Lefty Pundits Absolve Their Own Failures on Holding Trump Accountable for His Coup
Let me start this post with a quiz.
Who are the two Trump associates newly treated as co-conspirators in the October 2024 immunity brief?
Yes, Trump Is Trying to Prevent the Release of Jack Smith’s Report
As I have expected, Trump is trying to prevent the release of Jack Smith’s report. Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira asked Judge Cannon (who, unless I’m mistaken it, does not retain jurisdiction over the case) to prevent Smith from releasing the volume pertaining to the stolen documents. And that filing includes a long screed from Todd Blanche asking Merrick Garland to fire Jack Smith so he doesn’t do what Special Counsels do.
Among the other things Blanche complains about is that the report includes details on people expected to be part of Trump’s Administration. And that Xitter stalled its response to a warrant.
Equally problematic and inappropriate are the draft’s baseless attacks on other anticipated members of President Trump’s incoming administration, which are an obvious effort to interfere with upcoming confirmation hearings, and Smith’s pathetically transparent tirade about good-faith efforts by X to protect civil liberties, which in a myriad other contexts you have claimed are paramount.
As I keep mentioning, some of this will implicate Kash Patel. Hell, some of it may implicate Blanche himself.
As I have suggested, Garland may have been trying to release both this and the David Weiss report after Wednesday’s sentencing of Alexander Smirnov — so possibly the 10th. We’ll see whether Garland tries to get the documents part of the report out before Cannon tries to intervene.
Update: Jack Smith responded to the Florida motion.
The Special Counsel’s Office is working to finalize a two-volume confidential report to the Attorney General explaining the Special Counsel’s prosecution decisions. See 28 C.F.R. § 600.8(c). The Attorney General will decide whether any portion of the report should be released to the public. See 28 C.F.R. § 600.9(c). One volume of the report pertains to this case. The Attorney General has not yet determined how to handle the report volume pertaining to this case, about which the parties were conferring at the time the defendants filed the Motion, but the Department can commit that the Attorney General will not release that volume to the public, if he does at all, before Friday, January 10, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. The Special Counsel will not transmit that volume to the Attorney General before 1:00 p.m. on January 7, 2025. The Government will file a response to the defendants’ Motion no later than January 7, 2025, at 7:00 p.m.
Update: Aileen Cannon has enjoined DOJ from releasing the report at all. This wildly exceeds her authority and makes it more likely that it’ll come out under Presidential immunity.
Meanwhile, David Weiss plans to release a report under the same authority some time after Wednesday.
On January 6
Aquilino Gonell had this to say in a NYT column.
I never wanted to be a whistle-blower or a troublemaker. I grew up poor in the Dominican Republic, came to this country legally at age 12 and became the first in my family to finish high school and college. I lived in Brooklyn, just a few miles from where Mr. Trump grew up in Queens, yet the metaphoric distance between us was vast. My dad was a taxi driver who could give me only $100 to help pay for college. Mr. Trump’s father was a real estate developer who bequeathed him at least $413 million over the years. While Mr. Trump escaped the Vietnam draft with a medical exemption for bone spurs and never served in the military, I finished my degree with the help of the G.I. Bill after I enlisted and served in the Middle East. What I experienced defending the Capitol against rioters was worse than the combat I saw in Iraq.
[snip]
Although I don’t blame all Trump supporters — some of my own relatives support him — I do detest what MAGA extremism did to me and my team on Jan. 6. I resent the ongoing whitewashing of the barbarity and the collective amnesia of right-wing politicians who aren’t willing to hold Mr. Trump accountable. I can’t bear to hear Republicans describe themselves as the “law and order” party.
Mr. Trump is returning to the presidency at 78, while I had to leave the career I’d worked for my whole life at 42 as a result of injuries suffered while doing my job. I sometimes wonder why I risked my life to defend our elected officials from a mob inspired by Mr. Trump, only to see him return to power stronger than ever. It’s hard to witness a rich white man get rewarded for treachery while I’m punished for fulfilling my duty. Maybe that’s why so many people don’t do the right thing — because it’s hard and it hurts.
Michael Fanone shared some bitterness with Brandi Buchman.
Fanone said his experience as a police officer has taught him that accountability is what actually keeps people in line. The threat of going to jail, he said, or the threat of monetary fines can be meaningful deterrents.
But now, he said, “we have a situation where, openly, a political party says, ‘If you’re with us, there’s no accountability.’ That’s proven with those promises for pardons. Just be a Trump supporter, and ’we got your back,” Fanone said. “Well, that’s not fucking law and order.”
[snip]
Today, Fanone said he’s looking for work and often is told that he’s a hero and that he’s loved.
But, he said, he’s also told by prospective employers that they don’t want “potential workplace distraction” or “fallout” and are worried that they too will be targeted simply because they employ him.
Turning to the future, Fanone said he “doesn’t think so highly of myself to impart some life lesson on the American people,” but he could share, unfiltered, what he’s learned in the last four years.
“I no longer believe in American exceptionalism. I certainly did before Jan. 6. I don’t any longer. I think there’s a lot of decent Americans ― I’ve served with them in the police department, known them in the military and in other areas, that are deeply devoted to this country and the Constitution and to just being decent humans. But I don’t think those are the prevailing characteristics of the average American. I think the average American is cowardly and selfish.”
I linked this yesterday, but NYT’s report on how Trump retconned January 6 is quite good.
Don Moynihan describes all the Republican failures to hold Trump to account.
There was nothing inevitable about where we are today. In key moments key Republicans said, essentially, that Jan. 6 was not a big deal, or even a positive event. It is hard not to conclude that the people who occupy key institutions in newer democracies were simply less willing to take those democracies for granted. By contrast, American democracy seems to be of such little value to many of its leaders that they did nothing to defend it.
Merrick Garland pays tribute to the investigators who’ve fought for accountability for January 6.
The public servants of the Justice Department have sought to hold accountable those criminally responsible for the January 6 attack on our democracy with unrelenting integrity. They have conducted themselves in a manner that adheres to the rule of law and honors our obligation to protect the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone in this country.
Tom Joscelyn and Norm Eisen catalog Kash Patel’s conspiracy theories about January 6.
The role that the Proud Boys played instigating the January 6th attack has long been known. There is no credible evidence that suggests they were somehow duped into storming the Capitol. Yet Patel has repeatedly attempted to shift blame away from then President Donald Trump and rightwing extremists and onto the FBI.
For instance, Patel advocated for this conspiracy theory during a March 2023 interview with rightwing YouTuber Tim Pool. Brandishing his law enforcement credentials, Patel explained how he and others could “defeat the insurrection narrative” by pointing to the presence of FBI informants on January 6th.
“I think, as a former federal prosecutor and a public defender who defended a lot of these types of cases, what you need to show is whether or not the FBI and government agents were using undercover operatives and informants on the day of January 6th,” Patel said. Patel implied that the FBI’s conspiracy was long in the making, arguing it takes “a six-month buildup” at a minimum to place operatives or informants in extremist groups.
CNN confirms earlier NYT reporting that prosecutors chased leads between Trump and the crime scene in 2021, which ended up being dry holes. (Note, CNN gets the dates on overt grand jury activity wrong: subpoenas started going out in May 2022 and the Executive Privilege fight began in June 2022.)
Gravity and Trump’s Conspiracy Cabinet
This paragraph, describing the role that aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel played in Trump’s video collaboration with a bunch of mostly-violent Jan6ers, appears about two thirds of the way through a very good NYT review of how Trump has rewritten the history of January 6.
Mr. Trump recorded his contribution at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, while the choir was recorded with a phone in the Washington jail. The song — a fund-raising effort that the Trump loyalist Kash Patel, now the president-elect’s nominee to head the F.B.I., helped produce — concludes with a defiant echo of the “U.S.A.!” chants that resounded during the Jan. 6 attack.
Kash Patel has been central to the success of Trump’s repackaging of his own crimes as grievance from the start.
And I’ve been trying to figure out how that’ll work as I contemplate what I think of as Trump’s Conspiracy Cabinet.
I’ve been thinking of his nominations as a combination of a highly competent Christian nationalist core (led by Stephen Miller and Russ Vought), largely filled out with people who’ll be in the business of graft and other kinds of corruption — whether for their own benefit or Trump’s. But the most unpredictable element is how Trump plans to fill government with embodiments of the conspiracies that have become central to his movement.
That’s most evident in virtually of Trump’s health-related appointments, starting with Bobby Kennedy (who might yet lose his confirmation battle). I don’t, for a second, believe the claim from someone adjacent to Roger Stone that Trump picked RFK and Tulsi Gabbard as a way to tap into a realignment of Democrats. Rather, Trump had to appoint them to keep the likes of Matthew Livelsberger , who invoked RFK in his manifesto, engaged, no matter the cost. And so after having presided over a heroic rush to develop a COVID vaccine in his first term, Trump will hand over America’s scientific crown jewels to people who don’t believe in science.
What will happen when these conspiracists confront the immutable laws of science? What will happen when gravity hits?
And how many children will die as a result?
The damage that Tulsi will be able to do (again, her confirmation is not assured) at National Intelligence is more measurable. US intelligence has been politicized for years. Forever. Such politicization as often as not cause self-perpetuating scandal cycles. And if not, Bad Things will likely result that will harm the US and lead to avoidable catastrophes that Trump should own.
It’s the damage posed by Kash’s likely installation at FBI — he has a better shot at confirmation than either RFK or Tulsi — that I can’t fully grok.
Back in the halcyon days of the Durham investigation, I came to believe that gravity would defeat these grievance myths, would defeat the kinds of conspiracies Kash sows, too. Even with Durham, Kash helped facilitate the false claims Durham spun out of theories of conspiracy hung on two false statements indictments. A key prong of the Sussmann prosecution — into what he said to the CIA in January 2017 — arose out of a question Kash somehow knew to ask on December 18, 2017. Then, after Durham deliberately misrepresented legitimate intelligence that Georgia Tech discovered dating to the Obama Administration to insinuate that Trump had been spied on, Kash made a number of unhinged claims to expand on Durham’s already false claim.
But the oddest statement came from “Former Chief Investigator for Russia Gate [sic]” and current key witness to an attempted coup, Kash Patel, sent out by the fake Think Tank that hosts some of the former Trumpsters most instrumental in covering up for Trump corruption.
Taken literally (which one should not do because it is riddled with false claims), the statement is a confession by Kash that he knew of what others are calling “spying” on Trump and did nothing to protect the President.
Let’s start, though, by cataloguing the false claims made by a man who played a key role in US national security for the entirety of the Trump Administration.
First, he claims that the Hillary Campaign, “ordered … lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.” Thus far, Durham has made no claims about any orders coming from the Hillary Campaign (and the claim that there were such orders conflicts with testimony that Kash himself elicited as a Congressional staffer). The filing in question even suggests Perkins Coie may be upset about what Sussmann is alleged to have done.
Latham – through its prior representation of Law Firm-1 – likely possesses confidential knowledge about Law Firm-1’s role in, and views concerning, the defendant’s past activities.
In fact, in one of the first of a series of embarrassing confessions in this prosecution, Durham had to admit that Sussmann wasn’t coordinating directly with the Campaign, as alleged in the indictment.
Kash then claims that “Durham states that Sussmann and Marc Elias (Perkins Coie) … hired .. Rodney Joffe … to establish an ‘inference and narrative’ tying President Trump to Russia.” That’s false. The indictment says the opposite: Joffe was paying Perkins Coie, not the other way around. Indeed, Durham emphasized that Joffe’s company was paying Perkins Coie a lot of money. And in fact, Durham shows that the information-sharing also went the other way. Joffe put it together and brought it to Perkins Coie. Joffe paid Perkins Coie and Joffe brought this information to them.
Kash then claims that “Durham writes that he has evidence showing Joffe and his company were able to infiltrate White House servers.” Kash accuses the Hillary Campaign of “mastermind[ing] the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later President.” This betrays either real deceit, or ignorance about the most basic building blocks of the Internet, because nowhere does Durham claim that Joffe “infiltrated” any servers. Durham, who himself made some embarrassing technical errors in his filing, emphasizes that this is about DNS traffic. And while he does reveal that Joffe “maintain[ed] servers for the EOP,” that’s not infiltrating. These claims amount to a former AUSA (albeit one famously berated by a judge for his “ineptitude” and “spying”) accusing a conspiracy where none has been charged, at least not yet. Plus, if Joffe did what Kash claims starting in July 2016, as Kash claims, then Barack Obama would be the one with a complaint, not Trump.
Finally, Kash outright claims as fact that Joffe “exploited proprietary data, to hack Trump Tower and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.” This claim is not substantiated by anything Durham has said and smacks of the same kind of conspiracy theorizing Louise Mensch once engaged in. Only, in this case, Kash is accusing someone who has not been charged with any crime — indeed, a five year statute of limitation on this stuff would have expired this week — of committing a crime. Again: a former AUSA, however inept, should know the legal risk of doing that.
Curiously, Kash specifies that the White House addresses involved were in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. That could well be true, but Durham only claims they were associated with EOP, and as someone who worked there, Kash should know that one is a physical structure and the other is a bureaucratic designation. But to the extent Kash (who has flubbed basic Internet details already) believes this amounted to hacking the EOP, it is based off non-public data.
So, like I said, the piece is riddled with false claims, but with two claims that go beyond anything Durham has said.
This one-two punch — first Durham misrepresenting evidentiary claims and then Kash spinning Durham’s misrepresentations free of all mooring — resulted in Trump making death threats targeting Sussmann and an entire campaign targeting Rodney Joffe.
But in the end, even though Durham’s lawyers repeatedly defied Judge Christopher Cooper’s orders, they ultimately mostly failed to present the theory of conspiracy they had about Sussmann’s alleged false statement. Sussmann, after paying superb lawyers a bunch of money, having his career disrupted, and facing death threats ginned up by the former President, was acquitted.
The process worked, but not before a great many people’s lives were upended, irrevocably.
So even though only NYT joined me, in exposing the degree to which a theory of conspiracy, and not any real evidence, lay behind Durham’s insinuations of guilt, even though the legacy media chased Durham’s theory of conspiracy hook line and sinker, I at least believed that the system would work.
The Hunter Biden prosecution has disabused me of that faith. Between the fact that Hunter really did evade taxes — the presence of a crime that could substitute for all the unsubstantiated claims about him — and the way a multi-year revenge porn campaign solidified the legacy media belief he was too icky for due process, prosecutors continue to make outlandish claims with little pushback, much less curiosity about why a witness to a crime is overseeing the investigation into it.
As FBI Director Kash will have the ability to do what he did in advance of the Sussmann hearing, find some nugget, tangential to any topic at hand, on which to hand a larger conspiracy theory.
Amid all the focus on Trump naming his defense team to run DOJ, there has been little focus on the fact that Emil Bove, whom he named to PADAG (even though the position doesn’t require confirmation and once confirmed as DAG, Todd Blanche could presumably put anyone he wants in the position), presided over a serious discovery violation scandal at SDNY, which forced him out of DOJ. If judges continue to hold DOJ to already weak discovery requirements, due process might survive. But if DOJ institutionally permits prosecutors to ignore their ethical guidelines, it will become far, far easier to frame defendants.
And the press has simply stopped reporting on due process, choosing instead to chase whatever dick pics propagandists unpack in front of them.
Kash Patel earned his nomination to be FBI Director by being the self-described wizard of Trump’s grievance myth. He has done such a tremendous job spinning that myth that even some good faith Republican Senators believe that myth as true.
And while I’m sure that gravity will eventually catch up to RFK Jr, as it did in Samoa, while I have every expectation to continue doing what I do, if only to witness further assaults on due process, I’m far less sanguine about gravity’s effect on a Kash-run Bureau.
On the Ambivalence of Speaker Mike’s Gavel
Mike Johnson was reaffirmed Speaker yesterday.
The how matters. In what would have been the first vote, six people did not vote and three voted for other candidates, for a total of nine people opposing Johnson. The number is significant because the new rules require nine people to call to replace the Speaker (right wingers sent out a letter of complaints about Johnson signed by 11 members, so they have a few friends). So before the vote was cast, the right wingers demanding austerity from Johnson made a show of having the ability to immediately call to replace him.
At that point, Hakeem Jeffries had 214 votes, Johnson 210, others 3, and 6 people wandering the halls.
Then, basically, Republicans cheated to keep the vote open for two hours. They hid the “tellers,” who have to tell the Acting Clerk what their vote totals, off the floor, so the vote could not be called.
Meanwhile, the six holdouts spoke to Trump, who exhorted them that Johnson was the only person with the “likability” to get his, Trump’s, policies approved. Eventually, the six no votes registered for Johnson, two of the three “other” votes flipped. And Mike Johnson got the required 218 votes.
So: cheating and fealty to Trump will get Trump through to Monday where he’ll be declared President.
Lots of stories on this want to determine what it all means and I think the most important takeaway is we don’t know. Mike Johnson could build on cheating and blind fealty to Trump to go anywhere from here.
The hardliners made it clear — in the way they delivered their votes — they are disciplined yesterday. What’s not clear are whether Main Streeters (what might be called moderates if they weren’t just a different kind of right wing) could be equally disciplined if it came to it. I doubt they can. That’s when you’ll see the same carrots and mob-based threats we saw during the Jim Jordan fight.
Thus far, Jeffries has managed his caucus impeccably. Going forward, staying unified in opposition, in contrast to what Dems did last Congress (where they usually kept the lights on with a minority of Republicans), may be a tougher battle.
The question is how coming challenges will stress the very fragile unity Johnson won today.
Monday’s vote certification should be uneventful. Kamala Harris can put herself out of a job without a terrorist attack to threaten it.
Then Congress has to raise the debt limit. This is actually an area where there could be sharp disagreement between the hardliners in Congress and Trump, because they [think they] really want to cut US debt, whereas Trump wants no limits on his spending powers. Johnson will be completely dependent on Trump, so he’ll likely try to raise the debt ceiling. But there’s no reason for Democrats to help him do that.
If, as I wildarse guess, Brad Weinsheimer fancies delivering up both Jack Smith and David Weiss Special Counsel reports around January 10, those reports may create chaos as well. As I’ve said, I think Weiss wants to smear up Biden, and Republicans could well be tempted to impeach him on his way out of dodge.
Short term Republican hopes are that they’ll be able to achieve much of their policy goals through reconciliation (which cannot be filibustered in the Senate). But that’s already a bone of contention.
A lot of the reviews of the vote have focused on how little Johnson has to manage the Freedom Caucus. And many Freedom Caucus members are stupid and believe that Jim Jordan could get the gavel — and with enough coercion from Trump, they might be right.
But what we know least going forward is how tensions between Trump and those right wingers will play out, the degree to which he’ll be able to coerce or con his way out of them, and the degree to which the few sane Republicans left will want to stick around and watch all that.
Leo Wise Buries Bill Barr with Six Year Sentencing Recommendation
To be absolutely clear, David Weiss’s lead prosecutor Leo Wise did not bury Bill Barr with a recommendation that Bill Barr be sentenced to six years in prison for framing Joe Biden.
No.
Leo Wise argued that Alexander Smirmov should be sentenced to six years in prison for (in addition to cheating on his taxes over three years) providing a false claim that Mykola Zlochevsky had bribed Joe Biden via the side channel that Bill Barr set up in the wake of Trump’s search for bribery allegations against Joe Biden.
In 2020, Smirnov and his willingness to make false claims about Donald Trump’s opponent were magically discovered by a team Barr ordered Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady to convene. After that team magically discovered Smirnov, the FBI magically failed basic vetting, such that they took travel records showing no evidence Smirnov took trips he claimed to have taken and, from those, declared his travel records corroborated his claims.
Remember, vetting was, if you believe in magic, the entire point of the Brady side channel!
That would have been the end of things. Except then, one after another Republican kept magically rediscovering Smirnov’s false claim, each time using it as an excuse to ratchet up further investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden.
That happened in October 2020 after Donald Trump yelled at Bill Barr. That happened in May 2023. That happened in June 2023. And that happened when Leo Wise decided to chase the allegation in July 2023.
And in his sentencing memo, Leo Wise has argued that Smirnov should be punished with six years in prison because of Scott Brady and Bill Barr and Jamie Comer and Jim Jordan and Donald Trump and Leo Wise’s lust to pursue a claim that Joe Biden took a bribe.
Before I get into the story Wise tells to get there, check out how his sentencing recommendation compares to Charles McGonigal’s, who in addition to lying on FBI disclosure forms in order to hide that he had a side foreign partner paying him $225,000, like Smirnov, caused a false investigation to be filed against someone (the rival of McGonigal’s Albanian partner).
The left column is sentencing guidelines mumbo jumbo, but what you need to know is that prosecutors were arguing sentences for the same base level crime, 18 USC 1519 (altering a document) with a baseline of 14 points. Both were slapped with enhancements because their false claims led the government to take investigative steps (more on that below). Leo Wise argued that non-employee FBI informant Smirnov should get the same penalty for abusing his position of trust, 2 points, as a NY Field Office Special Agent in Charge (though that may be the only available enhancement). Then on top of the enhancements McGonigal got for hiding his side business from the FBI and investigating his partner’s rival, Wise argued Smirnov should get 2 points for how important the document is, and then first 3 and then another 2 points for framing a former Vice President during a Presidential election and also because his document was used again while Biden was President, including when Leo Wise decided to chase it.
One way you can tell this whole sentencing process — likely this whole plea deal — is a sham, is that Smirnov’s excellent attorneys didn’t do the analysis I just did (to say nothing of comparing Smirnov to Kevin Clinesmith, who altered an FBI email and whose victim was a former Trump campaign aide, yet got probation), showing that Leo Wise wants to punish Smirnov more aggressively than a guy who sold out the FBI and also caused a false investigation to be opened. The comparators Smirnov’s excellent attorneys invoked all involve people who got probation for conduct similar to Smirnov’s (but again, mysteriously not Clinesmith). Even if you assume Smirnov should go to prison for framing Joe Biden, though, it’s hard to see how his betrayal is worse than McGonigal’s.
Another way we can tell the whole sentencing process is a sham is that, as I speculated, the 4-6 year sentencing included in the deal was totally arbitrary, probably intended to serve some other purpose, maybe frame Joe Biden? Turns out even with all those enhancements, Leo Wise still only got to a 57 to 71 month range, but that didn’t stop him from asking for 72 months anyway. The range was, indeed, not based on guidelines, nor is it yet.
Which is where we finally get to the story Leo Wise told about all this, and ultimately to where he has hidden Bill Barr, the guy who ordered up the side channel that magically found a way to frame Joe Biden and then, in 2023, who made claims about the process with the result that the same Smirnov claim ended up framing Joe Biden a second time.
Leo Wise tells the story of how this all went down twice. The first time (in the section laying out Smirnov’s crime), he mostly stuck to what Wise put in the indictment, starting with the Brady side channel, to which Wise adds the letter to Jerry Nadler intended for public consumption, attributing the side channel to Jeffrey Rosen, not the guy mentioned in Trump’s perfect phone call who ordered Brady to open the side channel and to whom Brady personally reported on it.
In June 2020, the Handler reached out to the Defendant concerning the 2017 1023. Obstruction of Justice Indictment (Exhibit 2) ¶ 22. This was done at the request of the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office (hereafter “FBI Pittsburgh”). Id. In the first half of 2020, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania (hereafter “USAO WDPA”) had been tasked by the Deputy Attorney General of the United States to assist in the “receipt, processing, and preliminary analysis of new information provided by the public that may be relevant to matters relating to Ukraine.” Id.; see also February 18, 2020 Letter to The Honorable Jerrold Nadler (Exhibit 8). As part of that process, FBI Pittsburgh opened an assessment, 58A-PG-3250958, and in the course of that assessment identified the 2017 1023 in FBI holdings and shared it with USAO WDPA. Id. USAO WDPA then asked FBI Pittsburgh to reach out to the Handler to ask for any further information about the reference in his 2017 1023 that stated, “During this call, there was a brief, non-relevant discussion about former [Public Official1]’s son, [Businessperson 1], who is currently on the Board of Directors for Burisma Holdings [No Further Information]”. Id.
From there, Wise vaguely describes how, in July 2023, the FBI asked the people who were already investigating Hunter Biden to look into the Smirnov allegation, mentioning as well that, having magically gotten a copy of the 1023, Charles Grassley released it on a date Leo Wise chooses not to include: July 20, 2023.
In July 2023, the FBI requested that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware assist the FBI in an investigation of allegations related to the 2020 1023. Obstruction of Justice Indictment (Exhibit 2) ¶ 41. At that time, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware was handling an investigation and prosecution of Businessperson 1. Id.
Also in July 2023, a member of the United States Senate posted the 2020 1023 on his official website, making the Defendant’s false allegations against Public Official 1 public. https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-obtains-andreleases-fbi-record-alleging-vp-biden-foreign-bribery-scheme (Exhibit 5).
On August 11, 2023, the Attorney General appointed David C. Weiss, the United States Attorney for the District of Delaware, as Special Counsel. Obstruction of Justice Indictment (Exhibit 2) ¶ at 42. The Special Counsel was authorized to conduct the investigation and prosecution of Businessperson 1, as well as “any matters that arose from that investigation, may arise from the Special Counsel’s investigation, or that are within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).” Id
On August 29, 2023, FBI investigators spoke with the Handler in reference to the 2020 1023. Id. at ¶ 43. 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. Id.
No need to tell Judge Otis Wright about how sometime before July 10 — and probably as early as June 19, when Leo Wise came in and David Weiss started to renege on a signed plea deal — David Weiss was already investigating the allegation. Blame it on Chuck.
In this telling, Wise buries Barr’s personal role in setting up the side channel in January 2020, as well as Barr’s personal role in inflaming things in June 2023 — about the time that Weiss started reneging on a plea deal — by telling Margot Cleveland that he had told David Weiss to investigate this in 2020.
It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”
[snip]
But that’s just not true, according to the former attorney general. Instead, the confidential human source’s claims detailed in the FD-1023 were sent to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation, according to Barr.
Wise then tells the story again later, when he tries to lard on how much work Smirnov caused because he had the bad luck of having his willingness to make shit up about Joe Biden discovered by people who were hoping to make shit up about Joe Biden.
Wise doesn’t explain how Brady’s folks would even come across Smirnov’s allegation if all they were doing was vetting open source tips. It’s Smirnov’s fault Brady magically started searching on Burisma and Hunter Biden and discovered a guy who started offering to make shit up about Joe Biden a month earlier.
In 2020, the FBI, through the Pittsburgh Field Office, and the U.S. Department of Justice, through the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, assigned investigators and prosecutors to pursue the false allegations that the Defendant made that were memorialized in the 2020 1023. For example, the document titled “Open Items for Completion by PG” shows various investigative steps that FBI Pittsburgh and FBI Seattle, where the Defendant’s Handler was located, took in an attempt to assess the credibility of the allegations the Defendant first reported in 2020 that were memorialized in the 2020 1023. Exhibit 6
In 2023, the FBI assigned a second team of investigators, through the FBI’s Wilmington RA and the U.S. Department of Justice, through the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and later the Special Counsel’s Office, to investigate the Defendant’s allegations. This second group of FBI agents and prosecutors took investigative steps that caused them to conclude that the Defendant was lying and that he should be prosecuted himself for these lies.
In any event, significant Justice Department resources were expended determining that the Defendant’s false allegations were lies
Then it blames Smirnov — and not the GOPers seeking to frame Joe Biden — for the efforts FBI had to take in an effort to tamp down GOP efforts to find a way to frame Joe Biden.
In addition, the 1023 caused the substantial expenditure of government resources by the U.S. Congress and the FBI and Department of Justice in the Congressional oversight process. The following is a summary by FBI Director Wray of the actions taken by the Congress and the FBI and Justice Department specifically related to the 2020 1023
Most remarkably, given the way Leo Wise obscures that, after Barr publicly declared that David Weiss had been ordered to investigate the Smirnov allegation, a claim backed by multiple public records, David Weiss had publicly confirmed he was looking at the Smirnov allegations before someone magically gave Chuck Grassley a copy to leak, to argue for the extra two point enhancement for a super duper victim, the President of the United States!, Wise complains that Smirnov retold his lie when Wise (and Weiss) came calling, or maybe it’s that Comer and Jordan were trying to frame Joe Biden while he was President, or maybe it was all an election interference stunt.
The upward departure contemplated in Application Note 5 differs from Section 3A1.2 in two important ways. First, it uses the present tense “if the official victim is an exceptionally high-level official …” (emphasis added). When the Defendant was interviewed in September 2023 and repeated his false accusations against Joseph R. Biden, which is described in the indictment and is relevant conduct, Joseph R. Biden was the President of the United States. So that requirement is met. Second, the last phrase in the application note refers to “potential disruption of the governmental function,” which is an additional requirement that must be met to justify an additional upward departure. Congressional oversight is a “governmental function.” At the time the Defendant repeated his false accusations in September 2023, the Congress was actively involved in examining the Defendant’s false claims in the 2020 1023. The 2020 1023 was released publicly in July and, as described above, the Congress and the Executive Branch had taken numerous steps to address its claims. The Defendant’s choice to repeat his false claims when he was interviewed by the FBI in September 2023 had the potential to further disrupt the oversight process, which is a governmental function.
Further, at the time the Defendant was interviewed President Biden was a candidate for re-election. The Supreme Court has long recognized a state’s compelling interest in regulating elections, i.e. in securing the right to vote freely and effectively. Burson v. Freeman, 504 U.S. 191 (1992); see also Mills v. Alabama, 384 U.S. 214 (1966); Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970). The Defendant’s false statements had the potential to disrupt the conduct of federal elections by spreading misinformation about the presumptive nominee of one of the two major American political parties in the 2024 elections.
This all gets to be a bit much.
The truth of the matter is Donald Trump ordered his people to frame Joe Biden, Bill Barr set up a way to facilitate that process, they magically found a way to do that, and after Lesley Wolf tried to save David Weiss from all this in 2020, Leo Wise came along and — goaded on by an entire Congress trying to frame Joe Biden — decided he knew better and would pursue the same allegations that didn’t make sense three years earlier.
And here we are and all of this is the fault of Alexander Smirnov, and — according to Leo Wise — he should face the kind of obstruction sentence never before seen because the entire Republican party facilitated his effort to frame Joe Biden.
Alexander Smirnov was willing to frame Joe Biden and he got caught. But he got caught because the entire GOP renewed the effort to frame Joe Biden, over and over and over again.
Yet for that, only Alexander Smirnov should face a six year sentence, Leo Wise says.
Alexander Smirnov’s Vetting
David Weiss submitted his sentencing memorandum for Alexander Smirnov last night; it was a splendid exercise in comedy, well worthy of the sawdust-as-cocaine team. Congrats, gents, and thanks for kicking off an insane year in fine style!
But you’re going to have to wait on the comedy.
First, I want to review a vetting document submitted with the sentencing, completed sometime in July 2020 (per the indictment, on August 12, David Bowdich and Richard Donoghue recommended the assessment be closed, a claim that conflicts with known documentary evidence and Bill Barr’s public comments).
The most important detail in the assessment is a bullet explaining that the current reporting (probably on a Smirnov associate central to his story) “does not reveal the 2015/2016 introduction.” Contrary to what Scott Brady led Congress to believe in testimony given under oath, they already had good reason to doubt Smirnov’s story, yet DOJ resuscitated it anyway in the days after Trump yelled at Bill Barr in October 2020. And then again when Congress was looking to frame Joe Biden.
Another detail that David Weiss’ team has thus far obscured pertains to the date when, Smirnov claimed, he had a follow-up conversation about bribery with Mykola Zlochevsky. The call purportedly happened on a 2019 trip to London. This vetting document describes that Smirnov was in London working with the British National Crime Agency [!!!], after which Smirnov stayed behind. If the call happened in that time, it would have happened between October 7 and 11, 2019 — precisely the period when Lev Parnas was trying to board a plane to swap legal assistance for a laptop from Mykola Zlochevsky, only to be arrested at the airport. There’s no reason to believe the call did happen, but if it did, it would have been directly tied to impeachment and Rudy’s thwarted effort to get dirt from Burisma in that same time period. To believe it happened, you’d have to believe that Lev Parnas was supposed to fly to Vienna for an in-person meeting, while at the same time, Zlochevsky fed Smirnov the dirt Rudy was seeking via another channel. It could happen!! Other aspects of this story look just like that!! But if you ever remotely entertained this theory — as David Weiss did — it would suggest all the allegations about Hunter being set up were true, not the reverse.
No wonder all the documentation in this case thus far left that detail out.
Finally, there’s a long response to a question about whether Smirnov knew a guy named Michael Guralnik or any of the people he reported on. Guralnik is where Rudy’s Ukrainian dalliance started, in 2018, as reported by Daily Beast (though there’s plenty of other reporting on him).
The letters, which The Daily Beast reviewed, claim that an eclectic mix of Ukrainian political figures and businesspeople were part of an alleged “organized crime syndicate.” The letters claim that the individuals were “actively involved in the siphoning of funds appropriated by the American government for aid to Ukraine.” And they claim that the alleged crime syndicate used those funds to buy black-market military parts from a Russian company under U.S. sanctions. All the while, they say, Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general (Giuliani ally Yuriy Lutsenko) couldn’t fight the crime because then President Petro Poroshenko wouldn’t let him take the case to court.
“It concerns me, as should any fellow American, that a taxpayer’s money is rudely been stolen in Ukraine [sic],” reads the letter to Mandelker.
The letter-writer introduces himself in the letter addressed to Mandelker as a Ukraine-born U.S. citizen named Michael Guralnik who graduated from the Soviet Military Academy and was “a 10-year veteran of the Soviet Army.” The letter to Graham, meanwhile, also bears Guralnik’s name but contains no introduction. It arrived a month before Giuliani tried to help former Ukrainian top prosecutor Viktor Shokin travel to the U.S. and meet with Graham, Bondy said. A few weeks before the date of the Guralnik letter, Giuliani sent Graham a letter of his own asking his staff to help three unnamed Ukrainians get visas so they could come to the U.S. and share information about the Bidens. The State Department did not give Shokin a visa.
The letters say that the “only way” to “stop this syndicate” is to sanction the individuals involved. Both letters list 12 people, along with phone numbers for some of them. Included on the list are Mykola Zlochevskiy, the head of the scandal-plagued Ukrainian company where Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was a board member; Valeriya Gontareva, the head of the National Bank of Ukraine from mid-2014 to mid-2017; and Kateryna Rozhkova, who was her deputy.
Graham and Giuliani did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and it was not immediately clear if lawmakers ever even considered the sanctions. A spokesperson for Graham did not respond to a request for comment. Mandelker did not comment on the record for this report. When contacted, Guralnik hung up the phone and texted, “Do not call any more.”
The people in the letters Daily Beast describes appear to be different than the people FBI was chasing 18 months later. But there are several references in this document that suggest Brady got the claim that Biden had been bribed from Guralnik via Rudy first, and then chased down Smirnov, who was all too willing to say something that corroborated it. That’s a bit different than what members of Congress claimed last year; they insisted there was no tie to any of the dirt that Rudy had obtained.
Assessment content
Those are the big takeaways.
I’ve reproduced the outline used in the assessment, below (hopefully in more usable format than the Bureau managed), summarizing what is in there. It is probably done by the Pittsburgh FBI office (PG in the document).
The assessment appears to be split into two parts, the stuff Pittsburgh FBI could do and the stuff they claimed (not always credibly) they needed to have a predicated investigation to chase. I’m actually a bit sympathetic to the bullshit here. Scott Brady’s transcript is rife with discussion of a fight between him and the FBI about how much they could do without a preliminary investigation. These claims that FBI couldn’t do some of this at an assessment level may have just been the FBI’s effort to say, we’re not going to do this anymore unless you give us top cover, which is exactly what the fight sounds like as described by Brady. So the assessment ended, it got sent to David Weiss (which, again, doesn’t show up in the sentencing memo), and Lesley Wolf did nothing, leaving it there for Bill Barr to reflate in time for an election.
In each of those two parts, there may be three subcategories: Smirnov, and two others. The two others are completely redacted.
There are three Smirnov-related bullets in the assessment section. The first, is the question that elicited the response about Smirnov’s travel (there’s no context to the other two, bullets e and f). Given that Brady misled Congress on precisely this issue, I’m skeptical about that first redaction.
The items left for a predicated investigation — things like interviewing the Smirnov colleague through whom he said he met Zlochevsky and reviewing his travel — are all things Weiss’ team appears to have done, based on the indictment (though there’s no mention of the CIA). Perhaps the most obvious of those was to review Smirnov’s texts with his handler (you’d think you could do this at the assessment level, but testimony in the Oleg Danchenko trial suggests that may not be the case). That’s pretty telling. As those disclosed, Smirnov was sending his handler rewarmed Fox News propaganda, debunked months earlier, which if Smirnov had been competently handled at all, should have set off alarm bells.
More importantly, those texts showed that Smirnov offered up a bribery fabrication in May 2020, and then in June 2020, Scott Brady magically came looking for it.
As we’ll see in the sentencing memo, short of sentencing Smirnov on the fly as he is so he could get some follow-on indictment before Trump comes in, David Weiss has thus far exhibited not the remotest curiosity how that happened, how out of all the gin joints in all of the world, Scott Brady just happened to walk into Smirnov’s, the guy who a month earlier was offering up a fabricated Joe Biden bribery allegation.
And so, because a witness to this scheme is in charge of investigating it, we may never get an explanation of how that happened.
Update: In the sentencing memo, Leo Wise claims that Alexander Smirnov didn’t tell any lies pertaining to the period after Biden was Vice President.
In 2020, Joseph R. Biden was a former government officer, namely, the former Vice President of the United States. The Defendant’s text exchanges with his handler and others also evidence that he was motivated by Joseph R. Biden’s status as the former Vice President of the United States. The Defendant’s false statements all involved conduct that occurred when Joseph R. Biden was Vice President of the United States and the Obama Biden Administration lead on Ukraine policy.
For the reasons I laid out above, that appears to be false: it appears the claimed 2019 call with Zlochevsky could not exist. It seems that Wise may have dodged that in an attempt to distance his own effort from Trump’s efforts to find a way to frame Joe Biden.
Open Items for Completion by Pittsburgh FBI
1 [redacted]
2 Corroborating [Smirnov]
a. [redacted]
b. FBI PG/HQ PCU Response regarding travel
i. Photos of Smirnov’s passports sent on July 2, 2020
ii. CBP details about Smirnov’s travel provided on July 2, 2020 showing trips to Vienna from October 8 to 19, 2016, October 21 to 26, 2016, and December 8 to 10, 2016
iii. Smirnov’s trip to London from October 7 to 11, 2019
iv. A follow-up to confirm Smirnov’s travel, to which Smirnov’s handler offered pablum: “CHS travels very frequently and had traveled to Ukraine and London on multiple occasions during the relevant time periods, so it would be difficult to pinpoint the meeting.”
c. Does Smirnov know people named by Rudy Giuliani source Michael Guralnik?
d. How does Smirnov communicate with [redacted]? Via WhatsApp.
e. [redacted]
f. [redacted]
g. Further information
i. Someone else’s passport requested from NDOH on July 7, 2020, provided to serial on July 9, 2020
ii. Smirnov’s first references to [someone] while reporting on Transnational Criminal enterprises in November 2014
iii. Smirnov was introduced by Igor Fridman in 2013/2014
iv. Smirnov first reported on Burisma in March 2017
v. Smirnov handler provides phone number for other person
vi. This person had a B1/B2 visa in 2017, with an address in Kyiv
vii. Someone related is the subject of numerous SARS amounting to $200,610
h. An instruction to review the case file for all references to the alleged $5 million bribe to Hunter or Joe Biden, including a 302 from Guralnik
i. FBI PG say there’s nothing additional but “this is an ongoing process”
i. How would Mykola communicate with the Bidens?
i. Smirnov didn’t know
[2-3 other items, apparently first level title]
Items for consideration (likely necessitating a predicated investigation)
1. Further Smirnov corroboration
a. Validation of CHS and information provided ongoing
b. Further assess Smirnov colleague through third party FBI interview
c. Review CHS’ travel with CHS to determine estimated timing of in-person meetings with Mykola Zlochevsky
d. Further details on Guralnik
e. Cellebrite information on text messages with handler
f. Determine overlap with another case
i. PG recommends this happen with HQ validation [seems to be a deconfliction issue]
g. Coordinate with OGA [CIA] partners on reporting relating to dates, places, and persons of interest
2. Something else probably not Smirnov related
3. Something else probably not Smirnov related
Artificial Frameworks about Elon: On Adrian Dittmann and Tommy Robinson
I was alarmed by the response yesterday to Elon Musk’s full-throated propaganda campaign for Tommy Robinson.
In a formula not far off QAnon, Elon has used a child sexual abuse scandal magnified by the Tories to suggest that Robinson has been unfairly jailed for contempt.
He posted and reposted multiple calls for Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, to be released from prison.
The activist was jailed for 18 months in October after pleading guilty to showing a defamatory video of a Syrian refugee during a protest last year.
Judges previously heard that he fled the UK hours after being bailed last summer, following an alleged breach of the terms of a 2021 court order.
The order was imposed when he was successfully sued by refugee Jamal Hijazi for making false claims about him, preventing Robinson from repeating any of the allegations.
Pictures later showed him on a sun lounger at a holiday resort in Cyprus while violent riots erupted across the UK in the wake of the attack in Southport.
Posts promoted by Musk suggested Robinson was ‘smeared as a “far-right racist” for exposing the mass betrayal of English girls by the state’, an apparent reference to the grooming gang scandal.
This is fairly transparent effort at projection: to do damage to Labour even while delegitimizing the earned jailing of Robinson, a tactic right wing extremists always use (still are using with January 6) to turn the foot soldiers of political violence into heroes and martyrs. The intent, here, is to cause problems for Labour, sure, but more importantly to undermine rule of law and put Robinson above it.
I’m not alarmed that experts in radicalization are finding Musk’s efforts to turn Robinson into a martyr serving sexually abused children repulsive. Nor am I alarmed that experts in radicalization — and, really, anyone who supports democracy or has a smattering of history — are repulsed by Elon’s endorsement of Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party.
I’m alarmed by the nature of the alarm, which the Tommy Robinson full circle demonstrates.
Endorsements are the least of our worries, in my opinion.
To put it simply. Elon Musk’s endorsement of Donald Trump was, by itself, not all that valuable. Endorsements, themselves, don’t often sway voters.
Elon’s endorsement of Robinson is just the beginning of the damage he can do … and, importantly, has already done. Endorsement is the least of our worries.
It makes a difference if, as he has promised to do for Nigel Farage and as he did do for Trump, Elon drops some pocket cash — say, a quarter of a billion dollars — to get a far right candidate elected.
But where Elon was likely most valuable in the November election was in deploying both his own proprietary social media disinformation and that of others to depress Harris voters and mobilize the low turnout voters who consume no news who made the difference for Trump. We know, for example, that Musk was a big funder of a front group that sought to exacerbate negativity around Gaza (though I’ve seen no one assess the import of it to depress Democratic turnout anywhere but Michigan’s heavily Arab cities). I’ve seen no one revisit the observations that Elon shifted the entire algorithm of Xitter on the day he endorsed Trump to boost his own and other Republican content supporting Trump. (Of course, Elon deliberately made such analysis prohibitively expensive to do.) We’ve spent two months fighting about what Dems could do better but, as far as I’m aware, have never assessed the import of Elon’s technical contribution.
It’s the $44 billion donation, as much as the $250 million one.
In other words, Elon’s value to AfD may lie more in the viral and microtargeted promotion he can offer than simply his famous name normalizing Nazism or even cash dollars.
But back to Tommy Robinson, and the real reason for my alarm by the newfound concern, in the US, about Elon’s bromance with the far right provocateur.
It shouldn’t be newfound, and Elon has already done more than vocally endorse Robinson.
Tommy Robinson is a kind of gateway drug for US transnational support for British and Irish extremism, with Alex Jones solidly in the mix. This piece, from shortly after the UK riots, describes how Robinson’s reach exploded on Xitter after Elon reinstated him.
Robinson, who has been accused of stoking the anti-immigration riots, owes his huge platform to Musk. The billionaire owner of X rescued Robinson from the digital wilderness by restoring his account last November. In the past few days Musk has:
- responded to a post by Robinson criticising Keir Starmer’s response to the widespread disorder – amplifying it to Musk’s 193 million followers;
- questioned Robinson’s recent arrest under anti-terror laws, asking what he did that was “considered terrorism”; and
- allowed Robinson’s banned documentary, which repeats false claims about a Syrian refugee against a UK high court order, to rack up over 33 million views on X.
It was the screening of this documentary at a demonstration in London last month that prompted Robinson’s arrest under counter-terrorism powers. Robinson left the UK the day before he was due in court, and is currently believed to be staying at a five-star hotel in Ayia Napa. He is due in court for a full contempt hearing in October.
None of this has stopped Robinson incessantly tweeting about the riots, where far-right groups have regularly chanted his name. He has:
- falsely claimed that people were stabbed by Muslims in Stoke-on-Trent and Stirling;
- called for mass deportations, shared demonstration posters, and described violent protests in Southport as “justified”; and
- shared a video that speculated that the suspect in the Southport stabbings was Muslim, a widespread piece of disinformation that helped trigger the riots across the country.
Making the weather. The far-right activist has nearly 900,000 followers on X, but reaches a much larger number of people. Tortoise calculated that Robinson’s 268 posts over the weekend had been seen over 160 million times by late Monday afternoon.
Elon gives Tommy Robinson a vast platform and Robinson uses it to stoke racist hatred. Robinson was the key pivot point in July, and was a key pivot point in Irish anti-migrant mobilization. All this happened, already, in July. All this already translated into right wing violence. All this, already, created a crisis for Labour.
Elon Musk is all at once a vector for attention, enormous financial resources, disinformation, and (the UK argues about Xitter), incitement.
I worry that we’re not understanding the multiple vectors of risk Elon poses.
Which brings me to Adrian Dittmann, on its face an Elon fanboy who often speaks of Musk — and did, during the brief spat between Laura Loomer and the oligarch — in the First Person. Conspiracy theorist Loomer suggested that Dittmann is no more than an avatar for Musk, a burner account Musk uses like his another named after his son to boost his own ego.
Meanwhile, the account that supposedly convinced Loomer to concede the fight has some otherwise inexplicable ties to the Tesla CEO. Dittmann also purports to be a South African billionaire with identical beliefs to Musk. The account frequently responds to Musk’s posts, supporting his decisions related to his forthcoming government positions and the way in which the tech leader is raising his children. But the account also, at times, goes so far as to speak on behalf of Musk, organizing events with Musk’s friends while continuing to claim that the two aren’t affiliated.
X users felt that the illusion was completely shattered over the weekend, when Dittman participated in an X space using his actual voice—and, suspiciously, had the exact same cadence, accent, and vocal intonations as Musk himself.
Conspiracy theorist Charles Johnson, in his inimitable self promotion, claims to have proven the case (you’ll have to click thru for the link because I refuse to link him directly).
Right wing influencer and notorious troll Charles Johnson also claims to have uncovered “proof” that Dittmann is Musk.
He writes in his Substack article: “I recently attended a Twitter Space where I exposed Elon Musk’s alt account and Elon Musk as a fraud to his face. Take a listen. It was pretty great. Part of the reason I was as aggressive as I was with Adrian/Elon was to get him agitated so he would speak faster than his voice modulator could work and we could make a positive match using software some friends of mine use for this sort of thing. I can confirm it’s Elon. Even if it isn’t physically Elon in the flesh, it’s an account controlled and operated by Elon/X that represents him in every way shape and form. But of course, it’s actually Elon.”
I’ll let the conspiracy theorists argue about whether Dittmann is Musk.
I’m more interested in an underlying premise about Elon we seem to adopt.
After Elon Musk bought Xitter, he retconned his purpose, in part, as an AI product. After the election, Xitter officially updated its Terms of Service to include consent for AI training on your content.
You agree that this license includes the right for us to (i) analyze text and other information you provide and to otherwise provide, promote, and improve the Services, including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type;
Xitter is unabashedly an AI project. Musk’s views on AI are closely aligned with his far right ideology and his plans to destroy government.
With other tech oligarchs, we can make certain assumptions about their investment in AI: The necessity to always lead technology, a goal of eliminating human workers, cash. Particularly given Elon’s subordination of the profit motive to his ideological whims with his Xitter purchase, that $44 billion donation he made to Trump, I don’t know that we can make such assumptions about Elon.
So why do we assume that everything Xitter’s owner posts, who tweets prolifically even while babysitting the incoming US President, boosting fascists around the world, and occasionally sending a rocket to space, is his own primary work? Most of Elon’s tweets are so facile they could easily be replaced by a bot. How hard would it be to include a “Concerning” tweet that responds to certain kinds of far right virality? Indeed, what is Elon really doing with his posting except to hone his machine for fascism?
I’m not primarily concerned about whether Adrian Dittmann is a burner account for Elon Musk. Rather, I think that simplifies the question. Why would the next Elon burner account be his human person hiding behind a burner account, and not an AI avatar trained on his own likeness?
Beware South African oligarchs pitching fascists and technological fixes. Because you may often overlook the technological underbelly.
Update: I should have noted Meta’s announcement that they plan to create imaginary friends to try to keep users on their social media platforms entertained.
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the Financial Times Thursday.
“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.
Hayes said AI investment will be a “priority” for Meta over the next two years to help make its platforms “more entertaining and engaging” for users.
Update: Nicole Perloth links the analysis who did what Charles Johnson claimed to do: match the voices of Elon and Dittmann. They believe it’s highly likely to be a match.
Update: Some OSINT journalists have tracked down a real Dittmann in Fiji. Then Jacqueline Sweet wrote it up at the Spectator, all the while blaming the left for this, when it was pushed by people on the right. None of this addresses Elon’s play with the ID (he claimed he is Dittmann in the wake of Sweet’s piece).
Live this New Year with Considered Agency
Well, 2025 begins.
I’ve been fighting what may be the flu (once again, I tested negative for COVID, meaning I’ve still never tested positive!), so I’ll forgo any big celebratory posts. Plus, the passage into 2025 doesn’t feel all that happy.
So I wish that, in your own personal and professional life, you have a wonderful 2025.
I wish that in your political life, you find a way to be the most effective, healthiest defender of democracy you can be.
Peace and best wishes!
The Opportunity Costs of Conspiracy Theories about Merrick Garland
You have a choice.
You can spend the next few weeks laying the groundwork for making a big stink about the fact that the aspiring FBI Director tried to help Trump steal classified documents.
Or you can spend it clinging to false claims about Merrick Garland so you can blame him for the fact that Trump won reelection rather than blaming the guy directly responsible for preventing a trial (and the guy who’ll remain responsible for Trump’s license going forward), John Roberts, to say nothing of the failed Democratic consultants and voters themselves.
Sadly, Democrats and lefties — from random people on Bluesky to TV lawyers to the President himself — are choosing the latter path, the path that will guarantee they remain maximally ineffective.
They’re rolling out all the tired false claims: Merrick Garland waited before investigating people close to Trump, they claim. According to NYT, Garland approved an effort to follow the money in his first meeting with prosecutors — an effort that turned out to be a dry hole, but nevertheless was precisely the approach that people like Sheldon Whitehouse and Andrew Weissmann demanded.
After being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021, Merrick B. Garland gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups: the possibility that evidence from the far-ranging Jan. 6 investigation could quickly lead to former President Donald J. Trump and his inner circle.
At the time, some in the Justice Department were pushing for the chance to look at ties between pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his allies who had camped out at the Willard Hotel, and possibly Mr. Trump himself.
Mr. Garland said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the “evidence leads to Trump,” according to people with knowledge of several conversations held over his first months in office.
“Follow the connective tissue upward,” said Mr. Garland, adding a directive that would eventually lead to a dead end: “Follow the money.”
In June 2021, they focused on the Willard, precisely the people everyone wanted investigated.
In late June, Mr. Garland, Ms. Monaco and several aides decided they needed to take a dramatic step: creating an independent team, separate from Mr. Cooney’s original group, tasked with investigating the Willard plotters, with no restriction on moving up the ladder to Mr. Trump if the evidence justified it.
They did not want too many people knowing about it. So they gave it a vanilla name: the “Investigations Unit.”
NYT misses — as everyone else has, too — one of the most opportunistic things DOJ did to accelerate the investigation. It used the existing warrant for Rudy’s devices obtained on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job, April 21, 2021, to do a privilege review of the January 6 content at the same time. The Special Master prioritized the phone Rudy used on January 6 — 1b05A, which appears throughout Rudy’s privilege log for January 6 related material — and started turning over that material to DOJ starting on November 11, 2021. That effort yielded at least one key document that shows up in Trump’s January 6 indictment but not the January 6 Report, as well as encrypted content not available anywhere else.
DOJ started with Rudy, Co-Conspirator 1, the guy through whom the entire fake elector plot got pitched to Trump, and people are whining that DOJ didn’t start at the top of the conspiracy. They did. You just didn’t notice.
Those are not the only things DOJ was doing in 2021. The plodding DOJ IG started investigating Jeffrey Clark on January 25, 2021. DOJ appears to have figured out a way to solve a difficult problem — how to get waivers of Executive Privilege without violating White House contact policies — in July 2021. DOJ sent overt subpoenas pertaining to Co-Conspirator 3, Sidney Powell, in September 2021. DOJ was also working to fill out the encrypted communications the militias exchanged with people like Roger Stone (who first showed up in a court filing in March 2021) and Alex Jones, but it took even longer, over a year, to exploit Enrique Tarrio’s phone, than it did Rudy’s, nine months, and that process necessarily requires working phone by phone.
You can complain that investigations take too much time. You can gripe that investigators did precisely what everyone wanted them to do — follow the money and investigate the Willard. But they were pursuing precisely the angles people were demanding, and long before virtually everyone understands.
That 2021 focus is inconsistent with other conspiracy theories people are floating, too: None of this started until Jack Smith was appointed (or that Jack Smith gave it new life), they say. Nothing happened for two years, they say.
As far as I know, every phone that went into the indictment and immunity brief (which added information from Boris Ephsteyn and Mike Roman’s phone) was seized before Smith’s appointment. The onerous 10-month process of obtaining Executive Privilege waivers for testimony from Trump’s top aides, without which you couldn’t prove that Trump held the murder weapon — the phone used to send a tweet targeting Mike Pence during the riot — started on June 15, 2022, five months before Smith’s appointment. Jack Smith looks prolific to those who don’t know those details, because 10 months of hard work finally came to fruition in the months after he was appointed.
The claim nothing happened for two years? The only major investigative step that happened after the two-year anniversary of Merrick Garland’s confirmation was Mike Pence’s testimony.
The claims people are using to blame Merrick Garland that Trump was reelected — all of them!!! — are easily falsifiable. (I’m happy to entertain arguments that Garland’s grant of Special Counsel status to David Weiss affected the election, but the decision to keep Weiss was one Biden made.) The single possible action from DOJ (likely either Brad Weinsheimer or Public Integrity) that could have created a delay would be pre-election limits on what prosecutors could including the August 2024 superseding indictment. But it’s just as likely that prosecutors believed a narrow superseding indictment was tactically smart.
This is the point, though. This is not about Merrick Garland. I’m happy to criticize him for things he did. I’ve written more critical of his picks and handling of Special Counsels than anyone.
I could give a flying fuck about Merrick Garland.
What I care about is that at a time when we need to start establishing means of accountability for a second Trump term, much of the Democratic world has chosen instead to wallow in false claims about the Trump investigation in order to make Garland a scapegoat, rather than the guy directly responsible, John Roberts. It’s classical conspiracy thinking. Something really bad happened (Trump got elected), it’s not entirely clear why (because almost no one bothers to learn the details I’ve laid out here, to say nothing of considering the political work that didn’t happen to make Trump own this), and so people simply invent explanations. Every time those explanations get debunked, people double down on the theory — it’s Garland’s fault — rather than reconsidering their chosen explanation.
And those explanations have the effect of distracting attention from Roberts. Rather than talking about how six partisan Justices rewrote the Constitution to give the leader of the GOP a pass on egregious crimes, Democrats are choosing to blame a guy who encouraged prosecutors to follow the money in March 2021.
It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that guarantees maximal impotence. It’s a choice that eschews actual facts (and therefore the means to actually learn what happened). It’s a choice that embraces irrational conspiracy thinking (which makes people weak and ripe for manipulation by authoritarians). It’s a choice that distracts from Roberts’ role.
And there is a better, more urgent, option.
We have every reason to believe we’ll get a report from Jack Smith (though I would be unsurprised if Trump tried to enjoin its release). Given David Weiss’ great rush to sentence Alexander Smirnov on January 8, I suspect we’ll get a report from Weiss too. My guess (given Weiss’ January 8 sentencing day) is we may get both reports at the same time — maybe January 10 or so. That’s a wildarse guess.
And so rather than in wallowing in conspiracy theories, Democrats would do well to prepare a messaging plan for those reports.
I expect David Weiss’ report to smear up not just Hunter but also Joe Biden, for pardoning Hunter. I expect he’ll suggest that Kevin Morris’ support of Hunter (a loan Hunter would have had to pay back after the election, but which he had no means to pay) has amounted to a massive campaign contribution to Joe. I wouldn’t even rule out Weiss pushing for Republicans to impeach Biden over that.
I spoke with Harry Litman back in November about what a Jack Smith report might have. Remember, his mandate is to describe both charging decisions (the two indictments he filed) but also declination decisions (the people and crimes he didn’t charge).
That means the report — if Trump doesn’t thwart its release — should answer a lot of questions that have people spun into conspiracy theories. Why didn’t Smith charge all of Trump’s co-conspirators (probably because the Mueller investigation showed how futile it would be to charge anyone before Trump, which the Florida prosecution seems to confirm)? Why didn’t Smith charge any members of Congress (undoubtedly because their actions would be covered by Speech and Debate, as confirmed by a DC Circuit opinion written about the exploitation of Scott Perry’s phone)? It likely will even provide more fulsome descriptions of the documents Trump refused to give back.
But there are three possible or likely aspects to the report that may become important for the confirmation of Trump’s appointees (which is one reason he might try to enjoin the release) and the pardons he plans shortly thereafter.
First, prosecutors had investigated how Trump used money raised on a promise to spend on election integrity to instead pay everyone off. That’s how he paid Deputy Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche, Solicitor General nominee John Sauer, and PADAG Emil Bove (Bove does not need Senate confirmation). Trump’s incoming Chief of Staff (who also does not need Senate confirmation), Susie Wiles, managed much of that process. DOJ did not charge this scheme, but we may get an explanation for what it entailed and why Smith didn’t charge it. While Blanche, et al, have no legal exposure themselves in the way Trump paid them, if we learned more about it, it would further highlight the wildly inappropriate conflicts all these men would have in running DOJ. That is, there’s the distinct possibility that a report would provide tangible explanation for why Blanche and Sauer have grave conflicts.
Far more important is the point I made here. FBI Director nominee Kash Patel may figure in both sides of Jack Smith’s report, the January 6 and the documents side. With Christopher Miller, Kash engaged in what Barry Loudermilk treated as insubordination by refusing Trump’s order to get him 10,000 troops for January 6; this post talked about how that might be a more productive way to make Loudermilk’s Liz Cheney referral a problem for Kash. That’s a way to raise distrust of Kash among Republicans.
But Kash’s involvement in the other side of the investigation (which appears at 19:00 in the video above) is more important. A key prong of the investigation into Trump’s treatment of the documents found at Mar-a-Lago involve disproving Kash’s public claim — made just before DOJ subpoenaed the documents — that Trump had declassified everything.
Patel did not want to get into what the specific documents were, predicting claims from the left that he was disclosing “classified” material, but said, “It’s information that Trump felt spoke to matters regarding everything from Russiagate to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco to major national security matters of great public importance — anything the president felt the American people had a right to know is in there and more.”
Someone whose potty mouth resembles Eric Herschmann (Person 16) debunked this claim just before Patel (Person 24) testified.
What Kash said in his immunized November 2022 testimony didn’t show up in either of the Florida indictments (and we only got reports of what he thought he’d say beforehand). We don’t know whether he backed off his unsworn comments. We don’t know whether he gave testimony debunked by five other people. We don’t know how much Kash had to say about efforts to take the Crossfire Hurricane binder home.
But all that is highly likely to show up in a report.
If we get the report, it is highly likely that we’ll get evidence that the aspiring FBI Director lied to help Trump take classified documents home from the White House.
If we get the report, it is highly likely that, shortly before his confirmation process, we’ll get evidence that the aspiring FBI Director helped Trump commit a crime.
Now, the Republicans don’t care. That’s not going to affect their willingness to rubber stamp Kash’s nomination. But if Democrats do their job well, then they can use this information to dramatically raise the costs of the Kash confirmation.
Or Democrats can continue to wallow in conspiracy theories about Merrick Garland.
Finally, I think it highly like a report — if we get one — will talk about how Trump’s call to the rally motivated certain key rioters to conspire to obstruct the election. We’ll learn about how his exhortation to Stand Back and Stand By had an immediate effect on Proud Boy membership. We’re likely to learn about how Danny Rodriguez immediately responded to Trump’s targeting of Mike Pence in his January 6 speech to make slitting motion at his throat, naming Joe Biden, and then proceeded to almost murder Michael Fanone, pretty close to meeting the Brandenberg definition of incitement. We’re likely to learn how the guys who helped breach the East door, then broke into the Senate gallery, then rappelled down to the Senate floor and let others in believed that Trump ordered them to come to DC on December 19, 2020. Trump has been desperate to prevent just this evidence from being submitted at trial.
But it will also raise the stakes of his pardons. If this information comes out, then it will make it clear that Trump isn’t just pardoning his fans, he’s pardoning people who believed they were responding to his orders to attack Congress.
Democrats can spend the time between now and confirmation hearings making ever-evolving conspiracy theories about Merrick Garland, something that makes them as weak as possible, something that makes them more susceptible to authoritarian manipulation.
Or they can spend the time making it clear just how corrupt Trump’s appointments and pardons are.
Democrats seem to be struggling even to chew gum without faceplanting. They can’t do both.
It’s just my opinion. But I think Democrats would be far better served focusing on the facts that we do know from the twin investigations of Trump rather than inventing false claims about why they didn’t go to trial. This is the work Democrats didn’t do in 2023, when Trump was making unchallenged false claims that these investigations were witch hunts. The failure to do that work is a more direct explanation why the indictments didn’t disqualify him with voters than anything Merrick Garland did or didn’t do. And until Democrats do this work, they’ll be politically sunk.