Preliminary Comments on Rudy and Lev Warrants

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In the last few months, NYT asked to and did liberate the warrants in the Lev Parnas investigation and the expansion of the investigation into Rudy Giuliani on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job.

The Rudy warrants are very tidy. They include:

The Parnas warrants are a godawful mess — the digital equivalent of someone throwing 1,000 pages incorporating 30 or so documents on the floor, intermixing them all, thereby confusing where one document begins and the next ends. Here’s what just half look like: SDNY repeatedly split affidavits across multiple documents.

Bad words have been said in the Wheeler home today as a result.

Very bad words. And loudly.

For now, these two affidavits regarding Parnas provide a key introduction:

  • February 28, 2020: This warrant affidavit regarding Fraud Guarantee — the only ongoing investigation after Barr intervened to shut down any investigation into Rudy and after Parnas agreed to cooperate with impeachment — summarizes many if not all of the earlier warrants targeting Parnas.
  • December 10, 2019: This warrant, for Parnas’ Instagram account, is (for the moment) the most intact warrant describing the investigation as it was before Barr shut down any natural development. Temporally, it ends with a description of Trump’s perfect phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

I suspect the Parnas docket may look like it does to obscure what happened to the investigation when Barr intervened. Notably, while both sets of warrants make it clear that the Bidens were part of the project, there is much less focus on it in the Rudy warrants.

All that said, reviewing the Rudy affidavit, I have zero doubt — zero — that this affidavit was intended to obtain content for more than just the Foreign Agent investigation into Rudy. I was always confident that DOJ had set up that possibility (relatedly, former DOJ spox Anthony Coley pointed to this Politico story as proof that Garland nay-sayers have always been wrong), but there are several signs in this affidavit (which I’ll return to) that was the idea.

That said, as I reported, many of the devices seized with the Rudy warrant were corrupted, making them useless for any investigation.

37 replies
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  2. Peterr says:

    Bad words have been said in the Wheeler home today as a result.

    Very bad words. And loudly.

    Bad words, out of the mouth of Marcy “Pottymouth” Wheeler?

    No one could have anticipated . . .

      • Peterr says:

        Indeed.

        Live on MSNBC, no less.

        From bmaz, back in the day:

        Blowjob. There, I said it. And I am the second person on this blog to do so!! Now, I dunno if y’all have heard tell or not, but my friend, The Most Right Prim & Proper Ms. Marcy Wheeler, done gone and upset the delicate sensibilities of the Ms. Vanderbilt Ladies Couch Fainting Association, or at least Tam. Hall division thereof, into a bit of the vapors.

        Goodness now, what shall we do? Well, it turns out, if you are in the media, you want to cluck cluck that a modern woman might use the term “blowjob” on cable TeeVee. Oh my, It does make one faint, eh? This is delicate tripe coming from a woman employed by a network making its bones on the Bill Clinton prurient diversion.

  3. Peterr says:

    Your description of the Parnas warrants sounds like what modern biblical scholars have to deal with, when they come across a pile of ancient manuscripts that have been jumbled together.

    I suspect the Parnas docket may look like it does to obscure what happened to the investigation when Barr intervened.

    I agree, and would also say that your use of “I suspect” is being generous. Taking backbearings off of the docs, if possible, could lead back to some very enlightening evidence that might induce similarly loud outbursts of . . . ahem . . . colorful language at the Barr household. Very colorful language.

    • emptywheel says:

      It’s actually not going to be that hard, bc I know what to look for.

      Just time consuming. I guess NYT could ask SDNY to clean up their work? It’s inexcusable, but I guess a good way to dissuade anyone but me.

      • sohelpmedog says:

        I know these documents are not shredded, just scrambled, but there is a software program called the Unshredder that claims to be able to put shredded documents back to how they were before being shred. I don’t know if this would help here and it probably costs a million dollars.

    • gruntfuttock says:

      It sounds like they invoked the ghost of William Burroughs to obscure the actualite but I’m sure that’s no barrier to Marcy’s reading and memory skills. Never mind the awesome powers of her pottymouth :-)

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      Sounds like 52-card pickup. I spent time, so to speak, as a newbie pouring through documents some white shoe law firm had done the same thing to in civil litigation. It was a meat puzzle. But as a newbie, it meant meeting billable hours requirements was no problemo.

      • theartistvvv says:

        Working on a murder case now, was just advised the state turned over some 320+ *gigs* of discovery, much of it images of texts which likely can’t be OCR’d (so non-searchable).

        I’m hoping the recipient counted wrong, altho’ he said it’s on multiple DVD’s, 15+ …

        But we are likely about a year from trial, I’m told.

  4. 2Cats2Furious says:

    I’m still confounded by the allegations – re: both Rudy’s devices and Hunter’s “laptop” – that the FBI is allegedly incapable of making forensic images of the devices before attempting to analyze them.

    As a civil litigator, whenever I had a case involving electronically-stored information (ESI), the very first thing I would do is to have a 3rd-party vendor make forensic images of the devices at issue, whether they were a computer, phone, USB drives, etc. Any subsequent analysis was done on copies of the forensic images, so as not to disturb the original data or metadata from the devices.

    Anything else qualifies as potential spoliation of evidence. Either certain FBI agents don’t know what they’re doing, or some folks are lying.

      • 2Cats2Furious says:

        It’s certainly possible that there were “compromised” FBI agents, who subsequently “compromised” the data by not getting forensic images of devices made first.

        But it still baffles me. Having forensic images made of devices that may be used in investigations should be part of FBI 101.

  5. Sussex Trafalgar says:

    Another example of a premeditated Bill Barr clusteryuck!

    Thanks for trying to untangle the web he weaved.

  6. OneFineMonster says:

    For the cerebrally ungifted readers like myself, can someone make clear what point these findings indicate regarding whether there is an ongoing investigation into Rudy? Or is the mentioning of corrupted devices inferring that these investigations are dead in the water?

    • emptywheel says:

      The FARA investigation ended with no charges but there’s no reason to believe that Rudy got a declination letter. So it may have morphed. But one point I make above, this warrant is a bit of a front for other warrants. So it’s unclear what happened with those investigations.

      • timbozone says:

        Close to the SOL though on much of his criming at this point… may he at least end up in the poor house for having attempting to subvert the lawful transfer of power in 2020-21.

        • emptywheel says:

          Much of it is legally very difficult to approach. Normally he’d be a cinch to charge with acting as a foreign agent. But since Bill Barr not only KNEW he was parroting stuff from Russian spies, but had set up a special accommodation for him to do so, you can’t charge him (which is sort of what Rudy said when they searched him).

          If it is provable that Rudy conspired to hack Hunter Biden, that would be chargeable through 2025.

  8. ShallMustMay08 says:

    Why I read the “dry”. Nice.

    Years ago when Nixon and his gang did his/their crap I was young but aware. No choice but wait for tell all books or until government papers.

    So appreciate this. Good times. I hope we endure as a country.

    Thank you (from someone who can’t/won’t purchase the tell all books and will be long dead for the government papers).

    Happy Holidays to all.

    • emptywheel says:

      That’s the thing. It could be him. It could be friends with the ability to corrupt from afar. It could be corrupt FBI Agents.

      We CAN’T in this case rule out the FBI corrupting it, bc every other single thing about this story is corrupt.

  10. ShallMustMay08 says:

    Without conflating the political vs tech skill of FBI folks, I am reminded of the interview on C-Span – After Words, with Kyle Cheney and Ryan Reilly for Sedition Hunters from Oct of this year (23). It wasn’t confidence inspiring but you would think they’d put their best on the HB case not because he’s a regular citizen but exactly because he is not.

    Worth a listen all around. Like Nichole and Marcy’s weekly talk filling in nitty things that likely matter.

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