2016 Presidential Election Archives - Page 7 of 184

Russia’s Flipping Focus: Alexander Smirnov Is No Exception

March 4, 2024/23 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, Hunter Biden, Informants, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

When I started spinning the Ball of Thread out of which I hoped to explain how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law, this post was described, “The FBI keeps getting pwned.”

Trump’s narcissism makes him easy to trigger
Trump released documents that past actors assumed would never be released
The first time Trump “colluded” with Russia was to help Bibi Netanyahu dodge accountability
Corruption is a process and a tool
What is WikiLeaks
The FBI keeps getting pwned
My understanding of the Russian attack
The import of chat rooms
Rudy Giuliani was never investigated as the possible UNSUB
John Durham’s studied ignorance
Seth DuCharme’s information collection
The GRU propaganda from the US Attorney for Pittsburgh
Was Bill Barr even more corrupt than we knew?

The bullet point was, perhaps, a misnomer.

What I had planned to talk about, two months ago and some forty days before David Weiss accused a 14-year FBI informant of framing Joe Biden in 2020, was the way that Russia has long exploited one-time FBI informants as part of their operations against the US.

Since then, we’ve learned that a guy who first established contact with Russian spies, way back in 2002, by helping another intelligence service (likely Israel’s) flip a low-level Russian spy, and who would therefore have been readily identifiable as an asset of intelligence services throughout that period, attempted to frame Joe Biden in 2020. If you can believe his reporting, Alexander Smirnov has since established contact with four to six high level Russian spies.

Russia’s focus on using informants was readily apparent in the results of the Mueller investigation. Key players in the Russian attack who were or had previously been informants include:

Christopher Steele, whom Oleg Deripaska used to increase Paul Manafort’s legal vulnerability
Sergei Millian, who promised George Papadopoulos a “disruptive technology” to help his political work, inspired frothers to attack a key security research effort, and led John Durham like a puppy before blowing him off in embarrassing fashion
Hank Greenberg/Henry Oknyansky, who tested what Roger Stone would be willing to do to get dirt on Hillary Clinton
Felix Sater, who got Michael Cohen to chase a Trump Tower Moscow deal that would require involvement of a former GRU officer, sanctioned banks, and assistance from Putin
Konstantin Killimnik, who claims the recycled Bannon dirt he shared with State Department officials amounted to serving as an informant

This was nothing new then. This Emma Best piece describes how a former FBI informant, Maxsim Popov, played a key role in Anonymous; they suggest Popov made have been a model for the Guccifer 2.0 persona.

Nor has Russia’s focus on informants diminished. In addition to Alexander Smirnov, informants dealing dirt on the Bidens leading up to 2020 include Ukrainians Rollie and The Economist and Peter Schweizer.

Sometimes, Russia’s identification of FBI informants may have been facilitated by hacking. In the lead-up to the 2016 operation, the Crackas with Attitude hackers — who got far more attention for hacking John Brennan’s AOL account — stole some lists of law enforcement partners and accessed FBI’s Joint Automated Booking System, which might provide a way to identify hackers the FBI was in the process of flipping. The Solar Winds hack compromised DOJ six months before the department figured out what was happening; it also targeted PACER, another source of information on sealed plea deals usually associated with cooperating witnesses. To this day, I’m furious that when DOJ IG discovered what amounts to a backdoor in the system used to archive texts sent on FBI devices — including those on which Peter Strzok and Lisa Page conducted an affair — there wasn’t a more focused effort to find out whether anyone had found and used that back door. And the reason US spooks changed their understanding of WikiLeaks is that, after burning State’s partners worldwide and DOD’s partners in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010, WikiLeaks went on to make CIA’s local assets readily identifiable in 2017.

None of this is surprising or unique to Russia. It’s good spycraft.

But the targeting of informants, particularly FBI informants, has been a central part of Russia’s recent campaign against the US. There are all sorts of sound operational reasons for Russia to do that. It probably helps to evade certain kinds of counter-surveillance. It’s a good way to inject information directly into investigative hands.

Just as importantly, by making it clear how shoddy FBI’s management of informants is, it discredits the Bureau more generally.

Premier Palace: The Risk of Non-Russian Involvement in Alexander Smirnov’s anti-Biden Election Operation

February 25, 2024/121 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election /by emptywheel

Based on the transcript from the detention hearing, one reason Principal Senior Assistant Special Counsel Leo Wise failed to convince Nevada Magistrate Judge Daniel Albregts to detain Alexander Smirnov pretrial, is that in arguing Smirnov was a flight risk, Wise focused primarily on Smirnov’s ties to Russian intelligence, not other spy agencies.

That made it easier for Albregts to argue — repeating something Smirnov’s attorney, David Chesnoff, said — that Russian spooks are probably not too enamored of Smirnov right now, given the details included in court filings describing his reporting on Russian spies.

I — you know, I understand the concern about foreign intelligence agencies potentially resettling Mr. Smirnov outside of the United States/ his connections to them, but I think on some level that’s speculative as well because, as Mr. Chesnoff points out, I don’t know what Mr. Smirnov will be thought of in Russia/ but my guess is at this stage he probably thinks that’s not the most attractive place to go either if he was in fact inclined to go hide somewhere. So while I notice and note that that’s a concern and certainly raised by the Government that I should consider it, I just don’t know in the context of what’s happened in the last couple of weeks with his arrest and everything else that that is as grave a concern as the Government outlines.

This misunderstands the implied relationship of Smirnov to the Russians. For example, while Wise notes that Smirnov is not charged with spying (he’d have a tough time charging Smirnov with acting as a foreign agent without informing the Attorney General, given that the then-Attorney General was gleefully cheering what he was doing when he allegedly lied), he insinuates that Smirnov’s charged 2020 lie was part of a Russian influence operation.

MR. WISE: Understood, Your Honor. The defendant’s lies in this case have captured the national imagination. And while the — while the filing says they do not involve espionage, of course the charges do involve foreign intelligence services. The defendant claims to have met with Russian intelligence agencies on multiple occasions, and the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russian intelligence interfered in the 2020 election and continues to interfere in our elections by spreading misinformation.

What Wise didn’t emphasize, but which is no doubt the source of urgent concern, is that it’s not just Russian intelligence. As Wise addressed the limits of US extradition authority, he briefly noted there were other countries that, like Russia, would refuse to extradite Smirnov.

MR. WISE: These contacts make this defendant different from other defendants who merely have foreign ties, and they heighten the risk of flight dramatically. And that is because he can use these contacts with foreign intelligence services to flee and to resettle overseas, something I would again venture to say is almost unique in the presentation of a defendant being considered for the pretrial release.

THE COURT: So let’s say that happens. You don’t think that the Federal Government would have the ability to find him and take action to bring him back? You think that these Russian ties that you’re talking about are the type of people that would literally take him and secrete him from prosecution?

MR. WISE: If he were to resettle in Russian, we couldn’t extradite him. Russian won’t extradite under thesecircumstances. If he were to resettle in other — in third countries, we couldn’t extradite him. And so, yes, I think that is the case.

THE COURT: All right. Go ahead. I’ll —

MR. WISE: That’s even assuming we could find him. That’s even assuming we could find him.

For a dual Israeli citizen like Smirnov, those countries would, by law, include Israel. CNN reported last week that the FBI knew that Smirnov has also served as a source for Israel.

And while this is changing, those countries that would refuse extradition also likely include UAE, almost certainly another of the countries where Smirnov has been hanging out on mega yachts with Russian oligarchs.

Most of the details of Smirnov’s recent activity that David Weiss’ team chose to burn — and so the things that Albregts saw and Los Angeles Judge Otis Wright also received in their detention motion — does pertain to Russia.

The government put that reporting out of order in the detention memo, which obscures the timeline. I’m going to do the same, so as to first show the picture of Russian ties the government establishes. But as I’ll get to, those ties are built on two other relationships, relationships in Ukraine and Israel, that are critical to understanding Smirnov’s Russian relationships. [Note: I’ll be linking to the NV detention memo rather than the LA one; the declassified descriptions of his reporting are the same in both, but probably because of page limits, the LA one does not have most of the discussion about how Weiss intends to prove the case against Smirnov, which appears on pages 8-15 of the NV one.]

Here’s most of the timeline Smirnov gave his handler of how, along with discussing a way to end the Ukraine war, he also learned of a kompromat effort probably intending to use deep fake recordings of Hunter Biden. Note that the really interesting discussions post-date the September 27, 2023 FBI interview (marked in bold) at which Smirnov backtracked off some parts of his 2020 story and offered up details of another kompromat plan targeting the Bidens, which he already sourced in September 2023 to four Russian spies.

August 2023: Smirnov “had been introduced” to RI 2 (the unclassified report does not say, by whom), who was organizing a birthday party on his mega yacht that RO 2 would attend. At that point, the ties between two or three of the oligarchs involved and RO 2 are not yet clear.
September 27, 2023: Smirnov interviewed by different FBI agents, to whom he describes Premier Palace plan.
October 2023: Smirnov scores an invite to the birthday party on a Russian oligarch’s yacht in a Middle Eastern country (probably UAE). RO 1 and RI 1 were expected to attend.
October 2023: RO 1 is expected to attend the birthday party; Smirnov got a copy of RO 1’s passport.
November 2023: Smirnov has now met RO 1. RO 1 boasted that he has direct access to the “highest levels of the Russian government.” RO 1 is a top, unofficial representative to Country B. Smirnov got a picture of RO 1 in November 2023, while he was in Country A (meaning RO 1 stayed past the birthday party).
November 2023: RO 1 described the assassin teams in Ukraine, and offered to stop those efforts if Ukraine would stop targeting civilian family members of Russian officials living in Moscow. RO 1 also told Smirnov of plans for a winter attack in Ukraine and its intentions for that war.
December 2023: Smirnov attended a meeting at which RO 2 attended. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a resolution to the Ukraine war. He had a separate conversation in which RO 1 told him about the kompromat operation at a “club” in a particular Ukrainian hotel, probably the Premier Palace. He explained they might use kompromat from the hotel in an election year operation. A Ukrainian government official later confirmed that kompromat operation was common knowledge.
December 2023: RO 1 and others tell Smirnov that RO 3 is the representative of RO 4, now listed as the former head of a particular unit of Russian intelligence.
January 2024: Smirnov told his handler he’d be traveling to Country A (probably UAE) to discuss a prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia with RO 1. [my emphasis]

Here are descriptions of the kinds of Russians with whom Smirnov was partying on mega yachts in the Middle East:

Russian Official 1: Son of former high-ranking RU government official, controls two groups of assassins, a RU representative to another country, ties to a particular RU intelligence service.

Russian Official 2: High-ranking member of specific RIS central to discussions of ending the Ukraine war. He has ties to both RI 1 (the senior member of a defense conglomerate) and RI 2 (the senior member of a RU steel company).

Russian Official 3: The representative of Russian Official 4.

Russian Official 4: Head of a particular unit of a RU intelligence service, ran a kompromat operation at a hotel, probably Premier Palace.

Russian Official 5: A Russian spy that Smirnov helped to flip for Country D, probably Israel. In 2019, RO 5 expressed some opposition to Putin.

Russian Official 6: RO 5 had familial ties to RO 6, a former high-ranking member of a Russian intelligence service. In 2019, RO 5 told Smirnov that RO 6 was also not happy with Putin, and said he RO 6 was close friends with RO 2.

Russian Individual 1: A high ranking member of a RU state-owned defense conglomerate.

Russian Individual 2: A high-ranking member of a RU steel company — the guy who owns the mega yacht that was in a Middle Eastern country in October 2023.

According to the timeline of reporting to his handler, Smirnov was just learning about the assassin teams in November and the Premier Palace kompromat plan in December, both from Russian Official 1, whom he describes first meeting in November.

But as the indictment describes, after Smirnov reportedly stood by all his reporting in a conversation with his handler in July 2023, when his FD-1023 first got released, in August, the handler turned over a bunch of things that made it clear Smirnov was lying.

43. On August 29, 2023, FBI investigators spoke with the Handler in reference to the 2020 1023. During that conversation, the Handler indicated that he and the Defendant had reviewed the 2020 1023 following its public release by members of Congress in July 2023, and the Defendant reaffirmed the accuracy of the statements contained in it.

44. The Handler provided investigators with messages he had with the Defendant, including the ones described above. Additionally, the Handler identified and reviewed with the Defendant travel records associated with both Associate 2 and the Defendant. The travel records were inconsistent with what the Defendant had previously told the Handler that was memorialized in the 2020 1023. The Defendant also provided email communications with both Associate 2 and Burisma personnel beginning in 2017 to the Handler, which the Handler reviewed with the Defendant and shared with FBI investigators. [my emphasis]

Remember: Scott Brady testified that they asked the handler about travel information in 2020 and (while Brady refused to address the particulars on follow-up), the result of that was a determination that the travel records corroborated the claim.

Mr. Brady. So we attempted to use open-source material to check against what was stated in the 1023. We also interfaced with the CHS’ handler about certain statements relating to travel and meetings to see if they were consistent with his or her understanding.

Q And did you determine if the information was consistent with the handler’s understanding?

A What we were able to identify, we found that it was consistent. And so we felt that there were sufficient indicia of credibility in this 1023 to pass it on to an office that had a predicated grand jury investigation.

Someone, or someones, are lying about the travel records corroborating Smirnov’s claims, either Brady and/or the handler.

Chesnoff — Smirnov’s lawyer — seems to plan to bring this handler down with Smirnov, because he revealed that Smirnov and the handler communicated via the handler’s private phone.

I can tell you. Your Honor, that there will be a vehement defense to the argument that in fact he was not truthful. He had this personal relationship with the handler. It was so personal, Your Honor, that he wouldn’t even call him on his FBI phone; he would call him on his personal phone. So we’re going to dig down once we start defending this case and we’re going to find out who knew what when.

We may yet learn that all the texts in the indictment showing that Smirnov explicitly responded to a story about Andrii Derkach manufacturing dirt by slamming Joe Biden happened on the handler’s phone.

Given what I know of David Weiss’ sawdust-as-cocaine clown show thus far, my guess is they haven’t actually nailed down what this handler knew when, and what he meant when he said, “that would be a game changer.”

Indeed, what appears to have happened is that either the handler warned Smirnov or (more likely) Smirnov figured out, as his lies started crumbling in his September 2023 interview, that his story was in trouble, so tried to throw out new information to Weiss’ team to “help” their criminal investigation of the President and his son.

After the indictment describes the many things Smirnov said in his September 27 interview that thoroughly discredited the story, he describes Smirnov telling Weiss’ team that he already knew of the Premier Palace kompromat and advising them they should check Hunter Biden’s travel records, which they didn’t have to do to know that the Premier Palace kompromat was based on a lie.

51. The Defendant also shared a new story with investigators. He wanted them to look into whether Businessperson 1 was recorded in a hotel in Kiev called the Premier Palace. The Defendant told investigators that the entire Premier Palace Hotel is “wired” and under the control of the Russians. The Defendant claimed that Businessperson 1 went to the hotel many times and that he had seen video footage of Businessperson 1 entering the Premier Palace Hotel.

52. The Defendant suggested that investigators check to see if Businessperson 1 made telephone calls from the Premier Palace Hotel since those calls would have been recorded by the Russians. The Defendant claimed to have obtained this information a month earlier by calling a high-level official in a foreign country. The Defendant also claimed to have learned this information from four different Russian officials.

53. The Defendant told investigators that the four different Russian officials are all top officials and two are the heads of the entities they represent. These Russians said that conversations with Ukrainians about ending the war will include the next U.S. election. The Defendant told investigators he is involved in negotiations over ending the war and had been for the previous four months. According to the Defendant, the Russians want Ukraine to assist in influencing the U.S. election, and the Defendant thinks the tapes of Businessperson 1 at the Premier Palace Hotel is all they have. The Defendant told investigators he wants them to ask Businessperson 1 how many times he visited and what he did while at the Premier Palace Hotel.

54. Businessperson 1 has never traveled to Ukraine. The few Burisma Board meetings that Businessperson 1 did attend were all outside of Ukraine. [my emphasis]

In an effort to claim he was getting useful information about Hunter Biden, then, Smirnov offered up the Premier Palace story and sourced it, already, to four top Russian officials.

It’s totally unclear what Smirnov told his hander. Weiss’ team might be hiding that intentionally, or it may be the case that Smirnov didn’t tell his handler that he was involved in another election influence operation until months later, sourcing it from Russian spies he had or claimed to have met in the interim. But the record at least implies that he told Weiss’ team about the assassination teams and the Premier Palace in September, then found a way to source it anew over the next several months to RO 1, whom Smirnov claimed to have met for the first time on some oligarch’s yacht in October.

In the same interview, Smirnov also claimed that, sometime no later than 2016, he developed ties with Viktor Shokin and Petro Poroshenko.

50. The Defendant told investigators that he had asked the then-Ukrainian President to arrange a meeting between himself and the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General to talk about Burisma. The Defendant told investigators that this meeting occurred before the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General resigned, which was early 2016. The Defendant also told investigators this meeting occurred before his meeting with Burisma Official 1 in the coffee shop in a German speaking country. The Defendant told investigators that after he met with the thenUkrainian Prosecutor General, he met with the then-Ukrainian President. The Defendant did not provide any of this information to the Handler in 2020.

With all that in mind, consider the rest of the timeline, the stuff that happened (or that Smirnov claimed happened) before the reporting laid out above.

1992 to 2006: Smirnov lives in Israel, where his family still lives.
2002: Smirnov helps flip RO 5 at the behest of Country D (probably Israel).
October 1, 2010: Smirnov starts to serve as a source for the FBI.
2016 or earlier: Smirnov has direct communications with Shokin and Petro Poroshenko.
2019: Smirnov first tells his handler about flipping RO 5 in 2002.
January 2022: RO 5 set up a meeting helped introduce Smirnov to RO 2. Then, Smirnov set up a meeting between RO 2 and a high-ranking official of Ukraine.
January 2022: Smirnov asked RO 2 for a favor — to protect a Ukrainian associate during any Russian invasion. RO 2 told Smirnov that based on RO 5’s representation that Smirnov was a “good guy,” he’d protect Smirnov’s associate. (Note that the FD-1023 described that Alexander Ostapenko, the guy who introduced Smirnov to Burisma, worked in the Zelenskyy administration.) RO 2 also told Smirnov that there was a 99% chance that, rather than full-blown war, the invasion would only be a skirmish.
February 2022: Smirnov provides his handler the back story to his relationship with RO 5 and through him RO 2. When working in Country D (probably Israel) in 2002, Smirnov helped flip two spies, including RO 5, for Country D. Country D had caught RO 5 spying, but gave him 48 hours to leave the country rather than expelling him. RO 5 continued to provide Smirnov intelligence, but never anything adverse to Russia. In 2019, RO 5, whose wife is related to a former Russian spook, RO 6, had described what Russia might look like under different leadership. Smirnov never met RO 6, but once spoke to him briefly over a car speaker phone.
February 28, 2022: Smirnov’s partner buys a condo in Las Vegas, using his money, for $1,425,000.
December 2022: A RU spy (not any of the identified ones) tells Smirnov the identity of a Russian spy living outside of RU.
January 2023: Smirnov confirms, from a different non-identified RU spy, the first name of the RU spy living outside of RU.
May 2023: Smirnov participates in discussions to end the Ukraine war
By September 2023: Smirnov already claimed knowledge of the Premier Palace kompromat, sourcing that knowledge to four RU Officials, almost certainly one he described meeting in later months.

In other words, there are a bunch of things that lie behind all the reporting about parties with Russian oligarchs on yachts in (probably) UAE that Weiss’ team burned.

First, Smirnov’s entrée into Russian intelligence came by helping someone — probably Israel — flip RO 5, years ago, back in 2002. Smirnov may have thought he had flipped RO 5, but RO 5 never gave him any intelligence about Russia. In other words, in the process of flipping RO 5 for a country that likely is Israel, Russia learned that Smirnov was in the business of flipping people, and strung him along for years.

Smirnov allegedly lied about conversations with Zlochevsky in 2016 that implicated Joe Biden. But his currently operative story is that he had ties with Viktor Shokin from that period — someone who was absolutely central in the 2020 influence operation. It’s not clear that Smirnov ever revealed that to his handler, which surely would have changed the import of those texts sent in response to a story claiming there were secret recordings about Shokin’s firing.

That’s not the only important Ukraine tie. In January 2022, as Russia prepares to invade Ukraine, Smirnov used his tie to Russian spooks, the guy he thought he had flipped years before, RO 5, to meet RO 2. After brokering a meeting, Smirnov then asked for a favor, that Russia protect his associate when they invaded. Then, RO 2 lied about Russia’s intention.

That’s critical background to Smirnov’s claim to be involved in peace negotiations: His entire relationship with Russian spooks is built off a series of lies.

Then, finally, there’s the question of whether Smirnov retroactively provided reporting to cover up what he admitted to Weiss’ team in September: that for months, he had been part of an information operation that involved interfering in the US election and as part of that he had advance knowledge of a plan to frame Hunter Biden.

Again.

Weiss’ team has hinted that Smirnov’s entire relationship with Russian intelligence was built off that effort to flip RO 5 for another country, almost certainly Israel.

But they’re not telling us what they know, if anything, about Israel’s ongoing involvement with all this.

How Merrick Garland Mistook a Trump Hitman for a Career Prosecutor

February 19, 2024/103 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

When Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur to spend a year reading through Joe Biden’s diaries, he emphasized that Hur was a career prosecutor, even while describing the role his appointee had played as Rod Rosenstein’s Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (PADAG) and then as a Trump-nominated, Senate-confirmed, US Attorney.

Mr. Hur has a long and distinguished career as a prosecutor. In 2003, he joined the Department’s Criminal Division, where he worked on counterterrorism, corporate fraud, and appellate matters. From 2007 until 2014, Mr. Hur served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, where he prosecuted matters ranging from violent crime to financial fraud. In 2017, Mr. Hur rejoined the Department as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. In 2018, he was nominated and confirmed to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. As U.S. Attorney, he supervised some of the Department’s more important national security, public corruption, and other high-profile matters. [my emphasis]

In my opinion, the vast majority of Merrick Garland’s critics mistake this — Garland’s naive belief in the good faith of people who have been DOJ employees — for a kind of caution or partisanship. Garland simply believes, I think, that something about working for DOJ rubs off on people and stays there, even the people who did scandalous things during Trump’s term. This is not the only time that faith has or could result in really grave consequences for DOJ’s ability to hold people accountable.

The problem is, with Hur, Garland should have known better, and not just because Hur was obviously a senior member of Trump’s DOJ.

At the end of last week’s Jack podcast (YouTube; Simplecast), Allison Gill and Andrew McCabe discussed the role Hur played in Trump’s DOJ. Gill replayed McCabe’s warnings, a year ago when Hur was appointed, about the former PADAG’s willingness to engage in politics. McCabe pointed to Hur’s role in imposing limits on the Mueller investigation (to which, I’ve noted, Hur didn’t adhere in this review) and participation in a gang arrest press conference staged at the White House, breaching the separation between the White House and DOJ.

But Hur had a more specific role in carrying out a partisan hit job for Trump.

Just after 1:02 on the podcast, in the stuff recorded last week, McCabe described that Hur played a key role in, “overriding the process that I was entitled to and basically accelerating the decision to fire me in an effort to get it done before I could retire.” McCabe claimed that Hur violated his due process to fulfill Trump’s demands to fire the former FBI Deputy Director rather than let him retire on schedule.

As laid out in McCabe’s 2019 lawsuit against DOJ, for months leading up to McCabe’s firing, Trump had been complaining that DOJ hadn’t fired him yet. Against that background, on March 5, 2018, FBI and DOJ started the process of using DOJ IG’s problematic report finding that McCabe lacked candor about serving as a source for one of Devlin Barrett’s biennial right wing hit jobs as an excuse to fire him. Time was short. They had less than two weeks to do that before McCabe’s designated retirement date (depending on how you calculate it, any of the days from March 16 and 19, inclusive).

The process started with Candice Will, the head of FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, preparing a recommendation to fire him.

After some discussion on March 5 about whether, in response to McCabe attorney Michael Bromwich’s request, McCabe’s team should get a copy of the IG Report in advance so as to have more time to respond, Will laid out, in a handwritten note sent March 7, that she would send just the letter reporting DOJ IG’s referral, but not the report, to Bromwich. Without saying it directly, Will was signaling she was not going to give Bromwich any extra time to respond.

That same note made it clear that without intervention from DAG — Rod Rosenstein’s office — “it seems unlikely that this will reach final resolution before Mr. McCabe’s March 18 retirement date.” Those rushing to fire McCabe before his retirement recognized on March 7 that the only way they could fire McCabe before he retired was via Rosenstein’s involvement.

The same morning Will explained that they couldn’t manage to fire McCabe before he retired without intervention from Rosenstein’s office, she sent Hur an email asking to speak to him on the phone, “about a matter being forwarded to the DAG?” Remember: at this point, Hur was Rosenstein’s top deputy.

Hur and Will spoke that evening.

Will’s notes from that conversation were, when released via FOIA, almost entirely redacted under a deliberative privilege. They appear to memorialize what happened at a meeting between Hur, Rosenstein, and Scott Schools that day. Schools, the senior career Associate Deputy Attorney General at the time, played a role in DOJ that was always supposed to ensure ethics; in that role, he oversaw the review process leading up to McCabe’s termination.

An email thread documenting how OLC head Steven Engel interpreted the SES guidelines on firing, which Hur then forwarded to Schools, who forwarded it to Will, likewise remains heavily redacted under b5 deliberative exemptions.

Those documents — what Robert Hur told Will on March 7, 2018 and how Steven Engel spun guidelines mapping out what kind of due process senior employees get before you can fire them — are among the records that McCabe would have gotten in discovery if DOJ hadn’t settled the lawsuit.

DOJ redacted less of the emails showing that Will kept Schools and, at times, Hur, informed of how Michael Bromwich frantically tried to review the entire case file in time to mount a legal challenge, but even there, there are deliberative discussions withheld from release.

One thing is clear: with each request Bromwich made, DOJ took days to respond.

In the lawsuit, McCabe’s lawyers noted that Bromwich wasn’t given emails and statements involving FBI’s press person, Michael Korten, that the DOJ IG had ignored — emails that were exculpatory — until the day before Bromwich had to present McCabe’s case to Schools.

Certainly, Andrew McCabe has reason to be biased against Robert Hur, because Hur was part of a team that forced McCabe to fight for years just to get a pension earned over decades.

But you don’t have to take McCabe’s word that Hur played a part in, “overriding the process that I was entitled to and basically accelerating the decision to fire me in an effort to get it done before I could retire.”

Take Merrick Garland’s word on what happened. In response to a question from Chuck Grassley shortly after the settlement, Garland explained why career lawyers at DOJ said they should settle: because they were going to lose the case.

The case … involved a claim that he was not given amount of time necessary to respond to allegations and the litigators concluded that they needed to settle the case because of the likelihood of loss on the merits of that claim.

Garland delivered this heavily rehearsed (and inaccurate — that’s not the only thing included in the suit) statement, explaining that the team that rushed to fire McCabe so they could take his pension had not given McCabe the amount of time required to respond to the allegations against him, on October 27, 2021, over a year before he named one member of that team that deprived McCabe of his due process to lead an investigation into Joe Biden.

Garland was clearly just repeating a well-rehearsed answer in this response to Grassley. It’s unlikely he reviewed the matter closely enough to know that Hur was one of the people, according to the career attorneys who said DOJ would lose the suit, who deprived Andrew McCabe of due process. Though Garland knows how DOJ works. He should have known the universe of people who might be involved.

Given how politically contentious the decision to settle was, however, it is also virtually certain that people in Lisa Monaco’s office did review the details closely. In fact, traditionally, the person who would review matters that — like this one — involve weighing ethical considerations and the potential of a big black eye for DOJ is the career Associate Deputy Attorney General, the successor to Scott Schools, who was involved in the firing.

In July 2018, Jeff Sessions appointed Bradley Weinsheimer as Schools’ successor.

It would be shocking if Weinsheimer didn’t review the decision to settle the McCabe lawsuit.

But if he did, that would be cause for further concern. That’s because Weinsheimer is the guy who rejected complaints from Biden’s attorneys about Hur’s politicized attacks on Biden.

By settling Andrew McCabe’s lawsuit, DOJ conceded that Robert Hur and others had deprived the former FBI Deputy Director of due process. They violated DOJ’s rules to do Trump’s bidding. Then, DOJ put Hur in charge of an investigation of Joe Biden.

But Her Emails: How Trump Trained the GOP to Hate Rule of Law 1

February 18, 2024/160 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Note: I haven’t quite finished spinning my Ball of Thread out of which I will explain how Trump trained the GOP to hate rule of law. But for a number of reasons — this great Heather Cox Richardson piece marking the Maidan anniversary and Paul Manafort’s role in it, the arrest of Alexander Smirnov in conjunction with a 2020 attempt, assisted by Bill Barr, to frame Joe Biden, and the heightened urgency of the fate of Ukraine — I thought I’d publish this now.

In an alternate reality, the final report laying out how Trump knowingly requested and accepted help — help he may have denied, but which did come from Russia — to win the 2016 election might have started with a nod to these exhibits, submitted in conjunction with Paul Manafort’s guilty plea on September 14, 2018.

The criminal information and exhibits describe Manafort’s efforts to help Viktor Yanukovych neutralize his pro-Western female opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, first by prosecuting her for corruption, then by launching an increasingly complex transnational influence operation to “plant some stink on Tymo” to justify the prosecution. The exhibits describe how Manafort tried to spin a Skadden Arps report finding that Tymoshenko’s criminal intent “is almost non-existent,” and then how Manafort criminally covered up that effort at spin. There’s even a passage describing how Manafort manufactured a claim that Tymoshenko was antisemitic by getting an Israeli to make a statement to the NYPost.

“Bada bing bada boom,” Manafort bragged about his success in manufacturing a fake election scandal.

It was all an effort, Manafort described, to claim Ukraine was building a “‘rule of law’ democracy” so the EU and US would ignore Yanukovich’s human rights violations.

In that same alternate reality, Manafort would have honored his plea deal, and in the days following Manafort’s September 14 plea, he would have elaborated on the things he told prosecutors in the days leading up to it and some others they likely wanted to know. He might have explained how his Ukrainian backers and probably Konstantin Kilimnik — who a number of people, but not Manafort, admitted might be a Russian spy — seemed to know by December 2015 that Manafort would run Donald Trump’s campaign. Manafort might have revealed more about his meeting with Kilimnik on August 2, 2016, at which he reviewed polling that showed the key to winning was driving up Hillary’s negatives; Manafort might also have explained the relationship between that election discussion and two other topics discussed that night: how he would get paid millions and Kilimnik’s plan to carve up Ukraine for Russia’s benefit. If Manafort had fulfilled his plea deal, he might have explained what his long-time friend Roger Stone pitched to him on August 3, the day after that secret cigar bar meeting, as a way to “save Trump’s ass.”

He might have said more than he otherwise did about how Stone learned, within a few weeks after that August 3 conversation, that WikiLeaks would be dropping emails stolen from John Podesta that would show, Stone hoped, that Hillary’s campaign manager had the same kind of Russian exposures that Manafort did.

Manafort would be vindicated because he had to leave the campaign for being too pro-Russian, and this would show that Podesta also had links to Russia and would have to leave.

None of that happened.

Manafort seems to have decided — perhaps after a conversation his attorney had with Rudy Giuliani around the same day he flipped — to string out Mueller’s prosecutors until after the midterms. After the election Trump fired Jeff Sessions and ultimately replaced him with someone who would shut down the investigation and see to it that Manafort’s imprisonment remained comfortable, and not just comfortable, but amenable to further collusion with Rudy on schemes that would frame Hunter Biden for tax and influence peddling crimes in Ukraine, until such time as Trump could pardon his former campaign manager for tax and influence peddling crimes in Ukraine.

In this alternate reality, then, the story of how Trump taught Republicans to hate rule of law might start with a story of how his campaign manager had spun corruption as rule of law in the past, in Ukraine, and how the 2016 election did something similar in the US.

But then, Republicans didn’t need Paul Manafort’s help to demonize Hillary Clinton. That had been a core focus of the Republican party since her spouse’s presidency. That unrelenting focus on criminalizing the Clintons (and via that narrative, dehumanizing Democrats, thereby heightening polarization) had been nourished over three decades in an increasingly airtight Fox News bubble, one newly challenged by even sloppier, more radical propaganda outlets.

In the years before the election contest with Trump, the right wing propaganda machine manufactured two criminal investigations into Hillary to “plant some stink” on her.

In January 2016 — fifteen years after DOJ first investigated the Clinton Foundation — three different FBI offices opened investigations into the Clinton Foundation based entirely or substantially on Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. Notably. At least one of the FBI agents handling an informant on that investigation was affirmatively pro-Trump. “I saw a lot of scared MFers on … [my way to work] this morning,” one gloated the day after the election. “Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.” As NYT first reported, that investigation remained open until after Trump left office.

And by the time Manafort joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016, House Republicans were three years into their endless Benghazi investigations. After years of pushing, that had morphed into the investigation into Hillary’s private server, which would merge right into the public and private pursuit of Hillary’s deleted emails. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump begged a hostile country to find those deleted emails for him, even as his ascendant National Security Advisor worked with a Senate staffer to find out of hostile powers had gotten copies.

Details of both investigations into Hillary leaked, with a slew of stories (one, two, three) fed through Devlin Barrett (then still at WSJ) in the days before the election.

Of course it was Jim Comey who did the real damage, first by usurping DOJ’s authority to issue a prosecutorial decision and then planting some stink on Hillary while doing so. That led to a series of congressional hearings, and ultimately to the reopening of the investigation, predictably leaking days before the election.

Among the many but-fors that decided that election, Comey’s actions were easily the most important. Comey did this — made repeated attempts to stave off claims of partisanship — in a naive bid he could convince the hoards chanting “Lock her up!” of the legitimacy of the decision not to charge.

We’ll never know, but that effort, the orchestrated campaign to criminalize Hillary followed by a ham-handed effort to convince right wingers of the legitimacy of a considered prosecutorial decision, by itself, may have been enough to carry Trump to victory.

This, then, was the raw material Russia exploited in 2016 — stoking both sides of a deep partisan divide fueled by two decades of a propaganda focused on criminalizing Hillary Clinton.

The Republicans proved in that election (or reconfirmed the Whitewater test) that if only they repeated allegations often enough, loudly enough, preferably over and over again in Congress, eventually some criminal investigation would result, a criminal investigation that Republicans could then amplify.

The Republicans came to that election with an unshakeable belief that Hillary was a criminal and if DOJ said she wasn’t, there must be something wrong with DOJ, not any shortcomings in the evidentiary case.

And then Russia dropped a match on that already flaming bonfire.

Rod Rosenstein’s Baltimore Club of Men Gunning for the Bidens

February 12, 2024/44 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, Hunter Biden, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

In an interview yesterday with Jake Tapper (transcript), Rod Rosenstein exhibited more familiarity with the Robert Hur report, which had been public for just three days, than he was about the Mueller investigation that he oversaw for two years, during ten months of which, Hur played a key role.

Tapper: He was your deputy at the Justice Department. Do you agree with his decision that Biden should not be charged, it was not a prosecutable case?

Rosenstein: Yes, Jake.

And it’s — most people haven’t read the entire report. And I don’t blame them. It’s 345 pages, about 1,400 footnotes. It’s very dense and well-reasoned. And I think, if you read the whole report, you will conclude that Rob reached a reasonable decision that, given all the circumstances, that prosecution is not warranted.

After all, Rod Rosenstein was personally involved in drafting (though did not sign) the Barr Memo making a prosecution declination for Trump for his obstruction-related actions. Yet not even Rosenstein, who had been involved in the investigation from the start, thought to address the pardon dangles — a key focus of Volume II of the Mueller Report — that continued to undermine ongoing investigations.

Then, over a year later and under pressure from Lindsey Graham for having signed the worst of the Carter Page FISA applications, Rosenstein agreed with Graham’s false portrayal of the investigation as it existed on August 1, 2017, when Rosenstein expanded the scope of the investigation.

Lindsey Graham: (35:02) I am saying in January the 4th, 2017, the FBI had discounted Flynn, there was no evidence that Carter Page worked with the Russians, the dossier was a bunch of garbage and Papadopoulos is all over the place, not knowing he’s being recorded, denying working with the Russians, nobody’s ever been prosecuted for working with the Russians. The point is the whole concept that the campaign was colluding with the Russians, there was no there there in August, 2017. Do you agree with that general statement or not?

Rod Rosenstein: (35:39) I agree with that general statement.

Rosenstein’s endorsement of Lindsey’s statement about the evidence as it existed in August 2017 was egregiously wrong. Mueller had just acquired a great deal of evidence of conspiracy, including several details implicating Roger Stone and Paul Manafort that were never conclusively resolved. Crazier still, George Papadopoulos had just been arrested for lying to cover up when he learned that Russia planned to help Trump, an arrest of which Rosenstein would have personally had advance notice.

By comparison, days after its release, Rosenstein exhibited great confidence in his knowledge of the 1,400 footnotes his former deputy included in the report.

To be sure, Rosenstein’s defense of Hur did not honestly present the content of the Report. For example, the only other reason he provides for why Hur didn’t charge Biden, besides Hur’s opinion that Biden is a forgetful old geezer, involved the tradition of Presidents taking things home.

ROSENSTEIN: I think so, Jake.

And you identified the controversial elements of the special counsel’s report. It’s a very long report, 345 pages, and has a lot of information in there, other reasons why prosecution would not be warranted. And one of them is the history and experience of prior presidents and potentially vice presidents as well taking home classified documents.

This is simply a misrepresentation of the evidence.

Even if you ignore Hur’s misstatement of DOJ’s application of 18 USC 793(e) in cases where there is no other exposure (in something like a leak) or the challenges in applying it to someone who, like both Biden and Trump, didn’t hold clearance, for the primary set of documents he examined — the two folders of Afghanistan documents found in Biden’s garage — Hur admitted he couldn’t prove his already inventive theory of the case. He couldn’t even prove that the documents in question had been in Biden’s Virginia home when Biden made a comment about something classified in his home.

Rosenstein is, as Hur already did, emphasizing the most unflattering part of the declination decision, not the fact that after blowing over $3M and reading through Joe Biden’s most personal thoughts, Hur simply didn’t find evidence to support a charge.

Twice, Rosenstein disputed that Hur’s focus on Biden’s age was the kind of gratuitous attack for which he had made the case for firing Jim Comey, the second time in direct response to a question about the memo he wrote.

Tapper: I want to read from a memo you wrote in 2017 in which you criticized James Comey’s infamous press conference in which he criticized Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified e-mails, even as he declined to prosecute her, a similar circumstance, although he wasn’t a special counsel — quote — “Derogatory information” — this is you writing — “Derogatory information sometimes is disclosed in the course of criminal investigations and prosecutions, but we never release it gratuitously.

“The FBI director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial, it is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do” — unquote. By going to the lengths he did to critique Biden’s age and memory, even as he was clearing him of a crime, how do you differentiate between what Robert Hur did that you say is OK from what James Comey did that you say is not?

ROSENSTEIN: Jake, there are several significant differences between those two examples.

One is, most fundamentally, that Jim Comey wasn’t the prosecutor. He was the head of the FBI. His job was to ensure the police collected the proper evidence, submitted it to the prosecutors. And, ultimately, it’s up to the prosecutors in the Justice Department and the attorney general to make a decision about what information is released.

Rob Hur was the prosecutor. It was his job to make that decision, to make that recommendation to the attorney general, who, as you acknowledged, has previously committed to make this report public. That’s one difference.

The second difference is the special counsel regulation. In the ordinary case, Hillary Clinton was not investigated by a special counsel. There was no procedure to make those reasons public. Here, it’s baked into this regulation.

Now we sit, Jake, 25 years down the road. That regulation was passed by Attorney General Reno in 1999. Now we have 25 years of experience. I think it’s worthwhile to sit back and ask whether or not this is the right procedure. Do we really think that we ought to have prosecutors writing reports for public release of everything they discover and all the reasons for not prosecuting?

Or is there a better way to do that without having all the embarrassing information come to public light?

The big tell in Rosenstein’s defense of his former deputy, though, is his suggestion there’s a comparison between Hur’s attacks on Biden’s age with what Mueller — under the direction of Rosenstein and Hur — included in his report, which spent far fewer pages laying out the prosecutorial analysis for far more potential criminal exposure by Trump.

The second issue is what you release in the public. And the problem here with — that’s really baked in the special counsel model is that it’s not really the function of a prosecutor to publicly announce the reasons why they’re not prosecuting.

And so when you layer that into the process, it can result in unfortunate consequences. The Donald Trump report, I think, got people upset in the same way that this one did.

Given his inclusion of Independent Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh here, Rosenstein’s comparison is insane, because he left out the Ken Starr Report (to which investigation, he reminded Tapper, he contributed), which included the most gratuitous descriptions of the subject of the investigation of any of these reports.

Rosenstein’s likening of the Mueller and Hur report is odd for a number of reasons. The part of the Mueller Report focused on Trump was 200 pages, far shorter than the Hur Report yet covering far more overt acts.

Mueller made absolutely no complaint that both Trump and his failson refused to appear before a grand jury whereas Hur’s attacks arose out of Biden’s willingness to sit for several days of a voluntary interview. Mueller let Trump’s decision to invoke the Fifth stand without ascribing criminal motive; Hur made Biden’s cooperation into cause for attack.

But even in smaller details, the reports don’t compare. One thing Hur made up, for example, is that Biden might have alerted his attorneys that there were classified records (in a ratty beat up old box) in his garage, but his team couldn’t find out because if they asked, the answer would be privileged.

We considered the possibility that Mr. Biden alerted his counsel that classified documents were in the garage, but our investigation revealed no evidence of such a discussion because, it if happened, it would be protected by the attorney-client privilege.

This claim only appears in the Executive Summary, where lazy journalists might find it. It appears nowhere in the body of the report (which has to deal with the fact that if Biden had really brought these documents home, he wouldn’t have so willingly let his attorneys search for them). It’s one of the things Biden’s attorneys asked to be corrected.

There are a number of inaccuracies and misleading statements that could be corrected with minor changes:

‘We considered the possibility that Mr. Biden alerted his counsel that classified documents were in the garage but our investigation revealed no evidence of such a discussion because if it happened, it would be protected by the attorney-client privilege.” Report at 22. In fact, your investigation revealed no evidence of such a discussion because it did not happen–not because of any privilege. The President testified he was unaware that there were any classified documents in his possession. Tr., Day II, at 2, 41-42. You did not ask him in his interview or in the additional written questions if he had “alerted his counsel” about classified documents; if you had, he would have forcefully told you that he did not.

Hur’s decision to fabricate the possibility of an attorney-client conversation that did not happen — and his obstinate refusal to correct it — is especially telling given Mueller’s hands-off treatment of attorney-client privilege.

For example, Mueller didn’t even try to ask Jay Sekulow about his role in drafting Michael Cohen’s false claims about the Moscow Trump Tower, even though Cohen said Sekulow was involved.

The President’s personal counsel declined to provide us with his account of his conversations with Cohen, and there is no evidence available to us that indicates that the President was aware of the information Cohen provided to the President’s personal counsel. The President’s conversations with his personal counsel were presumptively protected by attorney-client privilege, and we did not seek to obtain the contents of any such communications.

Nor did Mueller attempt to interview John Dowd about whether he left a threatening voicemail for Mike Flynn’s then-attorney Rob Kelner, to find out whether Trump directed Dowd to make the threat.

Because of attorney-client privilege issues, we did not seek to interview the President’s personal counsel about the extent to which he discussed his statements to Flynn’s attorneys with the President.

In both cases, Mueller let privilege close off investigation into more egregious evidence of obstruction.

So where Mueller let Trump hide behind attorney-client privilege as a shield, Hur flipped that, and used a fabricated attorney-client conversation as a shield to insinuate evidence of guilt where none existed.

In short, Rosenstein went on teevee and made a bunch of cynical claims, defending Hur’s attack on Biden even while claiming that the Mueller Report was just as damning.

As I and others contemplate how Merrick Garland made such a shitty choice for Special Counsel here, I keep thinking about the fact that there’s a little club of Rod Rosentein associates gunning for the Biden men. There’s Hur, and Rosenstein’s hypocritical and remarkably hasty defense of him.

There’s also the reference that Gary Shapley, who is based partly in Baltimore, made about a prosecutor who became Deputy Attorney General, a reference that can only describe Rosenstein.

Mr. Shapley. No. I think I’ve said it, that this is not the norm. This is — I’ve worked with some great guys, some great prosecutors that went on to be U.S. attorneys and went on to be the deputy attorney general and, I think I have experience enough to where it means something.

After having agreed with the IRS that the case against Hunter Biden couldn’t move forward if Shapley were on the team, David Weiss then decided to appoint two AUSAs who would have worked for Hur and Rosenstein as AUSAs in MD USAO, in the case of Leo Wise, for years.

That is, the cabal of men gunning for Joe Biden and his son — all of whom have already engaged in questionable games — have ties to Rod Rosenstein, who still seems to be trying to make it up to Trump for his role in appointing a Special Counsel.

And Rod Rosenstein, as he demonstrated in that interview, is giving Hur, at least, special license to engage in precisely the kind of conduct for which he endorsed firing Jim Comey.

Call and Response: Putin Demanded Greater Russia and Trump Agreed

February 12, 2024/83 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Over the weekend, Putin and Donald Trump seem to have come to public agreement that, if elected in November, Trump would help Putin pursue Greater Russia.

In his session with Tucker Carlson, after all, Putin corrected the propagandist, informing him that, no, he didn’t invade Ukraine because of concerns about NATO expansion, but because he considers Ukraine — and much of Eastern Europe — part of Greater Russia. He subjected Tucker to a half hour lesson in his, Putin’s, mythology about Russia.

Tucker Carlson:Mr. President, thank you.

On February 24, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?

Vladimir Putin:The point is not that the United States was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia, I didn’t say so. Are we having a talk show or serious conversation?

Tucker Carlson:That was a good quote. Thank you, it’s formidably, serious!

Vladimir Putin: Your education background is in history, as far as I understand, right?

Tucker Carlson: Yes.

Vladimir Putin: Then I will allow myself – just 30 seconds or one minute – to give a little historical background, if you don’t mind.

Tucker Carlson: Please.

Vladimir Putin: Look how did our relations with Ukraine begin, where does Ukraine come from.

[snip]

Tucker Carlson: May I ask… You are making the case that Ukraine, certain parts of Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine, in fact, has been Russia for hundreds of years, why wouldn’t you just take it when you became President 24 years ago? Your have nuclear weapons, they don’t. It’s actually your land. Why did you wait so long?

Vladimir Putin: I’ll tell you. I’m coming to that. This briefing is coming to an end. It might be boring, but it explains many things.

And then, within a day, Trump told a fabricated story that served to promise that not only wouldn’t he honor America’s commitment to defend NATO states, but would instead encourage Russia to do “whatever they hell they want.”

One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, “Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,” I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.” No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.

Call and response.

I still owe you a post(s) about my full understanding of the Russian investigation, one of the last parts of my Ball of Thread before I describe how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law. But I want to point to some aspects of 2016 — how Russia used similar calls and response to lock Trump in as part of the help they gave him.

As Adam Schiff addressed to in the exchange where he walked John Durham through all the elements of what Schiff described as “collusion” of which Durham claimed to be ignorant, Trump first asked for help, then got it.

Mr. Schiff. Don Jr. when offered dirt as part of what was described as Russian government effort to help the Trump Campaign said, “if it’s what you say, I love it;” Would you call that an invitation to get Russian help with dirt on Hillary Clinton?

Mr. Durham. The words speak for themselves, I supposed.

Mr. Schiff. I think they do. In fact, he said, especially late in summer. Late in summer was around when the Russians started to dump the stolen emails, wasn’t it?

Mr. Durham. Late in the summer, there was information that was disclosed by WikiLeaks in mid to late July.

Only, it happened even more than Schiff laid out. And it happened in ways that ensured Trump would be stuck down the road.

The way it worked with the Trump Tower Moscow dangle may be most instructive (this is, obviously, a paraphrase).

Late 2015, Felix Sater to Michael Cohen: Do you want the biggest bestest tower in Moscow? Are you willing to work with a former GRU officer and sanctioned banks to get it?

Cohen: Yes.

January 2016, Sater: Okay, then call the Kremlin.

January 2016, Michael Cohen to Dmitry Peskov, writing on a server hosted by Microsoft: Can I have Vladimir Putin’s help to build the biggest bestest tower in Moscow?

[Peskov pockets proof that Cohen and Trump were willing to work with a former GRU officer and sanctioned banks. Before the first primary, Putin pocketed his first receipt.]

May, after Trump has sealed the nomination, Sater to Cohen: You should fly to St. Petersburg to meet with Putin.

Cohen agrees, but once the DNC hack is revealed, Cohen decides that’s a bad idea and calls it off. Already, the stakes of having agreed to work with a former GRU officer have now gone up considerably.

July 27, Trump responding to some totally predictable questions, between asking Russia to hack Hillary some more and stating he would consider recognizing Russia’s seizure of Crimeia:

TRUMP: No, I have nothing to do with Russia, John (ph). How many times do I have say that? Are you a smart man? I have nothing to with Russia, I have nothing to do with Russia.

And even — for anything. What do I have to do with Russia? You know the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida.

Palm Beach is a very expensive place. There was a man who went bankrupt and I bought the house for $40 million and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million including brokerage commissions. So I sold it. So I bought it for 40, I told it for 100 to a Russian. That was a number of years ago. I guess probably I sell condos to Russians, OK?

[snip]

TRUMP: Excuse me, listen. We wanted to; we were doing Miss Universe 4 or 5 years ago in Russia. It was a tremendous success. Very, very successful. And there were developers in Russia that wanted to put a lot of money into developments in Russia. And they wanted us to do it. But it never worked out.

Frankly I didn’t want to do it for a couple of different reasons. But we had a major developer, particular, but numerous developers that wanted to develop property in Moscow and other places. But we decided not to do it.

[Peskov now has a secret with Trump and Cohen, that in fact this was a lie.]

By the time Trump told this lie, Roger Stone was already working on getting advance notice of the contents of the John Podesta emails, a more specific ask. And Konstantin Kilimnik was preparing his trip to meet in a cigar bar with Paul Manafort where they would discuss how to win the swing states, how Manafort could get paid, and how to carve up Ukraine.

Later Steele dossier entries, sourced through Olga Galkina, who had started working directly with Peskov, claimed that Cohen had direct contact with the Kremlin (he had!), and claimed he was fixing Trump problems (he was! Trump’s sex worker problem!), but instead claimed that Cohen was instead fixing a Russian tie problem.

By the time those October Steele dossier entries were written, and especially by the time the December one was, Russia had done the following:

Gotten Cohen (and through him, Trump) to agree to work with sanctioned banks and a former GRU officer to get the biggest bestest Tower in Moscow
Left evidence of this fact on Cohen and Sater’s phones, in Trump Organization call records, and Trump Organization emails hosted by Microsoft, where they would be discoverable in case of investigation
Established a secret between the Kremlin and Trump: that the statements Trump made on the same day Russia obliged his request to hack Hillary, denying that he had ongoing discussions with Russia, were a lie
Made the substance of the lie look far, far worse, thereby increasing the chances the lie would be discovered, which it was

Through a predictable mix of narcissism and sloppiness, then, Trump had compromised himself without even thinking through the consequences.

Trump always insisted that his request that Russia further hack his opponent on July 27, 2016 was just a joke (and never really accounted for the Crimea comment). But Roger Stone was inserting himself into Trump’s public foreign policy statements as early as April.

And, after two conversations with Trump on July 31, Stone scripted a number of pro-Russian tweets for Trump to post. Trump didn’t post the tweets Stone sent; his staffers were instead cleaning up from the “Are you listening” comment. But Stone may have posted the ones he drafted himself.

Of course the Russians hacked @HillaryClinton’s e-mail- Putin doesn’t want the WAR with Russia neo-con Hillary’s donors have paid for

HYPOCRISY ! @HillaryClinton attacks Trump for non-relationship with Putin when she and Bill have taken millions from Russians oligarchs

Trump wants to end the cold war and defuse out tensions with Russia. Hillary ,neocon wants war. Putin gets it. @smerconish @realDonaldTrump

,@RealDonaldTrump wants to end new cold war tensions with Russia-thru tough negotiation- #detente #NYTimes

That is, in 2016, days before Stone’s lifelong friend Manafort would discuss election help in the same conversation as carving up Ukraine, days before Stone himself got advance notice of the Podesta emails, the rat-fucker was promising that Trump would end cold and hot wars with Russia.

By the time Stone did get those advance Podesta emails in mid-August 2016, the operation had already linked Stone to two Russian intelligence operations: the use of Julian Assange as a cut-out (and his request for a pardon), and the Shadow Brokers operation releasing NSA files publicly. That is, by chasing the carrot of stolen Hillary emails, Stone linked himself inextricably with two sticks, association with the most effective attacks on the US Deep State in recent history. Stone and Trump would have happily targeted the Deep State anyway, but Russia didn’t leave that to chance.

First Trump and Cohen compromised themselves by asking for help. Then Trump personally and through Stone made policy commitments. Along the way, Russia kept pocketing one or another receipt that would help bind Trump to those commitments, or if not, ensure some kind of leverage over him.

Here we are, eight years later, and that formula has only gotten more overt. At a time when winning the election is an existential necessity for Trump, one day after Putin made clear he is seeking not just Ukraine, but Greater Russia, Trump overtly promised to allow Russia to carve up NATO.

Past history suggests that may be no coincidence.

Update: Fixed a reference to Manafort.

John Durham Feigns Totally Dumb about Russian “Collusion”

February 6, 2024/50 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

The day the entire GOP refuses to pursue really draconian immigration legislation because Donald Trump has demanded they not do so — and especially not pass any more funding for Ukraine — seems like a good day to resume my effort to roll out a Ball of Thread in advance of explaining how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law.

This post is very simple. Under grilling from Adam Schiff during his House Judiciary Committee testimony last summer, John Durham played dumb — really, really dumb — about what Trump actually did in 2016 (there were a few more examples during the hearing, usually in exchange with Schiff).

It’s not surprising. But it is very similar to the way Scott Brady played dumb when quizzed (in a deposition, by House Judiciary Committee staffers) about what really happened in 2016. Again, not surprising. Just another example where key sycophants who played a central role in this process rigidly parroted the false cover story even when confronted with the truth.

Mr. Schiff. I thank you for yielding. One of my colleagues in the Republican side of the aisle took issue with my saying that the Trump Campaign invited Russian help, received Russian help, made use of it, and then lied about it. So, let’s break this down.

Let’s go to invited Russian help. Mr. Durham, you’re aware of Donald Trump’s public statements along the lines of, hey, Russia, if you’re listening, hack Hillary’s emails. You’ll be richly awarded by the press. Are you aware of that?

Mr. Durham. I’m aware of that.

Mr. Schiff. You’re aware that Mueller found that hours after he made that plea for Russian help, the Russians, in fact, tried to hack one of the email servers affiliated with the Clinton Campaign or family.

Mr. Durham. If that happened, I’m not aware of that.

Mr. Schiff. You’re not–

Mr. Durham. It could very well. I just don’t know.

Mr. Schiff. –aware of that in the Mueller Report? When you’re saying you’re not aware of evidence of collusion in the Mueller Report, it’s because apparently you haven’t read the Mueller Report every well if you’re not aware of that fact. Let me ask you about something else.

Mr. Durham. Sure.

Mr. Schiff. Don Jr. when offered dirt as part of what was described as Russian government effort to help the Trump Campaign said, “if it’s what you say, I love it;” Would you call that an invitation to get Russian help with dirt on Hillary Clinton?

Mr. Durham. The words speak for themselves, I supposed.

Mr. Schiff. I think they do. In fact, he said, especially late in summer. Late in summer was around when the Russians started to dump the stolen emails, wasn’t it?

Mr. Durham. Late in the summer, there was information that was disclosed by WikiLeaks in mid to late July. I think there had been some in June, and then there was maybe some later in October was it, I think. Don’t hold me to those dates.

Mr. Schiff. This gets to the receipt of help, second thing I mentioned, receiving Russian help. The dumping of those emails by the way just as forecast by what Papadopoulos told
the Australian diplomat. That is that the Russians would help by leaking dirt anonymously through cutouts like WikiLeaks and DCLeaks.

Mr. Durham. I don’t think that’s exactly what he told the Australians.

Mr. Schiff. Well, he said that he was informed that the Russians could anonymously release this information, right?

Mr. Durham. Release what?

Mr. Schiff. By anonymously releasing information damaging to Hillary Clinton, right?

Mr. Durham. I think if you read what’s in the cable and what’s in the report as to what the diplomats reported there was a suggestion of a suggestion that the Russians could help. They have damaging information as to Ms. Clinton.

Mr. Schiff. By releasing it anonymously, right? That’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?

Mr. Durham. I don’t–

Mr. Schiff. You really don’t know?

Mr. Durham. I’m not sure–when you say exactly what happened–

Mr. Schiff. Well, the Russians released stolen emails through cutouts, did they not?

Mr. Durham. There were emails that were released by WikiLeaks.

Mr. Schiff. It’s a very simple question. Did they release information, stolen information, through cutouts, yes or no?

Mr. Durham. I’m not sure that–

Mr. Schiff. You really don’t know the answer to that? The answer is yes, they did. Through DCLeaks–

Mr. Durham. In your mind, it’s yes.

Mr. Schiff. Well, Mueller’s answer is yes. More important than mine, Mueller’s answer was yes. Now, that information, of course, was helpful to the Trump Campaign, wasn’t it?

Mr. Durham. I don’t think there’s any question that Russians intruded into hacked into the systems.

Mr. Schiff. Well, I just want to get–

Mr. Durham. They released information.

Mr. Schiff. That was helpful to Trump Campaign, right?

Mr. Durham. The conclusion in the ICA and in the Mueller investigation was that the Russians intended to assist–

Mr. Schiff. Can you answer my question, Mr. Durham? That was helpful to Trump Campaign, right?

[Crosstalk.]

Mr. Schiff. Trump made use of that, as I said, didn’t he, by touting those stolen documents on the campaign trail over 100 times?
Mr. Durham. Like I said, I don’t really read the newspapers or listen to the news.

Mr. Schiff. You were totally–

Mr. Durham. I don’t find them reliable, so I don’t know that.

Mr. Schiff. Mr. Durham, you were totally oblivious to Donald Trump’s use of the stolen emails on the campaign trail more than 100 times?

Mr. Durham. I’m not aware of that.

Mr. Schiff. Did that escape your attention?

Mr. Durham. I am not aware of that.

Mr. Schiff. Are you aware of the final prong that I mentioned, that he lied about it, that the Trump Campaign covered it up? It’s the whole second volume of the Mueller Report. I hope you’re familiar with that.

Mr. Durham. Yes, that’s a section of the report, the second volume relating to their obstruction of justice.

Mr. Schiff. Well, thank you for confirming what my Republican colleague attacked me about. He also criticized the use of the word collusion. Apparently giving private polling data to the Russians while the Russians are helping your campaign, they don’t want to call it collusion.

Maybe there’s a better name for it. Maybe they would prefer we just call it good old fashioned GOP cheating with the enemy. Maybe that would be a little bit more accurate description.

Mr. Durham. Yes.

Josh Schulte Sentenced to 40 Years

February 3, 2024/32 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Cybersecurity, emptywheel, WikiLeaks /by emptywheel

Aldrich Ames was arrested at the age of 53 in 1994 after 9 years of spying for Russia. He remains imprisoned in Terre Haute to this day — 30 years and counting — at the age of 82. (My math here is all rough.)

Robert Hanssen was arrested in 2001 at the age of 57 after 22 years of spying for Russia. He died last year, at the age of 79, in Florence SuperMax.

After six years in jail — most under Special Administrative Measures sharply limiting his communication — Josh Schulte, aged 35, was sentenced Thursday to 40 years in prison. He will presumably go to either Florence (most likely, because Judge Jesse Furman recommended he should go to someplace close to Lubbock) or Terre Haute.

Since his guidelines sentencing range was life in prison, I’m not sure how much, if any, of his sentence could, hypothetically, be dropped for good behavior.

Furman sentenced him concurrently on his Child Sexual Abuse Material conviction and the Espionage Act charges. Barring any successful appeal, he would be in prison for at least 20 years on top of time served, if he were to get credit for good behavior. That would put him back on the street at age 55, still the prime of his life (says someone in precisely that prime of her life, someone still learning some of the forensic techniques Schulte mastered as a teenager).

But the possibility that Schulte would be released before 2058, when Schulte will be 69, is based on two very big assumptions (on top of my uncertainty about whether he could get time off). First, that Schulte could sustain “good behavior” in prison, when he has failed to do so even while being held under SAMs in New York. Most recently, the government alleges he somehow obtained more CSAM in 2022 while in prison, where he would consume it in his cell after days representing himself in his second trial, the one in which he was convicted of the Espionage Act charges.

Even while Schulte’s family was traveling to attend his trial in 2022, he chose to retreat to his cell to view the child pornography that he had secreted on his prison laptop. (See D.E. 1093-1 at 3-4 (describing examples of times when videos were played).)

And there’s good reason to believe he attempted to — may well have succeeded at — conducting further hacks from prison.

That’s some of what I’ve been pondering since the government first requested that Schulte be treated like four men, including Ames and Hanssen, who gave America’s secrets to Russia rather than giving them to WikiLeaks, as a jury convicted Schulte of doing, by sentencing him to life in prison.

It took years of tradecraft to recruit and cultivate sources like Ames and Hanssen.

Many of the details about what led up to Schulte’s leaks of the CIA’s hacking tools remain unknown — including via what server he shared the files, because WikiLeaks’ submission system could not have accepted them at the time, meaning Schulte necessarily had some kind of contact with WikiLeaks in advance.

But the current story is that Schulte reacted to being disciplined at work fairly directly by stealing and then sharing the CIA hacking tools in one fell swoop. In a matter of days in April and May 2016 (perhaps not coincidentally, the same period when Russian hackers were stealing files from Hillary Clinton’s team), Schulte took steps that burned a significant part of CIA’s capabilities to the ground.

As a result of that reactive decision, Schulte delivered a set of files that would allow their recipients to hunt down CIA’s human sources based off the digital tracks they left in highly inaccessible computers. As I’ve noted, Schulte was well aware of the damage that could do, because he wrote it up in a self-serving narrative after the fact.

I told them the confluence server was the one that seemed to be compromised, and while horrible and damaging at least it wasn’t Stash; At least not at this point–Hopefully they could stop any additional leaks from the network at this point. From the news articles I’ve read, wikileaks claims to have source code, but we don’t know what code or from where. However, at this point, I knew the SOP was a complete stand down on all [redacted] operations. We had no idea what had been leaked, when, for how long, or even who else had seen the materials leaked. Have they been steadily accessing our network every day? Have all our ops been blown since we wrote the first line of code? Perhaps only confluence had been leaked, but the individual(s) responsible are/were planning to exfil the other parts of DEVLAN too? So much still unknown, and with potential (yet unconfirmed) link between wikileaks and Russia–Did the Russians have all the tools? How long? It seems very unlikely that an intelligence service would ever leak a nation’s “cyber weapons” as the media calls them. These tools are MUCH more valuable undiscovered by the media or the nation that lost them. Now, you can secretly trace and discover every operation that nation is conducting. I told them all this was certainly very disturbing and I felt bad for my friends and colleagues at the agency who likely weren’t doing anything and most likely had to completely re-write everything. [my emphasis]

What gets virtually no coverage is that this is precisely what happened: the bulk of the most sensitive files Schulte stole, the source code, has never been publicly accounted for. That’s why I find credible the unsealed and sealed filings submitted with sentencing claiming that Schulte caused what Judge Furman claimed (as reported by Inner City Press) was $300 million in damage and a cascading series of compromises.

Because DOJ couldn’t trade a death sentence in exchange for cooperation about how Schulte did it, as they did with Ames and Hanssen, because digital encryption is much more secure than a dead drop in a Virginia park, it’s not clear whether the government even knows all of it.

I don’t even know what Schulte was trying when he attempted to social engineer me from jail in 2018 — but I have my suspicions.

Later this month, Julian Assange will get a last chance to stave off extradition. I have long suspected if the UK approves the extradition, Russia will attempt to swap Evan Gershkovich for Assange. One way or another, we may learn more about what the US government has learned about the WikiLeaks operation in the 7 years since Schulte was part of one of the most successful, sustained attacks by Russia on the US.

But until then, Schulte will be moving to new long-term accommodations in a highly secure prison.

Scott Brady Admitted He “Was in the Room” for One Partisan Errand; Was There for a Second?

January 18, 2024/9 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, emptywheel, January 6 Insurrection, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

It should surprise no one that in Scott Brady’s deposition before House Judiciary Committee last October, he refused to say whether he believes that voter fraud undermined the 2020 election.

Q Okay. All right. I think we’re almost done. You were U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh through, I think, you said the end of February 2021, correct?

A Correct.

Q So you were there during the 2020 election, correct?

A Yes.

Q Are you aware of allegations that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020?

Mr. [Andrew] Lelling. You’re a little outside the scope.

Q All right. So he’s declining. It’s fine. I’m just making a record. You’re declining to answer?

Mr. Lelling. He’s declining to answer.

Q Are you aware of allegations that President Biden was not fairly elected in 2020?

Mr. Lelling. Same. He’s not going to answer questions on that subject. [] Okay.

Q And do you believe that President Biden was fairly elected in 2020?

Mr. Lelling. He’s not going to answer that question.

This shouldn’t be a surprise because, in 2022, DOJ IG rebuked Brady for impugning a career prosecutor whose spouse signed a letter (also signed by Hunter Biden prosecutor Leo Wise, by the way) calling on Bill Barr to adhere to past practice regarding interference in voter fraud investigations.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) initiated an investigation after receiving a complaint regarding a then U.S. Attorney’s response, during a press conference on an unrelated case, to a reporter’s question about a letter signed by a number of Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSA) that was critical of a voting fraud investigations memorandum issued by then Attorney General William Barr. The complaint alleged that the U.S. Attorney responded to the reporter’s question about whether the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) had signed the letter by personally attacking the AUSA from that USAO who signed the letter.

The OIG investigation substantiated the allegation. The investigation determined that the U.S. Attorney, in response to the reporter’s question, sought to undermine the AUSA’s professional reputation by referencing that the spouse of the AUSA who signed the letter had previously worked for two U.S. Attorneys General of the previous administration, thereby inappropriately suggesting that partisan political considerations motivated the AUSA to sign the letter.

As with much of his testimony before House Judiciary, the Brady comment in question spun the adherence to norms as political interference.

“I can’t comment on any existing investigations,” Brady said. “To the second [question], one of our two district election officers, who was married to the former chief of staff of [Attorneys General] Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, did sign onto that unbeknownst to anyone in leadership before he signed onto that and did not talk about that with his fellow district election officer, who’s also our ethics advisor.”

Nadler’s staffers elicited Brady’s predictable non-answer about whether Joe Biden was fairly elected just as the deposition ended. Perhaps they asked the question to demonstrate Brady’s partisanship if he were ever to testify in impeachment.

But it’s worthwhile background to something Brady said that did shock me — more than his refusal to affirm that Joe Biden was fairly elected President, more than his blasé description of ingesting information from at least one Russian spy to be used in an investigation of Donald Trump’s rival.

Brady, the one-time US Attorney for Pittsburgh, similarly dodged when asked whether he believed that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.

Q Okay. And were you aware of Mr. Giuliani’s claim that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election?

A I don’t believe I was aware of that.

Q Okay. And just were you aware of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia actually interfered in the 2016 Presidential election?

A Wait. Let’s unpack that. So could you ask that again, please?

Q Are you aware of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 Presidential election?

A I am aware of allegations of Russian interference. Conclusive determinations by the entire intelligence community of the United States, I’m not certain, especially in light of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Q Have you read the Mueller report?

A The whole Mueller report? Parts of it. I have read parts of it.

Because of that answer, Nadler’s staffers asked Brady if he was familiar with the Intelligence Community Assessment that Russia had interfered in 2016. After first suggesting that Barr’s stunts to undermine the Mueller investigation had raised doubts for him, Brady then admitted that the office he oversaw had investigated GRU both before and after Mueller did.

Q Okay. And so you don’t have any opinion of whether the findings, the conclusions of this report are true and accurate or not?

A Well, I don’t know what the findings are. I am generally aware of allegations of Russian interference in U.S. elections. My office has investigated Russian investigations I’m sorry. My office has investigated Russian interference in French elections, Georgian elections.

Q Uhhuh.

A So I have no doubt that Russia and other adversaries attempt to interfere in our elections on a regular basis.

Q And you have no evidence to dispute the findings of the Director of National Intelligence in this report?

A Other than what is publicly available given Mr. Mueller’s report and then his appearance before Congress and then General Barr’s disposition of that matter.

Q But you have no personal knowledge. In other words, you have not personally investigated the matter.

A Could I have a moment, please?

[Discussion off the record.]

Mr. Brady. I am aware of this.

Q Uhhuh.

Mr. Brady. The Pittsburgh office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Pennsylvania, had an investigation into the hacking of the DNC.

Q Uhhuh.

Mr. Brady. We were investigating that until it was transmitted to Director Mueller’s office for part of his investigation. So, yes, I am I am aware.

Andrew Weissmann has described that after Mueller’s team started, first Jeanie Rhee and then he asked for a briefing on the investigation into the hack-and-leak, only to discover no one was investigating the dissemination of the stolen documents.

As soon as the Special Counsel’s Office opened up shop, Team R inherited work produced by other government investigations that had been launched before ours: These included the Papadopoulos lead, the National Security Division’s investigation into Russian hacking, and the Intelligence Community’s written assessment on Russian interference.

Ingesting this information was the domain of Team R, and Jeannie had quickly gotten to work untangling and synthesizing the facts. A few weeks after I arrived, I asked attorneys in the National Security Division of the Department of Justice to give me the same briefing they had given Jeannie, so I could familiarize myself with the investigation they’d been conducting into Russian hacking.

The meeting was in a SCIF at Justice’s imposing art deco headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.

[snip]

Because my debriefing with the National Security Division involved classified information, I cannot discuss its content substantively here. It took a couple of hours, as a team of NSD lawyers graciously walked me through what they had been up to and answered all my questions. As soon as I got back to our offices, however, I made a beeline to Jeannie’s office and immediately asked her: “What the fuck?”

“I know,” she said. She didn’t need me to finish my thought.

We had both been shocked by something we’d heard in our briefings—but it was less the substance of the Justice Department’s investigation than its approach. Jeannie knew that she was going to inherit some evidence that Russia had hacked the DNC and DCCC emails, but she was astonished that the National Security Division was not examining what the Russians had done with the emails and other documents they’d stolen from those servers—how the release of that information was weaponized by targeted release, and whether the Russians had any American accomplices. More alarmingly, the Department was not apparently looking beyond the hacking at all, to examine whether there had been other Russian efforts to disrupt the election. It was staggering to us that the Justice Department’s investigation was so narrowly circumscribed. Election interference by a foreign power was, inarguably, a national security issue; we expected the National Security Division to undertake a comprehensive investigation. Once again, Jeannie and I were left to speculate as to whether this lapse was the result of incompetence, political interference, fear of turning up answers that the Department’s political leaders would not like, or all of the above. The Intelligence Community’s investigation had assessed that Russia was behind the hacking, but remained seemingly incurious as to everything else. “The rest is going to be up to us,” Jeannie explained. [my emphasis]

The failures to investigate before Mueller got involved couldn’t have been Brady’s doing. He wasn’t nominated (in the same batch as the Jones Day attorney who represented him here, Andrew Lelling, in his deposition) until after this happened, on September 8, 2017; he wasn’t confirmed until December 14, 2017.

But his answer seems to reflect exposure to the investigation after the fact.

That makes sense, for two reasons. First, in October 2018, his office indicted some of the GRU hackers for their hack of the World Anti-Doping Agency. As I’ve noted in a post comparing the two indictments, that hack used some of the same infrastructure as the DNC hack did, though the WADA indictment adopted a different approach to describing the dissemination of the hacked materials.

Then, weeks before the 2020 election, his office indicted GRU hackers again, focused largely on NotPetya and the hack of the Pyeongchang Olympics, but also including the French and Georgian hacks that Brady mentioned. The primary hacker involved in the French and Georgia hacks, Anatoliy Kovalev was also charged in the DNC indictment.

The 2020 indictment adopted a different approach, a third one, to discussing the dissemination of the stolen files as I describe below.

But those later two indictments are one reason it’s so surprising that Brady would suggest any doubt on the DNC attribution. If you believe what was in the 2018 and 2020 indictments, if you signed your name to them, it’s hard to see how you could doubt the 2018 DNC indictment. They involved some of the same people and infrastructure.

The other reason I was alarmed by Brady’s comment is that he described these GRU indictments, along with the Rudy laundering project and the response to the Tree of Life synagogue attack, as the three events where Brady was in the room for the prosecutorial decisions.

Q Is it unusual for a United States attorney to participate in witness interviews directly, personally?

A No. It depends on the scope and sensitivity of the matter.

Q Okay. And have you, as a U.S. attorney, ever participated in a witness interview in an investigation or matter under your direction?

A As U.S. attorney, I have been involved in many meetings with the line AUSAs and agents, including our Tree of Life prosecution for the synagogue shooting. We had a number of highlevel investigations and indictments of the Russian intelligence directorate of the GRU, and I was in the room and a part of those meetings. I can’t remember if we had a witness interview that I was involved in, but I may have been.

This is where I took notice.

Particularly given my observation that one way in which the Macron hack-and-leak, the French hack Brady mentioned, differed from the DNC indictment released by Mueller is in the claimed failure to discover how the stolen Macron files got disseminated.

The Olympic Destroyer indictment obtained weeks before the election held Kovalev (and the GRU) accountable for the spearphish and communications with some French participants.

27. From on or about April 3, 2017, through on or about May 3, 2017 (during the days leading up to the May 7, 201 7, presidential election in France), the Conspirators conducted seven spearphishing campaigns targeting more than 100 individuals who were members of now-President Macron’s “La Republique En Marche!” (“En Marche!”) political party, other French politicians and high-profile individuals, and several email addresses associated with local French governments. The topics of these campaigns included public security announcements regarding terrorist attacks, email account lockouts, software updates for voting machines, journalist scoops on political scandals, En Marche! press relationships, and En Marchel internal cybersecurity recommendations.

28. KOVALEV participated in some of these campaigns. For example, on or about April 21, 2017, KOVALEV developed and tested a technique for sending spearphishing emails themed around file sharing through Google Docs. KOVALEV then crafted a malware-laced document entitled “Qui_peut_parler_ aux journalists.docx” (which translates to “Who can talk to journalists”) that purported to list nine En Marche! staff members who could talk to journalists about the previous day’s terrorist attack on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. Later that day, the Conspirators used an email account that mimicked the name of then-candidate Macron’s press secretary to send a Google Docs-themed spearphishing email to approximately 30 En Marche! staff members or advisors, which purported to share this document.

29. From on or about April 12, 2017, until on or about April 26, 2017, a GRU-controlled social media account communicated with various French individuals offering to provide them with internal documents from En Marche! that the user(s) of the account claimed to possess.

But it professed utter and complete ignorance about how the stolen documents started to get leaked.

30. On or about May 3 and May 5, 2017, unidentified individuals began to leak documents purporting to be from the En Marche! campaign’s email accounts.

But they weren’t unidentified, at least not all of them! As a DFIR report released 15-months before this indictment laid out, while there was a Latvian IP address that hadn’t been publicly identified at that point (one the FBI surely had some ability to unpack), the American alt-right, including Stone associate Jack Posobiec, made the campaign go viral, all in conjunction with WikiLeaks.

[snip]

MacronLeaks was, openly and proudly, a joint venture between the GRU, far right influencers in Stone’s immediate orbit, and WikiLeaks. It was an attempt to repeat the 2016 miracle that elected Donald Trump, by supporting the Russian-supporting Marine Le Pen by damaging Macron.

That is, one of the three investigations in which Brady said he had a more involved role is the one where an indictment happened not to name the far right figures known to have “colluded” with Russian spook hackers.

On October 19, Scott Brady’s office released an indictment that pulled its punches regarding the Trump boosters who were involved in a Russian hack-and-leak operation. On October 23, his team laundered an uncorroborated accusation of bribery into the Hunter Biden investigation. Then less than a month after that, on November 18, Brady ignored a warning about protected speech and made a baseless accusation of politicization.

Scott Brady thought to raise questions regarding things to which others signed their name. But his HJC testimony raises far more questions about things to which he signed his name.

This post is part of a Ball of Thread I’m putting together before I attempt to explain how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law. See this post for an explanation of my Ball of Thread.

The Non-Visible Networks behind the More Visible Networks of Fascism

January 15, 2024/180 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, emptywheel, January 6 Insurrection, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

There’s an RT posted at the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter account in 2016 that has always puzzled me: a stupid meme, posted on Labor Day, about what unemployed people do on Labor Day.

Virtually all Guccifer 2.0’s other public Tweets served to sustain a cover story about the hack-and-leak operation and its tie to WikiLeaks, disseminate stolen documents, or network with those who might be used to disseminate stolen documents. This RT does not do that — at least not obviously — and it deviates from the BernieBro culture adopted by the Guccifer persona up to that point. It suggests either there was an unseen tie to far right meme culture, or that someone had access to this account who was part of it.

The RT is especially interesting given that three different GRU indictments (DNC, Anti-Doping, Macron Leaks) adopt different approaches in discussing the dissemination of the documents stolen by GRU, which I’ve addressed here and here. In 2016, the Guccifer persona cultivated ties with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and released select files (on Black Lives Matter) to then-Breitbart, future-Sputnik writer Lee Stranahan. By the time of the Macron Leaks in May 2017, Jack Posobiec played an even more central, overt role in the leak part of the operation, via still unidentified Latvian account. But this meme suggests some other tie in real time.

Keep this RT in mind as you read the following discussion, about the extent to which much of what we visibly see in the Republican slide to fascism is just the public manifestation of a far more instrumental and far uglier infrastructure that exists in chat rooms.

Some of what we know about the 2016 state of that infrastructure comes from exhibits introduced at the Douglass Mackey trial. On the very same day Guccifer 2.0 RTed that meme, for example, the trolls in the Madman Twitter DM list were pushing memes to push a narrative, one picked up from Trump, that Hillary Clinton was unwell and might not make the election — a narrative about a Democrat replicated, with far greater success, in this election.

White nationalists plotted in private about how to get minorities to turn on Democrats. They explicitly focused on ways to affect turnout in ways that could swing the election.

As I’ve written here and here, the far right efforts to set a narrative that would (and did) help Trump win the presidency started over a year before the election. Both Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer — the webmaster for Daily Stormer — and Microchip worked hard in early months to professionalize the effort. They planned campaigns that would bridge from reddit, 4Chan, and The Donald onto Twitter, including efforts that started at Daily Stormer. This effort was transnational: the trolls reached back to efforts made during Brexit and looked ahead to EU elections, and planned to build a bigger bot army. They complained about Twitter’s shoddy efforts to moderate and plotted ways to defeat any moderation.

The effort by far right trolls to hijack the virality of Twitter to get mainstream journalists to echo their far right themes had at least two direct ties to Trump’s campaign. Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, whom Microchip alerted when the FBI first came calling, claimed to be part of a Trump campaign Slack, to which he invited others.

More importantly, Don Jr has confessed he was part of this network (curiously, when the Mackey took the stand at trial, he claimed to know nothing about the identities of his unindicted co-conspirators. As I have noted, there’s a troll in that channel who used the moniker P0TUSTrump and whom other trolls called Donald that was pushing hashtags pushing stolen documents on the same days Don Jr was doing so on his eponymous Twitter account. From there, trolls like Microchip made them go viral. If P0TUSTrump is Don Jr, then, it shows that he was a key channel between WikiLeaks through this far right channel to make things go viral.

Between 2016 and 2020, people associated with this far right group orchestrated PizzaGate, may have had a hand in QAnon, and helped disseminated documents stolen by GRU from Emmanuel Macron. PizzaGate and QAnon served as powerful recruiting narratives. I’ve shown how Doug Jensen, the QAnoner who chased Officer Eugene Goodman up the Senate stairs on January 6, went from a lifelong union Democrat to hating Hillary to throwing away his life in QAnon to attacking the Capitol via that process of radicalization. Early prosecutions, at least, suggested that QAnon was actually more successful at getting bodies where they could obstruct the vote certification than the militias.

But even as that cult narrative of QAnon was radicalizing people from all walks of life, the same network was replicating networks of more overtly partisan, paramilitary mobilization.

I suppose I or someone else should draw a network map of this.

But we know that Roger Stone had a Signal list call Friends of Stone, which included among its 47 members Stewart Rhodes, Enrique Tarrio, Ali Alexander, and Owen Shroyer, along with anti-vaxxers, Bundyists, Mike Flynn associate Ivan Raiklin, and longtime aides Jacobs Engels and Tyler Ziolkowski (who, along with Tarrio, were both implicated in the meme targeting Amy Berman Jackson during Stone’s prosecution).

Both Rhodes and Tarrio ran parallel sets of communication leading up to the insurrection — more public, accessible communications, and more select lists (on Signal in Rhodes’ case and on Telegram in Tarrio’s) that planned for the operation. Unlike Twitter, Signal and Telegram would only be accessible to law enforcement after exploiting the phones on which they were used, and only then if the comms hadn’t been successfully deleted.

Tarrio would also be networked into the Latinos for Trump group, along with Bianca Gracia and Oath Keeper Kellye SoRelle, with whom he visited the White House in December 2020 and both of whom were present for the parking garage meeting Tarrio had with Rhodes on January 5, 2021. One court filing submitted in advance of the trial of the cop who allegedly tipped off Tarrio to his arrest shows Tarrio also has a “Christian Nationalist” group that officer Shane Lamond joined on November 9, 2020. Another filing shows how Lamond warned Tarrio about investigations into Harry’s Bar and the Proud Boys organizing on Parler.

Ali Alexander and Brandon Straka provided the January 6 Committee (entirely unreliable) descriptions of the all-important Stop the Steal threads on which Alexander organized — first — early mob scenes at state capitols and then events around January 6 itself (though unlike Alexander, who fully attributed getting the brand from Roger Stone, Straka disclaimed knowledge of all that). Straka did acknowledge that Paul Gosar had ties to the Stop the Steal effort. The sentencing memorandum for Alan Hostetter, a key player in the SoCal anti-vax community with ties to 3Percenters, actually contacted Alexander on December 16, 2020, to suggest Stop the Steal organize a rally for January 6, though it’s not clear via what channel he knew him. While the leaders of the Stop the Steal effort were on Twitter until a late move to Signal (again, if we can believe unreliable J6C testimony), it spawned a massive viral effort on other platforms, including Facebook.

In addition to being the big draw for the donation from Publix heir Julie Fancelli, Alex Jones has his own media infrastructure. Organizers claim some percentage — a fifth or a third — of those at the Capitol were there for Jones, not Trump. Like Alexander, he also mobilized the earlier mobs in the states.

It’s not entire clear how Baked Alaska continues to fit into this network. But in order to avoid felony charges (as Straka had earlier), he reportedly agreed to share the kind of network information that would further elucidate these networks.

And that network of lists and threads maps onto this one, the list of people who, in 2020, were the most effective at spreading disinformation on Twitter.

We just don’t know via what chat rooms and threads they map, who else is in that map, and what international ties they have.

What kind of chat rooms did Don Jr inhabit, four years after he networked with Douglass Mackey, that helped him direct a broader network to make false claims go viral? Today, as Ric Grenell — Trump’s troll turned Ambassador to Germany turned Acting Director of National Intelligence — returns from supporting a coup attempt in Guatemala, what international networks was he mobilizing?

I’m always most fascinated by the role of Mike Roman on this list, punching well above his modest Twitter following of 29,610 people. Roman, a charged co-conspirator in Trump’s Georgia indictment, is claiming Fani Willis has a conflict arising from a personal relationship with one of the prosecutors she brought in for the case. He’s often thought of someone who ferried documents from fake electors around, but before that he was a kind of internal intelligence service for Trump targeting Republicans, and before that, the Kochs. Like Grenell, he has branched out to push far right policies internationally, in Canada. None of those activities, however, explain what chat rooms he was in that allowed him to help spread the Big Lie in 2020. They must exist, and yet they’re not yet visible.

Mike Roman is one of the Trump associates whose phone DOJ seized before Jack Smith was appointed. To the extent he didn’t delete them, that should disclose his networks to prosecutors.

As I noted above, increasingly, these networks have moved to platforms, especially Telegram and Signal, that are harder to investigate, particularly without advance notice. It took years (starting before January 6, with the seizure of Tarrio’s phone, which nevertheless took a full year to exploit) before the government had collected at least three sets of the Friends of Stone list.

That’s true even though some network effect — whether including anyone named here or not — likely explains a swatting campaign that has targeted:

While not all targets are seen as adversaries of Trump, or even Democrats, his top adversaries have been targeted. The swatting campaign is, at a minimum, terrorism (and could be part of a campaign to do real violence).

And there’s a non-zero chance that behind it is the same kind of non-visible infrastructure the far right has been professionalizing for a decade.

My effort to describe how Trump trained the Republican party to hate rule of law will describe the visible aspects of that effort. But behind it all, these non-visible networks form an integral part of the effort.

Update: Took out reference to Pepe.