There are at least four questions that arose from the initial report. Those are:

• How did the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper?
• Was that information legitimate?
• Was the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information warranted?
• Was the social media blackout of the Post’s story warranted?

In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the first and third questions: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.

You’ll remember the story. Hunter Biden allegedly showed up at a computer repair shop with three water-damaged laptop computers. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of that shop, one of the three computers was beyond repair, one simply needed an external keyboard and one required data recovery. Mac Isaac recovered the data, but no one ever came to pick the machine up. Eventually the data from the computer made its way to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney. It was Giuliani that gave it to the Post.

That summary excludes a lot of detail, some known at the time the Post story broke, some that only emerged afterward. Here, in the form of a timeline, is detail that seems salient to our current consideration of how the Post got the material from the laptop as well as what was known at the time.

The 2016 election. It’s critical to remember what happened in the 2016 election cycle. Then WikiLeaks published two large clusters of documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee’s network and from John Podesta, a top aide to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The Podesta material in particular was released in tranches for days beginning Oct. 7, 2016. It was real information, understood even then to have been a product of Russian efforts, that became fodder for criticism of Clinton.

After the election, we learned the full scope of Russia’s involvement in the election. Suddenly, the coverage of the WikiLeaks material took on a new light: It was stolen by a foreign government to try to influence U.S. politics. Media companies reconsidered their coverage; should there have been more caution about playing into the hands of a foreign influence campaign?

This question was very much on people’s minds in the months before the 2020 election — particularly given indications that Russia was again hoping to aid Trump’s election.

 

Bump's timeline does make it clear that the source of the story has a massive credibility problem: a laptop that was never picked up from the shop made its way to Rudy Giuliani, the only taker. 

And Rudy Giuliani is not exactly the most reliable source for anything other than laughs.

We still don't know anything about the laptop's journey some 18 months later. Nothing at all. It was complete bullshit then, and it's complete bullshit now. I could put copies of emails on my 8 year old laptop and then drop it off somewhere and never pick it up, yeah. Scandal!

Idiocy is what it is.

StupidiNews!

• Georgia officials say the last of the capsized Golden Ray cargo ship that sank in 2019 has finally been removed, the project took some three million manhours.
• Longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin says in a new book that she was sexually assaulted by a US senator in 2005.
• Biden administration lawyers are pushing to have WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange extradited from Britain to the US, where he would face espionage charges.
• Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley calls China's test of a hypersonic missile a "Sputnik moment" in the realm of international nuclear arms.
• An FDA advisory panel has unanimously greenlit COVID vaccines for children 5-12, final approval expected early next month.
  

Operation Plug The Leak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Stone Cold Justice

His felony lying to Congress sentence commuted by Trump, Roger Stone thought he got away with it.

He did not get away with it.

 

The Justice Department on Friday sued Roger Stone, a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, accusing Stone and his wife, Nydia, of owing nearly $2 million in unpaid federal income taxes and fees.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, says the couple underpaid their income taxes by $1,590,361 from 2007 to 2011. It further says Stone, 68, did not pay his full tax bill in 2018, coming up $407,036 short. The couple, the suit alleges, used a commercial entity to "shield their personal income from enforced collection and fund a lavish lifestyle despite owing nearly $2 million in unpaid taxes, interest and penalties."

Stone, a well-known Republican political operative and a friend of the former president, briefly served as a campaign adviser to Trump.

"This is yet another example of the Democrats weaponizing the Justice Department in violation of the rule of law," Stone said in a statement Friday night. "I will fight these politically motivated charges and I will prevail again."

Stone was on his way to federal prison in July 2020 when then-president Trump commuted his sentence. Stone was sentenced earlier that year to serve 40 months in prison for lying to Congress about his efforts to connect with WikiLeaks in hopes of digging up dirt on Trump's 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. The lead prosecutor in the case said Stone had lied because the "truth looked bad for Donald Trump." Stone was convicted of all seven counts against him.

Stone said Friday, "This case against me is motivated by blood lust and liberal hysteria over the fact that President Trump saw the clear corruption of my trial and had the strength and the courage to correct this injustice by issuing me a grant of clemency."

The Stones deposited more than $1 million in accounts belonging to a commercial entity, Drake Ventures, instead of personal accounts, thereby frustrating collection efforts, the government said in the filing.

From those accounts, the pair covered a down payment on a Fort Lauderdale condominium, paid for personal expenses and covered some of their tax liabilities, the lawsuit alleges, calling the entity an "alter ego" of the Stones.

Additionally, the filing wants to thwart the Stones' transfer of their $525,000 Florida condominium to an entity known as the Bertran Family Revocable Trust, which the government says is controlled by Nydia Stone and has as beneficiaries their children, Adria Stone and Scott Stone.

A tax lien was being sought against the property, it said. The suit also seeks a judgment for $1,590,361.89.

The government also said the Stones at one point entered into an agreement to cover taxes owed through monthly installments of nearly $20,000, but stopped paying. Additionally, the filing alleges that in 2018, Stone filed his federal income tax return as "a married individual filing separately from his spouse" and owes an additional $407,036.84 for that year alone.

 

Stone really does deserve a long prison sentence for his role in Trump's Russia collusion. But I'll take the Justice Department and IRS hounding him for every penny and rendering him bankrupt and destitute. Stone can scream all he wants to, but nobody will save him this time.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Another career prosecutor is quitting their role with the Barr "Justice" Department, as St. Paul prosecutor John Choi is ending his role on a DoJ advisory group over the group being pressured to attack local government prosecutors and district attorneys for using discretion to combat the systemic racism of federal minimum sentencing guidelines.

An elected prosecutor who took a role in Donald Trump’s presidential commission on law enforcement has resigned, telling Attorney General William Barr that he is concerned the commission was “intent on providing cover for a predetermined agenda that ignores the lessons of the past” and will issue a final report that “will only widen the divisions in our nation.”

Trump formed the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice late last October, announcing its formation at the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s annual meeting. Trump’s order mandated that the commission issue a report within one year ― a deadline that falls just days ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The commission is stacked with members of law enforcement, and the American Civil Liberties Union has questioned whether it is a “sham commission formed only for the purposes of advancing a ‘Thin Blue Line’ law and order agenda.”

John Choi, the elected prosecutor in Ramsey County, Minnesota, served as a member of the commission’s criminal justice system personnel intersection working group. But Choi, whose county includes the city of St. Paul, wrote in a letter to Barr that he was quitting his role on one of the commission’s 17 working groups because he worries the final report “will vilify local prosecutors who exercise their well settled prosecutorial discretion consistent with their community’s values and the interests of justice.”

The Justice Department struck back at Choi, with one official telling HuffPost that Choi didn’t really resign because the working groups had already completed their work. The two chairs of the working group ― former U.S. Attorney Jay Town and Cook County Judge William O’Brien ― also criticized Choi’s work in interviews with HuffPost. Town said Choi offered “very little in substance,” while O’Brien said his opinions “didn’t have a lot of depth.” 

Choi wrote in his letter to Barr that he previously tried to communicate to the commission that it “needed to listen to those who have been negatively impacted by policing and the criminal justice system.” But he said it is now clear that engaging communities to help bridge the divide between communities and law enforcement “was never the intended goal.”
“Rather than examine how decades of over-policing in communities of color have created that deficit of trust, the Commission was instead encouraged to study ‘underenforcement’ of criminal laws and ‘refusals by State and local prosecutors to enforce laws or prosecute categories of crimes’,” Choi wrote.

“At the very beginning of this process, President Trump said the Commission would ‘have [the recommendations] soon because most of them know many of the answers before they begin.’ It is now patently obvious that he was correct ― that this process had no intention of engaging in a thoughtful and open analysis, but was intent on providing cover for a predetermined agenda that ignores the lessons of the past, furthering failed tough-on-crime policies that led to our current mass incarceration crisis and fueling divisions between our communities and our police officers,” Choi wrote.

Choi called the commission “a missed opportunity to seriously deliberate in regard to areas for improvement in law enforcement and develop thoughtful solutions to address longstanding problems in the criminal legal system.”

In hindsight it's obvious now that Choi is correct, and was correct from the moment Bill Barr became Attorney General.  Barr exists to preserve Trump's power by any means necessary.

On the Durham report, “the president wants it released before Election Day and he wants more indictments to come out of it... He has put the pressure on his attorney general here to do that.“ pic.twitter.com/Zg4BQHg4Bn

— Robert Costa (@costareports) September 12, 2020

Trump wants this to hit essentially within the next 30-40 days.  Can you imagine the headlines?

"Former Obama Officials Indicted For 'Spying' On 2016 Trump Campaign"

"Mueller Probe 'Based On Lies', Evidence 'Falsified', Durham Says"

"Durham Confirms Biden Under Investigation Days Before Election"

"Trump Demands Biden To Drop Out Of Race, 'Pay' For


Underestimate what he will do in the next five months at your own peril.

Roger Stone is making baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and is urging Donald Trump to consider several draconian measures to stay in power, including having federal authorities seize ballots in Nevada, having FBI agents and Republican state officials “physically” block voting under the pretext of preventing voter fraud, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.

Stone, a longtime confidant of the president, made the comments during a September 10 appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network. On July 10, Trump commuted a 40-month prison sentence that was handed down to Stone after he was convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election interference. Namely, Stone lied to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks, which released hacked emails with the aim of boosting Trump’s prospects. In the weeks leading up to the commutation, Stone made a number of media appearances where he asked Trump to grant him clemency and said that in exchange, he could be a more effective campaigner for the president’s 2020 reelection efforts.

Stone’s efforts are now underway, and his aim appears to be to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud and call for actions that would likely intimidate potential Joe Biden voters.

During his September 10 appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Stone declared that the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory. He made this assertion on the basis of his entirely unfounded claim that early voting has been marred by widespread voter fraud.

 You want to bet Trump will play fair when he loses?

Many Trump allies say the president’s concerns about mail-in voting are valid — primarily his claim that unsolicited ballots and ballot applications will be sent to millions of people ineligible to vote. But they argue that in a pandemic when many people are expected to avoid the polls, it’s more important to get Republicans to vote however they can.

Four additional Republicans familiar with the situation said this point was made early on to Trump, with advisers urging him to state that he does trust some forms of remote voting. And in August, the message appeared to be sinking in — sort of.

Trump started drawing a distinction between requesting an absentee ballot and universal remote voting. And he suddenly started imploring supporters in Florida to request mail-in ballots, insisting back-to-back Republican governors had cleaned up the process in the crucial battleground state.

But Trump simultaneously continued his almost daily rants about massive election fraud and rigged elections in tweets, interviews and speeches. And then last week, while on another tirade about remote voting, Trump appeared to encourage North Carolina residents to illegally cast two ballots — by mail and in person — prompting a fresh spate of worries by his allies. Despite pointed condemnations from even some Republican election officials, Trump is still urging his supporters to go to polling stations on Election Day to see if their mail-in ballot was received, exacerbating confusion.

Already this year, about 1,000 people attempted to vote twice in Georgia’s primary and runoff elections. Another 40 did the same in Pennsylvania’s primary.

"But Trump won't possibly be allowed to do that."

"You will see a backlash the likes of which you haven't seen in many, many years" -- here's the president encouraging his supporters, many of them armed, to take matters into their own hands to stop alleged left-wing violence in cities like Chicago and Portland pic.twitter.com/CLqcLs5fWR

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2020

Oh really?

Who's going to stand up to him and say "No"?

Violence is guaranteed at this point.  Real, ugly, mass casualty violence.

You willing to be your country, your neighborhood, your family and your life on that bet?

Because frankly, by not demanding Trump's immediate ouster years ago, we already have made that bet.

And Trump controls the casino.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr continues to openly remove obstacles in his way towards a transition to Trump dictatorship, this time removing a 23-year Justice Department veteran overseeing the legality of counter-terrorism activities and replacing him with the numbnuts who is such an expert on legal policy and procedure that he leaked the Trump regime's charges against Julian Assange.

Current and former national security officials are raising concerns over Attorney General William Barr's recent decision to remove the head of a Justice Department office that helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal – and replace him with a political appointee with relatively limited experience.
"It's very alarming," said Katrina Mulligan, who worked for the Obama administration in several national security roles and then, after President Donald Trump's inauguration, joined the Office of Law and Policy in the Justice Department's National Security Division.

For much of the past decade, that little-known office has been led by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a 23-year career public servant, not a political appointee. But two weeks ago, Wiegmann, 54, was told he is being reassigned and replaced with a political appointee, according to a Justice Department spokesman and sources familiar with the matter.

Mulligan and other sources told ABC News that the new head of the office is 36-year-old Kellen Dwyer, a cyber-crimes prosecutor who joined the federal government six years ago and made international headlines in November 2018 when he accidentally revealed that federal charges had been secretly filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Mulligan said that given Dwyer's limited time and experience handling national security matters, he is "a very odd" choice to replace Wiegmann, whom she described as "exceptional" at managing government bureaucracy and resolving "highly contentious matters across the government."

The timing of the personnel change – coming just two months before the U.S. presidential election, and in the midst of a battle against domestic terrorism and foreign interference in the election – has worried current and former members of the national security community.

Past chiefs of the office have served as political appointees, while others – like Wiegmann – served as career officials, so, "It would not have been that unusual early in an administration to place a political [appointee] in that policy role, but to do that now is very unusual," one current U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

None of this makes sense two months before an election unless you want a particular loyalist in the Justice Department's office of determining which of the Executive Branch's activities are legal and defensible, particularly in the name of counter-intelligence.

Because, you know, you're running amoral and illegal counter-intelligence operations on, say, political opponents.

Just saying. Barr knows exactly what he's doing.

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.

Indepen-Dunce Week: Stone Cold Negative

Bill Barr may have dropped the charges against Michael Flynn (who is now completely down the "deep state" conspiracy theory black hole) in order to save Donald Trump, but Barr apparently isn't going to extend convicted dirty tricks artist Roger Stone the same courtesy. If Trump wants to save Stone from reporting to a Georgia prison on Tuesday, he's going to have to order the pardon himself.

The Justice Department supports longtime Trump friend Roger Stone going to prison on Tuesday, according to a new court filing. 

Stone has asked a federal appeals court for emergency help to delay his prison term until September, citing coronavirus. 

But the Justice Department, which has been criticized for going easy on Stone, said the report date of July 14 that was set by his trial judge is "a reasonable exercise of that court's discretion based on the totality of the factual and legal circumstances." 

The Justice Department argument on Thursday sets up how Stone may need to turn to President Donald Trump as his last hope to avoid prison. 

The department told the DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday that Stone, 67, hasn't given any legal reasons why he should be treated differently from other convicted felons or kept out of prison at this time. Stone had claimed he had an exceptional situation because his age put him at risk of death from coronavirus in prison. 

Stone has all but conceded he's unlikely to get another reprieve from a court before July 14, when he's set to turn himself in to a federal prison camp in Georgia. In recent weeks, he blanketed online forums with pleas for a presidential pardon. 

Despite Attorney General William Barr calling Stone's case a "righteous" prosecution, Trump has repeatedly said Stone is a victim of the Mueller investigation, which the President, without basis, has called corrupt and illegal. "He can sleep well at night!" Trump wrote on Twitter on June 4 after a Stone supporter tweeted about a pardon. 

Stone's prison term has already been delayed before. 

A federal judge delayed Stone's June 30 prison report date by two weeks, ordering him to spend that time at home essentially in quarantine. The prison in Jesup, Georgia, has reported 10 inmates and three staff testing positive with coronavirus as of Thursday afternoon, with one staff member recovered. It's unclear how many of those cases are in the medium-security prison versus the camp where Stone is to report. 

Stone was indicted in January 2019 on charges including attempting to cover up his efforts to reach WikiLeaks in 2016 to help the Trump campaign access documents stolen by the Russians. Prosecutors argued at the trial that Stone had lied to Congress in 2017 to protect the President. 

A jury found him guilty last November, and Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him to more than three years in prison in February.

So, absent a presidential commutation or full pardon, Roger's going to prison on Tuesday.  And if that happens, I bet he'll be willing to make a deal to rat out Trump to save himself.

Clock's ticking, Donald. You've talked a good game, but are you willing to risk Barr's wrath?

President Donald Trump implied in a pair of interviews Thursday that he was ready to grant clemency to Roger Stone, his friend and ally who was convicted of, among other things, lying to Congress and is set to go to prison this month.  

Trump is widely expected to pardon or commute Stone's sentence, according to at least half a dozen sources close to the President. 

Asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity whether he's considered a pardon or commutation for Stone, Trump said during a phone interview, "I am always thinking." 

"You'll be watching like everyone else in this case," he said. 

In another interview, with radio host Howie Carr, Trump decried Stone's treatment at the hands of law enforcement and said he may grant his clemency plea. 

"He was framed. He was treated horrible. He was treated so badly," Trump said. 

Told Stone was "praying" for a pardon ahead of the day he is due to report to prison on July 14, Trump said Thursday, those prayers may be worthwhile. 

"If you say he's praying, his prayer may be answered," Trump said. "Let's see what happens." 

Stay tuned.  That pardon could come as soon as tonight.

What will Barr do in response?  Most likely nothing and he'll go around cleaning up the crap all over the floor like he always does, but wouldn't this be funny if it was the last straw?

We'll see.  Should be an interesting weekend to say the least.

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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.

StupidiNews!

• An internal Justice Department report on the CIA's suite of top-secret cyber tools falling into the hands of WikiLeaks in 2016 blames "woefully lax security" at the agency for the theft.
• Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis says there will be "no rollback" of planned opening of public areas even as the state's number of new COVID-19 cases are reaching new daily highs.
• North Korea is rejecting envoys from South Korea and is vowing to redeploy border troops as tensions are rising after Pyongyang blew up a joint liaison office established in 2018 this week.
• The Trump regime has filed a civil lawsuit against former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton to prevent the publishing of his White House memoirs next week.
• Vice-President Mike Pence is blaming increased testing for the recent rise of COVID-19 cases and is claiming that spikes in multiple states are a sign that data is catching up to the pandemic being over.

StupidiNews!

• US forces used airstrikes to hit multiple Iranian-backed militia targets in Iraq in retaliation for a rocket attack on a US base in Iraq that killed 2 British and one US soldier earlier this week.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to announce a deal with Republicans on COVID-19 on Friday that will provide additional measures for testing and combating the virus nationally.
• A federal judge has ordered former US Army soldier and WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning released from her contempt of court charge for refusing to testify.
• UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the government will no longer attempt COVID-19 containment and switch to triage as over 10,000 people are infected.
• AT&T says it will waive home internet data caps during the COVID-19 outbreak, competitor Comcast says it has no such plans to follow suit.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spies Like Us, Con't

The Trump regime loyalists are now openly calling the intelligence community liars, with National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien echoing Acting DNI Richard Grenell in saying there is "no intelligence" to indicate Russian interference in the 2020 elections on behalf of Donald Trump.

Last week, intelligence officials warned lawmakers in a briefing before the House Intelligence Committee that the Russians are continuing their efforts to interfere in the 2020 election, and that one prong is aimed at helping re-elect President Trump. But the president's top national security official said there's "no intelligence behind" such claims.

Speaking to "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan, National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien disputed the reports of what was presented during a House Intelligence Committee briefing that he said was "leaked" to members of the press. O'Brien said he had "not seen the finding" himself.

"From what I understand about the report....I get this second hand, but from Republican congressmen that were in the committee, there was no intelligence behind it," O'Brien said. "I haven't seen any intelligence to support the reports that were leaked out of the House. But it's just hard to comment on that because, again, I wasn't there. And these are leaks that were coming from a House Intel Committee hearing. I haven't seen any intelligence that would- would back up what I'm reading in the papers."
Following the congressional briefing, intelligence officials then briefed the White House on election security and offered the same assessment — that Russia is trying to help Mr. Trump win re-election in 2020 — a senior administration official told CBS.

Moscow has since denied that it's trying to interfere in the election and help Mr. Trump, and said the reports are the result of paranoia, according to the Reuters news service.

Mr. Trump was also dismissive, tweeting Friday, "Another misinformation campaign is being launched by Democrats in Congress saying that Russia prefers me to any of the Do Nothing Democrat candidates who still have been unable to, after two weeks, count their votes in Iowa."

Sources tell CBS News that Mr. Trump was unaware of the classified House briefing and was furious when he found out about it from House Republicans.

Now, this seems like a huge hedge, and Grenell is actually saying the same thing: neither of them have seen intelligence, neither of them attended the briefings.  It doesn't mean the intel doesn't exist, but let's face fact, it absolutely does. 

For all his faults, former DNI Dan Coats never said the intelligence that Russia was interfering on behalf of Trump in 2016 didn't exist, it 100% did and we've known about the internet farm in St. Petersburg that did exactly that, along with the social media manipulation, and the repeated hacks into state voter registration servers, plus the DNC email hack laundered through WikiLeaks.

Grenell and O'Brien aren't going quite that far, yet.  But Trump is too busy ordering mass purges of the intel community anyhow for the distinction to matter too much.  I fully expect whoever did brief House Democrats and Bernie Sanders on Russian interference will find themselves manning a desk somewhere in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands before the end of the year.

The point of these denials is precisely that, to set up plausible deniability.  They're "not aware of" intelligence so when the inevitable leaks happen they can say they weren't aware of it, and it will justify purges going forward in order to "stop future leaks".

The ultimate goal is to discredit the Mueller probe and to smokescreen the Trump regime getting help from Russia in 2020, and the seed that the people who absolutely have seen the intelligence haven't "seen" it is now planted.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And speaking of Russian operatives...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Call For Stone Cold Criminal, Con't

The prosecution in convicted Trump lackey Roger Stone's case filed sentencing recommendations last night for Stone for witness tampering in his role in the WikiLeaks DNC hack, and asked for seven to nine years in prison.  The Trump regime in the last 24 hours has gone completely insane with rage over the recommendation.

The Justice Department plans to reduce its sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Trump, after top officials professed to be blindsided by the seven-to-nine-year penalty prosecutors urged a judge to impose, a senior Justice Department official said Tuesday.

In a stunning rebuke of career prosecutors that immediately raised questions about political interference in the case, a senior Justice Department official said the department “was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation in the Roger Stone case last night.”

“That recommendation is not what had been briefed to the department,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive case. “The department finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and disproportionate to Stone’s offenses. The department will clarify its position later today.”

The statement came hours after Trump tweeted about the sentence prosecutors recommended, saying: “This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” The senior Justice Department official, though, said the decision to revise prosecutors’ recommendation came before Trump’s tweet.

Stone was convicted by a jury in November of obstructing Congress and witness tampering. His was the last conviction secured by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Stone has been a friend and adviser to Trump since the 1980s and was a key figure in his 2016 campaign, working to discover damaging information on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

All four prosecutors who signed the sentencing memo have now left the Stone case over the DoJ overriding the recommendations, one has resigned from the DoJ completely in protest.

Four federal prosecutors dramatically quit the criminal case against Republican operative Roger Stone as the Department of Justice reduced their recommendation that a judge sentence the longtime ally of President Donald Trump to up to nine years in prison. 

In a revised sentencing memo filed Tuesday, Timothy Shea, U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., said Stone deserves to be sentenced to “far less” time in prison than what the four prosecutors, who worked under Shea, proposed Monday.

Jonathan Kravis, who delivered the closing argument at Stone’s trial last fall, resigned as an assistant U.S. Attorney, according to a court filing in Washington federal court. 

Kravis, who did not give a reason in the filing, will no longer work as a prosecutor for the federal government. 

The other three prosecutors, Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed and Michael Marando, also withdrew from Stone’s case, according to their own separate filings, which did not explain their decision. 

But those three all will continue working for the federal government.

Marcy Wheeler believes this is being done to keep Stone from talking to the press.  It's not just helping a loyal lackey, it's self-preservation.  Trump doesn't just want to commute Stone's sentence or pardon Stone (or both!) but that he has to.
 

The trial itself provided ample evidence of what Mark Meadows considers “collusion” involving Donald Trump personally. It showed the campaign — and probably Trump personally — were working through Stone to optimize the WikiLeaks releases from the very day they came out on June 14, 2016. It showed that Stone was informing Trump personally about his efforts to optimize the releases. After some arm-twisting to adhere to his grand jury testimony, Steve Bannon testified he knew of all this, contrary to some of what he had said in earlier testimony that Trump would learn about. Erik Prince was in the loop. Gates testified that Stone was strategizing with Jared Kushner on all this. And it appears that Paul Manafort was in the loop, too.

But all that really damning evidence came out in a trial that only had to prove that Stone had lied to cover up the actions he took to optimize the release of the WikiLeaks emails. The trial did not need to explain what Stone’s actual back channel was, what he had to do to obtain it, and how involved Trump was in that process. And the trial did not explain it.

Indeed, there’s evidence I’ll lay out at more length in a follow-up that the government chose not to lay out all it knew. That is, it appears the government came to trial prepared to present evidence about the underlying “collusion,” but ultimately decided to hold it back for now.

At multiple times during the trial, however, the prosecution pointed to suspiciously timed phone calls, right before or after Stone discussed WikiLeaks with Gates, Manafort, or Jerome Corsi. Only Stone or Trump can tell us what happened between the two men, what Trump’s actual role in maximizing the degree to which his campaign benefitted from Russia’s theft of his opponent’s email.

Immediately after the trial, Stone made an intense effort to get Trump to pardon him, with his wife Nydia appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show to ask directly and a man with a vuvuzela inside the White House calling for a pardon gates.

Since that time, Stone was silent, until the time that the Probation Office provided the sentencing range for the crimes that was built in to the way that Mueller charged this just over a year ago. That is, by charging Stone with witness tampering, Mueller built in the possibility that Stone would be facing the steep sentence recommended yesterday. And that steep sentence may have been envisioned not as the sum of what Stone’s actual actions entailed — certainly every single warrant save the last four showed probable cause that Stone had done far more, but rather as leverage to get Stone to tell what he knows about Trump’s involvement in all this.

Bill Barr was brought in as AG to bury abundant evidence that Trump was personally involved in efforts to maximize the Russian operation, to deny all the ways that Trump did cheat to win. From his initial misleading claims in the wake of the report’s release, he was always suppressing the centrality of Roger Stone in all this.

So it’s fairly safe to conclude that DOJ’s reversal today is not just an effort to prevent a rich white man, Roger Stone, from facing the full consequences of his actions, but to prevent voters from learning what another rich white man did to cheat to get elected.

Yes, ultimately Trump will commute what is left of Roger Stone’s sentence, probably on November 4, just like he fired Jeff Sessions the day after the 2018 election. But I suspect that Roger Stone, rightly, isn’t going to leave anything to chance. And so neither can Bill Barr.

And some in Trumpland are saying that Dear Leader will pardon Stone even earlier, as soon as he is sentenced.

Democrats were quick to respond:

Schumer calls for IG probe into DOJ overruling prosecutors to give Roger Stone lighter sentence. Nadler says his panel will “get to the bottom” of it. Schiff says Trump administration represents “the gravest threat” to rule of law “in a generation.” McConnell declines to comment

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 11, 2020

We'll see.  The one thing that isn't in doubt is the obvious interference in Stone's case by the Trump regime, but that no longer matters in America, does it?

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The long-awaited Justice Department inspector general report on the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Donald Trump is out, and while the report is pretty scathing on what the DoJ sees as "missteps" by the FBI, the report also concludes that there was sufficient evidence to open the investigation into Trump's Russian collusion.

The 434-page report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found the FBI had an “authorized purpose” when it initiated its investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, into the Trump campaign, and rejected the assertion that the case was opened out of political animus or that informants were used in violation of FBI rules.

It asserted, though, that as the probe went on, FBI officials repeatedly decided to emphasize damaging information they heard about Trump associates, and play down exculpatory evidence they found.

Conservatives and liberals alike claimed victory in the report — with Democrats saying it validated the Russia investigation while Republicans asserted it exposed serious wrongdoing.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said the inspector general had “completely demolished” some of conservatives’ assertions about the origins of the probe, though his investigators did find some problems.

“Clearly, there was a legitimate, factual basis; in fact the FBI had a moral imperative to begin this investigation,” Blumenthal said. In particular, he said the inspector general had rebutted claims that Trump campaign advisers were illegally surveilled or entrapped, or that political motive was “in any way a factor.”
In a statement, Attorney General William P. Barr disagreed with one of the inspector general’s key conclusions, saying the FBI launched an investigation of a presidential campaign “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.” So, too, did Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who Barr handpicked to conduct an investigation similar to that of Horowitz.

“Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.,” Durham said in a statement. “Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina), a strong Trump ally, said “this is not a good day for the FBI.”

“There’s more than enough evidence in this report that would suggest a major overhaul in terms of policies and procedures,” he said.

Meadows has a point, although Republicans surely didn't care about FISA reform until it was legitimately used on Donald Trump's campaign.

Oh, and the report absolutely concludes that the Russians hacked the DNC email server and laundered the emails through WikiLeaks, and it concludes it was done to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.

So no, there wasn't any "deep state" anything, just overworked FBI agents who cut corners and who have already for the most part been disciplined if not already fired.

This should put an end to all this, but of course if Barr ends it here, he's fired by Trump, so he won't leave it where things are.

Count on that.