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?
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.
The Two Smear Attacks against Jeff Bezos and His Partner
Jeff Bezos doesn’t tweet much.
On July 14, he proclaimed that, “Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage” after being shot.
On November 6, shortly after spiking a WaPo editorial describing how unfit Trump is to be President, Bezos congratulated “our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.”
On November 21, Bezos debunked Elon Musk’s claim that Bezos, “was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock.” “100% not true,” Bezos replied, without noting how Elon had conflated Trump’s success with his own, including the rocket company that directly competes with Bezos’ own spaceship project.
By December 20, Bezos had found common cause with his rival. Both shifting people from the “low productivity” government sector to the “high productivity” private sector and deregulation “results in greatly increased prosperity,” the richest man in the world said. “Both of these are correct and the first is widely under appreciated,” the second richest man replied. Neither clarified whether the “greatly increased prosperity” in question was their own, or that of the people out o f their secure government job.
When Bezos RTed Bill Ackman’s explanation of why a New York Post story claiming” Jeff Bezos to marry fiancée Lauren Sanchez in lavish $600M Aspen wedding next weekend” was not credible. “Unless you are buying each of your guests a house, you can’t spend this much money,” then, it was just his fifth tweet since February.
The owner of the Washington Post engaged in a bit of press criticism in that tweet, apparently denying not just that he’s dropping $600M on a party, but that the party would happen this week at all (I believe the date of the purported wedding has now passed with no wedding).
Furthermore, this whole thing is completely false — none of this is happening. The old adage “don’t believe everything you read” is even more true today than it ever has been. Now lies can get ALL the way around the world before the truth can get its pants on. So be careful out there folks and don’t be gullible.
Will be interesting to see if all the outlets that “covered” and re-reported on this issue a correction when it comes and goes and doesn’t happen.
Bezos — whose rag (according to a Will Lewis interview with Ben Smith) specifically pointed to brainless dick pic sniffing about Hunter Biden that didn’t correct WaPo’s past errors to rebut claims of bias — believed he’d get “corrections” to salacious stories from Daily Mail and NY Post of the kind that made Hunter Biden dick pics A Thing.
Let me state that more clearly. A man whose newspaper chose to respond to political pressure by letting the Daily Mail and NYPost and Fox News serve as assignment editors for his journalists demanded that the Daily Mail and NYPost adhere to a higher standard than the still-uncorrected WaPo.
That’s why I decided to revisit this incident after watching this exchange, about the problems with traditional journalistic efforts to achieve objectivity in the face of asymmetric approaches to truth.
Bezos, of course, tried to explain his decision to intervene in the content of his rag (by spiking the Kamala Harris endorsement) by suggesting WaPo simply isn’t being realistic about perceptions of bias, then adding to perceptions of bias by failing to disclose all the conflicts that might have led him to curry favor with Trump.
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
[snip]
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Weeks later, after sucking up to Trump post-election, Bezos’ rag buried news of the unfitness of Trump’s nominees behind 7 pieces on the Hunter Biden pardon.
The continued reliance on dick pic sniffing to convince right wingers the WaPo is not biased is particularly rich [cough] coming from Bezos, newly targeted by gossip from the Daily Mail picked up by NYP.
Bezos, of all people, should have known better than to exploit a guy targeted with revenge porn by hostile nation-states and political partisans. In 2019, the NY Enquirer, while under Non-Prosecution Agreement for its past Kill and Capture activities, tried to extort him with … dick pics. As a Dylan Howard email described when trying to get Bezos to call off an investigation into Saudi ties in all this, the rag that had intervened in 2016 to help elect Trump had ten damning pictures disclosing what was then an affair with Lauren Sanchez while Bezos was still married.
In addition to the “below the belt selfie — otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick’” — The Enquirer obtained a further nine images. These include:
· Mr. Bezos face selfie at what appears to be a business meeting.
· Ms. Sanchez response — a photograph of her smoking a cigar in what appears to be a simulated oral sex scene.
· A shirtless Mr. Bezos holding his phone in his left hand — while wearing his wedding ring. He’s wearing either tight black cargo pants or shorts — and his semi-erect manhood is penetrating the zipper of said garment.
When Bezos preemptively exposed that effort (an effort that mysteriously didn’t turn into charges for a violation of National Enquirer’s past NPA), he attributed the attack to his ownership of the WaPo. But, the same guy spiking endorsements of Trump’s opponent and relying on dick pic sniffing to stave off claims of bias said then, his stewardship of the WaPo would remain unswerving.
Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.
President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles.
(Even though The Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.)
It turns out, as happened the last time someone tried to start a scandal about Bezos’ relationship with Sanchez, the second richest man in the world didn’t have to rely on journalistic ethics to combat the dick pic sniffing.
Both the Daily Mail and the NYP prominently (including in a blurb added to the NYP video, above) added Bezos’ denial to their original stories.
Sources told the DailyMail.com that the billionaire Amazon founder, 60, and his ex-TV news anchor fiancée, 55, had bought out ritzy sushi restaurant Matsuhisa in the Colorado ski town for December 26 or 27, and have their nuptials planned for Saturday 28.
Three sources told DailyMail.com they had been made aware of the Bezos wedding taking place on December 28.
However, after the Daily Mail published the story, Bezos’s team, denied the wedding was going ahead next weekend.
The billionaire took to X on Sunday to slam the wedding claims as ‘completely false’.
‘This whole thing is completely false – none of this is happening,’ he posted on X. ‘The old adage “don’t believe everything you read” is even more true today than it ever has been.’
And by the time I returned to this exchange on Xitter, the link Ackman had RTed had been disabled, as if Xitter had [gasp!] throttled a link to a NYP story!
It didn’t even take the date of the alleged marriage passing for everyone to have cleaned up a story about the second richest man in the world!
Must be nice not to have to rely on corrections.
The problem is so, so much worse than an asymmetric relationship with the truth.
But it has a happy ending for defense contractor Jeff Bezos, whose Blue Origin rocket company was the most obvious hint of payback for his sycophancy, launched yesterday. Bezos posted rocket launch porn on his account at rival rocket man Elon’s site, and accepted the congratulations of numerous people, including his rocket man rival.
We are so beyond the stratosphere of symmetrical relationships to the truth.
Human Individuality
The question for this series is what does it mean to be an individual in contemporary US society. The first posts lay some groundwork for this question. In this post, I give a tentative answer to part of the question: what do we mean by individuality.
I began to address this question in the conclusion to the series on Michael Tomasello’s book The Evolution of Agency, The idea is that all human characteristics, including consciousness, reasoning capacity, and emotions, evolved over millions of years. The main point of that post was to deal with the difference between free will and agency.
This is Tomasello’s description of agency:
…[W]e may say that agentive beings are distinguished from non-agentive beings … by a special type of behavioral organization. That behavioral organization is feedback control organization in which the individual directs its behavior toward goals — many or most of which are biologically evolved — controlling or even self-regulating the process through informed decision-making and behavioral self-monitoring. Species biology is supplemented by individual psychology.
I suggest that we find individuality in the way each of us selects goals, directs our behavior toward those goals, and the way each of us controls and self-regulates ourselves through informed decision-making and self-monitoring.
It may seem that I am just pushing back the problem to another level: what are the goals and how do we form them, what are the control and self-regulating functions, what are informed decision-making and self-monitoring and how do they work. I don’t think so. I think we can’t handle the broad question of individuality, but we can find approximate descriptions for Tomasello’s operations. And, I think the part about setting goals and the part about informed decision-making carry us most of the way to individuality.
What Peirce Got Wrong
I like the ideas of C.S. Peirce, including this 1877 article. He tells us two things that are often true.
1. Thinking is hard and we don’t like to do it. We only do it when faced with doubt, and even then only when other techniques of dealing with doubt fail.
2. When doubt reaches the point that we can’t ignore it, we look for some other opinion. Not necessarily a true opinion, but just something that causes the doubt to subside.
I suspect that this is true of a lot of people (like MAGAts and me when someone attacks my heroes). But I think a lot of us enjoy thinking, talking about stuff, learning new stuff, meeting people not like us, traveling, and we happily do it all through our lives. I think it starts with curiosity, that force that drives children to ask questions about everything. For such people, truth matters.
Probably most of us are a combination of these two poles depending on the subject, but once you start with curiosity, it tends to undercut other certainties we hold, which in the long run might mean a bias towards true answers. I might even come to question my heroes.
A Metaphor
My brother Michael did a number of single cell studies as part of his research into the transmission of pain signals to the brain. He said a neuron fires when the number of charged ions in the cell hits the magic number. When that happens, the cell fires, sending a signal down the axon to the next neuron. The first cell then returns to its resting state, ready for the next burst of charged ions. See also this.
I think one way we set goals for our actions is sort of like that. We get a stimulus outside what we anticipate, and we shrug it off, If that keeps happening, we hit a magic number and we decide to look more closely. Nothing changes until the magic level is reached. We just coast along.
Here’s an example. You go for a hike in a national forest. You’re looking around, but mostly at the ground to avoid tripping. You notice a bush with berries. Fine. Later you see a similar bush with more berries. And again. Then again, and this time you look closely. What are they? Are they edible? Am I hungry? A whole series of questions suddenly arises based on that stimulus.
Here’s another example, this time fairly close to my recollection of my own experience. I was raised Catholic, and starting in third grade, attended Catholic schools. I read a bunch of books about the lives of the Saints, including one I found recently: Ten Saints For Boys. I knew the stories, read about relics, read kid versions of the Bible stories and the Gospels, and it all seemed fine.
By high school, some of the stories started to feel a touch unreal. They didn’t correspond with the things in my life, and the histories didn’t sound like anything I knew about. One in particular was the doctrine of the Assumption of the Body Of The Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. That was very difficult to believe, but I tried.
Then I found out that the doctrine of papal infallibility was not established until 1870, suspiciously close to the loss of the Papal States in connection with the reunification of Italy that same year. That was a tipping point. Over the next few years I modified my understanding of Catholic teachings using a much broader range of sources, many if not most of which weren’t Catholic at all.
Now that’s a simplified version of what happened. I was doing a lot of related reading in those days, including existentialisn, math and physics, even Zen Buddhism, including Eugen Herrigel’s Zen In The Art Of Archery which I recommend very highly; and mysticism, including Thomas Merton’s Mystics And Zen Masters. I’m sure all that worked together to lead me to examine my thinking.
Selection Of Influences
We don’t get to choose our initial influences, parents, their friends and family, the people we live next to, teachers in K-12, the people and leaders of our Churches. Those choices are made for us. Today many of us don’t select much of what we read on social media because algorithms do the picking. We are at the mercy of the Billionaire Media, and Google or some other profit-driven search engine, which generally sucks. (Side note: Musk attacks Wikipedia; one of the few useful sources of vetted information, donate if you can. I use it a lot so I donate regularly.)
But we can select what we read if we try. We can look for those who can teach us things we care about. How we pick what to read and who we can trust to teach us, and how we understand what we read and are taught, these are crucial factors in our individuality.
Summary
I think individuality is found in our control of our goal-setting and self-monitoring. I think we learn from other people, and that selection of those other people is crucial to our individuality. I think some things are better than others. Those choices are driven by curiosity. It gives me great satisfaction and pleasure to read and understand other people’s thinking. The world and the people in it are endlessly interesting.
The Complications of Elon Musk
You might be forgiven for forgetting that, just over a week ago, Trump’s spox, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement affirming that Trump — and not Elon Musk — leads the Republican party.
As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.
She was trying to sustain the illusion that Trump really did only learn about the contents of the Continuing Resolution that Elon Musk tanked after Elon did, rather than that Elon vetoed a bill Trump had already acquiesced to.
Read Robert Kuttner on the ways that Elon outplayed Trump in the CR negotiations (though I think Elon had several goals, not just to continue doing business in China unimpeded, but also defeating a measure that would have limited his ability to post Deep Fakes of AOC on Xitter).
You might be forgiven for forgetting Leavitt’s thin denial because Trump’s own comments, at Turning Point USA’s latest shindig, were even more striking.
Elon is going to have his DOGE [sic], Trump recommitted. But he’s not going to be President, Trump continued, because he is Constitutionally prohibited.
But I will order federal workers to get back to the office in person or be terminated from the job immediately. And we will create the new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk.
And no, he’s not taking the presidency. I like having smart people. You know, the — they’re on a new kick — Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, all the different hoaxes. And the new one is, President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk. No, no, that’s not happening. But Elon’s done an amazing job. Isn’t it nice to have smart people that we can rely on, okay? Don’t we want that?
[snip]
But no, he’s not going to be president, that I can tell you. And I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country. But the fake news knows that. No, he’s a great guy, and we want to have him, everybody.
Pretty rich [cough] for a guy like Trump to seek refuge in the Constitution.
The next day, Trump put Stephen Miller’s spouse, Katie on DOGE [sic], right alongside naming another billionaire, Stephen Feinberg, to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense.
We learned during the campaign that the relationship between Stephen Miller and Musk is chummier than we knew, though we still can’t say whether Miller was the one who counseled Musk on bringing “the boss himself, if you’re up for that!” back onto Xitter.
But by picking even the spokesperson for DOGE [sic] — presumably a spox who would like to get paid — Trump provides NGOs like CREW a lever to demand transparency into DOGE [sic] that it is otherwise designed to evade.
It also puts a trusted insider inside.
All that was before the hilarious fight between Laura Loomer and Elon Musk (and Vivek Ramaswamy, who suggested American children don’t have the same work ethic that children of South Asian immigrants do) over H1Bs yesterday. After Loomer called Musk out for pushing immigration, Elon started shutting down her Xitter privileges.
Which led to Elon “censoring” Loomer’s account, after which she herself adopted the “President Musk” moniker.
Then someone with a manic South African accent using the name Adrian Dittman went into an Owen Shroyer chatroom and further antagonized Loomer.
Perhaps this is all some light-hearted amusement — something to do between the Beyoncé hafltime show and the New Years Eve ball drop.
But I do think it’s a testament to the complexity of the relationship between Trump and Elon. And that’s true for more reasons than the fundamental incompatibility of Trump’s populist nativism and Elon’s supranational aspirations. As it happened, the CR disappointed almost three dozen Republicans, who took Trump’s promise of backing Elon’s plans to cut government seriously. But it also disappointed Trump, who didn’t get Republicans to eliminate the debt ceiling. And those two incompatible stances — cutting government spending versus eliminating all limits to it — are simply two unpopular ways of giving the richest man in the world more tax cuts.
Many people predict, with good reason, that the two Malignant Narcissist problem will soon lead to a break between the men — that Trump will tire of questions about his own authority and lash out, cut off Elon, maybe even retaliate. The more people call Elon the President, the more likely that will happen.
But I’m not convinced that fully accounts for the complexity of this relationship. I don’t know whether that’s because Trump is awed by Elon’s shiny rockets and endless money. Or if there’s further complexity to the way Trump won the election.
It should be the case that Trump, through no more than inaction, a failure to order subordinates to shut down the various investigations and regulatory reviews that threaten Musk, could eliminate the problem Elon poses to his authority.
But Trump has already allowed Elon to chip away at the viability of his coalition.
Cotton Swabs and Grievance Myths: Do Not Invite Republicans to Express Support for Kash Patel’s Witch Hunts
I want to elaborate on some points I made in a Bluesky exchange I had with Greg Sargent about his post on the Barry Loudermilk report referring Liz Cheney for investigation yesterday. It was, I hope, a civil and substantive exchange (multiple people have mentioned it since), and for that I want to thank Sargent.
But I wanted to explain some points I tried making at more length.
Sargent’s post noted — and he’s right — that Trump’s embrace of Loudermilk’s report discredits false assurances Senate Republicans have offered that Kash Patel won’t pursue political witch hunts if confirmed as FBI Director.
Barely moments after Donald Trump announced that he’d chosen loyalist Kash Patel as FBI director, Republicans stampeded forth to insist that this in no way means Trump will unleash law enforcement on his enemies, even though Trump himself has threatened to do so. Senator John Cornyn suggested such threats were only for “public consumption.” Senator Rick Scott said Trump is “not gonna do it.” And Representative Dan Meuser scoffed that the very idea is “nonsense.”
These lawmakers should take a moment to consult Trump’s Truth Social feed. At 3:11 a.m. on Wednesday, demonstrating characteristic emotional balance, Trump posted this reaction to a new report from a House subcommittee chaired by GOP Representative Barry Loudermilk, which recommends that the FBI investigate former GOP Representative Liz Cheney over her role in the House’s January 6 inquiry:
Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.” Thank you to Congressman Barry Loudermilk on a job well done.
Note the trademark mobspeak here: Cheney could be in a lot of trouble for federal lawbreaking, Trump declares, as if he’s merely a passive observer remarking on the danger she faces, rather than someone who will control the nation’s sprawling federal law enforcement apparatus in just over a month. Trump has been raging at Cheney for years and has amplified suggestions that she should face televised military tribunals.
Now, in a dark turn in this whole farcical saga, Trump is pretending that House Republicans have given him a legitimate basis for prosecuting Cheney, when in fact their claims were cooked up in bad faith for precisely that purpose.
Sargent argues that the press should “hound[ GOP Senators] mercilessly” on whether they’ll still support Kash after Trump’s endorsement of Loudermilk’s report.
Trump’s veiled threat toward Cheney should prompt the press to revisit those reassurances from Republicans. GOP senators should be hounded mercilessly by reporters on whether they’ll knowingly support Patel now that Trump has made the corrupt reality of the situation so inescapably, alarmingly clear.
If we lived in a world where Republican hypocrisy could be shamed, where journalists had the skill to manage such an exchange, that would be worthwhile.
We don’t live in that world.
Trying to budge Republicans from their reassurances would backfire.
Here’s why.
First, consider the utter incompetence of most journalists this side of Mehdi Hasan to handle such an exchange.
I’ve been tracking a right wing technique I’ve dubbed “Cotton swabs” (because Tom Cotton is a skilled practitioner in the technique). In it, when Republicans get asked these kind of gotcha questions by Manu Raju in the hallway or by Kristen Welker on a Sunday show, they instead flip the gotcha on its head, using it as an opportunity to air unrebutted propaganda. And the journalist is left as a discredited prop in Trump’s assault on the press.
For example, when Welker recently asked Trump if he would, in the interest of unifying the country, concede he lost the 2020 election, Trump not only refused to concede he lost, but he used the question to blame Biden that the country was divided, and then — with absolutely no pushback from Welker — lied about Joe Biden weaponizing DOJ to go after him, Trump. (The exchange introduced precisely the same kind of false reassurance that Sargent called out.)
KRISTEN WELKER:
Yes. And sir, I don’t have to tell you this, because you’ve talked about it. It comes at a time when the country is deeply divided, and now you’re going to be leading this country for the next four years. For the sake of unifying this country, will you concede the 2020 election and turn the page on that chapter?
PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:
No. No, why would I do that? But let me just tell you —
KRISTEN WELKER:
You won’t ever concede —
PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:
– when you say the country is deeply divided, I’m not the president. Joe Biden is the president.
KRISTEN WELKER:
But you’re going to be the president.
PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP:
No, no. I’m not the president. So when you say it’s deeply divided, I agree. But Biden’s the president, I’m not. And he has been a divider. And you know where he divided it more than anything else, and it probably backfired on him. I think definitely is weaponization. When he weaponized the Justice Department and he went after his political opponent, me. He went after his political opponent violently because he knew he couldn’t beat him. And I think it really was a bad thing, and it really divided our country.
So instead of giving the harmless concession she invited, that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump instead hijacked Welker’s platform to lie about being a victim. She asked for something to support unity. He stoked division more, blaming the polarization of the country on Biden. Then he made false claims of grievance.
It had exactly opposite effect Welker imagined. And in the fact check NBC did after the interview? Trump’s lie about Biden weaponizing DOJ went unmentioned.
NBC treated it, a brazen lie, as if it were true.
If you want to know how Trump got elected even after being charged in two federal indictments, you might start with the way that every legacy media outlet lets lies like this go uncontested.* Always. Trump never gets fact checked on his false claims about the federal investigations into his attempted coup and stolen documents.
As a result, even newsies who watch mainstream Sunday shows might be forgiven for believing the cases against Trump were ginned up, to say nothing of the judges and lawyers, from Aileen Cannon to Bill Barr to Sam Alito, who instead pickle their brains with the propaganda on Fox News.
If journalists don’t fact check these false claims, where would voters learn differently? Where would your average voter learn that the investigations against Trump were just?
Sometimes Cotton swabs involve speaking over the questioner (a favorite technique of JD Vance [see update below for an example] and Marco Rubio). Sometimes it involves flipping the entire premise of the question. It always involves, first, a shameless refusal to disavow the outrageous Trump practice or statement. As such, these are performative moments of obeisance, reinforcing Trump’s power and the assault on truth he demands.
And on questions regarding Trump’s troubled relationship with rule of law, it always involves false claims about past DOJ practice, either denials he politicized DOJ or false claims it was politicized against him. Sometimes both!
Trump and his allies have used Cotton swabs to sneak hundreds — probably thousands — of false claims that he, and not his adversaries, was a victim of politicized prosecution onto purportedly factual news outlets with no pushback.
None.
Indeed, at least one of the underlying examples of Republicans giving reassurances about Kash that Sargent cited was itself a Cotton swab. Rick Scott didn’t just say that Trump wouldn’t launch investigations in his second term, the part Sargent quoted, he premised his answer on a false claim that Trump didn’t do so in his first term (a very common claim among Trump’s most loyal allies).
“He didn’t do it the first time. He’s not gonna do it this time,” Scott said. (Trump actually did press for prosecutions of his enemies during his first term, such as by publicly musing there should be probes of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and he also pushed for a criminal investigation into a previous investigation of his 2016 campaign.)
Even with Arthur Delaney’s fact check (a rarity in the reporting of Cotton swabs), HuffPo didn’t note that Trump did more than simply demand investigations of his adversaries, he got them. A key prong of the John Durham investigation chased possible Russian disinformation exacerbated by Durham’s own fabrications to criminalize Hillary’s use of oppo research. And both Durham’s indictments presented dodgy false statement accusations as conspiracies extending to the Hillary campaign. Trump’s DOJ set up a side channel via which Biden was framed — a false allegation used to ratchet up felony charges against his son. And there’s a long line of investigations — IRS audits, DOJ IG investigations used to fire people without due process, US Attorneys ordered to pursue special investigations (including another one targeting Hillary) — that targeted Trump’s enemies.
Trump’s administration targeted his enemies all the time, via a variety of means. And yet that gets buried in the HuffPo report. What should have been an opportunity to debunk Scott’s premise was, even from a diligent journalist, an exchange that still obscured how systematically Trump politicized rule of law in his first term.
And these Cotton swabs are part of a larger process, the extended con via which Trump has gotten Republicans to hate rule of law that LOLGOP and I have been tracing in the Ball of Thread podcast. Rather than treating the Russian investigation as a welcome review of four associates all of whom were monetizing their access to Trump with foreign countries, he instead latched onto false claims he was wiretapped, making himself a victim. With the help of Kash Patel, Trump substituted the Steele dossier for the real substance of the Russian investigation, convincing most Republicans that the investigation started not from the Trump campaign’s foreknowledge of the Russian attack on Hillary, but instead from Hillary’s attempt to understand Trump’s unabashed Russian ties — that oppo research Durham would criminalize. Trump then turned on the FBI, claiming that a bunch of people who were just trying to protect the country from an attack by a hostile country were instead targeting him personally; the myth that FBI targeted him is precisely what John Cornyn internalized when he attributed his support for Kash because Kash planned, “to restore the FBI to its former reputation as a nonpartisan, no political institution, and he told me he agreed” (also part of the Delaney story). Via both his own propaganda and the Durham investigation designed to flip the script on Hillary, Bill Barr reinforced that myth of Trump grievance. And all that while the entire Republican party responded to Trump’s extortion of Ukraine by relentlessly pursuing Joe Biden’s kid to the exclusion of pursuing policy, using a fabricated bribery allegation to ratchet things up before their rematch. Think about that! Trump dodged his first impeachment by ginning up a politicized investigation of Biden and his kid, and that entire process has been memory holed!
Gone!
Poof!
And while LOLGOP and I still have several episodes to do, it is no accident that the same team that turned a hard drive of Hunter’s dick pics — a relentless campaign of revenge porn — into yet another claim that poor Donald Trump was the victim, it is no accident that that very same team turned immediately to using the Big Lie to attack the foundations of American democracy. And Trump did it again when he beat the second (impeachment) and third (criminal indictment) attempts to hold him accountable. The price of admission in today’s GOP is these moments of performed fealty, the willingness to use legitimate questions about the politicized justice Kash has promised to instead publicly adopt Trump’s false claims that he is a victim.
The entire GOP is currently built around this myth of grievance. It gets reinforced with every Cotton swab. It was Trump’s platform during the election. It was the lie he used to make a bunch of disaffected Americans believe they had something in common with a billionaire grifting off their vulnerabilities.
This is the core of Trump’s super power, the claims of grievance he manufactures to justify his assault on rule of law.
The last thing you should want is for journalists to rush out to give Republican Senators yet another opportunity to perform their obeisance to Trump and his false myths of grievance, because all it will do is reinforce the polarization Trump thrives on and do further damage to truth and rule of law.
If we’re going to break this spell, we need to go about it a different way, some of which Sargent and I also discussed with respect to Kash, some of which I laid out in an earlier post responding to something Sargent wrote.
You are not going to defeat a Kash Patel or Pam Bondi nomination by asking for promises about political investigations. As I noted in that earlier post, Democrats (and even Lindsey Graham) attempted that approach with Bill Barr, and he proceeded directly from his confirmation to turn DOJ into a propaganda factory, down to the fabricated bribery allegation against Joe Biden.
Leave the direct assault on Kash to Olivia Troye (if she remains willing), to whom Kash already provided opportunity to talk not about his past role in abusing rule of law for Trump, but instead about how he lied to the people who relied on him, up to and including Mike Pence. Troye gives Republicans reason to oppose Kash because he has harmed Republicans. If you instead focus on Kash’s past and promised politicization, you’ll just trigger more obeisance to Trump’s myth of grievance.
Luckily, with Kash, there are other ways to get at this.
The question that kicked off the entire exchange between Sargent and me, for example, was about Speech and Debate, which should protect Liz Cheney from any scrutiny even if the false claims alleged in the Loudermilk report were true. Raising the Loudermilk referral as a question about Speech and Debate has the advantage of addressing the one area that has gotten Republicans to stand up to Trump, their own prerogatives (for example, by defending advice and consent on nominations). Questions about Speech and Debate would provide cause to raise the opinion — written by Trump appointee Neomi Rao, with a concurrence from former Trump White House Counsel Greg Katsas — that extended Speech and Debate protection to Scott Perry’s plotting on the Big Lie and affirmed its application in less formal situations than Liz Cheney’s communication with Cassidy Hutchinson at the core of Loudermilk’s report.
The district court, however, incorrectly withheld the privilege from communications between Representative Perry and other Members about the 2020 election certification vote and a vote on proposed election reform legislation.
Does Kash know better than Neomi Rao about Liz Cheney’s immunity from this kind of investigation, he should be asked (whether Rao or Kash is a bigger nutball is admittedly a close question, but one that can sow some useful discomfort). Questions to Kash about whether Speech and Debate defeats Loudermilk’s referral would have a very different valence than questions about politicization, because they would carry with them the implication that if Kash can investigate Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff, Mitch McConnell will be next.
Plus, they provide cause to focus on something Senators should address anyway: Kash’s lawsuit against DOJ for his own subpoena. In addition to claiming that the subpoena targeting him and others (including Adam Schiff, though he neglected to mention that) was “a chilling attempt to surveil the person leading the Legislative Branch’s investigation into the Department of Justice’s conduct,” something also included in the scope of the January 6 Committee, Kash also made preposterous claims about the standard for subpoenas (which is why it was dismissed unceremoniously in September).
Even Kash’s legally illiterate claims won’t disqualify him with Republican Senators, but raising them gets him on the record as to his understanding of the law before he signs a bunch of orders adopting wildly different standards targeting Trump’s adversaries. Kash has made expansive claims about privacy rights and right of redress against the federal government. Fine. Let’s make aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel adhere to that standard.
But they also provide a way to point out that Kash’s targets actually aren’t Trump’s targets. Many of those on his enemies list, for example, are people, like Rod Rosenstein (the real target of Kash’s lawsuit) against whom he’s got a grudge. Trump and GOP Republicans don’t give a damn if Kash pursues Trump’s enemies. Either they’re too cynical to care, or they believe — or have to feign that they believe — that Trump’s enemies have it coming. But if Kash turns the FBI into his own personal fiefdom? Too many Republicans have been at odds with Kash to abide by that.
Finally, there’s the point I made about the Loudermilk report, after actually taking the time to read it (which no one else seems to have done). In the 39 pages of his report dedicated to DOD’s inaction, Loudermilk gets vanishingly close to accusing then Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller of criminal insubordination for not deploying 10,000 members of the National Guard on January 6.
President Trump instructed the highest-ranking Pentagon official to use any and all military assets to ensure safety three days prior to January 6, 2021. The Acting Secretary of Defense concedes that external variables, such as the “Twitter sphere”, accusations of being a “Trump crony” and Representative Cheney’s Op-Ed, weighed on his mind as he determined how and whether to employ the National Guard on January 6, 2021. During this period of time, Acting Secretary Miller published his January 4 memo, with significant restrictions and control measures on the DCNG.
To date, no investigation or disciplinary action has taken place against Acting Secretary of Defense Miller for his failure to follow directives from the sitting Commander-in-Chief on January 3, 2021.
Loudermilk sources this accusation in DOD IG’s own investigation of their inaction for some very good reasons. First, the January 6 Committee revealed that what really happened is that a bunch of Trump loyalists, up to and including Mark Meadows, scoffed at the notion that Trump would march to the Capitol protected by 10,000 National Guard troops. More importantly, Kash Patel’s claims about his own involvement in this process put him right there at Miller’s side, part of the same insubordinate inaction. That’s a fiction Loudermilk needed to spin. It’s a fiction even more outrageous than his referral of Liz Cheney.
But it’s also a referral that implicates Trump’s pick for FBI Director personally. Did Kash fail the President? Or did he instead join everyone else in recognizing what it would mean for Trump to march to the Capitol?
A damn good question for a confirmation hearing.
Kash Patel’s own big mouth, past actions, and wacky legal claims provide ample material to create friction between him and Senate Republicans guarding their own prerogatives. That’s almost certainly not enough to sink his nomination, though it would be more effective than inviting Republicans to reaffirm their belief in Trump’s grievance myth. But questions about such topics may provide better material going forward to box him in.
About one thing I’m certain, though: you will get nowhere if you make this a loyalty contest. You will get nowhere if you keep framing this as an opportunity for Republicans to either reaffirm that loyalty oath, even if it entails a direct assault on rule of law, or invite an attack on themselves personally.
Virtually all GOP Senators will find a way to back Trump and his assault on rule of law. Every single time.
And given the inept media we’ve got right now, it will serve only to do more damage, reinforcing Trump’s conceit that the law is just a matter of political loyalty.
Do not give Republicans an opportunity to condemn or endorse Kash Patel’s witch hunt against Trump’s enemies. It’s the quickest way to ensure they remain unified in supporting him.
*The night after I wrote this, I woke up and remembered that CNN’s Daniel Dale had written a fairly extensive fact check about Trump going after his adversaries. The exchange with Martha Raddatz he responded to was a good example of how JD Vance talks over people to deliver his Cotton swabs, filibustering to prevent any rebuttal.
RADDATZ: Would Donald Trump go after his political opponents?
VANCE: No —
RADDATZ: He suggested that in the past.
VANCE: Martha, he was president for four years and he didn’t go after his political opponents.
You know who did go after her political opponents? Kamala Harris, who has tried to arrest everything from pro-life activists to her political opponents —
(CROSSTALK)
RADDATZ: He said those people who cheated would be prosecuted.
VANCE: — and used the Department of Justice as a weapon against people — well, he said that people who violated our election laws will be prosecuted. I think that’s the administration of law. He didn’t say people are going to go to jail because they disagree with me. That is, in fact, been the administration and the policy of Kamala Harris, Martha.
Look, under the last three-and-a-half years, we have seen politically-motivated after politically-motivated prosecution. I’d like us to just get back to a system of law and order where we try to arrest people when they break the law, not because they disagree with the prevailing opinion of the day, and there’s a fundamental difference here between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Donald Trump may agree — agree or disagree on a particular issue, but he will fight for your right to speak your mind without the government trying to silence you.
Kamala Harris is explicitly —
RADDATZ: Senator Vance, I —
(CROSSTALK)
VANCE: — censorship of folks who disagree with her.
RADDATZ: I want to go back to Donald Trump.
(CROSSTALK)
In response to Dale’s fact check, Trump’s campaign accused the media of a double standard because DOJ hadn’t indicted Biden or Hillary for their non-crimes.
Trump made extensive behind-the-scenes efforts to get his political opponents charged with crimes. But you don’t have to rely on investigative reporting or the memoirs of former administration officials to know that Trump went after political opponents as president.
He often went after them in public, too.
As CNN reporter Marshall Cohen has noted, there is a long list of political opponents whom Trump publicly called for the Justice Department and others to investigate or prosecute. The list includes not only 2016 election opponent Hillary Clinton and 2020 election opponent Joe Biden but also Biden’s son Hunter Biden, Democratic former Secretary of State John Kerry, Trump’s former national security advisor turned critic John Bolton, Democratic former President Barack Obama, unspecified Obama administration officials, the anonymous author of a New York Times op-ed by a Trump administration official critical of Trump, MSNBC host and Trump critic Joe Scarborough, former FBI director turned Trump critic James Comey, other former FBI officials, former British spy Christopher Steele (the author of a controversial dossier of allegations against Trump), and various congressional Democrats – including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.
Asked for comment for this article on Monday, Vance spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk accused the media of having a biased “double standard” and said “it is indisputable that under Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s DOJ, the Republican nominee for president was targeted and indicted, while under President Trump, nothing like that ever transpired against either of the Democrats he faced off with in 2016 or 2020.”
But that wasn’t for a lack of Trump trying.
Trump repeatedly pressured the Justice Department as president to prosecute both Clinton and Biden, in addition to trying to get foreign countries to investigate Biden. That the Trump-era Justice Department declined to charge Clinton and Biden doesn’t mean it’s true that Trump didn’t “go after” them or others. (In fact, Trump literally said in 2017 that he wanted the department to be “going after” Clinton.) [my emphasis]
But even Dale, the best in the business, made no mention of how aggressively Durham investigated Hillary and her campaign and ignored that the Brady side channel led directly to the elevation of Alexander Smirnov’s attempt to frame Joe Biden, which had a role in David Weiss’ elevation as Special Counsel, which led to the felony conviction of Hunter [Dale relies heavily on CNN’s Marshall Cohen, who got the Durham investigation wildly wrong].
In 2019, Barr satisfied Trump’s investigate-the-investigators demand by tasking a federal prosecutor to help investigate the origins of the FBI’s probe related to Russia and the 2016 election. In late 2020, with about three months left in Trump’s presidency, Barr gave that prosecutor, John Durham, the status of special counsel.
And in early 2020, Barr tasked a different federal prosecutor with taking in information from members of the public, notably including then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, related to allegations about the Bidens and Ukraine, which had been a subject of Trump’s public and private focus.
Barry Loudermilk Provides Proof of Kash Patel’s Incompetence Wrapped Up inside His Liz Cheney Referral
As you’ve no doubt heard, Congressman Barry Loudermilk released a report that, beneath what seems to be an appendix, refers Liz Cheney for investigation because she made sure that Cassidy Hutchinson had a lawyer who represented the former Mark Meadows aide’s interests when testifying before the Committee.
Loudermilk claims obtaining witness testimony for a proceeding amounts to obstructing it and also claims Cheney — and not those who provided testimony inconsistent with other sworn documents — suborned perjury.
Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, the former Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge. This secret communication with a witness is improper and likely violates 18 U.S.C. 1512. Such action is outside the due functioning of the legislative process and therefore not protected by the Speech and Debate clause.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation must also investigate Representative Cheney for violating 18 U.S.C. 1622, which prohibits any person from procuring another person to commit perjury. Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, Hutchinson committed perjury when she lied under oath to the Select Committee. Additionally, Hutchinson was interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation into President Trump. This Subcommittee sought a copy of the FBI report 302, documenting this interview and Hutchinson’s statements, but the FBI has refused to produce this vital document. The FBI must immediately review the testimony given by Hutchinson in this interview to determine if she also lied in her FBI interview, and, if so, the role former Representative Cheney played in instigating Hutchinson to radically change her testimony.
Loudermilk’s tribute to Kash Patel’s leadership
Before Loudermilk delivers his welcome wagon for aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel, however, he provides solid evidence that Kash Patel is not fit to be FBI Director.
It turns out that the longest section of his report — 39 pages as compared to 36 for the Cassidy and Liz section — lays out how top DOD officials misrepresented their decisions regarding the National Guard leading up to and on January 6.
Just five pages of that pertain to Christopher Miller’s inaction on what Loudermilk treats as a legitimate request from Trump to have 10,000 National Guard in DC (Loudermilk doesn’t lay out the testimony from top Trump aides nixing that idea, based in part on a fear that Trump wanted an armed guard to accompany him to the Capitol).
But the rest has to do with delays created in deploying the Guard after the riot started. It has long been clear that DOD was blowing smoke about their claimed actions that day. On its face, this part of Loudermilk’s report is fair pushback to DOD’s past unpersuasive claims. He even sneaks some quasi-referrals — whether to aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel or aspiring Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, it’s not clear — for Miller and Ryan McCarthy into his report.
To date, no investigation or disciplinary action has taken place against Acting Secretary of
Defense Miller for his failure to follow directives from the sitting Commander-in-Chief on
January 3, 2021.[snip]
To date, no investigation or disciplinary action has taken place against Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy for his failure to relay the Acting Secretary of Defense’s lawful deployment order at 3:04 PM on January 6, 2021.
[snip]
To date, no investigation or disciplinary action has taken place against Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy for deceiving congressional leadership with false statements regarding the delay in deployment of the D.C. National Guard to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The referrals are kind of interesting because McCarthy, at least, is on Kash’s dated and disorderly enemies list.
Mind you, if McCarthy was at fault for his January 6 response, it suggests there was something real to be at fault for. Maybe that’s why these referrals are snuck into the longest section of the report?
What’s most interesting, however, is Loudermilk’s picture of the DOD leadership that failed.
Someone — DOD’s then Acting Chief of Staff at the time — is missing.
Indeed, Kash’s name doesn’t show up anywhere in the 128-page report. Kash is a no-show even though, in the immediate wake of the insurrection, he had a great deal to say to Vanity Fair about his personal involvement in the two issues for which Loudermilk faults DOD.
On the evening of January 5—the night before a white supremacist mob stormed Capitol Hill in a siege that would leave five dead—the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller, was at the White House with his chief of staff, Kash Patel. They were meeting with President Trump on “an Iran issue,” Miller told me. But then the conversation switched gears. The president, Miller recalled, asked how many troops the Pentagon planned to turn out the following day. “We’re like, ‘We’re going to provide any National Guard support that the District requests,’” Miller responded. “And [Trump] goes, ‘You’re going to need 10,000 people.’ No, I’m not talking bullshit. He said that. And we’re like, ‘Maybe. But you know, someone’s going to have to ask for it.’” At that point Miller remembered the president telling him, “‘You do what you need to do. You do what you need to do.’ He said, ‘You’re going to need 10,000.’ That’s what he said. Swear to God.”
[snip]
On the morning of January 6, as Miller recounted, he was hopeful that the day would prove uneventful. But decades in special operations and intelligence had honed his senses. “It was the first day I brought an overnight bag to work. My wife was like, ‘What are you doing there?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know when I’m going to be home.’” To hear Patel tell it, they were on autopilot for most of the day: “We had talked to [the president] in person the day before, on the phone the day before, and two days before that. We were given clear instructions. We had all our authorizations. We didn’t need to talk to the president. I was talking to [Trump’s chief of staff, Mark] Meadows, nonstop that day.”
[snip]
Miller and Patel both insisted, in separate conversations, that they neither tried nor needed to contact the president on January 6; they had already gotten approval to deploy forces. However, another senior defense official remembered things quite differently, “They couldn’t get through. They tried to call him”—meaning the president.The implication: Either Trump was shell-shocked, effectively abdicating his role as commander in chief, or he was deliberately stiff-arming some of his top officials because he was, in effect, siding with the insurrectionists and their cause of denying Biden’s victory.
As for Mike Pence, Miller disputed reports that the vice president was calling the shots or was the one who sent in the Guard. The SECDEF stated that he did speak with Pence—then in a secure location on the Hill—and provided a situation report. Referring to the Electoral College certification that had been paused when the mob stormed the building, Miller recalled Pence telling him, “We got to get this thing going again,” to which the defense secretary replied, “Roger. We’re moving.” Patel, for his part, said that those assembled in Miller’s office also spoke with congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell. “We were called upon to do our job, and we executed because we had the reps and sets built into our process to get the troops where they were requested, to put up a fence, to secure a perimeter, and to help clear the Capitol compound. I mean, that’s just what we do.”
Some of what Kash said to Vanity Fair somewhat resembles Kash’s testimony to the January 6 Committee.
Although look forward to discussing these events in detail, I would like to make three things clear at the outset — excuse me — at the outset:
One, the actions the DOD took before January 6, 2021, to prepare for the planned protest in Washington, D.C., on January 5th and 6th, 2021, were appropriate, supported by requirements, consistent with the DOD’s roles and responsibilities, and compliant with laws, regulations, and other applicable guidance; two, the DOD’s actions to respond to the United States Capitol Police request for assistance on January 6th, 2021, were appropriate, supported by requirements, consistent with the DOD’s roles and responsibilities, and compliant with the laws, regulations, and other applicable guidance; and, three, DOD officials did not delay or obstruct the DOD’s response to the United States Capitol Police request for assistance on January 6th, 2021.
These are not just my words but, in fact, the findings of the DOD’s independent inspector general under President Biden’s administration. The IG’s November 16, 2021, report has marked has been marked as exhibit 3, I think.
But when January 6 Committee staffers asked the now-aspiring FBI Director about the Vanity Fair article itself he got … squirmy. His testimony to J6C was inconsistent with both what he told Vanity Fair and what Loudermilk lays out in his report.
A Oh, so you remember stuff like that. So, going off just the memory, and we can go back to the article when you bring it up, there was a meeting with the President of the United States, Acting Secretary Miller, and some others — I can’t recall off the top of my head where we were discussing, as the article states, something related to Iran.
And, in that same meeting, I believe it was on or around January 4th, 3rd, 4th, or 5th, the -as I stated earlier, in order for the Department of Defense’s National Guard to 11 be activated in any way we needed Presidential authorization. And President Trump at that
[Discussion off the record.]
Q sure. Go ahead.
A Okay. And so this question appears to implicate core executive privilege concems. I’m prepared to answer it, but I want the record to reflect my serious concerns about congressional overreaching of this matter.
So what I remember is that we knew, in order to get the National Guard even mobilized, we needed the President to at least say yes first. So what — my recollection of that meeting is the President preemptively authorized 10 to 20 National Guardsmen and-women around the country sorry? 10- to 20,000.
[snip]
Q Do you remember if the President mentioned anything that he may need these 19 troops to protect the Trump people?
A don’t recall him ever saying that.
Whichever Kash story you believe, however, both stories put Kash in the center of everything. Both stories claim he had the ability to directly affect all of the failures Loudermilk lays out (which might also explain why DOD’s story about January 6 is so unpersuasive).
If Kash was right there at the center of the story of DOD’s failures leading up to and on January 6, as told by Barry Loudermilk, then Loudermilk would have to include him, the aspiring FBI Director, among the referrals for investigation.
Perhaps that’s why Loudermilk instead just disappears the aspiring FBI Director: to avoid referring him to the aspiring FBI Director for accountability for his failures on that day?
How Barry Loudermilk covers up his own coverup
Which brings us to Loudermilk’s own coverup.
Loudermilk has been fluffing Trump’s non-response for some time as in this report, when he shows no interest in the Commander in Chief’s inaction that day.
Rather than dwelling on Trump’s demonstrable inaction, including in accelerating the Guard deployment, Loudermilk claims there was a witness present that day who would have heard if (as Hutchinson testified) Trump had cheered the taunts of “Hang Mike Pence,” rather than (as Jack Smith described) Nick Luna testifying that Trump simply said, “So what” when told Pence was evacuated.
Loudermilk puts great stock in this witness being better situated than Hutchinson to hear what Trump was saying.
This individual was within earshot of President Trump the entire time the President was in the President’s Dining Room. Additionally, in its investigation, the Subcommittee spoke with numerous individuals who worked closely with Meadows in the White House, and they confirmed that Meadows would not react apathetically to calls for violence, nor repeat an incident like the one alleged by Hutchinson so carelessly in a public space.
Only, this appears to be the area where Loudermilk was dealing with incomplete information. As Kyle Cheney first pointed out, Loudermilk released a redacted copy of what appears to be this person’s transcript.
But Jack Smith released an unredacted fragment of that transcript.
The transcript suggests Trump was far more entranced with the mob than Loudermilk wants to admit.
Loudermilk excuses his own gaps in knowledge by accusing Jack Smith of … collusion.
Chairman Loudermilk and the Subcommittee have uncovered evidence of collusion between the Special Counsel Jack Smith—the prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Merick Garland to conduct two separate criminal investigations into President Trump207—and either the White House or the Select Committee. On October 18, 2024, Special Counsel Smith released some of the documents used in his filing against President Trump.208
Among the released documents was an unredacted version of the transcript of a Select Committee interview with a certain White House employee. 209 Given that the Select Committee did not archive, or otherwise destroyed this transcript, and that the White House refused to provide an unredacted version to the Subcommittee, the only remaining explanation is that Special Counsel Smith received the unredacted version from one of the two institutions which did not cooperate fully with the Subcommittee.
207 Press Release, U.S. DEP’T OF JUST., Appointment of a Special Counsel (Nov. 18, 2022).
208 April Ruben, More docs unsealed in Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 case against Trump, AXIOS (Oct. 18, 2024).
209 Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney), X (Oct. 18, 2024, 11:45 AM).
We may find out soon enough how Jack Smith got an unredacted transcript that Loudermilk did not get. But he’s wrong that they’re the same transcript. They’re paginated differently (what is page 38 on Loudermilk’s copy is page 30 on Smith’s). Which ought to be a hint to Loudermilk’s crack team: the transcript is sourced differently, which may prove that January 6 committee didn’t destroy evidence he accuses them of destroying.
Plus, the point remains: Loudermilk’s own excuses for Trump’s inaction look different in light of more fulsome evidence, which shows Trump was entranced by the riot as soon as he returned to his office.
Loudermilk’s sketchy evidence
As to Loudermilk’s referral of Liz Cheney to an aspiring FBI Director whom Loudermilk would have to refer as well if not for his utter silence about the aspiring FBI Director’s centrality to what Loudermilk describes as insubordination and misconduct?
I hope, for Loudermilk’s sake, that it is intentionally half-hearted, an effort to do what he knows Trump is demanding, to simply give the aspiring FBI Director an excuse to predicate an investigation into Liz Cheney (if not himself).
Because key parts of his argument don’t say what he claims they do.
For example, a footnote in Loudermilk’s report appears to claim that texts between Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farrah apparently dated May 2 (by context, this would be 2022) are instead from June 6 (2021, the footnote says; my annotations, but Loudermilk appears to have mixed up two sets of texts he has).
Even assuming the footnote meant June 6, 2022, not 2021, the difference matters, because as Loudermilk notes, Hutchinson appeared a third time before the committee represented by Stefan Passantino on May 17, 2022, so her continued satisfaction with Passantino on May 2, 2022 is inconsistent with Loudermilk’s story and consistent with Cheney’s.
Loudermilk makes much of the fact that Passantino was not disciplined after a complaint in which Hutchinson refused to cooperate. Except the source he relies on for that claim, this NYT story, describes (in addition to the fact that Hutchinson refused to cooperate) that Passantino was ordered to do training about written conflict disclosure to his clients.
In a Feb. 2 letter, the office said that while Ms. Hutchinson had consented to having Mr. Passantino’s fees paid by the political action committee aligned with Mr. Trump, putting the arrangement in writing is mandatory under Rule l. 5(b) of the District of Columbia Rules of Professional Conduct. It required him to take legal ethics training classes during a probation period.
But, citing Ms. Hutchinson’s unwillingness to talk to investigators, the office said there was insufficient evidence on the larger matter.
“Ms. Hutchinson made some allegations about your conduct to the committee, but she refused to cooperate in our investigation,” it said. “Accordingly, except for the Rule l. 5(b) allegation, which you admit, we are not proceeding on her other allegations at this time. We are unable to prove those allegations by clear and convincing evidence, as we must.”
Elsewhere, Loudermilk claims that Hutchinson’s own House testimony supports his claim that Hutchinson selected Alston & Bird “at the recommendation of Representative Cheney” (he doesn’t provide a page number). But that section of Hutchinson’s testimony doesn’t support his contention about Cheney’s role in it.
Which brings us to the biggest problem with all this. Loudermilk’s conspiracy theory that Liz Cheney went out and got Hutchinson a lawyer who would support a propaganda line that Committee was seeking gets very close to claiming that Hutchinson’s new legal team, including former top DOJ official Jody Hunt, was himself engaged in unethical conduct.
I would bet a good deal of money that if Hunt were ever asked if he acted ethically when he represented Hutchinson’s later appearances before the committee, he would say he did.
And even if everything Loudermilk claimed were true, even if Cheney were acting as a lawyer and not a Committee member, she’d still be guilty of no more than unethical — not illegal — conduct.
Especially when by focusing on Cheney but ignoring aspiring FBI Director Kash Patel, Loudermilk gives up the game.
This report does more to cover up what Loudermilk himself suggests is potential misconduct from aspiring FBI Director than it exposes real crimes by Liz Cheney.
And he provides this evidence of either incompetence or (Loudermilk claims) misconduct in the black hole where Kash Patel should be just in time for Kash’s confirmation hearings before the Senate.
Kash Patel Also Lied about Trump’s Personalization of US Intelligence
First Mother Jones and then NYT had stories this week laying out a bunch of false claims that Kash Patel made about his experience at DOJ.
The headline lie in both is that, in his Government Gangsters book and interviews since, Kash lied about how significant a role he played in the Benghazi investigation, as MoJo lays out here.
“I was leading the prosecution’s efforts at Main Justice in Washington, DC,” Patel writes.
Several FBI and Justice Department officials who worked the Benghazi case say this description is an exaggeration. Asked about Patel’s characterization, a former FBI special agent who was on that investigation for years exclaimed, “Oh my god, no. Not on that case. Not on Benghazi.”
[snip]
This former agent said that the counterterrorism section had a small role in the Benghazi probe. Primarily, the FBI and the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, handled the case. “I don’t recall Patel having any influence on it,” he said. He recounted one meeting during the investigation that Patel attended in which Patel was not taken seriously by the main attorneys on the investigation. “The issue was whether or not we had the information needed to make a charge,” the former agent said. “He wasn’t a very experienced attorney and was dismissed by some of the attorneys at the table. The message was, we’re not paying attention to you.”
NYT adds a second, perhaps more important reason why Kash’s lies matter: Because he lied in an attempt to claim Democrats went soft on terrorism.
“Despite the fact that we had reams of evidence against dozens of terrorists in the Benghazi attack, Eric Holder’s Justice Department decided to only prosecute one of the attackers.”
— “Government Gangsters”“I remember this meeting with then-A.G. Holder. And we had a deck of like 19 guys we wanted to prosecute. You know, JSOC had them rolled up and we wanted to get them all. They killed four Americans. You know, it’s a legit terrorist attack. And the basic general response from the F.B.I. and D.O.J. leadership was ‘it’s only politically convenient to get one guy.’”
— “The Shawn Ryan Show”Mr. Patel’s statements suggest that the Justice Department under the Obama administration decided to initiate criminal proceedings against only one of the attackers, Mr. Khattala.
But as early as late 2013, the department had already filed sealed complaints against about a dozen militants, officials said at the time. Criminal complaints initiate prosecutions, but are often kept under seal if the charged person remains at large.
And prosecutors filed more secret complaints as the investigation identified additional suspects. A complaint filed against a Libyan man, Mustafa al-Imam, in May 2015, for example, became public only after his capture in 2017. (He was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to more than 19 years in prison.)
Other Benghazi suspects have since died.
Mr. Patel’s statement that the military had already “rolled up” as many as 19 attackers implied that they were already in American custody, raising the seemingly inexplicable question of why they did not get sent to trial.
In fact, to date, only Mr. Khatalla and Mr. al-Imam have been tried because the military has not captured any others — including on Mr. Patel’s watch as the Trump White House’s senior director for counterterrorism.
Capturing a specific person in a war-torn country where the military has scant ground presence is costly, risky and difficult. The operation to find and grab Mr. Khatalla required months of complex planning, including recruiting an informant to befriend and then lure Mr. Khattala to an oceanside villa, where an F.B.I. agent and American commandoes captured him and took him to an American warship waiting off the coast.
These fact checks will make for some interesting questions at Kash’s confirmation hearing. With some unspecified exceptions, these stories are primarily sourced to former officials:
- Former agent
- Former official in counterterrorism section
- Andy McCabe
- A former FBI agent who worked for years on the Uganda investigation
- Robert D’Amico, a former F.B.I. agent
- Public documents and interviews with several current and former law enforcement officials
That has the upside of allowing people to talk without fear. It means these people are no longer inside the bureaucracy, able to push back from within.
In any case, none of this will prevent Kash from being confirmed. Like Kash, John Ratcliffe fluffed his counterterrorism experience, in Ratcliffe’s case, to get elected. That led Trump to ditch his nomination a first time, but not in 2020 when he was confirmed on a largely partyline vote; the second vote was successful in significant part because then Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, who was being babysat by Kash, was such a shitshow that Ratcliffe was a less-awful alternative.
But Kash has lied about more than his own inexperience. As NYT noted, he also likes to lie for partisan gain. That’s how he has convinced Republicans to support his nomination.
It’s a third kind of lie that hasn’t factored much in discussions of his tenure at FBI. Kash Patel has been absolutely central to Trump’s efforts to personalize intelligence obtained by US officials. And there is abundant reason to believe he lied about that, at least publicly, when he claimed, in May 2022, that Trump had declassified all the documents found at Mar-a-Lago. There’s a bunch about Kash’s role in the classified documents investigation — for example, why Kash and John Solomon suddenly got status as Trump’s representatives to the archives when prosecutors asked for surveillance video, or what Kash told prosecutors in November 2022 when he sat for immunized testimony — that is not yet public.
But it may become public, possibly as early as this week and presumably well before his confirmation hearing. Indeed, if (for example) one of the things the FBI found during the August 8, 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago but did not charge was some version of the Crossfire Hurricane binder, that may show up in Jack Smith’s closing report.
Another thing that might show up in Jack Smith’s report is what someone whose potty mouth resembles that of Eric Herschmann (person 16 here) had to say, in an interview days before Kash testified, about the claims that Trump “declassified everything” made by some “unhinged” person who exactly matches Kash (person 24).
As MoJo and NYT lay out, Kash Patel has lied to inflate his own resumé. He has lied to attack Democrats. According to Olivia Troye (whom Kash did not sue after threatening to do so).
But he was also a key player in Trump’s effort to take home classified documents and put them to his own personal use.
That, too, is unlikely to give Republican Senators pause before putting him in charge of FBI’s signals collection (often with NSA involvement) and informant programs. But it is likely to be far more important than fluffing his resumé going forward.
To Pay Off His Election Debts, Trump Seems Prepared to Destroy the United States
Kimberly Strassel is struggling with cognitive dissonance. She’s trying to convince Republicans to reject the nomination of RJK Jr, whom she believes Trump named to head Health and Human Services only as electoral payback.
Welcome to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nomination, one of the more counterproductive Washington charades in recent history. Donald Trump has, in payback for late-stage election support, nominated a man for the vital cabinet position (health and human services) whom he once labeled a “Democrat Plant” and a bigger threat to the country than Joe Biden. Now meet the Republican senators, activists and influencers who are so clueless—and so blindly eager to salute the leader—that they can’t see the opportunity to save Mr. Trump from a deal he would never have made in other circumstances.
[snip]
It seems not to have occurred to Senate Republicans—who ought to have learned a little bit about Mr. Trump by now—that he needs a rescue here. No insider believes this is a heartfelt pick. Even political naïfs understand what happened: This agreement was entirely transactional. Mr. Trump saw an opportunity to gain RFK’s endorsement. The price was a promise of a big post. The president-elect is holding true to that deal as a businessman, so he won’t dare whisper misgivings for fear of leaks.
Instead Senate Republicans are playing monkey-see-monkey-do to an extent that even Mr. Trump must be exasperated. Nearly every GOP senator looks at Mr. Kennedy with wincing concern—knowing the havoc the anticapitalist big-government regulator can and will wreak on a Trump agenda. Yet no one steps up to save the president. If Joe Biden chose Hulk Hogan to be Treasury secretary, does anyone think Democrats would have let him step into that trap? But so desperate right now are Republicans to nod along that they are abdicating the real job of advice and consent—and protection.
Murdoch’s top columnist believes Trump needs to be saved from himself.
It comes with no small discomfort to admit that my approach to Trump’s nominations is not much different than [gulp] Strassel’s. I think Democrats, rather than fostering polarization by attacking Trump’s nominees as the partisan hacks they are, should instead frame the question in terms of the damage they’ll do to the US, the damage Republican Senators will own if they confirm them.
How hard can it be, after all, to convince Republicans that they don’t want to be responsible for letting Bobby Kennedy get rid of childhood vaccinations, revoking approval for the polio vaccine entirely, with the resultant death and destruction that’ll directly cause in their own states (as it did already in Samoa)?
How hard can it be, after all, to convince Republicans that the same billionaires who bankrupted Silicon Valley Bank then promptly begged for and got bailed out, shouldn’t be recommending the elimination of the FDIC?
That is, I think Democrats would be best served by laying out that if the Republicans approve these charlatans, they cannot claim they were not warned. They own the destruction Trump is embracing. If Trump gets his way on all these picks, it will be more destructive to the United States than dropping a nuke on NYC. And Republican Senators have a choice to sanction that … or try to prevent it.
All that said, in her valiant struggle to make sense of why the man she has blindly defended for years might take steps that will foreseeably do grave damage to harm the US, Strassel may simplify things somewhat when she imagines this is just about electoral payback.
For starters, much of the criticism Trump launched against RFK during the campaign was kayfabe, an attempt to appear to be on opposite sides as him, in a ploy to harm the Democratic ticket. That “charade,” as Strassel calls this, was about stealing Democratic votes, not feigned approval for RFK now.
Plus, Donald Trump is famous for reneging on his debts, whether personal or financial, and he would happily do so with RFK if he saw an advantage in it. Hell he has already reneged on the offer to Bill McGinley to be White House Counsel and given the job instead to David Warrington. While Elon Musk likely has a great deal of leverage over Trump for the foreseeable future, it’s hard to see how RFK could enforce any deal they made, if indeed they had one.
On the contrary, at least according to Trump whisperer Marc Caputo (citing Roger Stone, who has long been a professional Kennedy conspirator), Trump has affirmative reasons he wants RFK and … Tulsi Gabbard.
But the most critical fights for the president-elect, at least in regard to his immediate political legacy, center around Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr., former Democrats tapped to head the nation’s sprawling intelligence and health bureaucracies, respectively.
Gabbard’s and Kennedy’s nominations, like Hegseth’s and Patel’s, have met resistance in pockets of the Senate. But Trump allies view the stakes differently. Confirming Gabbard and Kennedy is seen as an opportunity for the president-elect to cement his legacy of broadening the Republican coalition to include disaffected Democrats and independents. They note that the two are considered Blue MAGA rock stars among the Trump faithful. They’re both loved by the new influential podcasters whom Trump courted this election and give Trump the chance to burnish his anti-establishment bona fides.
“The appointments of RFK and Tulsi Gabbard represent a realignment in American politics that you saw in the election,” said Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser. “He understands the historical significance of that realignment.”
For that reason, there is an expectation in Trump world that the president-elect will expend more of his political capital on Gabbard and Kennedy than on any of the other nominees. And that he could go apoplectic if their prospects begin to dim.
“Frankly, Pete [Hegseth] might not make it,” said one Trump adviser. “We’ll see. I’m not sure if the boss is willing to fight for that because there are people in our own camp who aren’t sure it’s worth it. But Kash [Patel] should get confirmed. And if they try to touch Tulsi and Kennedy, then it’s war.”
Added a second adviser: “If Tulsi or Bobby face real trouble, that’s when Trump will really start to fight. They represent the challenging of the status quo of the bureaucracy. That’s what MAGA is about.”
Now, Caputo is incredibly well-sourced in the vicinity of people like Stone, but he can be credulous.
And I’m not sure I believe that his sources believe what Bobby and Tulsi give you is some magical realignment among actual Democrats, who long ago dissociated from these nuts.
But I don’t doubt that the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s advisory team believes that Bobby and Tulsi do accomplish something. The question is whether some really smart politicos believe it’ll be a good thing to kill children and give dictators America’s secrets and let the richest men in the world destroy America’s banking system and the dollar exchange — whether they believe this will win lasting approval from America’s great disaffected masses. It might well! It certainly will expand the pool of disaffected Americans, and with it, increase the market for a strong man to respond to it all.
Or whether there’s some reason Trump is tempting Republican Senators to defy his plans to do great damage to the United States. Perhaps he intends to dare them to start defying him in bulk.
Or perhaps the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s entourage simply has an unknown reason they want to destroy America. Maybe Trump has other election debts — debts he’d get in more trouble for ignoring — that make him amenable to dropping policy bomb after policy bomb on America’s children.
But that’s sort of the point. You’ve got Kimberly Strassel up in arms because Trump is going to the mat for a conspiracist with a Democratic name who’ll get children killed. But it’s more likely to do with the policy bombs that RFK will help Trump drop than the specific conversations that led Bobby Jr to drop out of the race.
Zero Accountability: The Five-Plus Times DOJ Got Fabricated Evidence against Hunter Biden
The other day, former FBI Agent Asha Rangappa attributed the 11-year scope of Hunter Biden’s pardon to the possibility that, “For the 1st time, the FBI and Justice Department could literally fabricate evidence, or collaborate with a foreign government to ‘find’ evidence of a ‘crime,’ with zero accountability.”
Rangappa is not wrong that the ability to fabricate evidence to invent new crimes with which to charge Hunter likely helps explain the scope of the pardon.
But her suggestion that a second Trump term would be the “1st time” the FBI was in a position to do that is, itself, a symptom of the “zero accountability” that allowed Trump to win a second term.
FBI and DOJ already allowed various types of people — from spies to grifters to informants to an AUSA — to fabricate evidence against Hunter Biden and his father at least five times, with another four instances of potentially false evidence. It appears that such fabricated evidence played a role in the collapse of Hunter’s plea deal, David Weiss’ request for Special Counsel authority, and the evidence that convicted Hunter in his Delaware trial.
And whatever its influence on Hunter’s ultimate conviction, how Republicans worked to insert fabricated and otherwise suspect information into Hunter’s case is a lesson for how it’ll continue to happen.
The following list includes five examples, with numbered headings, that present compelling evidence of fabricated information used either by Congress or DOJ to go after Hunter and his father, along with four suspect incidents. The first five are presented in order of seriousness with regards to the effect on Hunter’s due process. This post will review each. I’ll do a followup that explains the lessons we can take from this.
- After sharing a debunked Fox News meme, Alexander Smirnov makes false claims of bribery
- Derek Hines narratively plants a crack pipe in Wilmington
- The gun shop also lied on the gun form
- Tony Bobulinski[‘s FBI report] claims he saw a diamond pass hands
- Gal Luft claims Joe Biden met directly with CEFC Chairman Ye in 2016
- FBI enthusiastically welcomes “The Economist’s” claims
- The Scott Brady side channel launders dirt Rudy Giuliani obtained from Russian agents
- FBI makes Peter Schweizer their special Hunter Biden informant
- Judge Maryellen Noreika admits a laptop that has never been indexed
1. After sharing a debunked Fox News meme, Alexander Smirnov makes false claims of bribery
Fabrication: Longtime FBI informant Alexander Smirnov allegedly falsely claimed Mykola Zlochevsky twice told him that he was bribing Joe Biden.
Resolution: According to Scott Brady’s testimony, prosecutor Lesley Wolf had treated the Smirnov allegation with the same skepticism she did other tips shared via the side channel from Rudy. But after Congress leaked the Smirnov FD-1023 and Bill Barr publicly complained that David Weiss was supposed to have investigated it, it appears to have been part of — if not the primary reason — why Weiss reneged on the plea deal with Hunter, obtained Special Counsel status, and ratcheted up charges afterwards.
In January 2020, right in the middle of impeachment, Bill Barr set up a “discreet” side channel overseen via Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady via which Rudy Giuliani could share the dirt on Hunter Biden he had obtained, in part, from known Russian agent, Andrii Derkach.
As part of that process, Brady checked in on all investigations implicated by the side channel: the SDNY investigation into whether Rudy was acting as an unregistered agent of various Ukrainians, David Weiss’ investigation into Hunter Biden, and two oligarchs from whom Rudy solicited dirt on Hunter: Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoisky. In his interview, Brady didn’t claim to have looked into the investigation into another oligarch from whom Rudy solicited dirt (indirectly): Mykola Zlochevsky. That investigation reportedly started in 2016 while Joe Biden was Vice President and got shut down the previous month, December 2019, right in the middle of an impeachment focused on corruption at Burisma. Rather, Brady dubiously claimed he discovered Smirnov in a search on Hunter and Burisma.
As Alexander Smirnov’s first indictment describes it, it worked the other way. When Smirnov saw a report of Derkach’s meetings with Rudy, Smirnov started texting his handler that, “bribe of [Joe Biden] should soon be in the news))).” He promised to get proof — and then started sending already debunked memes made popular on Fox News.
Neither story convincingly explains how Brady came to reach out to Smirnov to give him opportunity to frame Donald Trump’s opponent. Perhaps one of Smirnov’s three ties to Trump and his people, including the financial ties to Economic Transformation Technologies, which in turn has ties to one of the construction companies that has partnered with Trump Organization in the Middle East, that are the subject of a second indictment against Smirnov, better explains it. That is, perhaps someone in Trump’s camp knew to send him.
Whatever the case, after Brady came calling, Smirnov claimed that at a meeting in 2017, Zlochevsky insinuated he was paying Hunter Biden as protection, from Joe, for himself. Smirnov further claimed that on a phone call the previous year (in 2019, around the time Rudy was expecting a Hunter laptop, and close to the time the investigation into Zlochevsky would be shut down), the Burisma head bragged about hiding his payments so well it would take ten years to find them.
Here was the bribery claim that Trump had first demanded a year earlier from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, all wrapped up with a bow in that Brady side channel!
Brady told Congress his investigators vetted Smirnov’s claims, which was, after all, the purported reason for his side channel. The Smirnov indictment repeatedly described how precisely the thing — Smirnov’s travel records — that Brady claimed he had used to validate Smirnov’s allegations instead debunked them. Jerry Nadler referred Brady for investigation for those false claims to Congress, an investigation that will presumably be killed after inauguration.
On October 23, 2020 — days after Trump personally yelled at Bill Barr about the investigation into Hunter Biden and on the same day that Tony Bobulinski, accompanied by a former Trump White House lawyer, claimed to have personally witnessed a key meeting with CEFC — David Weiss’ team was ordered by Richard Donoghue to receive a briefing on this allegation.
With the personal involvement of Bill Barr, PADAG Richard Donoghue and before him Seth DuCharme, and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, Scott Brady found an informant who — if you believe the indictment — was willing to fabricate a bribery claim against Joe and Hunter Biden during an election year.
Don’t tell me that a second Trump administration will only prospectively use fabricated evidence, because it already happened, and the guy currently investigating how it happened was a witness to the process and one of the interviews in this case.
When DOJ ordered prosecutors to accept this alleged fabrication in 2020, AUSA Lesley Wolf reportedly treated it with the same skepticism she treated all the other dirt laundered through the side channel, and it went nowhere. But it didn’t go away. Republicans resuscitated it, in 2023, during their baseless effort to impeach Joe Biden. The FBI tried but failed to limit sharing of Smirnov’s FD-1023. Marjorie Taylor Greene promptly leaked details of it. Bill Barr started making public claims about it in response to Jamie Raskin’s accurate description of what happened in 2020. Then a “whistleblower” leaked the form itself via Chuck Grassley and James Comer. And amid that frenzy, Weiss reneged on his office’s previous assurances that there was no ongoing investigation, told Lindsey Graham that Smirnov’s FD-1023 was part of that ongoing investigation, and then obtained Special Counsel status, out of which the Smirnov false statements prosecution arose.
Yes, after the Smirnov allegation served as a precipitating factor in the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal, he too is now being prosecuted. But by all appearances, the fabrication and the way Republicans leveraged it nevertheless played a central role in the plight of Hunter Biden, a central role in prosecuting him with far more serious charges than originally planned. The fabrication had its effect, and the effect was to make Hunter a felon.
Update: On December 10, Alexander Smirnov signed a plea deal admitting his bribery claims against Joe Biden were fabricated.
The events Defendant first reported to the Handler in June 2020 were fabrications. In truth and fact. Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016 — in other words, when Public Official 1 could not engage in any official act to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office. Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.
2. Derek Hines narratively plants a crack pipe in Wilmington
Fabrication: AUSA Derek Hines repeatedly claimed that a line from Hunter Biden’s memoir set in February to March 2019 in New Haven happened in 2018 in Wilmington.
Resolution: None. Hines presented a version of this claim to jurors.
Prosecutors faced a number of challenges with charging Hunter Biden for the gun crime David Weiss had earlier decided to divert. They needed to defend against a vindictive prosecution claim that they had ratcheted up the gun charges against Hunter Biden because he didn’t accept the narrowed plea agreement after Weiss reneged on his June 19, 2023 assurances there was no ongoing investigation. Their plight was made worse because investigators had never taken the most basic investigative steps to pursue the gun charge: they had never obtained a warrant to search Hunter’s digital evidence for proof he was addicted when he owned the gun, and they had never done laboratory analysis on the pouch in which the gun was found. They did both those things after indicting Hunter for the gun crimes in 2023, after the statute of limitations had already expired.
The decision to charge Hunter with the gun crimes appears to have amounted to, “We know Hunter was an addict based on stuff obtained on the laptop and published in the right wing press” (indeed, one of Judge Maryellen Noreika’s decisions mistook stuff published by Murdoch rags for evidence before her).
Abbe Lowell has claimed that, at least in August 2023, prosecutors told him they had no need to rely on the laptop for evidence at trial. Prosecutors seem to have believed, incorrectly, that the laptop was an exact match of Hunter Biden’s iCloud. They similarly seem to have believed that Hunter’s memoir provided adequate proof that Hunter was doing drugs during the 11-day period in October 2018 he owned the gun. In fact, the memoir says almost nothing about that period.
Nevertheless, AUSA Derek Hines made a version of that argument — that the memoir reflected drug use during or closely after the period he owned the gun — over and over, at least seven times by my last count. Hines did so by claiming that his favorite line from the memoir — “It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8, not knowing which the fuck way was up” — took place in fall 2018 in Wilmington, DE, and not in Hunter’s stopover in New Haven between the time he left Keith Ablow’s treatment in February 2019 and arrived back in Wilmington, before then moving back to Los Angeles permanently.
He simply moved the narrative reference to the crack pipe in a Super 8 from one crime scene to the one where he needed it to be, from 2019 to 2018, from New Haven to Wilmington. Just like a dirty cop moves an actual crack pipe from one location to another.
(This post includes the full memoir excerpt and a summary of Hunter’s spending around New Haven; it also notes that the claim he was staying in Super 8s was, as so much auto-biography is, embellishment.) The argument was absolutely crucial to Hines’ responses to Hunter’s selective and vindictive prosecution claims, falsely substantiating a defense of the prosecutorial decision to charge Hunter with the gun crimes (and even the tax crimes) because there was so much evidence against Hunter in the memoir, when in fact the memoir had a gap for the crucial period.
Hines sustained this fabrication with the jury by selectively presenting the memoir to exclude the discussion of leaving Ablow’s treatment and the way it exacerbated Hunter’s addiction. And when he walked his summary witness through the memoir, he again falsely insinuated that the line took place in 2018, not 2019.
Q. And how about any section in Chapter 9 or Chapter 10, the relevant time period for 2018?
A. No.
Q. And finally, page 208, continuing in the same chapter, after Mr. Biden describes full blown addiction, Exhibit 19, page 208, does Mr. Biden write “crack is a great leveler.” And then he goes on to say “just like in California.” Is that what he goes on to say here?
A. Yes.
Q. If you zoom out, above that, does he say in the first paragraph, “It was me and a crack pipe and a super eight, not knowing which the fuck way was up.” Are those his words?
A. Yes.
Q. And this is in the same chapter when he describes his return in the fall of 2018; correct?
To be sure: Hunter was also staying in cheap motels while he was in Wilmington in 2018, including the night before Hallie Biden found the gun. But those stays don’t appear in his memoir, and so prosecutors had little to no evidence that he was smoking a crack pipe while staying there. As noted, virtually nothing from those weeks in Wilmington appears in his memoir.
But that was true of the evidence against Hunter generally. While there was a great deal of evidence showing Hunter using drugs before and after the period he owned the gun, there was little definitive evidence showing him using in those 11 days.
Prosecutors charged a case for which they had very little direct evidence of drug use during the period in question. One way they won a conviction anyway was by misrepresenting the timing and location of this line in the memoir.
3. The gun shop also lied on the gun form
Fabrication: Sometime after reporting the gun purchase, the gun shop added a claim to the original form that they had asked Hunter for a second form of ID, in addition to his passport (which, because it lacks an address, would not suffice).
Resolution: Judge Noreika prevented Hunter from presenting the doctored form to the jury or questioning specifically on the question (though Abbe Lowell did elicit closely related answers), thereby preventing Hunter from discrediting the gun shop practices generally or the proving Hunter’s lie on the gun form was not material.
According to a contested Abbe Lowell filing, before the election in 2020, the guy who owned the gun shop from which Hunter bought a gun, Ron Palimere, and the State Trooper who first investigated the gun in 2018, Vincent Clemons, exchanged WhatsApp texts about how they could release the paperwork tied to the gun purchase in order to help beat Joe Biden.
[Vincent] Clemons was the Delaware State Police officer who first arrived at Janssens’ grocery store on October 23, 2018 when Hallie Biden threw a bag containing the handgun into a trash can in front of the store. It was Clemons who took statements about the handgun from both Hallie and Hunter Biden and was part of filling out an official police report on the issue. Two years later, he is in the communications with [Ron] Palimere about the Form 4473, one of which states: “Yep your side is simple – Hunter bought a gun from you, he filled out the proper forms and the Feds approved him for a purchase.” (emphasis added). Palimere later responded, “I’ll keep it short and sweet as well: Hunter bought a gun. The police visited me asking for verification of the purchase and that’s all I can recall from that day. It was over 2 years ago.” (TAB 6B, 10/26/20 Palimere-Clemons Texts at 4, 6.) The reference to filling out the “proper forms” is not lost on defense counsel given what transpired thereafter. And, despite the importance of Clemons (e.g., the person who actually took the statements), the Special Counsel is foregoing him as a witness to call two other Delaware officers instead.
As part of their effort to use Hunter’s gun purchase to hurt his father in the 2020 election, it appears that on October 22, 2020 they for the first time printed out the receipt recording Hunter’s purchase of the gun.
They would leak these materials, as well as the partisan write-up of the investigation penned after the fact by Clemons, to right wing propagandists.
Their reference to “proper forms” was important, Lowell argued, because some time after the original gun form was emailed to ATF after the gun had already been lost and recovered, it got altered, to falsely reflect that the gun shop obtained a second form of ID before selling a guy they knew to be Joe Biden’s kid a gun. (There’s no way this vehicle registration could have served as a second ID to supplement the passport, because Hunter was driving his father’s Cadillac, and so the registration would have been in Dad’s name.)
Hunter got evidence that these key witnesses tried to use these documents as part of a political hit job long after his selective and vindictive prosecution bids were rejected. And Judge Maryellen Noreika prohibited Hunter’s team from introducing either that the gun shop owner hated Joe Biden and also wanted to get Hunter out of his shop as quickly as possible and as a result sold him a gun without first getting the proper paperwork, or that they altered the form after the fact. Jurors were left with no explanation of why gun shop employee Jason Turner repeatedly claimed to have written “DE Vehicle Registration” on the form, but it didn’t appear on the form before them (see this post for more on the way the gun shop employees’ testimony materially conflicted).
The means by which prosecutors managed to cover up that the gun shop had also broken the law is fairly banal: They relied on secondary witnesses for key testimony rather than that of people more directly implicated in similar conduct as Hunter (the gun shop owner was immunized to sustain this case), and performed ignorance of details about this corruption at trial.
That happens all the time in criminal trials prosecuted by AUSAs who excel at prosecutorial dickishness. Judge Noreika’s decision to exclude a doctored gun form (and instead rely on a scan at trial) might have been a ripe issue for appeal. Certainly, by excluding evidence that the gun sale went through without proper paperwork, she excluded evidence that Hunter’s lie was not material.
But the larger issue is that Hunter Biden was prosecuted for lying on a gun form even while prosecutors covered up that the gun shop owner himself had an employee fabricate the form after the fact, possibly to hide his own role in leaking to the press and trying to push such a case against Joe Biden’s kid.
4. Tony Bobulinski[‘s FBI report] claims he saw a diamond pass hands
Fabrication: After Trump hosted Tony Bobulinski at a debate, the FBI recorded claims that Bobulinski personally witnessed a key CEFC meeting.
Resolution: After prosecutors deemed Bobulinski’s testimony unreliable and so avoided follow-up, IRS agents claimed prosecutors improperly withheld Bobulinski’s testimony, leading to his platforming of slightly different claims in a hearing purporting to support impeachment. Bobulinski accused FBI of misrecording his interview.
The day after being hosted by Donald Trump at one of the Presidential debates, Tony Bobulinski — represented by onetime White House Counsel and future January 6 witness attorney Stefan Passantino — went to the FBI and made certain claims about Hunter Biden’s ties to CEFC. Among other things, he claimed that he participated in a Miami meeting between Hunter Biden and CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming.
BOBULINSKI first met in person with members of the BIDEN family at a 2017 meeting in Miami, Florida. BOBULINSKI, GILLIAR, WALKER, HUNTER BIDEN, and YE all attended the meeting. Also in attendance was Director JIAN ZANG (“ZANG”), a CEFC Director involved in forming new businesses and capitalizing them at the request of CEFC. At the meeting, BOBULINSKI witnessed a large diamond gemstone given as a gift to HUNTER BIDEN by YE.
The work conducted by CEFC, GILLIAR, WALKER, HUNTER BIDEN, JAMES BIDEN and YE over the preceding two years was discussed in detail at the Miami meeting. In particular, CEFC was closing significant investment deals in Poland, Kazakhstan, Romania, Oman, and the Middle East during this period of time. CEFC had used its relationship with HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN – and the influence attached to the BIDEN name – to advance CEFC’s interests abroad. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any monetary compensation for their assistance in these projects. HUNTER BIDEN and JAMES BIDEN did not receive any compensation because JOSEPH BIDEN was still VPOTUS during this time period.
He also claimed that when he met Joe Biden in May 2017, they discussed the business deal.
Further, BOBULINSKI met with JOSEPH BIDEN in person on May 2, 2017 at approximately 10:30 PM at the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel bar in Beverly Hills, California where they discussed SINOHAWK
In his congressional testimony, Bobulinski disclaimed several things recorded in his FBI interview report. He said he did not attend the meeting in Miami nor witnessed the transfer of a diamond to Hunter. He backed off his description of the substance of his meetings with Biden.
Not only did Joe Biden meet with me twice for an extensive amount of time — and we weren’t talking about the weather or niceties. We had an extensive discussion about his family, my family, my business career, where I was successful, the military background, and what I was doing with the Chinese. However, coached before that meeting to not go into a lot of detail by Hunter and Jim Biden. Okay?
The effect here is subtle. Bobulinski — who is furious that Hunter cut him out of this deal — is still trying to put Joe Biden at the center of it, he’s still trying to claim (contracts and finances notwithstanding) that the aspiring President got 10% of the deal. That’s the now partly-disclaimed story he told, allegedly presenting himself as a direct witness to more than he was, when he waltzed into the FBI fresh off his campaign event with Donald Trump.
5. Gal Luft claims Joe Biden met directly with CEFC Chairman Ye in 2016
Fabrication: Uncorroborated testimony that Hunter’s financial payments from CEFC started while Joe Biden was still Vice President.
Resolution: Public release of charges after Luft got House Republicans to claim a cover-up.
At a time when he would have known he was under investigation for his role in Patrick Ho’s influence-peddling scheme, March 2019 (for which he was charged and currently awaits extradition), Gal Luft met with investigators in Belgium for two interviews, one focusing on his role in Ho’s activities, another focused on Hunter Biden. At the latter, he claimed that Joe Biden had met with Ye when he was still President, in 2016, and Hunter had gotten paid in 2016 too.
LUFT is aware that YE met with BIDEN and HUNTER at the end of 2016 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.
The meeting at which Biden was present was later, in March 2017. Here’s how Rob Walker described it.
Walker: It was out‐of‐office. Ah, we were in ah.., D. C. at the Four Seasons…
Soline: Hmph hmph. Walker: …and ah.., we were having lunch and he.., he stopped in…
Soline: Hmph hmph.
Walker: …then he’d ah, leave.
Wilson: Okay.
Walker: That was it.
Wilson: Just said hello to everybody and then…
Walker: Yes.
Wilson: …took off?
Walker: He literally sat down. I don’t even think he drank water. I think Hunter said um.., I may be tryin’ to start a company, ah, or tried to do something with these guys and could you.., and think he was like “if I’m around”….and he’d show up.
So, too, was a $3 million payment that Luft said Hunter (actually, Rob Walker) received. Luft said it was paid in December 2016; it was paid in March 2017.
At the meeting, Luft “was directly asked to identify his CEFC CHINA ENERGY source(s) but refused to do so.”
Here’s how the tax indictment against Hunter (though not dissimilar to Bobulinski’s claims) described these ties.
8. In the late fall of 2015, the Defendant, Business Associate 1, and Business Associate 2 began to investigate potential infrastructure projects with individuals associated with CEFC China Energy Co Ltd. (CEFC), a Chinese energy conglomerate.
9. In or around December of that year, the Defendant met in Washington, D.C., with individuals associated with CEFC. During the next two years the Defendant, Business Associate 1, and Business Associate 2 continued to meet with individuals associated with CEFC, including in February 2017, with CEFC’s then-Chairman (hereafter “the Chairman”).
10. On or about March 1, 2017, State Energy HK, a Hong Kong entity associated with CEFC, paid approximately $3 million to Business Associate 1’s entity for sourcing deals and for identifying other potential ventures. The Defendant had an oral agreement with Business Associate 1 to receive one-third of those funds, or a million dollars. The Defendant, in turn, directed a portion of those million dollars to Business Associate 3.
On these topics, Luft’s testimony is subtle — just a temporal shift by a few months to make the sleazy Biden relationship with CEFC more damning (and put FARA charges that SDNY seems to have declined by the time Luft went public in 2022 back on the table). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Luft slightly adjusted his claims about his testimony when he went to NYPost after his arrest, correcting the monetary amounts and timing focusing instead on the later event at which Biden was co-present with Ye.
Luft’s comments about Hunter Biden don’t appear in his own indictment. And indeed, there’s no evidence he wittingly lied himself; whereas Bobulinski had claimed firsthand knowledge of the Miami meeting, Luft was only claiming to have second-hand knowledge of this information. It could well have been an effort from his own sources to harm the Bidens. In his effort to allegedly disavow his own involvement in this influence peddling, Luft certainly had cause to want to shift CEFC’s attempt to recruit James Woolsey, likely sparked by Trump’s election win, to instead focus on what was surely a similar attempt to cultivate the Biden family, something that had less value after Trump’s win.
The files released by the disgruntled IRS agents show that by 2021, SDNY was no longer pursuing a FARA investigation against the Bidens with relation to CEFC, so whatever Luft claim, it has not (at least thus far) done lasting damage, which is the way investigations are supposed to work.
FBI enthusiastically welcomes “The Economist’s” claims
There are a range of Ukrainians who shared dirt on Hunter Biden that made it to investigators. The first two of those, by chronology, were Ukrainians who were briefly made informants by people in Los Angeles, but who were subsequently deemed to be part of an influence operation targeting Joe Biden.
As Johnathan Buma described it, the thumb drive Ukrainians he called Rollie and the Economist provided targeting Hunter Biden in early 2019 (which would have been almost immediately after the investigation into Hunter was opened in Delaware) largely focused on the sex and drugs that reflect Hunter’s addiction, as well as financial improprieties.
After receiving the presentation from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST, THE ECONOMIST provided me a thumb drive with some supporting documentation, much of which was in the Ukrainian language, which I do not speak. After I submitted my FD-1023 reports on this information, I was put in touch with two agents working out of the Baltimore office on a case based in Delaware involving Hunter. spoke on the phone with these agents, who were very interested in the information due to its relation to their ongoing investigation that was mostly involving allegations of Hunter’s involvement with drugs and prostitution. Information derived from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST had previously been found to be credible, so this was handled carefully and quickly transferred over to the agents in Baltimore and was serilized in their case file. While I transferred the information, I could not read the Ukrainian language, and it required translation in order to determine the viability of the electronic document’s presumed support of the allegations related to Hunter and Burisma, which were presented and summarized in a PowerPoint presentation created by THE ECONOMIST and serialized in the case file. I had no involvement in the subsequent investigation concerning Burisma and the Bidens and never received any update from these agents as to whether the information was corroborated, but later learned from the media that some of the allegations appeared to have been true. Based on the level of corruption and the RIS’ past usage of Ukraine for influence operations raw single-source information derived from Ukraine is always viewed with skepticism by members of the USIC with some specialty and experience in Ukrainian matters.
Buma went on to describe how, when he shared information about Rudy’s ties to Russian spies, his supervisor shut him down.
I’ve written why I am skeptical of Buma. It’s also worth noting that, in fact, in spite of four years of investigation, the FBI never managed to substantiate what he seems to suggest the claims were, so he’s likely wrong that the tips from Rollie and the Economist held up to scrutiny.
Given that, per Buma’s description, these two were quickly disqualified as informants, it seems likely that their information was deemed problematic. That is, it seems likely that this information was vetted and found wanting, which is (again, like the Luft allegations) precisely what is supposed to happen with potentially motivated informant information.
The Scott Brady side channel launders dirt Rudy Giuliani obtained from Russian agents
It’s what DOJ did with Rudy Giuliani’s information, obtained in part from known Russian agents trying to interfere in the election, that defies excuse.
By setting up the Brady Side channel (and related steps), Barr thwarted the SDNY investigation into whether Rudy was himself an unregistered agent of Ukrainian sources. SDNY did not then — and it appears, did not ever — get access to the interview Brady did with Trump’s personal lawyer about how he collected this information. And Brady attempted to intervene in the SDNY investigation to tell them they had gotten it wrong.
As noted above, at Barr’s direction, Brady also created a way that Smirnov could fabricate an allegedly false bribery claim against Joe Biden. He created a way to, effectively, spy on several ongoing investigations.
And, while his sole purpose was supposed to be vetting, his vetting process appears to have done nothing more than serve as a laundry service, insulating Rudy and his sources from investigators and parachuting his information in with the sanction of top DOJ personnel, as when Richard Donoghue ordered DE USAO to provide information about their investigation and accept information in exchange, into the Hunter investigation.
Q And did your AUSAs ever communicate to you issues they were having with Ms. Wolf?
A Not with Ms. Wolf specifically — well, no strike that.
There was an occasion with Ms. Wolf as well, but they would communicate to me the issues that we were having, our investigative team was having with both the FBI and with Delaware and with SDNY. Really the only office we didn’t have any issues with was EDNY. It was Rich Donoghue’s office.
Q Okay.
And so, before you communicated with the PADAG that you needed assistance, did you have an initiative to talk with Mr. Weiss?
A Yeah, I wouldn’t always run to the principal right away, right. I would try to go professional to professional, you know, U.S. attorney to U.S. attorney, and we would try to resolve things. And, only when we couldn’t, would we elevate it to the DAG’s office and involve the PADAG.
Mr. Rosen was never involved directly in our communications. It was always the PADAG.
Q Okay.
And what feedback was Mr. Weiss giving you during that time period before you had to involve the PADAG?
Mr. Lelling. Only in general terms.
Mr. Brady. Usually Mr. Weiss was in receiving mode and would say that he would talk to his team to try to resolve it?
Q At any point did you have to advise Mr. Weiss that you’ve been, you know, you’ve been charged by the DAG to collect this information, and part of your charge and your duty, and correct me if I’m wrong, is to analyze it and hand it off?
A That’s correct and to coordinate with other offices. And, yes, I reminded Mr. Weiss of that obligation that we have, of that requirement, and the FBI on a regular basis as well.
[snip]
Q And were you ever told that the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office did not want a briefing from your office?
A I believe I was. I don’t remember. But I know that we had trouble scheduling it.
Q Okay. And then, further down, it states AUSA Wolf’s comments made clear she did not want to cooperate with the Pittsburgh USAO, and that she had already concluded no information from that office could be credible stating her belief that it all came from Rudy Giuliani.
Were you ever made aware of Ms. Wolf’s processing and decisions regarding this briefing, and why she didn’t want the briefing?
A I was not. We did, however, make it clear that some of the information including this 1023 did not come from Mr. Giuliani.
We do not know what kind of information got laundered through this process. We do know that after four years of investigation, DE USAO did not charge any of the allegations that Rudy’s Russian spy buddies were pushing. Again, it looks like prosecutors in Delaware properly viewed this information with skepticism.
FBI makes Peter Schweizer their special Hunter Biden informant
But the import of that process shares a feature with another of the efforts to launder dirt into an investigation into Hunter Biden.
By 2020, even as Arkansas’ US Attorney’s Office was four years into an investigation of the Clinton Foundation predicated in three different venues at least partly on Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, some FBI agents in DC had not just used his writing, but made him a formal informant to report on Hunter Biden. It seems that Schweizer was at least partly repackaging allegations based on the laptop, because (according to testimony from retired FBI agent Tim Thibault), when FBI agents from Delaware asked to stop getting the information, they effectively said they already had it.
At the request of the Delaware investigators, Thibault shut down Schweizer as an informant, four years after Thibault had been one of the the three FBI agents who had chased the Clinton Foundation allegations based on Schweizer’s work.
But like the Brady Side channel, this privileged means of sharing dirt — of uncertain quality — on Hunter Biden became a means to discipline those who tried to protect the integrity of investigations by limiting the partisan shit dumped into them. As Lesley Wolf also did, Thibault faced an entire campaign of retaliation (including from two agents who were themselves firebreathing partisans, who claimed that Thibault shut good work down), including public humiliation in an oversight hearing with Chris Wray.
The threats that Wolf faced may have been worse than what Thibault faced. But unlike Wolf, Thibault is on the (dated) Kash Patel’s enemies list.
We don’t know what substance of information Schweizer share with the FBI; we know the investigative agents didn’t want it, at least in that form.
But a more important point is that Thibault’s efforts (at the request of the investigative team itself) to protect the investigation from partisan taint, just like Wolf’s, made him a target for professional and potentially dangerous retaliation.
Judge Maryellen Noreika admits a laptop that has never been indexed
Which brings us, of course, to the laptop (and accompanying hard drive, purportedly a copy of the laptop but the Cellebrite report from which was 62% longer).
There are a great deal of reasons to be skeptical about the laptop: the discrepancies between John Paul Mac Isaac’s story and the FBI’s, JPMI’s claim that the FBI tried to boot it up four days before the known warrant, the possibility that Bill Barr got sent a copy.
But the biggest caution has to do with its handling.
Immediately after the release by NYPost, Rudy ran his yap and said it didn’t really matter if Derkach was a Russian spy and that he regarded the hard drive copy of the laptop he had to be an “extension” of his efforts to collect dirt from Russian spies. (In congressional testimony, Scott Brady admitted that Rudy never told him about the laptop.)
Thanks to Gary Shapley, we know the panicked meeting that ensued, as the investigative team tried to justify the year that they had spent snooping in a laptop that might have, after all, had something to do with Russia’s information operation. And Shapley recorded in real time not just that prosecutors had an email, dated March 31, 2020, recording some kind of concerns “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive,” but that they would not share it with anyone who might have to testify at trial. He also described that, at the time of that October 22, 2020 meeting, the FBI had never checked when the files on the laptop got added when. They had never checked to see if someone had packaged Joe Biden’s son’s digital life up onto a laptop to be dealt to the FBI.
My suspicion is that, after that time, prosecutors decided they shouldn’t try to introduce the laptop at any trial, because they could never clean it of this stench (they don’t appear to have considered investigating that stench, which continues to baffle me to this day). But after brashly telling Abbe Lowell in August 2023 they didn’t need no fucking laptop to charge the gun case, a different set of prosecutors discovered they had almost no evidence showing that Hunter Biden was doing drugs in the 11 days he owned a gun. They discovered that the all-critical communications between Hunter and Hallie Biden from that period — saved from a phone he used until replacement phones for ones he lost days before he bought the gun arrived during this same period — existed only on that laptop which he did not yet possess.
And rather than going back and pretending they were the FBI, acting like the FBI — rather than going back and doing the index that would tell them whether the laptop really did reflect Hunter’s use of it or someone else packaging up the digital life of the then President’s son — they instead bulldozed through things like the dickish prosecutors they are.
They never indexed the laptop. Never.
They never Bates stamped their own exhibits.
They never provided the laptop in e-discovery format.
In fact, after Hunter’s team did their own extraction so they could do searches, prosecutors raised questions about the integrity of their own source, the laptop.
When Judge Noreika denied my request for the extraction reports that Derek Hines claimed authenticated the laptop, she admitted that she had never required a report that actually referred to the laptop by some kind of identifier. The laptop evidence came in with no formal validation whatsoever.
The only two pieces of authentication used to validate the laptop at trial were the fact it had accessed Hunter’s iCloud account (but Zoe Kestan testified at trial that so had her own laptop), and that JPMI had sent an invoice to Hunter’s public iCloud email.
That was it.
The laptop and the most damning evidence against Hunter all came in without the most basic kind of validation. And as a result, we still can’t say with certainty we know fuckall about its provenance. Nor can we say whether its existence as a collection of evidence was doctored by hostile players (who would just as likely be Republican rat-fuckers as Russian spies).
We simply don’t know, and anyone claiming they do, is lying or withholding reporting and testimony that could have come in as part of the trial.
So we still can’t say whether the most famous prop in this whole story involved fabrications or manipulations or merely the disordered digital life of a hopelessly addicted man.
Hunter has been pardoned from these convictions (though James Comer has promised to continue hounding him going forward). Even still, these nine instances of dodgy evidence used against the President’s son provide lessons — none pretty — about what we should expect going forward.