Andrew McCabe Got His Pension and His Cufflinks — But Is that Adequate Recourse for the Country?

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As part of a settlement DOJ entered into yesterday to avoid giving Andrew McCabe discovery on the full extent of the politicized campaign against him, DOJ agreed to give him his retirement — and the cufflinks he would normally have gotten upon retiring from Senior Executive Service.

The more substantive parts of the agreement reflect a total capitulation by DOJ: restoration of McCabe’s pension backdated to the time he was fired and partial award of his legal fees for representation from Arnold & Porter.

Defendants will complete all actions necessary to ensure that Plaintiff will be recorded as having entered the federal retirement system effective March 19, 2018, with an annuity commencement date of April 1, 2018, see 5 U.S.C. § 8464(a)(1)(A), 5 C.F.R. § 842.208(b), and will receive:

a. a payment of a lump sum representing all retirement annuity payments, including annuity supplement payments, that he would otherwise have received from the April 1, 2018 annuity commencement date until the day before he is paid his first regular monthly payment, which will be computed in accordance with all relevant statutory and regulatory provisions, and which will not deduct or withhold any amounts for benefits not received or for taxes not owed during the time period specified above, unless such deductions and/or withholdings are required by relevant statutory or regulatory provisions;

b. prospectively from the date of his first regular monthly payment, through the federal retirement system, all periodic annuity payments, including annuity supplement payments, consistent with his March 19, 2018 retirement date;

[snip]

Defendants agree to pay $539,348.15 to Plaintiff, pursuant to the Equal Access to Justice Act, and in full settlement and satisfaction of all attorney’s fees, costs, and expenses. Payment shall be made to Plaintiff via electronic funds transfer to Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, as promptly as practicable, consistent with the normal processing procedures followed by the Department of Justice and the Department of the Treasury, following the dismissal of the above-captioned civil action. This provision does not constitute an admission that Defendants’ position was not substantially justified under 28 U.S.C. § 2412(d)(1)(A).

McCabe will get also an admission that “Executive Branch officials outside the Department” — otherwise known as The President —  “should not comment publicly on ongoing career civil service employee disciplinary matters.” [my emphasis]

WHEREAS, the Parties agree that Executive Branch officials outside the Department of Justice and its components should not comment publicly on ongoing career civil service employee disciplinary matters, except as provided by statute or regulation, so as not to create any appearance of improper political influence;

But McCabe won’t get a concession that numerous people within the chain of command at DOJ and FBI, including prosecutors who pursued a false statements charge against McCabe, bowed to that improper political influence. Nor, as noted, will McCabe get discovery to learn what documents — besides proof that Bill Barr’s DOJ altered McCabe’s notes in an effort to undermine the Mike Flynn prosecution —  DOJ was so determined to avoid disclosing that they settled this case.

All this is being accomplished, legally, by a kind of reset. McCabe’s personnel records will be altered such that there’s no record of his firing.

1. Within 30 days of the execution of this Settlement Agreement, Defendants will rescind their removal of Plaintiff from the FBI and the civil service, and will rescind and vacate former Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions’s March 16, 2018 removal decision (“DOJ Removal Decision”), and the March 16, 2018 removal recommendation that was submitted to Attorney General Sessions (“DOJ Removal Recommendation”).

2. The Parties agree that Plaintiff’s electronic Official Personnel Folder will reflect that he was employed continuously by the FBI from July 1996 until his retirement on March 19, 2018, as the FBI Deputy Director and a member of the Senior Executive Service (“SES”), after becoming 50 years of age and completing over 20 years of service.

3. Within 30 days of the execution of this Settlement Agreement, the government will remove from Plaintiff’s electronic Official Personnel Folder all documents that reflect or reference his removal, and replace them with documents reflecting that Plaintiff was continuously employed by the FBI until his retirement on March 19, 2018. Defendants will then provide to Plaintiff a copy of his revised electronic Official Personnel Folder.

4. Plaintiff will be deemed to have retired from the FBI on March 19, 2018.

5. Plaintiff will be deemed to have separated from the FBI in good standing for the purposes of 18 U.S.C. § 926C(c)(1).

By my reading, this doesn’t force DOJ Inspector General to revise its report on McCabe to incorporate Michael Kortan’s testimony, one of the problems in the report identified in McCabe’s suit. It doesn’t negate the conflicting Office of Professional Responsibility review results. But it does legally remove the final effect of over a year of retaliation and public badgering by the President, eliminating all trace of Sessions’ last minute firing of McCabe.

I have no doubt this settlement makes a lot of sense for McCabe. He gets the money he earned over two decades of chasing terrorists, spies, and organized crime and the ability to be treated with the respect a former Deputy Director is normally accorded.

But this country is still fighting the aftereffects of a coup attempt that almost succeeded, in part, because the FBI backed off investigating those close to the President, including Proud Boys who played a key leadership role in the attack. We never got fully visibility into the President’s relationship with Russia because Trump throttled that investigation with firings and pardons. And an unrelenting flood of disinformation masks both of these facts.

We know, from the fact that DOJ entered into this settlement (among other things), that Trump badly politicized DOJ. But this settlement allows DOJ to avoid coming clean about all that happened.

Jenny Cudd’s Pre- and Post-Riot Endorsement of a Revolution

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Jenny Cudd and Eliel Rosa were charged with trespassing together by complaint on January 12 and arrested on January 13. The arrest affidavit tracked how the two of them walked together through the Capitol.

  • At approximately 2:35 p.m., Jenny Louise Cudd and Eliel Rosa, enter the U.S. Capitol via Upper West Terrace Door.
  • At approximately 2:36 p.m., Jenny Louise Cudd and Eliel Rosa are observed inside the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol from the west side doorway that leads into the Rotunda. They are observed remaining inside the Rotunda until approximately 2:39 p.m. They are further observed taking pictures of the Rotunda and the surrounding area.
  • At approximately 2:39 p.m., Jenny Louise Cudd and Eliel Rosa are observed walking across the Statuary Hall area of the U.S. Capitol.
  • At approximately 2:40 p.m., Jenny Louise Cudd and Eliel Rosa are observed walking the Statuary Hall Connector and moves off camera at approximately 2:42 p.m.
  • At approximately 2:43 p.m., Jenny Louise Cudd and Eliel Rosa are observed departing from a large crowd inside the U.S. Capitol in front of the Main Door of the House Chamber and walks east toward the staircase.
  • Jenny Louise Cudd and Eliel Rosa are subsequently observed walking past the staircase and is further observed walking past the Upper House Door, going toward the other entrance to the House Chamber
  • Jenny Louise Cudd and Eliel Rosa are observed at approximately 2:54 p.m. at the Upper House Door and further observed departing the U.S. Capitol.

It described how Cudd filmed a video at the Willard after she returned, boasting that she was present when, “the new revolution started at the Capitol.”

Jenny Cudd stated on the Facebook video that she was at the Willard Hotel, located on 1401 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington D.C. 20004. During the course of the video she made the following comments to confirm the location and date of the video recording, “I am sitting in front of the Willard Hotel, as I always do when I am in DC protesting,” and “I was here today on January 6th when the new revolution started at the Capitol.”

It further described an interview Cudd did a few days later, boasting of her actions.

On January 8, 2021, Jenny Louise Cudd participated in an interview with a local news station in which she describes her actions on January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C., to include her admission of entering the U.S. Capitol on the same date. Specifically, Jenny Louise Cudd states during her interview she stated the following, “we walked up the steps and walked inside an open door (referring to the U.S. Capitol).” Jenny Louise Cudd further stated, “we the Patriots did storm the U.S. Capitol.” She added in reference to entering the U.S. Capitol, “Yes, I would absolutely do it again.”

As the arrest affidavit notes, the FBI also interviewed Rosa before arresting the two of them. He confirmed that the two of them had, indeed, entered the Capitol on January 6.

On January 8, 2021, Eliel Rosa was interviewed by the FBI in Midland, Texas. During the interview, Eliel Rosa admitted that he and Jenny Louise Cudd had entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The arrest affidavit focused entirely on events of January 6 and thereafter. And while both Cudd and Rosa were implicated in trespassing, the most damning evidence in the affidavit came from Cudd’s own description of their activity.

On February 3, they were both indicted with their original trespassing charges, as well as obstruction of the vote count and abetting such obstruction.

In March, Cudd moved to sever her case from that of Rosa, arguing in part that by charging them together, the government was attempting, “to create the appearance of a conspiracy or plan.” Specifically, though, Cudd wanted to sever her case from Rosa’s both to prevent his voluntary statement to the FBI from being presented against her, but also to ensure she could cross-examine him to get him to verify that she had no corrupt plan to disrupt the vote count.

Ms. Cudd will seek Mr. Rosa’s exculpatory testimony to show that there was no advance plan for Ms. Cudd to walk into the Capitol, that Ms. Cudd was not aware they were breaking the law by walking around inside, that Ms. Cudd did not act “corruptly,” that Ms. Cudd did not “picket,” that Ms. Cudd was not “disorderly,” that Ms. Cudd did not have the intent to commit any of the offenses alleged, and, more generally and most importantly, to show that Ms. Cudd did not commit any of the offenses of which she is accused. Mr. Rosa’s testimony would support reasonable doubt for each count of the Indictment. Furthermore, Ms. Cudd would be able to examine Mr. Rosa on redirect, to place any government cross examination into context for the fact finder.

In the government response, they largely recited the same facts shown in the arrest affidavit, then noted that Cudd and Rosa traveled from Midland, TX, stayed at the same hotel, and traveled through the Capitol together.

Cudd and Rosa both live in Midland, Texas, and they knew each other prior to January 6, 2021. They checked into the same hotel in Washington, D.C. on January 5, 2021, and checked out on January 7. On January 6, they went to the U.S. Capitol together.

In her reply, Cudd cited from Rosa’s 302, describing that he did not travel to the riot with anyone, and added more details based on the receipts obtained in discovery to make it clear they had not traveled together.

Contrary to the government’s implication that the two traveled together or planned to be at the Capitol together, Mr. Rosa’s interview with the FBI shows they did not. This is further supported by the hotel receipts, which the government obtained and shared with the defense. The Willard Hotel receipts show that rooms for the two co-defendants were booked on different dates and for different prices. (Ms. Cudd paid $143 more for her stay. If they coordinated, she would have surely chosen to save that money and would not have used Expedia for that booking.) The two stayed on different floors and had dinner separately and at different times, according to meal receipts. These were not the only two Trump supporters staying at the Willard Hotel from January 5-7. A large number of other Trump supporters shared those booking dates at the Willard. And, while the two may have known each other from back home and shared political views, that is not a basis for joinder. The entire crowd of Trump supporters, many of whom stayed at the Willard Hotel, were present at the Capitol. They are not charged together.

After the government had provided some discovery, including the contents of two phones, the government response to a request from Cudd that it identify all the exhibits it would use in its case in chief repeated the same facts laid out in the original arrest affidavit, all focused on January 6 and thereafter. The response also said it was far too early for Cudd to demand a list of exhibits that would be used against her at trial.

Shortly after Cudd’s request to learn precisely which exhibits the government would use at trial, Eliel Rosa entered into a plea agreement with an expiration date of July 29, pleading guilty to 40 USC 5104, the lesser of the two trespassing charges used with January 6 defendants. His statement of offense narrated what he and Cudd saw and heard as they wandered through the Capitol together. Specifically, he described hearing gunshots and seeing a bunch of people banging on doors, possibly the doors to the Speaker’s Lobby.

While inside of the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Rosa heard two gunshots and saw 15 to 20 men banging on assorted doors. These men were wearing “MAGA” gear.

In addition to implicating Cudd in his own trespassing, Rosa also noted that he did not have any evidence as to Cudd’s intent when she entered the Capitol.

Mr. Rosa has reviewed the allegations in the indictment that relate to his codefendant, Jenny Cudd, and admits that the allegations are true, or that he does not have sufficient information to dispute or disprove those allegations set forth the indictment. Specifically, this includes that Mr. Rosa does not have information as to Ms. Cudd’s motive and intent when she entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 or whether Ms. Cudd had the intent to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding before Congress – to wit: Congress’s Electoral College Certification on that date.

This might be seen as exculpatory for Cudd, precisely the kind of testimony she hoped to elicit from Rosa at any trial. But it also protected Rosa from any implication in whatever intent Cudd did have when she went to the Capitol.

The government’s sentencing memo for Rosa provided more details about the friendship between Rosa and Cudd, which Rosa described to be a recent friendship.

In an interview with the FBI, Mr. Rosa explained his relationship to his co-defendant Jenny Cudd. Mr. Rosa and Ms. Cudd are new friends, who met at an event in November 2020. Mr. Rosa explained that he and his co-defendant Jenny Cudd held similar beliefs. Although the two were not travel companions, they both discussed their plans to travel to Washington, D.C. and stayed in the same hotel in separate rooms.

It also describes how both returned to the Willard after Trump’s speech, and only then did Rosa decide to go to the Capitol (this detail was used against him at his sentencing).

In the afternoon on January 6, 2021, after listening to President Trump’s speech, Mr. Rosa returned to his hotel, however, he decided he would follow others heading toward the Capitol after learning that Vice President Pence was not going to take action. Mr. Rosa met with his friend Ms. Cudd at the hotel and together they marched toward the United States Capitol where he knew the Congressional certification was taking place.

Rosa’s own sentencing memo explains that the gunshot referred to in his statement of offense was probably the fatal shot of Ashli Babbitt, thereby seemingly confirming that he witnessed a bunch of people in MAGA hats banging on a door before Babbitt was shot.

When he got to the Capitol he walked in through an open door and followed the flow of people going through the rotunda and towards the East gate. He heard what he believes to have been the shot that killed Ms. Babitt. After being asked to stand against the wall for a short period of time while officers dealt with that situation, he (and others) were asked to leave out the East door, and he complied immediately.

Rosa’s sentencing memo also makes clear that he posted nothing positive about the riot after he attended it; a photo he posted to Facebook stating, “And we fight,” was posted at 5:22AM that morning.

On Tuesday, Judge McFadden sentenced Rosa to a year of probation, less than the month of home confinement the government requested (I thought I heard McFadden impose more community service than the government had asked for, 100 hours instead of 60, but no reference to community service appears in the docket).

Hours later, the notice that Cudd would plead guilty posted to the docket. Her plea offer was dated September 27, with a deadline of acceptance of October 11, a day earlier (and indeed, the signatures on the plea agreement are dated October 11). Because Cudd pled guilty to the more serious trespassing misdemeanor than Rosa, it meant that language permitting the government to ask for a terrorism enhancement was included as boilerplate in her plea agreement and given Marina Medvin’s complaints at the plea colloquy, nothing Medvin tried to do managed to get it removed.

Cudd’s statement of offense included a detail that may not appear anywhere else. Not only did she admit under oath she knew the vote was going to be certified (something Rosa also attested to), but she admitted under oath that at the the Stop the Steal rallies on January 5, she heard people calling for revolution and then stated that she was “all for it.”

On January 5, 2021, Ms. Cudd stated the following in a video on social media: “a lot of . . . the speakers this evening were calling for a revolution. Now I don’t know what y’all think about a revolution, but I’m all for it. . . . Nobody actually wants war, nobody wants bloodshed, but the government works for us and unfortunately it appears that they have forgotten that, quite a lot. So, if a revolution is what it takes then so be it. Um, I don’t know if that is going to kick off tomorrow or not, we shall see what the powers that be choose to do with their powers and we shall see what it is that happens in Congress tomorrow at our United States Capitol. So, um either way I think that either our side or the other side is going to start a revolution.”

It’s not clear whether Rosa knew of this video or saw it before he stated that he had no evidence about her intent on the day of the riot.

Cudd’s statement of offense admits that she was in the vicinity of the Babbitt shooting (without specifying it as such), but doesn’t describe (as Rosa’s did) being held up while police dealt with the aftermath.

The government produced to the defense evidence that showed that Ms. Cudd and Mr. Rosa continued walking through the Statuary Hall area of the U.S. Capitol, until 2:43 p.m., when they moved toward the House Chamber and connecting hallways; the defense does not dispute this evidence.

Thus, while Cudd’s statement of offense notes that she did not, herself, enter Pelosi’s office, the statement she recorded after the riot stating that, “we did break down the Nancy Pelosi’s office door,” would have taken place after those with Ashli Babbit had done more than $1,000 of damage to the doors to the Speaker’s lobby, something charged against at least three of those present, and something that could carry a terrorist enhancement for those who did the damage.

We did break down the Nancy Pelosi’s office door and somebody stole her gavel and took a picture sitting in the chair flipping off the camera. . . . they had to evacuate it before we charged the Capitol. . . . Fuck yes, I am proud of my actions, I fucking charged the Capitol today with patriots today. Hell yes I am proud of my actions.” Despite Ms. Cudd’s statement, there is no evidence that Ms. Cudd entered Nancy Pelosi’s office and no evidence that Ms. Cudd stole any property from the Capitol.

The next day, January 8, Cudd explained why she used the collective “we” in her statement from the day of the riot, seemingly trying to distance herself from some of the violence yet still describing that “the patriots [collectively] stormed the Capitol” and asserting she would do the same again, even after she was (at least per Rosa’s statement of offense) present in the vicinity of the Babbitt killing.

So if you watch the entire video [referring to her January 6 social media video] and you watch any of my videos you know that the way that I speak is that I always say we. So I say we the patriots, we . . . whatever. I always say we so those things did happen by other people but I was not a part of that. But in reference to it that umm we the patriots stormed the Capitol and some people went into different offices and different things like that . . . . I would do it again in a heartbeat because I did not break any laws.

The new language in Cudd’s statement of offense — describing the speakers calling for revolution — will help DOJ make a case (one they’ve already started to lay out) about the premeditation reflected in those who gave speeches on January 5.

But it also shows that she responded to calls for revolution the day before the riot by endorsing the idea, and then after the riot, she returned to the Willard and bragged she had been present when the revolution was started, ““I was here today on January 6th when the new revolution started at the Capitol.”

Marina Medvin’s Client Signs a Plea with the Potential of a Terrorism Enhancement

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Marina Medvin is the sweet spot of January 6 lawyers. She’s a legit lawyer, doing particularly good work trying to challenge the asymmetrical access defendants get to security video of the attack. She clearly serves the interests of her clients rather than grifting or focusing more on scoring political points, as some other January 6 defense attorneys appear to do. But she’s also a right wing activist in her own right.

As such, she spends a great deal of time calling people she doesn’t like “terrorists.”

She uses debunked claims about (foreign) terrorists to try to sow fear about immigration.

She spends a great deal of time demanding that the 9/11 attackers be called terrorists.

She calls the evacuation of Afghans who helped the US fight terrorism the importation of terrorists.

She labels Joe Biden’s effort to craft a positive outcome out of Donald Trump’s capitulation to the Taliban as negotiating with terrorists.

She holds protestors accountable for those they affiliate with who call for violence.

She even complains when those held as — and those guarding — terrorists get treated humanely.

Yesterday, with the benefit of Medvin’s able counsel, her client Jenny Louise Cudd pled guilty under a plea agreement that permits the government to ask for a terrorism enhancement under U.S.S.G. § 3A1.4 at sentencing.

To be sure, I agree with Medvin’s assessment yesterday that it is unlikely the government will actually push for this enhancement with Cudd (and I think it even more unlikely that Judge Trevor McFadden would side with such a government request). This appears to be a standard part of any January 6 plea agreement involving sentencing calculations but no cooperation agreement; one thing cooperators are getting — especially those in militia conspiracy cases — is an assurance they won’t been deemed terrorists at sentencing.

Still, Cudd won’t be sentenced until March, and the government may have a far more complete story to tell about the attempted revolution that Cudd applauded by then, a story that will likely incorporate some of the facts to which Cudd admitted under oath yesterday. You never know what DOJ will do or Judge McFadden might find plausible by then.

I raise the terrorism enhancement language in Cudd’s plea agreement not because I think she’ll be treated as one come sentencing (thus far, I think Scott Fairlamb is at greatest risk of that, because his statement of offense admitted both to using violence and to his intent to intimidate those certifying the vote). Rather, I raise it to show that even a right wing activist like Medvin agrees with my reading of the language in these plea agreements. The government is reserving the right to treat these defendants, even someone who pled down to a trespassing misdemeanor like Cudd, as terrorists at sentencing. To be clear: Medvin doesn’t think this will work legally nor does she think her client is implicated in the violence of those with whom she chose to affiliate on January 6, but that is what she described the language effectively means in Cudd’s plea hearing.

Such terrorism enhancements are how domestic terrorists get labeled as terrorists. Because domestic terrorist groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers aren’t labeled as (foreign) terrorist groups by the State Department, affiliation with or abetment of those groups is not per se illegal (as it might be under material support statutes for foreign terrorist organizations). It’s not until sentencing, then, that the government can argue and a judge might agree that the specific crime a person committed involved acts dangerous to human life, and (in the case of January 6) an attempt to intimidate or coerce the policy of government. If the judge does agree, a terrorist enhancement could expose the defendant to a much longer sentence as a result, a guidelines range of 121 to 151 months for someone with no criminal history.

This is a detail that has gone almost entirely unreported elsewhere: that DOJ is building in an ability to treat these defendants as terrorists when it comes to sentencing, sentencing that may be five months in the future.

Mind you, since this would be domestic terrorism, the government could not just wildly label someone as a terrorist for attending a protest at which others present espouse violence, as Medvin has done of Muslims. They’d have to lay out a specific intent on the part of the defendant to threaten force to coerce some political outcome. But if they do so with these January 6 defendants, then they may be legally branded as terrorists for their actions on January 6.

DOJ Was Still Working to Access Joshua Schulte’s Phone in September 2019

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Glenn Greenwald is making factually unsupported defenses of Russia on Twitter again.

Yesterday, he made an argument about what he sees as one of the most overlooked claims in the Yahoo piece suggesting there was an assassination plot against Julian Assange and then, 100-something paragraphs into the thing, admitting that discussions of killing Assange were really regarded in the CIA as, “a crazy thing that wastes our time.”

Glenn doesn’t, apparently, think the overlooked detail is that the timeline in the story describing the changing US government understanding towards Assange, including Edward Snowden’s central role in that, shows that Assange’s defense lied shamelessly about the timeline in his extradition hearing.

Nor does Glenn seem interested that DOJ didn’t charge Assange during the summer of 2017 after Mike Pompeo started plotting against the Australian, but only did so on December 21, 2017, as the US and UK prepared for what they believed to be an imminent exfiltration attempt by Russia.

Intelligence reports warned that Russia had its own plans to sneak the WikiLeaks leader out of the embassy and fly him to Moscow, according to Evanina, the top U.S. counterintelligence official from 2014 through early 2021.

The United States “had exquisite collection of his plans and intentions,” said Evanina. “We were very confident that we were able to mitigate any of those [escape] attempts.”

[snip]

Narvaez told Yahoo News that he was directed by his superiors to try and get Assange accredited as a diplomat to the London embassy. “However, Ecuador did have a plan B,” said Narvaez, “and I understood it was to be Russia.”

Aitor Martínez, a Spanish lawyer for Assange who worked closely with Ecuador on getting Assange his diplomat status, also said the Ecuadorian foreign minister presented the Russia assignment to Assange as a fait accompli — and that Assange, when he heard about it, immediately rejected the idea.

On Dec. 21, the Justice Department secretly charged Assange, increasing the chances of legal extradition to the United States. That same day, UC Global recorded a meeting held between Assange and the head of Ecuador’s intelligence service to discuss Assange’s escape plan, according to El País. “Hours after the meeting” the U.S. ambassador relayed his knowledge of the plan to his Ecuadorian counterparts, reported El País.

What Glenn thinks is important is that, on April 13, 2017, when Mike Pompeo labeled WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service, the CIA did not yet have proof that “WikiLeaks was operating at the direct behest of the Kremlin,” though of course Glenn overstates this and claims that they had “no evidence.”

Glenn then claimed that CIA’s lack of proof on April 13, 2017 is proof that all claims about Assange’s ties with Russia made in the last five years — that is, from roughly October 7, 2016 through October 12, 2021 — lacked (any!) evidence. In other words, Glenn claims that CIA’s lack of proof, before UC Global ratcheted up surveillance against Assange in June 2017 and then ratcheted it up much more intensively in December 2017, and before US intelligence discovered the Russian exfiltration attempt, and before they had enough evidence to charge Joshua Schulte in 2018, and before they seized Assange’s computer in 2019, and before Snowden wrote a book confirming WikiLeaks’ intent in helping him flee, is proof that they never acquired such proof in the 1600 days since then.

At the time Pompeo made his comments, FBI was just five weeks into the Vault 7 investigation. They were chasing ghosts in the Shadow Brokers case, which also implicated Assange. Robert Mueller had not yet been appointed and, perhaps a month after he was, Andrew Weissmann discovered that, “the National Security Division was not examining what the Russians had done with the emails and other documents they’d stolen from those servers.” Pompeo’s comments came four months before Mueller obtained the first warrant targeting Roger Stone. They came seven months before Mueller obtained a warrant targeting Assange’s Twitter account. They came sixteen months before Mueller obtained a warrant describing a hacking and foreign agent investigation into WikiLeaks and others. They came 25 months before Mueller released his report while redacting the revelation that multiple strands of the investigation into Stone were ongoing (though also stating they did not have enough admissible evidence to prove Assange knew that Russia continued to hack the DNC). They came three years before DOJ kept the warrants reflecting the foreign agent investigation into WikiLeaks and others largely redacted, presumably because that investigation remained ongoing. They came three and a half years before the government withheld almost all of WikiLeaks lawyer Margaret Kunstler’s two interviews with Mueller’s team because of an ongoing investigation.

And all that’s separate from the long-standing WikiLeaks investigation at EDVA that led to Assange’s charges, which Rod Rosenstein has said never fully moved under Mueller.

On April 13, 2017, the investigation into Assange’s activities in 2016 had barely begun. Yet the fact that CIA couldn’t prove Assange was a Russian agent before most investigation into these things had started, Glenn claims, is proof that Assange is not a Russian agent.

It’s a logically nonsensical argument, but because certain gullible WikiLeaks boosters don’t see the flaws in the argument, I’d like to point to something fascinating disclosed just recently in the Joshua Schulte case: as late as September 2019, DOJ was still trying to get a full forensic image of the the phone Schulte was using when he was first interviewed on March 15, 2017.

That was revealed in the government’s response to a Schulte motion to suppress evidence from the Huawei he used at the time, in the early stages of the FBI’s investigation. We saw many of these warrants from Schulte’s first attempt to get these early warrants suppressed (in which his attorney noted that the government got a second device-specific warrant). But Schulte is challenging the search on a basis that even Sabrina Shroff didn’t raise two years ago.

As the government tells it, FBI agents used a subpoena to get Schulte to hand over his phone during the interview on March 15 before they all returned to his apartment where they had a warrant for all his devices, then got a separate warrant at 1:26AM that night to search the phone specifically. They were unable to do so because it was locked, so in an interview on March 21 — at which time the search warrant was still valid — they got Schulte to open his phone (something his attorney at the time boasted he did voluntarily during a 2017 bail hearing).

Someone must have lost their job at FBI, though, because after Schulte opened the phone, it rebooted, preventing them from obtaining a full forensic copy of the device.

On March 20 and 21, 2021, the defendant, accompanied by his attorneys, was interviewed by the Government and law enforcement agents at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. At the interview on March 21, 2021, the defendant, in the presence of counsel, consented to a search of the Cellphone and entered his password to unlock it. (Id. ¶ 13(b)). When the Cellphone was unlocked, however, it rebooted, and FBI was able to obtain only a logical copy of the Cellphone rather than a complete forensic image. (Id. ¶ 13(c)).

However, in its response to Schulte, the government is relying on two documents that it released for the first time. First, a location warrant/pen register targeting three different phones, which the government submitted to show that Schulte’s Google history obtained on March 14 showed that he searched for ways to delete files in the time period he is accused of stealing the CIA files and deleting evidence of doing so. The affidavit is useful for explaining how Schulte was using phones in that period of 2017. In addition to the Huawei, for example, Schulte had a phone with a Virginia number he used to call at least one of his CIA colleagues between March 7 and when he canceled the phone on March 12. Then, after he gave the FBI his Huawei phone, he bought one that night he used to call Bloomberg (his employer), and another on March 17.

More importantly, the government released the affidavit and warrant from September 9, 2019, providing more explanation why they weren’t able to fully exploit the phone in 2017.

After Schulte unlocked the phone, FBI personnel attempted to forensically image the Subject Device so that the FBI could review its contents. However, because the Subject Device rebooted during that process, the FBI was able to obtain only a logical forensic image of the Subject Device (the “Logical Forensic Image”). Although the Logical Forensic Image contains some content from the Subject Device, the Logical Forensic Image does not contain all data that may be on the Subject Device, including deleted information and data from applications. The data and information from the Subject Device that is missing from the Logical Forensic Image would likely be captured on a complete forensic image of the phone (“Complete Forensic Image”). However, in March 2017, the FBI was unable to obtain a Complete Forensic Image of the Subject Device because the Subject Device locked after it rebooted and the FBI did not know the password to unlock the phone again to attempt to obtain a Complete Forensic Image.

On or about August 12, 2019, FBI personnel involved in this investigation successfully unlocked the Subject Device using a portion of a password identified during the course of the investigation (“Password-1”). Forensic examiners with the FBI believe that they will be able to obtain a Complete Forensic Image of the Subject Device using Password-1.

After unlocking the Subject Device using Password-1, an FBI agent promptly contacted the Assistant United States Attorneys involved in this investigation to inform them of this development, and the decision was made to seek a warrant to search the Subject Device for evidence, fruits, and instrumentalities of the Subject Offense.

The affidavit explains, among other things, that Schulte first obtained the phone on September 21, 2016 and logged into Google right away (somewhere in the vast paperwork released in the case, Schulte admitted that Google was his big weakness — and how!).

In the government response, they describe that the government did search the phone. They say the phone contains images of a woman Schulte lived with that he was charged, in Virginia, with assaulting in 2015.

The FBI searched the Cellphone pursuant to that warrant. The Cellphone contains, among other things, images of an individual identified as Victim-1 in the Government’s prior filings.

It’s an interesting defense of the import of the warrant. As the government explained in 2017 when it first informed Judge Paul Crotty of the Virginia assault charge, the incriminating photos had already been found on one of Schulte’s phones (it’s unclear whether these were found on the Huawei or the phone shut down on March 12), so the State of Virginia presumably doesn’t need any images discovered after 2019 to prosecute him on the assault charge.

As relevant here, the Government discussed several photographs recovered from the defendant’s cellphone that depicted an unknown individual using his hands to sexually assault an unconscious female woman (the “Victim”). (See Exhibit A, Aug. 24, 2017 Tr. at 12-13). At the time, the Government was aware that the Victim knew the defendant and had lived in his apartment as a roommate in the past. (Id.) Magistrate Judge Henry B. Pitman, who presided over the presentment, did not consider the information proffered by the Government regarding the Victim, explaining that “facts have [not] been proffered that . . . tie Mr. Schulte to the conduct in that incident.” (Id. at 48-89). Nevertheless, Judge Pitman detained the defendant concluding that the defendant had not rebutted the presumption that he was a danger to the community. (Id. at 47-49).

[snip]

On or about November 15, 2017, the defendant was charged in Loudoun County Virginia with two crimes: (i) object sexual penetration, a felony, in violation Virginia Code Section 18.2-67.2; and (ii) the unlawful creation of an image of another, a misdemeanor, in violation of Virginia Code Section 18.2-386.1. The Government understands that these charges are premised on the photographs of the Victim. Specifically, the Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorneys Office has developed evidence that the defendant was the individual whose hands are visible in the photographs sexually penetrating the Victim.

But whatever they found on the phone, the government made an effort to make clear that even this 2019 search — which might have obtained deleted WhatsApp or Signal texts, both of which Schulte has used — was covered by a search warrant, something Schulte is currently trying to suppress only on a poison fruit claim.

This wasn’t the only evidence the government obtained years after Schulte became the primary suspect, though. They didn’t obtain full cooperation from Schulte’s closest buddy from when he was at the CIA, Michael, until January 2020, just before his first trial (which is one of the reasons the government provided fatally late notice to Schulte that the friend had been placed on leave at CIA). Michael helped Schulte buy the disk drives the government seems to suspect Schulte used in the theft, he also knew of Schulte’s gaming habits, and the CIA believed he might know more about Schulte’s theft from CIA.

So it’s clear that for most of the time that Glenn says the investigation as it stood in April 2017 must reflect all the evidence about Schulte, Assange, and Russia, the government continued to investigate.

None of that says DOJ obtained information from Schulte in that time implicating Assange in ties with Russia (though, as I’ve noted, someone close to WikiLeaks told me Schulte reached out to Russia well before ambiguous references to Russia showed up at Schulte’s trial). But to suggest all the evidence the government might now have was already in their possession on April 13, 2017, requires ignoring everything that has happened since that time.

Timeline

October 7, 2016: In statement attributing DNC hack to Russia, DHS and ODNI include documents released by WikiLeaks; an hour later WikiLeaks starts Podesta release

January 6, 2017: Intelligence Community Assessment assesses, with high confidence, that GRU released stolen documents via exclusives with WikiLeaks

March 7, 2017: First Vault 7 release, including unredacted names of key CIA developers

March 13, 2017: Affidavit supporting covert warrant approving search of Schulte’s apartment, including the devices found there

March 14, 2017: Affidavit supporting overt warrant approving search of Schulte’s apartment, including devices

March 14, 2017: Search warrants for Schulte’s Google account and other electronic accounts

March 15, 2017: 302 from interview with Schulte and testimonial subpoena and cell phone subpoena handed to him at interview

March 16, 2017: Affidavit supporting search warrant authorizing search of Schulte’s Huawei smart phone

March 31, 2017: Warrant and pen register for three different Schulte phones — one serviced by Sprint that he had used through all of 2016 but canceled on March 12, 2017, one he obtained after his phone was seized on March 15, 2017 serviced by Virgin, another he bought on March 17, 2017 serviced by AT&T

April 13, 2017: Mike Pompeo declares WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service

May 17, 2017: Robert Mueller appointed

August 7, 2017: Mueller obtains first warrant targeting Stone, covering hacking

August 23, 2017: Schulte charged with possession of child pornography

September 6, 2017: Schulte indicted on child pornography charges

September 26, 2017: Roger Stone testifies before HPSCI, lies about source for advance knowledge

October 19, 2017: Stone falsely claims Credico is his intermediary with WikiLeaks

November 6, 2017: Mueller obtains warrant targeting Assange’s Twitter account, citing hacking, conspiracy, and illegal foreign political contribution

November 8, 2017: Schulte claims to have been approached by foreign spies on Subway between his house and court appearance

November 9, 2017: WikiLeaks releases source code, billing it Vault 8

November 14, 2017: Assange invokes CIA’s source code (Vault 8) in suggesting Don Jr should get him named Ambassador to the US

November 16, 2017: Schulte tells FBI story about approach on Subway, accesses Tor

November 17, 2017: Schulte accesses Tor

November 26, 2017: Schulte accesses Tor

November 30, 2017: Schulte accesses Tor

December 5, 2017: Schulte accesses Tor

December 7, 2017: Schulte detained pursuant to charges of sexual assault in VA and violating release conditions

December 12, 2017: Randy Credico invokes the Fifth

December 21, 2017: Assange first charged with CFAA charge

March 6, 2018: Assange indicted on single CFAA charge

June 18, 2018: Superseding Schulte indictment adds Vault 7 leak charges

June 19, 2018: WikiLeaks links to Schulte diaries

August 20, 2018: Mueller obtains warrant describing investigation of WikiLeaks and others into conspiracy, hacking, illegal foreign contribution, and foreign agent charges

September 25, 2018: Schulte posts diaries from jail

October 31, 2018: Second Schulte superseding indictment adds charges for leaking from MCC

April 11, 2019: Assange seized from Embassy

May 23, 2019: Superseding Assange indictment adds Espionage Act charges

August 16, 2019: After FBI interview, CIA places Schulte buddy, “Michael” on leave

September 9, 2019: Affidavit in support of warrant authorizing search of Huawei phone

February 4, 2020: Schulte trial opens

February 12, 2020: Schulte attorneys reveal “Michael” was put on paid leave in August 2019

March 6, 2020: In effort to coerce Jeremy Hammond to testify, AUSA twice tells Hammond that Julian Assange is a Russian spy

March 9, 2020: Judge Paul Crotty declares mistrial on most counts in Schulte case

April 28, 2020: DOJ continues to redact Foreign Agent warrants targeting WikiLeaks and others because of ongoing investigation

June 8, 2020: Third superseding Schulte indictment adds clarification to the charges

June 24, 2020: Second superseding Assange indictment extends CFAA conspiracy through 2015, citing efforts to use Snowden to recruit more leakers

November 2, 2020: BuzzFeed FOIA reveals that Mueller referred “factual uncertainties” regarding possible Stone hacking charge to DC US Attorney for further investigation, but also finding that it did not have admissible evidence that Assange knew Russia continued to hack the DNC

September 3, 2021: Schulte submits motion to suppress cell phone content

September 31, 2021: Schulte’s motion to suppress docketed

October 1, 2021: Government response to Schulte motion to suppress

FBI Searches the Home of the Guy Who Said, “I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash” on January 6

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I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today — Telegram text from person described as UCC-1, January 6, 2021

According to NYT’s Alan Feuer, the person who participated in the Proud Boy leadership Telegram chat planning for January 6 who was described as “Unindicted Co-Conspirator 1” (UCC-1) in the Proud Boy Leaders indictment is Aaron Whallon-Wolkind, the Vice President of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Proud Boys.

As described in the indictment, in Telegram chats obtained from Nordean’s phone, UCC-1 made a comment on January 4 reflecting an existing plan. And he played a key role in setting up the radio communications that would be used on the day of the riot.

41. On January 4, 2021, at 8:20 p.m., an unindicted co-conspirator (“UCC-1”) posted to New MOSD channel: “We had originally planned on breaking the guys into teams. Let’s start divying them up and getting baofeng channels picked out.”1

42. On January 5, 2021, at 1:23 p.m., a new encrypted messaging channel entitled “Boots on the Ground” was created for communications by Proud Boys members in Washington, DC. In total, over sixty users participated in the Boots on the Ground channel, including D.C. NORDEAN, BIGGS, REHL, DONOHOE, and UCC-1. Shortly after the channel’s creation, BIGGS posted a message to the channel that read: “We are trying to avoid getting into any shit tonight. Tomorrow’s the day” and then “I’m here with rufio and a good group[.]”

[snip]

47. UCC-1 the At 9:09 p.m., broadcast a message to New MOSD and Boots Ground channels that read: “Stand by for the shared baofeng channel and shared zello channel, no Colors, be decentralized and use good judgement until further orders” UCC-1 also wrote, “Rufio is in charge, cops are the primary threat, don’t get caught by them or BLM, don’t get drunk until off the street.” UCC-1 then provided a specific radio frequency of 477.985.

UCC-1 also warned the others not to write their criminal plans in Telegram texts.

Specifically, the person identified in the Superseding Indictment as Unindicted Co-Conspirator (“UCC-1”) advised that participants “[s]houldn’t be typing plans to commit felonies into your phone.” UCC-1 later directed that, “if you’re talkin[g] about playing Minecraft2 you just make sure you don’t use your phone at all or even have it anywhere around you.”

2 Minecraft is a video game. Based on information provided by the FBI, the government understands that it is common for persons discussing criminal activity online to refer to such activity as occurring “in Minecraft” to conceal the true nature of the activity.

The full context of UCC-1’s comment about burning DC to ash includes a comment reflecting his belief that “the state is the enemy of the people” and a response from Person 2 describing that “normiecons” have no adrenaline control, a recognition that shows up elsewhere that the Proud Boys could and did inflame non-Proud Boy members.

DONOHOE: Are you here?

…

UCC-1: No I started a new job, don’t want to fuck it up yet

DONOHOE: Well fuck man

UCC-1: There will be plenty more I’m sure lol

UCC-1: I want to see thousands of normies burn that city to ash today

Person-2: Would be epic

UCC-1: The state is the enemy of the people

Person-2: We are the people

UCC-1: Fuck yea

Person-3: God let it happen . . . I will settle with seeing them smash some pigs to dust

Person-2: Fuck these commie traitors

Person-3 It’s going to happen. These normiecons have no adrenaline control . . . They are like a pack of wild dogs

DONOHOE: I’m leaving with a crew of about 15 at 0830 to hoof it to the monument no colors

Person-2 Fuck it let them loose

Person-3 I agree . . . They went too far when the [sic] arrested Henry as a scare tactic

A detention memo for Ethan Nordean revealed that UCC-1 was monitoring livestreams and using other methods to track the riot (I’ve written about how useful former Army Captain Gabriel Garcia’s live streams would have been for that purpose; given Whallon-Wolkind’s role in setting the channel for the Baofengs, it’s likely he tracked that too).

When the Defendant, his co-Defendants, and the Proud Boys under the Defendant’s command did, in fact, storm the Capitol grounds, messages on Telegram immediately reflected the event. PERSON-2 announced, “Storming the capital building right now!!” and then “Get there.” UCC-1 immediately followed by posting the message, “Storming the capital building right now!!” four consecutive times.6 These messages reflect that the men involved in the planning understood that the plan included storming the Capitol grounds. This shared understanding of the plan is further reflected in co-Defendant Biggs’ real-time descriptions that “we’ve just taken the Capitol” and “we just stormed the fucking Capitol.”

6 UCC-1 and PERSON-2 are not believed to have been present on the Capitol grounds, but rather indicated that they were monitoring events remotely using livestreams and other methods.

The centrality of UCC-1 in the indictment against the Proud Boy leaders — along with Aram Rostom’s reporting on Whallon-Wolkind’s past efforts to share information on Antifa with the FBI — fed conspiracies about the FBI seeding the entire January 6 riot.

In January 2019, a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys who called himself “Aaron PB” was on a Telegram chat with fellow members to gather information about Antifa, according to leaked chat screenshots whose authenticity was confirmed by a source familiar with the Proud Boys and by a lawyer for Aaron PB. Aaron PB said in a chat that he was gathering “info we want to send our FBI contact.”

A source close to the federal investigation told Reuters that “Aaron PB” is a Philadelphia Proud Boy leader named Aaron Whallon-Wolkind.

Whallon-Wolkind did not respond to phone calls or questions sent via text. Reached by a Reuters reporter, he hung up.

Patrick Trainor, a New Jersey lawyer for Whallon-Wolkind in an unrelated lawsuit, said Whallon-Wolkind and other Philadelphia Proud Boys had talked about inconsequential matters with the FBI over the years. Those contacts did not amount to anything substantive, Trainor said. Trainor represents other Proud Boys as well.

“They’ve all been approached at different times at different rallies in the city of Philadelphia,” he said. “Plainclothes FBI guys wanted to talk to them. You know: ‘We heard this happened. This happened so let’s talk about it.’”

Trainor acknowledged Whallon-Wolkind made the comments about “our FBI contact” on the Telegram chat, but believes they were not meant to be taken seriously. “I think he was just breaking balls,” Trainor said. “I think there was no contact with the FBI.”

In a May Motion for a Bill of Particulars, Ethan Nordean’s attorneys professed to need the identity of UCC-1 because key allegations in the conspiracy were attributed to him.

The government uses the statements of a person identified as “UCC-1” in the FSI to detain Nordean and to establish a conspiracy. The government has not produced evidence identifying this individual.

[snip]

The FSI cites a “UCC-1” who allegedly makes various conspiratorial remarks. FSI, ¶¶ 41, 42, 47. The government has not produced evidence identifying this individual.

But by July 15 (not long before Enrique Tarrio called Zach Rehl’s wife to sound out whether Rehl was flipping), when Judge Tim Kelly asked whether Nordean lawyer Nick Smith still wanted that identity, Smith instead emphasized a greater need for evidence linking Dominic Pezzola to his client. Smith did complain that the Proud Boys were left speculating on the identity of the person, ridiculously suggesting that his client didn’t know the identities of the around six other people with whom he was in a leadership Telegram channel. Smith then noted that there was public information (Rostom’s reporting) that UCC-1 had been a government informant. Prosecutor Luke Jones then confirmed that UCC-1 was not a CHS — that is, a paid informant of the sort that FBI might use to entrap others.

Nevertheless, in July, it appeared that prosecutors had a cooperating witness who could attest to an advance plan to storm the Capitol.

On Friday, according to a filing purporting to argue that Zach Rehl should be released on bail, FBI agents raided Whallon-Wolkind’s home.

Rehl’s attorney, Jonathon Moseley, claimed that because (he said), “Aaron Whallon-Wollkind did not join the events in the District of Columbia on January 6, 2021, whether the peaceful demonstrations or the violent attacks by a very, very few against U.S. Capitol Police … the Government has no basis for investigating or charging Whallon-Wollkind other than his connection to Zachary Rehl” [all three forms of emphasis Moseley’s], which in turn Moseley claimed was proof that the government still did not have any evidence against Rehl.

It’s a colossally stupid argument, almost as stupid as Moseley’s last two filings, in which he admitted that the Proud Boys “‘circle[d]’ (in a rectangle) the region around the Capitol to monitor the risk from counter-demonstrators,” an encirclement plan that had been publicly tied to obstructing the vote count in advance, and then argued that because Ali Alexander, a brown person who took credit for organizing the Stop the Steal rallies, had not been arrested yet, his [white] client should not have been either.

In the guise of arguing that a warrant that Judge Kelly likely knew about — if not authorized — in advance did not substantiate probable cause, Moseley laid out anything a co-conspirator might want to know about the raid of one of another co-conspirator, including the date of the search, the items listed in the warrant, the crimes under investigation, the items seized, and Whallon-Wolkind’s [wise] refusal to answer questions without an attorney present.

Before dawn on the morning of Friday, October 8, 2021, approximately 20 law enforcement agents heavily armed and wearing riot police gear, raided the home rented by Aaron Whallon-Wollkind near the Pennsylvania border. Aaron was awakened to threats, commands, and intimidation from an extremely loud loud-speaker (far more powerful than a hand-held bullhorn) ordering him to come out of his rural house with his hands up. He walked out of the door to find his girlfriend already handcuffed outdoors without any pants being guarded by the riot-gear wearing FBI agents.

On his lawn he found an armored personnel carrier which he understands to be a “Bear Cat.” The tank-like armored personnel carrier and other vehicles had torn up his lawn. There was also a roughly 15 foot long battering ram mounted on a vehicle. They were apparently all agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or at least led by the FBI with supporting officers.

[snip]

In the pre-dawn of Friday, October 8, 2021, Whallon-Wollkind was also handcuffed and held outside while the agents ransacked his house along with his half-naked girlfriend. After some of the roughly 20 agents had searched his house inside, some of the agents brought Whallon-Wollkind back inside where they had moved a single chair in the middle of a room like an interrogation scene from a war movie. They sat him down and began to interrogate him. He told them that he refused to say anything without the advice of an attorney.

The FBI took all of his computer and computer devices and phones, including an old broken phone.

However, Whallon-Wollkind was not arrested or charged.

[snip]

They had staked out his house and taken photographs. The only thing they did not already have is evidence of Zachary Rehl planning, organizing, or leading a poorly-defined “Stop the Steal protest” which Ari [sic] Alexander takes credit for being the National Organizer of. Counsel has reviewed the search warrant and documents given to Whallon-Wollkind yesterday morning, which was sent by text message from his girlfriend.

Counsel understands that when freely given to Wollkind and his girlfriend, the documents lost their sealed character. The paperwork was freely provided to Wollkind and his girlfriend at their house, with no instructions that any restrictions applied to them. There is nothing in the search warrant that orders anything with regard to the person whose property is being searched. We are not talking about the underlying affidavit, which was not provided and remains under seal. But the deprivation of Zachary Rehl’s liberty, being incarcerated for months of his life he will never get back, for things he did not do, outweighs any interest of the Government in continuing to perpetuate a baseless conspiracy theory against Zachary Rehl.

The search warrant is authorized to be executed by October 14, 2021, corresponding to the motions schedule for the next hearing of this Court.

The search warrant was issued on either October 1, 2021, or October 4, 2021 (the text message version is blurry).

[snip]

The SUBJECT OFFENSES are the same criminal charges for which Zachary Rehl was indicted in the First Superseding Indictment. The items to be searched and seized include:

a. Clothing items associating AARON WOLKIND with the Proud Boys organization, as described in the affidavit in support of the search warrant application.

* * *

d. Records and information relating to the identification of persons who either (i) collaborated, conspired or assisted (knowingly or unknowingly) the commission of the SUBJECT OFFENSES; or (ii) communicated about matters relating to the SUBJECT OFFENSES, including records that help reveal their whereabouts.

* * *

f. Records and information … any efforts to or questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election, the certification process of the 2020 Presidential Election, or otherwise influence the policy or composition of the United States government by intimidation or coercion.

* * *

h. Records and information relating to the state of mind of the subjects and/or co-conspirators, e.g. intent, absence of mistake….

Moseley makes much of the fact that the FBI had correctly identified in which judicial district Whallon-Wolkind’s house is located, which he says is in a rural area close to the PA border, as well as that the FBI had a serial number and type for Whallon-Wolkind’s smart phone.

Indeed, while counsel is not revealing the judicial district where the search warrant was issued, where Wollkind resides, and where the search warrant was executed, the FBI would have to already know everything imaginable about Wollkind in order to apply to the correct judicial district, which is not what one would expect, and to include (thankfully, to avoid misunderstandings and mistakes) three photographs of Wollkind’s rented house. Thus, the FBI did not need to learn about Wollkind. They wanted to scrounge around for evidence against Rehl that they still do not have. The FBI already knew the precise type and serial number of the smart phone used by Wollkind.

It’s as if this attorney has never seen a probable cause warrant affidavit before, which describe both these things to establish probable cause for the warrant.

Moseley’s conspiracy theory is that the FBI obtained this warrant between the time Rehl first renewed his bid for pretrial release and days before the time there’ll be a status hearing exclusively to obtain evidence to use to prove what the DC Circuit Court has already said is adequate basis to detain Rehl’s co-conspirators.

Perhaps the most interesting detail in this filing, however, is a stray sentence that seems to indicate that Whallon-Wolkind may have traveled to DC in January after the riot.

Aaron Whallon-Wollkind never travelled to the District of Columbia until after the protests were over.

Whatever else Moseley argues, this filing comes after months in which his client’s alleged co-conspirators have suggested that Whallon-Wolkind either was cued by the FBI to incite the entire riot with really incriminating statements (which Jones effectively denied) or had only avoided charges for those far more damning statements because he was cooperating. That is, for months, other Proud Boys have argued that Whallon-Wolkind’s statements were badly incriminating. Now Moseley wants the judge who has been hearing that for months (Moseley repeatedly states that this investigation has been going on ten months rather than nine) to believe there’s nothing incriminating about Whallon-Wolkind’s actions leading up to and during the riot.

If Whallon-Wolkind had been cooperating before — presumably under a proffer agreement that would have prohibited the government from using his statements against him so long as they were honest — it appears that cooperation has ceased. Or perhaps the government has gotten more useful cooperators who’ve implicated Whallon-Wolkind more deeply in the planning for that day.

Whatever the reason, the FBI has recently shifted its focus to the guy who expressed his desire on the morning of the insurrection that there would be an insurrection.

Puzzling Developments in the January 6 Investigation

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As I sometimes do, I’d like to look at some curious developments in a series of January 6 cases.

Adam Honeycutt’s trips to DC

If you read just his arrest affidavit, former bail bondsman Adam Honeycutt is a guy who made the grave mistake of posting a picture of himself holding a broken furniture leg to Facebook during the January 6 riot.

Honeycutt was arrested on misdemeanor trespass charges on February 11, but since then his DC case has been continued, with no indictment, until — with the most recent continuation at a status hearing on Tuesday — January 4, almost a year after the riot.

If you look more closely, however, things get more confusing. As several earlier requests for continuances reveal, Honeycutt made the still graver mistake of having guns and non-legal marijuana in his home when the FBI came to arrest him on his January 6 charges, and then chatting about it as he was being driven to the FBI office.

During the transport, HONEYCUTT made a number of unsolicited statements to TFO Rohermel and SA Grover related to his use of marihuana. HONEYCUTT stated that all of the drugs and guns in the house belonged to him, that he knew it looked bad ot have guns layout out in the open in his residence, that he had a large quantity of ammunition of various calibers in the residence, some of which was for firearms he did not currently possess. HONEYCUTT also stated that it was lucky that agents had executed the warrants that day, because his marihuana supply was almost gone, and if the agents had executed the warrants the following day he would have had more because Fridays are his day for resupplying marihuana. HONEYCUTT stated that there were only a few “roaches” left in the garage, referring to burned marihuana cigarette butts. HONEYCUTT stated that he had been smoking marihuana since he was twelve years old and smokes daily. HONEYCUTT expressed to the agents that he was upset he was out of marihuana and there would not be any for him when he got home.

Honeycutt was as a result also charged under a bullshit draconian war on drugs law that carries a ten year maximum sentence, meaning what otherwise might have been a simple trespassing plea turned into (thus far) 8 months of detention on the Florida Federal charge. Honeycutt pled guilty to that charge in June, but is still awaiting sentencing, which is scheduled for next week.

And there’s a curious detail in his sentencing memo on that charge. He reveals that somewhere along the line, he got transferred to DC, even though by March he was formally released from custody on the DC charge.

Mr. Honeycutt has been in custody continuously since February 24, 2021 and has had the additional hardship of prolonged transports from McClenny to Washington, DC in during the pandemic. While in transit, Mr. Honeycutt was assaulted by another inmate while using the phone at the Grady County Jail in Oklahoma. The inmate struck him on the back of the head causing Mr. Honeycutt to hit his head on the ground and suffer dizziness and a black eye. While he suspected he may have had a concussion, this has never been confirmed medically. Also, while detained at the Baker County Jail, Mr. Honeycutt tested positive for Covid-19 and was placed on restrictive quarantine for 14 days while he recovered.

None of that shows up in his docket, though it may simply reflect a remarkably quick transfer after his initial arrest (and Honeycutt would not be the only January 6 defendant who got in a beat up at the Oklahoma transfer jail).

I don’t condone any of this, least of all the war on drugs treatment of marijuana possession. But it’s the kind of stuff that prosecutors use to coerce cooperation elsewhere. And while it’s not at all clear what went on with Honeycutt, his case will still be pending next year on the anniversary of the riot.

Lonnie Coffman’s Alabama Molotovs

Something similar may be going on with Lonnie Coffman’s Molotov cocktails.

Coffman, you’ll recall, is the guy who was dropped off blocks away from the Capitol on January 6, trying to pick up his GMC pick-up full of Molotov cocktails.

After addressing the explosive devices found in the vicinity of the National Republican Club and the Democratic National Committee Headquarters, the Bomb Squad responded to the location of the Red GMC Sierra Pickup truck. One black handgun was recovered from the right front passenger seat of the vehicle. After locating the black handgun, officers proceeded to search the rest of the pickup truck, including the bed of the truck, which was secured under a fabric top. During the search of the cab of the truck, officers recovered, among other things, one M4 Carbine assault rifle along with rifle magazines loaded with ammunition.

In addition, officers recovered the following items in the bed of the pickup truck in close proximity to one another: (i) eleven mason jars containing an unknown liquid with a golf tee in the top of each jar, (ii) cloth rags, and (iii) lighters. Upon finding these materials, bomb technicians observed that the items appeared to be consistent with components for an explosive or incendiary device known as a “Molotov Cocktail.” Based on this discovery, additional personnel were called to the scene, including the United States Capitol Police Hazardous Materials Team. A preliminary test by the United States Capitol Police Hazardous Material Team determined that the liquid in the mason jars was an igniting substance and that it had a spectrograph profile consistent with gasoline.

[snip]

At approximately 6:30 p.m., a blue sedan with a female driver and a male front passenger, approached law enforcement officers in the 400 block of First Street, Southeast. Officers made contact with the vehicle, and the male passenger stated that he was trying to get to his vehicle that was parked in the 300 block of First Street, Southeast, which is the location that the Red GMC Sierra 1500 pickup truck had been located and searched. When the officers asked the man to provide a description of the vehicle, the male passenger stated that it was a red pickup truck. The officers then asked what the male passenger’s name was, and he stated that his name was “Lonnie.”

Coffman also has been detained (more justifiably than Honeycutt) since he was arrested. For much of that time, he has been working on a plea agreement, and on September 1, his lawyer reported they were close to one. On September 8, AUSA Michael Friedman said they would be ready for a plea by September 29.

But one day before that happened, the plea hearing was inexplicably vacated until October 26.

Unnoticed until yesterday, it turns out that on September 27 (that is, the day before his plea hearing was vacated), Coffman was charged in Alabama for possessing those Molotov cocktails the week before he drove them to DC. With Coffman’s consent, that case got transferred to DC in an entirely different docket than his January 6 one.

As with Honeycutt, it’s entirely unclear how his Alabama Federal charges are intersecting with his DC ones. Perhaps Coffman got cold feet on his plea last month, so DOJ added the Alabama charges to convince him to plead. But its another reminder that not every part of the January 6 investigation will be visible in the DC docket.

Brandon Straka gets to walk away

Meanwhile, a case that never left the DC docket, that of Brandon Straka, is just as curious.

Straka was first arrested on January 25 on civil disorder, as well as trespass, charges. Since that time, AUSA April Russo has gotten a series of continuances (February, May, August), each one citing efforts to resolve the matter, which is usually code for a plea agreement. A week after the last continuance, DOJ made a plea offer that had to be accepted by September 14. The day after the plea agreement would have expired, Straka was ultimately charged with the less serious of the two trespass charges, and after a tweak, that’s what he pled guilty to on Wednesday.

Straka’s Statement of Offense includes (and Russo made a point of entering it into the record) the incitement of attacks on cops that originally got him charged for civil disorder.

While in the restricted area, knowing he was not authorized to be there, Straka observed the crowd yelling and U.S. Capitol Police trying to prevent people from going into the U.S. Capitol and to manage the unruly crowd. Amongst other things, he engaged in disruptive conduct by participating, along with others, in yelling “go, go, go” to encourage others to enter the U.S. Capitol while the U.S. Capitol Police were making their best efforts to prevent people from doing so. Straka also observed others yelling to take a U.S. Capitol Police Officer’s shield. He recorded a video of what was happening, and in the video, he chimed in with the crowd, saying “take it, take it.” He did this between 2:30 and 2:45 p.m. on January 6 while outside the entrance to the U.S. Capitol in the restricted area on the Capitol Grounds. Straka left the U.S. Capitol Grounds at approximately 3:00 p.m.

But the Statement of Offense doesn’t include any description of his speech from January 5, where he spoke about “revolution.”

My review of STRAKA’s Twitter account on January 11, also found a video he had posted of himself speaking at a “Stop the Steal” rally held at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. on January 5, 2021. As of January 13, STRAKA had removed this video from his Twitter account, but a video of the entire event had been posted to YouTube. The video showed that STRAKA was introduced by name and brought onto stage. STRAKA spoke for about five minutes during which time he repeatedly referred to the attendees as “Patriots” and referenced the “revolution” multiple times. STRAKA told the attendees to “fight back” and ended by saying, “We are sending a message to the Democrats, we are not going away, you’ve got a problem!”

Nor does his Statement of Offense include this language from Straka’s arrest affidavit describing a video in which he admitted that, “The plan was always to go to the Capitol.”

About one minute into the video, STRAKA stated, “I literally just got home…minutes ago from Washington, D.C.” Later in the video, STRAKA stated, “Yesterday, a lot of us got up very, very early. We went to this event in which Donald Trump spoke. The plan was always to go to the Capitol. We were going to march from that event…to the Capitol, and there was going to be another rally. I was one of the speakers slated to speak at the Capitol.” STRAKA later stated that, while riding the metro to the Capitol, he received alerts on his phone stating that Vice President Pence was “not going to object to certifying Joe Biden.” STRAKA stated that he learned on his walk from the metro to the Capitol that people had “breached” the Capitol and that “patriots had entered the Capitol.” STRAKA said that he thought to himself, “Wow, so they’re going to basically storm and try to get into the chamber so that they can demand that we get the investigation that we want.”

Not only was Straka permitted to a plea that may help him avoid all jail time, but DOJ assented to letting him rush the sentencing so he could be done by Christmas, coincidentally on the same day all the status reports for Oath Keeper cooperators are next due.

Baked Alaska — someone as wired into the organizers of this riot as Straka — claimed early on that prosecutors were threatening to charge him with obstruction if he didn’t cooperate.

This plea looks like it could be the flip (heh) side of such an offer, someone who worked his way out of an existing felony charge and any further exposure on obstruction. That said, his plea includes the standard boilerplate language about minimal cooperation (basically, requiring the defendant share the contents of his phone).

If this does reflect cooperation, then it suggests a number of other people exposed to felony prosecution may similarly be cooperating under the guise of misdemeanor plea agreements.

Ryan Samsel’s aborted cooperation

For about the first four months after Ryan Samsel kicked off the entire riot on January 6 by allegedly knocking over a cop, it looked like he might be considering a cooperation agreement. The same prosecutor who filed continuances in Straka’s case, April Russo, was filing continuances in his case (March, May), also citing efforts to resolve the case.

But on March 21, Samsel was brutally assaulted in jail; his attorney claimed at the time that a guard did it, though that has never been officially confirmed. Samsel’s assault set off a feeding frenzy as one after another attorney — first Martin Tankleff, then John Pierce (whose clients include a significant bunch who could incriminate Joe Biggs), and now Stanley Woodward and former Trump vote fraudster Juli Haller — tried to capitalize off a client who might have basis for a big lawsuit against DOJ (Elisabeth Pasqualini did very competent work as Samsel’s first attorney before all this started). The events that transpired after that assault seems to have ended up changing prosecutors’ approach with his case, and in June, DOJ added another prosecutor, Danielle Rosborough, and in August, DOJ finally indicted Samsel on two counts of civil disorder, two counts of assault, obstruction, and trespassing. (Russo remains the sole prosecutor on the case against the woman who was (and may still be) Samsel’s girlfriend on the day of the riot, Raechel Genco.)

All that’s important background to a big scoop from NYT’s Alan Feuer, describing that, when Samsel was originally arrested, he told the FBI that he kicked off that assault after a threat from Joe Biggs.

For months, however, according to three people familiar with the matter, the government has known Mr. Samsel’s account of the exchange: He has told investigators that Mr. Biggs encouraged him to push at the barricades and that when he hesitated, the Proud Boys leader flashed a gun, questioned his manhood and repeated his demand to move upfront and challenge the police.

Mr. Samsel’s version of events was provided to the government in late January, when he was interviewed by the F.B.I., without a lawyer present, shortly after his arrest in Pennsylvania, according to the people familiar with the matter. He has since been charged with several crimes, including assaulting an officer and obstructing Congress’s efforts to certify the election results.

[snip]

[I]f Mr. Samsel’s account is true, it could serve to bolster arguments that some Proud Boys leaders intentionally incited ordinary people in the crowd — or what they refer to as “normies” — to commit violence during the attack. The government has offered other evidence, drawn from the group’s internal messaging chats, that two Proud Boys leaders from Philadelphia were excited by the prospect of “riling up the normies” on Jan. 6.

As Feuer notes, Biggs’ lawyer Daniel Hull categorically denies this claim. As he also notes, there has been no hint of a weapons charge against Biggs. So it’s quite possible that this allegation was entirely made up out of thin air–or exaggerated in a bid for lenient treatment for Samsel’s own central role in the riot.

But there’s also no sign that DOJ is charging Samsel with lying about these claims.

That is, from the public filings, we can’t discern whether Samsel’s allegation is true or not.

That said, if it’s true, it might explain both the apparent attempt to woo Samsel’s cooperation, but also the urgency surrounding efforts to make sure he doesn’t do so.

The government has flamboyantly obtained cooperation from five different Oath Keepers. But precisely what the government is doing in a slew of other cases remains obscure.

Update: There were three people involved in the assault on the first barricade: Samsel, Paul Johnson, and Stephen Chase Randolph. The latter two are charged together, though Johnson is moving to sever his case from Randolph’s. Here’s the government opposition. Never addressed in it are why Samsel is not only not charged with them, but is before an entirely different judge, who just happens to be the Proud Boy judge.

Michael Sussmann Attempts to Bill [of Particulars] Durham for His Sloppy Indictment Language

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“Without prejudice to any other pretrial motions”

Michael Sussmann’s lawyers reserve their right to challenge the Durham indictment of Sussmann via other pretrial motions in their motion for a Bill of Particulars six different times. The motion does so three different times when noting that Durham used squishy language to paraphrase Sussmann’s alleged lie and couldn’t seem to decide whether he affirmatively lied or lied by omission.

Mr. Sussmann is entitled to understand which particular crime he must defend himself against. Without prejudice to any other pretrial motions Mr. Sussmann may bring on the matter, Mr. Sussmann is also entitled to additional particulars regarding the alleged omissions in the Indictment, including regarding the legal duty, if any, that required him to disclose the allegedly omitted information the Indictment suggests he should have disclosed.

[snip]

The Special Counsel should be required to clarify which crime he believes Mr. Sussmann committed and, to the extent the Special Counsel is proceeding on an omissions theory, he should be required to provide additional particulars (without prejudice to any motions Mr. Sussmann may make later).

[snip]

To the extent that the Special Counsel believes the Indictment is alleging a material omission under Section 1001(a)(1), and without prejudicing any other motions Mr. Sussmann may make on this issue, the Special Counsel should be required to clarify: (1) what specific information Mr. Sussmann failed to disclose; (2) to whom he failed to disclose it; (3) what legal duty required Mr. Sussmann to make the required disclosure; and (4) why the omission was material. See United States v. Safavian, 528 F.3d 957, 964 (D.C. Cir. 2008). [my emphasis]

It does so twice when asking that Durham address problems with his claims that Sussmann’s alleged lie was material.

The Indictment does make several allegations regarding materiality, and yet these allegations are vague, imprecise, and inconsistent. Suggesting the FBI might have asked more questions, taken other steps, or allocated resources differently, without specifying how or why it would have done so, leaves Mr. Sussmann having to guess about the meaning of the allegations that the Special Counsel has leveled against him. Accordingly, without prejudice to any pretrial motions Mr. Sussmann may make regarding materiality, Mr. Sussmann requests that the Court order the Special Counsel to provide more detail about why the purported false statement was material.

[snip]

Accordingly, without prejudice to any pretrial motions Mr. Sussmann may make regarding materiality, Mr. Sussmann requests that the Special Counsel be ordered to provide more detail about why the purported false statement was material. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 7(c)(1). [my emphasis]

And the motion does so again when pointing out that Durham hasn’t included specifics about another alleged lie, to just two of an unidentified number of people who attended a meeting at CIA, which Sussmann elsewhere describes as improper inclusion of 404(b) material in an indictment.

Without prejudicing any other motions Mr. Sussmann may make on this issue, the Special Counsel should first be required to clarify the false statement alleged to have been made to the two anonymous Agency-2 employees, and any other individuals present at the meeting, in February 2017. [my emphasis]

A list of things John Durham didn’t provide in his Michael Sussmann indictment

It’s only after making it clear that this is just his opening move before filing a motion to dismiss and other legal challenges to the indictment…

The Indictment is seriously vulnerable to challenge as a matter of law, and Mr. Sussmann will make relevant pretrial motions at the appropriate time. For now, Mr. Sussmann moves for a bill of particulars.

…that Sussmann lays out a list of things he claims he can’t figure out from Durham’s sloppy indictment:

For the foregoing reasons, this Motion for a Bill of Particulars should be granted, and the Court should order the Special Counsel to promptly:

A. Provide particulars regarding the specific false statement the Special Counsel alleges Mr. Sussmann made to Mr. Baker, namely:

1. The exact words of Mr. Sussmann’s alleged false statement;

2. The specific context in which the statement was made so that the meaning of the words is clear;

3. What part of the statement is allegedly false, i.e., whether the statement was false because Mr. Sussmann allegedly stated he was not “acting on behalf of any client in conveying particular allegations concerning a Presidential Candidate” as alleged in Paragraph 46, or if he falsely stated that he was not doing any “work” on behalf of a client more generally, as alleged in Paragraphs 4, 27(a), 28;

4. What is meant by “his work,” as referenced in Paragraph 4;

5. What is meant by “acting [or acted] on behalf of any client” as alleged in Paragraphs 27(a) and 30; and

6. What “this” refers to in the Assistant Director’s notes referenced in Paragraph 28.

B. Provide particulars regarding the statutory violation charged and, if applicable any alleged omissions, namely:

1. Which crime the Special Counsel believes Mr. Sussmann has committed; and

2. To the extent the Special Counsel alleges that Mr. Sussmann made a material omission in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(1), as suggested by Paragraph 30 of the Indictment –

a. the specific information Mr. Sussmann allegedly failed to disclose;

b. to whom he allegedly failed to make that disclosure;

c. what legal duty required Mr. Sussmann to disclose such information; and

d. why the allegedly omitted information was material.

C. Provide particulars regarding how the alleged false statement to Mr. Baker was material, specifically:

1. The “other reasons” Mr. Sussmann’s false statement was material, as alleged in Paragraphs 5 and 32;

2. What “his work” refers to as referenced in Paragraph 5, what about such work was unknown to the FBI, and how the “political nature of his work” was material to the FBI’s investigation;

3. How Mr. Sussmann’s alleged false statement was material to the FBI’s ability to “assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis,” as alleged in Paragraph 5, when Mr. Sussmann disclosed the origins of the data and technical analysis;

4. How Mr. Sussmann’s role as a paid advocate was materially “relevant” to the FBI’s investigation, as alleged in Paragraph 32, given that the information itself raised serious national security concerns and the FBI otherwise enables civilians to provide anonymous tips; and

5. What potential questions, additional steps, resource allocations, or more complete information the FBI would have gathered absent Mr. Sussmann’s false statement, as alleged in Paragraph 32.

D. Provide particulars regarding the alleged false statement Mr. Sussmann made to all Agency-2 employees and representatives, as alleged in Paragraphs 39 and 42, namely:

1. The exact words of Mr. Sussmann’s alleged false statement;

2. The specific context in which the statement was made so that the meaning of the words is clear;

3. What portion of the statement is allegedly false;

4. The identities of all individuals to whom the statement was made, including:

a. both Employee-1 and Employee-2 as referenced in Paragraph 42; and

b. anyone else present who also heard the false statement.

E. Provide particulars regarding the identities of the “representatives and agents of the Clinton Campaign” referenced in Paragraph 6.

Motions for a Bill of Particular rarely work

Make no mistake, most demands for a Bill of Particulars like this fail. The prosecution will argue that everything Sussmann needs is in the indictment and, if Judge Christopher Cooper agrees, Sussmann will just submit his motion to dismiss and other challenges like he’s clearly planning to do anyway.

That’s almost certainly what will happen for several of these requests, such as the names of Clinton Campaign personnel Durham accuses Sussmann of coordinating with on the Alfa Bank materials. But Sussmann likely doesn’t really need these names because he likely knows that Durham has nothing to substantiate this claim. If he did, Durham would have described such evidence in his speaking indictment. Sussmann may well know there are no names — of campaign personnel with whom he personally coordinated in advance of the James Baker meeting, at least — to give, because he didn’t coordinate with anyone from the campaign (Durham probably wants to substantiate this claim by charging Marc Elias in a conspiracy with Sussmann, but that all depends on being able to prove that anyone was lying about all this).

Similarly, Sussmann seems to know — and Durham may not — that there were more than just two people at a February 9, 2017 meeting at which Sussmann tried to bring new concerns to the attention of the government. This request seems to suggest there was at least one and possibly other witnesses who were at this meeting that Durham should know of who didn’t corroborate a claim that Sussmann lied, witnesses Durham didn’t mention in his indictment.

Likewise, Sussmann is unlikely to get very far asking for more details about Durham’s materiality claim, in particular, Durham’s repeated allegation that what he presented were just some, “among other reasons,” why Sussmann’s alleged lie was material. Prosecutors will argue that materiality is a matter for the jury to decide. But if Sussmann can force Durham to admit he has a theory of prosecution he hasn’t included in his indictment — that Durham believes that, rather than raising a real anomaly to the FBI’s attention because it was a real anomaly, lawyers who were paid by Hillary were trying to start a witch hunt against Donald Trump (never mind that the actual investigation that would prove at least three Trump officials, and probably Trump himself, got advance warning of a Russian attack on Hillary started three weeks before the meeting at which Sussmann is alleged to have lied) — then it will make it far easier for Sussmann to attack the indictment down the road.

What a false statement charge is supposed to look like

But Sussmann may succeed on his key complaint, that Durham has built a 27-page indictment around a false claim allegation without any means to clearly lay out what was the specific lie Sussmann told.

To understand what Sussmann means when he says,

It is simply not enough for the Indictment to make allegations generally about the substance of the purported false statement. Rather, the law requires that the Special Counsel identify the specific false statement made, i.e., the precise words that were allegedly used.

We can look at the false statements that Trump’s associates made to cover up the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. For example, for each of six charged lies in the Roger Stone indictment, Mueller’s prosecutors quoted the precise questions he was asked as well as his response, then laid out specific evidence that each lie was a lie.

22. During his HPSCI testimony, STONE was asked, “So you have no emails to anyone concerning the allegations of hacked documents . . . or any discussions you have had with third parties about [the head of Organization 1]? You have no emails, no texts, no documents whatsoever, any kind of that nature?” STONE falsely and misleadingly answered, “That is correct. Not to my knowledge.”

23. In truth and in fact, STONE had sent and received numerous emails and text messages during the 2016 campaign in which he discussed Organization 1, its head, and its possession of hacked emails. At the time of his false testimony, STONE was still in possession of many of these emails and text messages, including:

a. The email from STONE to Person 1 on or about July 25, 2016 that read in part, “Get to [the head of Organization 1] [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending [Organization 1] emails . . . they deal with Foundation, allegedly.”;

b. The email from STONE to Person 1 on or about July 31, 2016 that said an associate of Person 1 “should see [the head of Organization 1].”;

c. The email from Person 1 to STONE on or about August 2, 2016 that stated in part, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”;

d. Dozens of text messages and emails, beginning on or about August 19, 2016 and continuing through the election, between STONE and Person 2 in which they discussed Organization 1 and the head of Organization 1;

e. The email from STONE on or about October 3, 2016 to the supporter involved with the Trump Campaign, which read in part, “Spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.”; and

f. The emails on or about October 4, 2016 between STONE and the high-ranking member of the Trump Campaign, including STONE’s statement that Organization 1 would release “a load every week going forward.”

For some of Stone’s charged lies, prosecutors even had communications with Jerome Corsi or Randy Credico or one of his lawyers showing Stone planned in advance to lie.

In George Papadopoulos’ statement of offense, for each of several lies outlined, prosecutors laid out specifically what he told the FBI and then laid out how Papadopoulos’ own communications records and his later testimony proved those statements to be false.

c. Defendant PAPADOPOULOS claimed he met a certain female Russian national before he joined the Campaign and that their communications consisted of emails such as, ‘”Hi , how are you?”‘ In truth and in fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS met the female Russian national on or about March 24, 2016, after he had become an adviser to the Campaign; he believed that she had connections to Russian government officials; and he sought to use her Russian connections over a period of months in an effort to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and Russian government officials.

The most recent Mueller backup liberated by Jason Leopold reveals that, in addition to Papaodpoulos’ communications and later testimony that prove this particular claim to be an intentional lie, Papadopoulos also emailed the FBI on January 27 after consulting his records, laying out his claim that he met Olga before he joined the Trump campaign and never met her after that.

As promised, wanted to send you the name of the individual that Joseph Mifsud introduced me to over lunch in February or early March (while I was working with the London Center of International Law Practice and did not even know at that time whether or not I would even have moved back to the U.S. or especially worked on another presidential campaign).

He introduced her as his student, but was looking to impress her by meeting with me fresh off my Ben Carson gig. That is all I know. Never met her again.

I could go on for each of the false statements charged against Trump’s flunkies (and also show how, when Andrew Weissmann fell short of this kind of evidence, Amy Berman Jackson ruled against prosecutors on two of five claimed lies alleged in Paul Manafort’s plea breach determination).

Even Mike Flynn’s statement of offense, substantiating a charge that Trump loyalists have spent years wailing about, laid out clearly the two charged lies.

During the interview, FLYNN falsely stated that he did not ask Russia’s Ambassador to the United States (“Russian Ambassador”) to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia. FLYNN also falsely stated that he did not remember a follow-up conversation in which the Russian Ambassador stated that Russia had chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of FL YNN’s request.

[snip]

During the January 24 voluntary interview, FLYNN made additional false statements about calls he made to Russia and several other countries regarding a resolution submitted by Egypt to the United Nations Security Council on December 21, 2016. Specifically FLYNN falsely stated that he only asked the countries’ positions on the vote, and that he did not request that any of the countries take any particular action on the resolution. FLYNN also falsely stated that the Russian Ambassador never described to him Russia’s response to FL YNN’s request regarding the resolution.

Not only did prosecutors describe what a transcript of these calls said, but they also had testimony from both Flynn himself and KT McFarland substantiating that these were lies. They even had a text that Flynn sent McFarland, before any of these intercepts had leaked, that Flynn later admitted he had deliberately written to cover up the content of his calls with Sergey Kislyak.

Then, after Sidney Powell spent six months trying to claim that one of Flynn’s lies wasn’t clearly laid out in his original 302, Judge Emmet Sullivan meticulously pointed out that the notes of both FBI interviewers matched every iteration of Flynn’s 302.

Having carefully reviewed the interviewing FBI agents’ notes, the draft interview reports, the final version of the FD302, and the statements contained therein, the Court agrees with the government that those documents are “consistent and clear that [Mr. Flynn] made multiple false statements to the [FBI] agents about his communications with the Russian Ambassador on January 24, 2017.” Gov’t’s Surreply, ECF No. 132 at 4-5. The Court rejects Mr. Flynn’s request for additional information regarding the drafting process for the FD-302s and a search for the “original 302,” see Def.’s Sur-Surreply, ECF No. 135 at 8- 10, because the interviewing FBI agents’ notes, the draft interview reports, the final version of the FD-302, and Mr. Flynn’s own admissions of his false statements make clear that Mr. Flynn made those false statements.

These are what false statements charges are supposed to look like. They’re backed by contemporaneous admissible evidence and laid out in specific detail in charging documents.

Trump and his supporters have wailed for years about these charges. Except prosecutors had evidence to substantiate them, the kind of evidence Durham makes no claim to have.

What few witnesses Durham has may not all agree on Sussmann’s alleged lies

Sussmann is more likely to succeed with his request to have his alleged false statement laid out in quote form and in context — and even if he doesn’t, he may back Durham into a corner he doesn’t want to be in — because Sussmann has presented several central questions about what the allegation really is. Is it that Sussmann didn’t offer up that he was working with (Sussmann claims) Rodney Joffe or  (Durham also alleges) Hillary on the Alfa Bank issues? Is it that Sussmann falsely claimed not to be billing the meeting with James Baker (evidence of which Durham has not presented)? Or does Durham have any shred of evidence that Baker affirmatively asked Sussmann, “are you sharing this on behalf of a client,” or even less supported in the indictment, “are you sharing this on behalf of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton”? Similarly, Durham doesn’t explain whether when he claims that Sussmann lied about “this,” or “his work,” he means about the meetings that were actually billed to Hillary’s campaign internally at Perkins Coie (even if Hillary paid no money specifically tied to those meetings), or that the meeting with Baker was billed to one or another client (no evidence of which Durham presents). Those details will all be necessary for Durham to prove his case and for Sussmann to rebut it. And Sussmann needs to know whether he should focus his time on the absence of billing records substantiating that he met with Baker and then billed it to Hillary (something implicated by the meaning of “this” and “his work”), or whether he needs to focus on showing whether Priestap distinguished these allegations from the other claims about a Russian information operation undeniably targeting Hillary (something implicating whether this is supposed to be a crime of commission or omission).

It’s quite possible that Durham has presented these allegations using such squishy language because what little evidence he has doesn’t actually agree on the claimed lies. That is, it may be that Baker believes Sussmann simply didn’t bother explaining which client he was working for, but Bill Priestap, the next in line in a game of telephone, differently understood from Baker’s report that Sussmann affirmatively failed to provide Baker information that (Priestap’s own notes prove) the FBI already had anyway, that he was working with Hillary Clinton.

If, having had these weaknesses laid out by Sussmann’s attorneys, Durham can show that all his evidence actually substantiates the same false claim, he could get a superseding indictment making that clear. But once he does that, it may tie his hands at trial.

But it’s distinctly possible that Durham can’t prove that what little evidence he has backs the same interpretation of Sussmann’s alleged lie. That is, there may be a reason — on top of the fact that he has no contemporaneous transcript from a witness — that he avoided being more specific in his indictment, and that’s because it was the only way he could cobble together enough evidence to get a grand jury to indict.

So while much of the rest of this motion of a Bill of Particulars may serve only to call attention to gaping holes in the rest of the indictment, the request for specifics about what, specifically, Sussmann is alleged to have said when he lied may succeed. And even if it doesn’t, it may force Durham to commit to an interpretation that not all of his thin evidence would ultimately support.

The Two New Material Errors Are the News from the IG Report on Woods File Errors

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Footnote 14 in a DOJ Inspector General Report summarizing the problems with the FBI’s compliance with the Woods requirement released last week claims to lay out why reviewing Woods file compliance is a good measure of FISA.

14 The OIG’s December 2019 FISA Report demonstrates the significant problems that can result from a lack of compliance with the Woods Procedures. For example, one of the Woods Procedures-based failures detailed in our December 2019 report concerned the failure to seek and document the handling agent’s approval of the source characterization statement for Christopher Steele in the FISA applications, which we found overstated Steele’s bona fides and gave the misimpression that Steele’s past reporting to the FBI had been deemed sufficiently reliable by prosecutors to use in court and that more of his information had been corroborated than was actually the case. As detailed in our December 2019 report, the handling agent told us that had he been shown the source characterization statement, as required by the Woods Procedures, he would not have approved it. Given the importance of a source characterization statement to the FISC’s determination of a source’s reliability, the failure to comply with the Woods Procedures was a significant error on the part of the FBI case agents involved and their supervisors. Moreover, this issue compounded other serious problems with the subsequent FISA renewal applications, such as the FBI’s continued reliance on Steele’s information despite the fact that the Primary Sub-source, during his FBI interviews, had contradicted Steele’s reporting on several critical issues.

The footnote badly overstates its claim.

In a post laying out how the Woods file errors in Carter Page’s applications weren’t the real indicators of a problem, I noted that Steele’s FBI handler, Mike Gaeta, had explained why he treated Steele’s reporting as reliable, even though Steele had never testified in any trials, the measure FBI normally uses to measure the reliability of a source.

[DOJ IG identified two claims unsupported by the Woods file stating] that Christopher Steele’s reporting had been corroborated, something the DOJ IG Report lays out at length was not true in the terms FBI normally measured. Except, even there, Steele handler Mike Gaeta’s sworn testimony actually said it had been. He described jumping when Steele told him he had information because he was a professional,

And at that time there were a number of instances when his information had borne out, had been corroborated by other sources.

He also provided a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Steele’s reporting was not corroborated in the way DOJ IG measured it in the report: because you could never put Steele on a stand, so his testimony would never be used to prosecute people.

From a criminal perspective and a criminal investigative kind of framework, you know, Christopher Steele and [redacted] were never individuals who were going to be on a witness stand.

In other words, while it appears that DOJ cleaned up many of the errors identified by DOJ IG by finding the documentation to back it over the course of months, the public record makes it clear that Crossfire Hurricane would have been able to clear up even more of the Page Woods file.

Per the IG Report, Gaeta would not have approved the source statement in the Carter Page application as written. But Gaeta is on the record explaining what measure he used to assess a source who would never be asked to testify but whose reporting had nevertheless “borne out.” And Gaeta, per his Congressional testimony, believed Steele’s reporting was worth immediate attention.

There was just one other Woods file error identified in the Carter Page IG Report that wasn’t proven elsewhere that can be publicly tested — a James Clapper claim that Russia had provided money (unproven) and disinformation (proven) to particular candidates. The majority of the problems in the Page report, however, weren’t related to a Woods violation, in large part because they were about critical information omitted from the applications, not included.

That is, the Woods file was pretty much useless for identifying the real errors in the Carter Page applications. That’s why I’m sympathetic with a comment that DOJ IG cited critically — DOJ IG judged that the comment “dismiss[ed …] the weaknesses we identified related to compliance with the Woods Procedures” — that the IG emphasis on Woods file compliance may distract from getting material facts correct.

While we all understand the extreme importance of presenting accurate facts to any court on material issues, there is a concern that we are allowing our efforts to be diverted from that very important goal and instead diverted to the creation of picture perfect Woods binders that literally support every granular fact in the application regardless of whether it is material to probable cause.

That’s why — as my previous post laid out at length — the DOJ IG audit is most useful for identifying problems in the claims FBI and DOJ made about the FISA process, as well as larger systematic problems identified. For example, DOJ IG scolded DOJ for releasing a statement boasting, in summer of 2020, of its accuracy, while downplaying the seriousness of the errors DOJ IG identified (something I noted in my earlier post).

On July 30, 2020, following the Department’s review of the remaining applications, the FBI issued a press statement that again referenced the FBI’s “dedicat[ion] to the continued, ongoing improvement of the FISA process to ensure all factual assertions contained in FISA applications are accurate and complete,” while highlighting that “DOJ and FBI discovered only two material errors [in the 29 FISA applications] but—most importantly—neither of these errors is assessed to have undermined or otherwise impacted the FISC’s probable cause determinations” (emphasis in original). The statement went on to state that “Within these thousands of facts, there were approximately 201 non-material errors found, across the 29 applications. These include minor typographical errors, such as misspelled words, and slight date inaccuracies.”28 However, the statement did not mention that the majority of the FISA application errors—124 of these 201—involved errors beyond minor typographical mistakes and date errors, including deviations from source documentation, misidentified sources of information, and unsupported facts.

The report provided examples of the kinds of errors that DOJ deemed fairly insignificant. My favorite — which DOJ considered non-material — is that a counterintelligence suspect had visited an entirely different continent than the country they were suspected of being an agent of, but FBI misreported that destination.

Example: The FISA application stated the target returned from a trip overseas from the specific country of counterintelligence threat concern, but the support in the Woods File stated that the target was returning from a country on a different continent.

In perhaps the most telling example, though, DOJ IG described how FBI blew off as “subjective” a FISA application assertion that DOJ IG identified as a “potential inaccuracy,” only to have NSD determine the inaccuracy was not only an error, but a material one requiring a report to FISC.

[T]here were 30 instances where FBI field personnel initially determined that the potential inaccuracy we identified was not an error, yet NSD OI ultimately determined it was an error, which was thereafter reported to the FISC. In one instance that was ultimately determined to be a material omission of fact by NSD OI, the FBI field office’s initial response dismissed our note and stated that the issue was “subjective” and “not material to probable cause.”

The IG Report identifies that, in addition to two publicly released letters to FISC (one, two) describing the errors DOJ identified based off DOJ IG’s preliminary review of 29 cases, there was a third, dated October 28, 2020, which DOJ NSD has not made public, revealing two additional material errors.

In three separate filings with the FISC on June 15, July 29, and October 28, 2020, the Department and FBI provided the results after their assessment of the CDC accuracy reviews of the 29 FISA applications that the OIG had reviewed and in which we had identified numerous potential errors. 12 In total, the Department notified the FISC about 209 instances of unsupported or inaccurate statements, as well as omissions of fact, that it had identified in 27 of the 29 FISA applications. The Department and FBI further informed the FISC that 2 of the 29 FISA applications reviewed did not contain any inaccurate statements.13 Of the total 209 errors reported to the FISC, 162 related to initial concerns identified in the OIG’s review. The additional errors reported were identified by the FBI in its subsequent CDC accuracy reviews in response to the FISC’s order.

[snip]

The Department and FBI determined that 4 of the 209 identified errors were material errors. FBI policy and the 2009 Accuracy Memorandum define material facts as “those facts that are relevant to the outcome of the probable cause determination” and states that NSD OI determines whether a misstatement or omission is capable of influencing the FISC’s probable cause determination. The Department further assessed that none of these 209 errors undermined or otherwise impacted the FISC’s probable cause determinations. The four reported material errors or omissions occurred in three different applications related to different targets. The material errors were:

  • Failing to include context to inform the reader of the application that certain remarks the target made about a particular organization were made, according to evidentiary support, to provoke a response from law enforcement personnel. Instead, the application simply stated that the target expressed support of the referenced organization.
  • Describing the target’s support for a specific group, where the evidence in the Woods File instead indicated the target supported a specific cause.
  • Describing that the target used a financial account as of a certain date. NSD OI stated that it was not evident from the supporting documentation how recently the government had confirmed the target’s use of the financial account, and certain evidence on the target’s use of the financial account was several years prior to the date included in the application.
  • Failing to include the required reliability statement for one of two CHSs referenced in the application.

It’s not just that FBI treated a comment made by someone trying to “provoke a response from law enforcement personnel” as sincere. It’s that having already reviewed all these errors and publicly boasted about how minimal they were (even while ignoring that none of the worst problems in the Carter Page applications were found using this methodology), DOJ somehow went back and discovered there were additional problems, one of which they had dismissed as “subjective.”

Don’t get me wrong. The headline findings — that FBI simply didn’t have Woods files for a number of applications — are concerning.

Out of the FBI’s stated universe of over 7,000 FISA applications for which Woods Files appeared to be required, we identified at least 179 instances (in addition to the 4 that the OIG previously identified) across 21 field offices where the respective field office reported the Woods File as missing or incomplete and requiring whole or partial reassembly.17

But they’re frankly not the real concern. The real concern is that the Woods file is not designed to fix the problems identified in the Carter Page applications (and this report doesn’t describe whether an effort to elicit information that might otherwise be omitted is working). And somewhere along the way, Billy Barr’s DOJ admitted to the FISC that their self-congratulatory press boasts turned out to be inaccurate without revealing that publicly.

Update, 11/14/21: I just realized that the Woods File violation pertaining to Clapper involved the FBI paraphrasing a Clapper interview otherwise quoted before and after the violative language.

CLAPPER: In the U.S., the United States. And of course there is a history there of — there is a tradition in Russia of interfering with the elections, their own and others’. So it shouldn’t come as a big shock to people. I think it’s more dramatic maybe because now they have the cyber tools that they can bring to bear in the same effort. This is still going on, but I will say that it’s probably not real, real clear whether there is influence in terms of outcome. What I worry about more, frankly, is just sowing seeds of doubt, where doubt is cast on the whole process. So what are we doing about it? Well, apart from what you talked about, certainly DHS, Secretary Jeh Johnson has been very active with state election officials, offering, you know, our services and best practices and that sort of thing to secure, where appropriate, particularly if there is any dependence on the Internet in the course of the conduct of an election in voter registration, databases or the actual conduct of the election. We have a strength here in that we don’t have a centralized electoral system. It’s very decentralized among the states and local officials, and that actually works our advantage to be really a real monumental undertaking to try to affect the election nationally. But again, I think probably the more likely — and I am just surmising here — the more likely objective to would be to try to just sow seeds of doubt about the efficacy and viability and the sanctity — if I could use that word — of the whole system. _________IGNATIUS: You mentioned that there had been past instances where Russia — in this case I assume the Soviet Union — had tried to interfere in our election process. I probably should know what those are but I don’t. What comes to mind in terms of the past history of this? _________CLAPPER: Well, where they have fed money to opposition candidates, or tried to feed disinformation. Again, the way it was done during the Cold War, which of course preceded what we now know as the cyber era. And of course the record is replete with cases of influencing elections in East Europe and that sort of thing by, by today’s standards, more primitive methods. They have a history of that

In Indictment Accusing Michael Sussmann of Hiding Details about Researchers, John Durham Hid Details about Researchers

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In my initial John Durham Is the Jim Jordan of Ken Starrs post pointing to all the problems with John Durham’s attempt to criminalize victims reporting on information operations, I described Durham’s description of why Michael Sussmann’s alleged lie was material.

SUSSMANN’s lie was material because, among other reasons, SUSSMANN’s false statement misled the FBI General Counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of SUSSMANN’s clients.

Had the FBI uncovered the origins of the relevant data and analysis and as alleged below, it might have learned, among other things that (i) in compiling and analyzing the Russian Bank-1 allegations, Tech Executive-1 had exploited his access to non-public data at multiple Internet companies to conduct opposition research concerning Trump; (ii) in furtherance of these efforts, Tech Executive-1 had enlisted, and was continuing to enlist, the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract; and (iii) SUSSMAN, Tech Executive-1, and Law Firm-1 had coordinated, and were continuing to coordinate, with representatives and agents of the Clinton Campaign with regard to the data and written materials that Sussmann gave to the FBI and the media. [my emphasis]

John Durham says it is a crime to hide details about the researchers who first identified the Alfa Bank anomaly.

Yet, even based on the indictment, I identified a number of holes in Durham’s description of what the researchers had done. Yesterday, NYT and CNN both published stories identifying the four researchers — Rodney Joffe (Tech Executive-1), April Lorenzen (Tea Leaves, whom Durham needlessly renamed Originator-1), Manos Antonakakis (Researcher-1), and David Dagon (Researcher-2) — showing that the holes I identified in the indictment indeed left out information that totally undermined Durham’s insinuations.

For example, I noted that the date when what NYT identifies as DARPA shared information with the researchers is important to identify whether they obtained the data in order to research Trump.

At some point [Durham doesn’t provide even a month, but by context it was at least as early as July 2016 and could have been far, far earlier], TE-1’s company provided a university with data for a government contract ultimately not contracted until November 2016, including the DNS data from an Executive Branch office of the US government that Tech Exec-1’s company had gotten as a sub-contractor to the US government. [This date of this is critical because it would be the trigger for a Conspiracy to Defraud charge, if Durham goes there.]

NYT describes that DARPA first approached potential partners in the spring, long before Sussman or Joffe got involved.

The involvement of the researchers traces back to the spring of 2016. DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency, wanted to commission data scientists to develop the use of so-called DNS logs, records of when servers have prepared to communicate with other servers over the internet, as a tool for hacking investigations.

DARPA identified Georgia Tech as a potential recipient of funding and encouraged researchers there to develop examples. Mr. Antonakakis and Mr. Dagon reached out to Mr. Joffe to gain access to Neustar’s repository of DNS logs, people familiar with the matter said, and began sifting them.

I noted that Durham didn’t give the date when Lorenzen first started looking at the the DNS data. That date is another read of whether she had done so out of malice targeting Trump.

By some time in late July 2016 [the exact date Durham doesn’t provide], a guy who always operated under the pseudonym Tea Leaves but whom Durham heavy-handedly calls “Originator-1” instead had assembled “purported DNS data” reflecting apparent DNS lookups between Alfa Bank and “mail1.trump-email.com” that spanned from May 4 through July 29.

NYT reveals that Lorenzen and Dagon first started talking about using the DNS data to check other election-related hacking at a conference that went from June 13 to June 16 (meaning, the DNC hack would have been revealed during the conference).

Separately, when the news broke in June 2016 that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers, Mr. Dagon and Ms. Lorenzen began talking at a conference about whether such data might uncover other election-related hacking.

Ms. Lorenzen eventually noticed an odd pattern: a server called mail1.trump-email.com appeared to be communicating almost exclusively with servers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health. She shared her findings with Mr. Dagon, the people said, and they both discussed it with Mr. Joffe.

I noted that Durham had left out all mention of the WikiLeaks release and Trump’s invitation to Russia to keep hacking his opponent.

It appears (though Durham obscures this point) that all the actions laid out in this indictment post-date the press conference. Virtually everyone in the US committed to ensuring America’s national security was alarmed by Trump’s comments in this press conference. Yet Durham doesn’t acknowledge that all these actions took place in the wake of public comments that made it reasonable for those committed to cybersecurity to treat Donald Trump as a national security threat, irrespective of partisan affiliation.

Durham will work hard to exclude detail of Trump’s press conference from trial. But I assume that if any of the named subjects of this investigation were to take the stand at trial, they would point out that it was objectively reasonable after July 27 to have national security concerns based on Trump’s encouragement of Russia’s attack on Hillary Clinton and his defensive denials of any business ties. Any of the named subjects of the indictment would be able to make a strong case that there was reason to want to, as a matter of national security, test Trump’s claim to have no financial ties to Russia. Indeed, the bipartisan SSCI Report concluded that Trump posed multiple counterintelligence concerns, and therefore has concluded that Durham’s portrayal of politics as the only potential motive here to be false.

Central to Durham’s theory of prosecution is that there was no sound national security basis to respond to anomalous forensic data suggesting a possible financial tie between Trump and Russia. Except that, after that July 27 speech — and all of these events appear to post-date it — that theory is unsustainable.

NYT reveals that when Dagon shared the data with Joffe on July 29, he did so in the context of those two events.

“Half the time I stop myself and wonder: am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?” Mr. Dagon wrote in an email to Mr. Joffe on July 29, after WikiLeaks made public stolen Democratic emails timed to disrupt the party’s convention and Mr. Trump urged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.

I noted that Durham was probably wrong to believe that an August discussion about whether the data could have been spoofed was inculpatory.

Still others (such as the recognition that this could be spoofed data) will almost certainly end up being presented as exculpatory if this ever goes to trial, but Durham seems to think is inculpatory.

NYT describes that a later discussion doubted that the data could have been spoofed.

The indictment quotes August emails from Ms. Lorenzen and Mr. Antonakakis worrying that they might not know if someone had faked the DNS data. But people familiar with the matter said the indictment omitted later discussion of reasons to doubt any attempt to spoof the overall pattern could go undetected.

I noted that Durham attributed the view that the DNS traffic was a “red herring” to everyone involved, including Sussmann, even though Sussmann appears not to have been on the email.

In one place, Durham describes “aforementioned views,” plural, that the Alfa Bank data was a “red herring,” something only attributed to TE-1 in the indictment, seemingly presenting TE-1’s stated view on August 21 to everyone involved, including Sussmann, who does not appear to have been on that email chain.

NYT describes that after that, Joffe came to discount the marketing server explanation.

Mr. Tyrrell, his lawyer, said that research in the weeks that followed, omitted by the indictment, had yielded evidence that the specific subsidiary server in apparent contact with Alfa Bank had not been used to send bulk marketing emails. That further discussion, he said, changed his client’s mind about whether it was a red herring.

“The quotation of the ‘red herring’ email is deeply misleading,” he said, adding: “The research process is iterative and this is exactly how it should work. Their efforts culminated in the well-supported conclusions that were ultimately delivered to the F.B.I.”

It also explains that in context, Joffe referenced a June article describing Trump’s interest in a Trump Tower Moscow.

The indictment says Mr. Joffe sent an email on Aug. 21 urging more research about Mr. Trump, which he stated could “give the base of a very useful narrative,” while also expressing a belief that the Trump server at issue was “a red herring” and they should ignore it because it had been used by the mass-marketing company.

The full email provides context: Mr. Trump had claimed he had no dealings in Russia and yet many links appeared to exist, Mr. Joffe noted, citing an article that discussed aspirations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Despite the “red herring” line, the same email also showed that Mr. Joffe nevertheless remained suspicious about Alfa Bank, proposing a deeper hunt in the data “for the anomalies that we believe exist.”

He wrote: “If we can show possible email communication between” any Trump server and an Alfa Bank server “that has occurred in the last few weeks, we have the beginning of a narrative,” adding that such communications with any “Russian or Ukrainian financial institutions would give the base of a very useful narrative.”

In my post, I noted that Durham neglected to describe that the researchers turned out to correctly suspect Trump was hiding efforts to broker a Trump Tower deal.

According to Michael Cohen, when Trump walked off the stage from that July 27 press conference, Cohen asked Trump why he had claimed that he had zero business ties with Russia when he had in fact been pursuing an impossibly lucrative deal to brand a Trump Tower in Moscow. And we now know that within hours of Trump’s request, GRU hackers made a renewed assault on Hillary’s own servers. By the time security researchers pursued anomalous data suggesting covert communications with a Russian bank, Cohen had already participated in discussions about working with two sanctioned Russian banks to fund the Trump Tower deal, had agreed to work with a former GRU officer to broker it, had spoken to an aide of Dmitry Peskov, and had been told that Putin was personally involved in making the deal happen. Just on the Trump Tower basis alone, Trump had publicly lied in such a way that posed a counterintelligence risk to America.

In my post, I noted that Durham downplayed that, when Joffe asked the researchers if the paper Sussmann wrote was plausible, they said it was.

On September 14, TE-1 [not Sussmann] sent the white paper he had drafted to Researcher 1, Researcher 2, and Tea Leaves to ask them if a review of less than an hour would show this to be plausible. Though some of them noted how limited the standard of “plausibility” was, they agreed it was plausible, and Researcher 2 said [Durham does not quote the specific language here] “the paper should be shared with government officials.”

NYT describes that Durham misrepresented the enthusiasm with which Lorenzen “wholeheartedly” expressed her belief the explanation was plausible.

The indictment also quoted from emails in mid-September, when the researchers were discussing a paper on their suspicions that Mr. Sussmann would soon take to the F.B.I. It says Mr. Joffe asked if the paper’s hypothesis would strike security experts as a “plausible explanation.”

The paper’s conclusion was somewhat qualified, an email shows, saying “there were other possible explanations,” but the only “plausible” one was that Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization had taken steps “to obfuscate their communications.”

The indictment suggested Ms. Lorenzen’s reaction to the paper was guarded, describing an email from her as “stating, in part, that it was ‘plausible’ in the ‘narrow scope’ defined by” Mr. Joffe. But the text of her email displays enthusiasm.

“In the narrow scope of what you have defined above, I agree wholeheartedly that it is plausible,” she wrote, adding: “If the white paper intends to say that there are communications between at least Alfa and Trump, which are being intentionally hidden by Alfa and Trump I absolutely believe that is the case,” her email said.

NYT shows several more ways that Durham utterly misrepresented how seriously the researchers took this thesis.

The indictment cited emails by Mr. Antonakakis in August in which he flagged holes and noted they disliked Mr. Trump, and in September in which he approvingly noted that the paper did not get into a technical issue that specialists would raise.

Mr. Antonakakis’ lawyer, Mark E. Schamel, said his client had provided “feedback on an early draft of data that was cause for additional investigation.” And, he said, their hypothesis “to this day, remains a plausible working theory.”

The indictment also suggests Mr. Dagon’s support for the paper’s hypothesis was qualified, describing his email response as “acknowledging that questions remained, but stating, in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”

The text of that email shows Mr. Dagon was forcefully supportive. He proposed editing the paper to declare as “fact” that it was clear “that there are hidden communications between Trump and Alfa Bank,” and said he believed the findings met the probable cause standard to open a criminal investigation.

“Hopefully the intended audience are officials with subpoena powers, who can investigate the purpose” of the apparent Alfa Bank connection, Mr. Dagon wrote.

One of the first things Michael Sussmann is going to do after this story is request information on what the grand jury was told, including whether any of this was affirmatively misrepresented to the grand jury.

The sheer amount of communications that, in days, these researchers have been able to prove were misrepresented, too, suggests DOJ has cause to review whether Durham misrepresented the substance of this indictment to those who approved it, up to and including Merrick Garland.

John Durham says it is a crime to lie about these researchers in an effort to launch an investigation. And yet, the available evidence suggests he did just that.

Update: To be clear, he can’t be prosecuted for any of this. Prosecutors have expansive immunity for such things.

Zach Rehl’s Subpoena for Port-a-John Details from the Non-Existent One Nation Under God

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The fourth defendant in the Proud Boy Leader indictment, Zach Rehl, has finally made an aggressive appearance in the docket.

How he got here is a matter of significant interest — and some dispute. On September 9, Aram Rostom (who keeps getting these great scoops), reported that Enrique Tarrio released a recording in July reassuring everyone that Rehl would not flip. “If there’s anyone that will hold fast, it’s fucking Zach.”

In the July audio, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, Tarrio said that “we are trying to f—ing avoid” a situation in which the senior members facing charges would cooperate with prosecutors. The four, who are jailed without bond, have pleaded not guilty.

Raising the possibility that one of the four leaders may have been cooperating with authorities, Tarrio told fellow Proud Boy leadership he didn’t believe that the man was doing so – and said he had spoken about the matter directly with that leader’s wife.

“The bigger problem with that is the guys that are in prison right now are holding on to hope that everybody is f—ing staying put because they didn’t do anything wrong,” Tarrio said. “The moment that they think one of the guys flipped, it throws everything off and it makes everybody turn on each other, and that’s what we are trying to f—ing avoid.”

When the message leaked, Tarrio released another recording saying that it’s hard enough to fight the government without having to fight, “not just a regular felony, like a serious felony.”

“You know it’s hard enough to fight a f—ing entire government…,” Tarrio said in the Aug. 27 message, “to have to worry about dudes in here f—ing putting you in felony territory. Not just regular felony, like a serious felony.”

On September 19, Ethan Nordean included the following allegations in a filing, noting that in August (so after Tarrio called Rehl’s wife), Rehl had asked Judge Amit Mehta for help firing his attorney, citing what sound like real complaints with his representation. Nordean went on, describing an incident in which prosecutor Seth Jones met with Rehl outside the presence of his counsel and threatened Rehl with transfer to DC if he didn’t flip.

In the bail hearing on September 13, counsel to Defendant Biggs alerted the Court to information concerning the government’s attempts to transfer Defendant Rehl to the D.C. jail. Specifically, Biggs’ counsel advised that the government’s attorneys may have threatened to transfer Rehl to D.C. from a Philadelphia jail if he did not agree to cooperate with the government against the other Defendants. Counsel have subsequently gathered additional information about this episode. It significantly bears on Nordean’s and Biggs’ pending bail motions in several respects. These matters should be investigated by the Court, as it appears that the government’s constitutional violations here are not limited to the improper withholding of exculpatory material beyond the point at which Defendants may make timely use of it. Counsel are working on obtaining sworn declarations for the Court but advise it here about what they have learned in the meantime.

On August 13, Defendant Rehl mailed a letter to the Court. Exh. 1. He was writing from his cell in FDC Philadelphia. Rehl formally requested that he be allowed to terminate his thencounsel, “effective immediately, due to ineffective counsel.” Among other reasons given, Rehl noted that his counsel was taking actions on his behalf without his knowledge and ignoring virtually all requests to discuss the case. “In five months, I have met with [counsel] once in the middle of May for approximately 30 minutes,” Rehl wrote. Exh. 1. As this letter was never filed on the docket, it is not clear when the government became aware of it. However, as inmate nonlegal mail is reviewed, particularly in a case such as this, there is a presumption that the government gained knowledge of the letter at some point.

Sometime after he mailed that message to the Court, Rehl was removed from his cell by federal agents, likely U.S. Marshals. Rehl did not know where he was being taken. The agents told him he was headed to a court appearance. That was not true. Rehl was then moved through an underground tunnel to what appeared to be the Philadelphia federal courthouse. He was then steered not to a courtroom but to an office. There he was greeted by assistant U.S. Attorney Luke Jones. Rehl apparently waited with the government’s prosecutor, without counsel present, for approximately an hour and a half. At that point, an individual who works in the office of Rehl’s former counsel appeared. Rehl had never retained this person to be his counsel and knew her only as an assistant to his former lawyer.3 At that point, AUSA Jones began to converse with Rehl about this case. It is our understanding that Rehl’s retained counsel was not then present. Neither was an FBI agent, according to those in the room.

Among other matters, AUSA Jones apparently told Rehl that if he did not cooperate with the government, he would likely be transferred from FDC Philadelphia to the D.C. jail, where he would not be able to see his wife and child, at least until after his “conviction.”4 It is our understanding that when Rehl said there was nothing to cooperate about, AUSA Jones responded that, in that case, Rehl could “wear a wire” when talking to others. Rehl’s then-counsel arrived much later—approximately three hours behind schedule. At that point the lawyers agreed to continue the meeting to the following day.

So unusual were these proceedings that the Marshals who transported Rehl back to the jail expressed their concern to him about his apparent total lack of legal representation. “Did you know that interview was going to happen? Did your lawyer set that up for you?” When jail staff returned to Rehl’s cell the next day, he refused to meet with AUSA Jones again. [link added]

Nordean made all this public based on a claim that this meant the government was holding them — last I checked, in Florida and Washington — because they wanted Rehl to wear a wire on them.

In response, Jones said the claims were bullshit and inappropriate for Biggs and Nordean to raise in any case.

The allegations of government misconduct are false. It would be improper for the government to address these allegations with counsel for defendants Nordean or Biggs, neither of whom represent defendant Rehl, or to address them further in a public filing. Defendant Rehl is represented by counsel, with whom the government has conferred regarding these allegations.

Contrary to defendant Nordean’s suggestion (ECF No. 174 at 4-7), the allegations have no bearing on his or defendant Biggs’ pending motions to reopen bail hearings. Moreover, the allegations are spurious and should not be countenenced by the Court.

At the most recent hearing, prosecutors attributed the earlier delay on moving Rehl to detention motions and said the Marshals were responsible for the decision to move him. Who knows who is telling the truth, but Judge Tim Kelly agreed that it really is irrelevant to Biggs and Nordean’s bids to get out of jail. He also had a separate hearing where Rehl informed him that Jonathon Moseley is now representing him and he’s quite happy with the relationship thus far.

That’s how we got here, to Rehl’s second substantive motion, in which Moseley moved to request for a subpoena for information on the permits authorizing the Wild Protest rally at the location advertised on the East side of the Capitol. Or, if he can’t get that, he wants policies on port-a-johns because (the motion shows) there were port-a-johns where the rally advertisement said a rally would be held.

ZACHARY REHL, by counsel, requests the issuance of a subpoena to the U.S. Capitol Police, c/o Thomas Manger, [new] Chief of Police and/or Custodian of Records, for

(1) Any and all documents relating in any way to any application for —

(2) Any and all documents relating in any way to —

(3) Any and all documents relating in any way to the denial of —

(4) Any and all documents relating in any way to any revocation of — any permit to demonstrate or assemble on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, especially in the Northeast corner of the grounds across 2nd Street, NE from the U.S. Supreme Court, on January 6, 2021, or for any time period including January 6, 2021. Or:

(5) Any and all documents relating in any way to the placement of temporary toilets (commonly described as porta-potties) on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, in the Northeast corner of the grounds across 2nd Street, NE from the U.S. Supreme Court, on January 6, 2021, or for any time period including January 6, 2021. (Please do not confuse the facilities set up on the other side of the Capitol very far away for assembly of stands for the inauguration on January 20, 2021, which could not explain the porta-potties across Second Street from the U.S. Supreme Court.)

(6) Any and all documents relating in any way to general policies and procedures at any time concerning restrictions on the placement of equipment such as porta-potties on the grass of the U.S. Capitol grounds (i) without a permit or (ii) without the employment of contractors approved by the U.S. Capitol Police to do the work.

There’s a lot of word games about how what the indictment really alleges (the object of the conspiracy notwithstanding) is that Rehl conspired to argue in favor of the Electoral College.

15. Indeed, the First Superseding Indictment alleges that:

36. On December 23, 2020, REHL posted on social media describing January 6, 2021, Congress gets to argue the legitimacy of the [E]lectoral [C]ollege votes, and as “the day where yes, there will be a big rally on that day.”

16. Thus, the grand jury by indictment and the prosecution assisting in the drafting of the indictment admits and confesses that REHL’s goal was to get Congress “to argue the legitimacy of the [E]lectoral [C]ollege votes, and – for THAT purpose ” yes, there will be a big rally on that day.”

17. The government admits and confesses within the four corners of the indictment that the goal of the alleged “conspiracy” (which would require a criminal goal) was to get Congress “to argue the legitimacy of the [E]lectoral [C]ollege votes,” and not to stop, obstruct, delay or hinder the Electoral College certification.

18. The government admits and confesses within the four corners of the indictment that the goal of the alleged “conspiracy” was to demand that Congress do not just half of its job but all of its job in certifying the Electoral College vote.

19. Congress plainly could not “argue” the “legitimacy” of the Electoral College votes IF CONGRESS WERE NOT IN SESSION.

But the request itself, for proof that the underlying protest was permitted, is a reasonable basis to try to argue he didn’t plan to prevent the peaceful transfer of power that day.

The problem for Rehl — and the reason this move may backfire — is that the permits are already public and they likely say far more than Rehl wants them to say; BuzzFeed liberated them (in a fairly historic bit of Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Light FOIA magic).

The documents show that when Capitol Police received the permit application for the specific port-a-john location that Rehl wants to subpoena, an officer responding to the permits judged that the application was an attempt to hide the role of Stop the Steal in the rally.

On Dec. 21, 2020, a group called One Nation Under God filed an application with the Capitol Police’s special events section to stage a protest over “election fraud in swing states” at the Senate East Front grassy area on Jan. 6 between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.

The officer who reviewed the application noticed some irregularities. For one thing, the officer wrote in an intelligence assessment, “One Nation Under God is not an organization and does not maintain social media accounts or webpages.” For another, one of the people listed as a confirmed speaker was Alexander, a leader of Stop the Steal, which was planning a major rally at Freedom Plaza that same day.

A screenshot of the text from the documents

Obtained via Capitol Police

“I explained,” the officer wrote, “that it appears that the Stop the Steal and the One Nation Under God is one in the same due to the similarities and the affiliation with Ali Alexander.” In an email on Dec. 31, 2020, another officer mentioned concerns about the approval of “certain permits,” specifically that “the permit requests … are being used as proxies for Stop the Steal” and “may also be involved with organizations that may be planning trouble.”

The officer did some follow up only to find that the guy who applied for the permit couldn’t answer basic questions about the event.

The permit application listed Nathan Martin of Shelby, Ohio, as a representative of One Nation Under God. According to the documents, a Capitol Police officer spoke with him on Dec. 28, 2020. The officer’s notes suggest that Martin was not forthcoming about the group’s plans.

A screenshot of the application from One Nation Under God

Obtained via Capitol Police

A permit application listing Nathan Martin as the contact for One Nation Under God

“I inquired if he has any additional information he could give me for the event. Mr. Martin said there are a few events that they have going on and he does not know which one I was referring,” the officer wrote. “When I asked about the ‘few events’, he stated that the events were in the hotels.”

And when BuzzFeed called Martin, he admitted the tie between the group on the permit and Stop the Steal — effectively confirming that One Nation was a front for Stop the Steal.

Brown, who did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment, told the officer Martin “is associated with Stop the Steal and travels with Ali Alexander.” Martin “does not seem to have an official title but he deals with the daily operations to include hotel books and car rentals.”

[snip]

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Martin acknowledged his affiliation with the two groups but said he could not explain what One Nation Under God’s mission was, how it was formed, and for what purpose. He said he had not seen the permit, could not explain why his name was on it, and was unaware that the demonstration had been capped at 50 people.

The permit also says the purpose of the demonstration is “demonstration for election fraud in swing states,” which doesn’t sound particularly legal. And BuzzFeed learned that the sound equipment (which Alex Jones may have used to lure bodies to the East side of the Capitol) was never used.

Now maybe Rehl knows all this. Maybe this is what he thinks he’ll get. He first started pursuing this subpoena on September 11, two days after BuzzFeed released these records. So maybe the proof that the Capitol Police approved this permit even after recognizing it was all just a front is what he’s after.

But effectively what he’s doing is soliciting records that show Stop the Steal, with which the Proud Boys seem to have coordinated, engaged in a kind of fraud on the Capitol Police to obtain more permits and spread out their obviously false claim that each protest would only have 50 participants.

Effectively, he risks opening up a whole big can of fraud exposure for any co-conspirators, and any reliance the Proud Boys made on having this permit (and the port-a-johns) to legitimize their mob rests on the shell games that Ali Alexander’s people were playing.

Update: Rehl didn’t know about the BuzzFeed liberation, but neither did he credit me for informing him when he learned of it (the third time the Proud Boy leaders have not credited my reporting in their filings).

4. However, in response to the filing of counsel’s Motion, a news blog noticed the Motion and commented on it, and the blog entry was forwarded to me as counsel.

5. It seems that BUZZFEED filed suit for this information and the permits were released to the public on September 9, 2021. The documents produced are attached hereto.

The admission that he didn’t know that the permits had been liberated (and therefore didn’t know that they show Ali Alexander playing a shell game to obtain permits) may be why his attorney wants to get a good look at these permits for “demonstration for election fraud in swing states” before he relies on them for a new bid to be released.

THEREFORE, the Motion may be moot and counsel asks the Court to delay any consideration of the Motion until counsel can decipher these documents and determine if anything further is still needed.