[Photo: Emily Morter via Unsplash]

Open Thread: Oddments Olio

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A dog’s breakfast, hodgepodge, pastiche, olio — this is a catch-all post with an open thread. I have a bunch of tidbits and loose ends with no place to go, not enough on which to center posts. Make of them what you will and bring your own potpourri in comments.

Loews — No, not Lowe’s as in the big box hardware store chain. Loews Regency, as in pricey hotel in NYC where Trump’s personal attorney and likely cut-out has been staying, ostensibly because of construction at his home. Yeah, the same home which was searched this past week along with this hotel room and office.

One detail folks may have forgotten: Loews Regency is the same hotel where Felix Sater arranged a 27-JAN-2017 meeting between Michael Cohen and Ukrainian lawmaker Andrey Artemenko to discuss a plan to lift the sanctions on Russia. Totally legal one week after the inauguration, right? But why meet with the president’s personal lawyer instead of State Department employees, or wait until Rex Tillerson was confirmed on February 1?

And when was the meeting set up — did Sater take a phone call from Artemenko before the inauguration?

It wasn’t clear back in early 2017 when exactly this back-channel was first established and it’s still not clear now.

Searching Cohen’s room at the Loews seems more reasonable considering the Artemenko meeting. Has Cohen had a room or rooms in Loews Regency since inauguration day or earlier?

~ | ~

Hacka cracka lacka — Hey, remember how former CIA director John Brennan was hacked in 2015 and 2016 by a couple of “Cracka” hackers? Two dudes from North Carolina were arrested and prosecuted, sent to prison for two years for hacking senior U.S. officials.

One detail sticking in my craw has been the third party characterized as a group leader; only a teenager at the time, they were located in the U.K.

Why have so many issues related to politics and information security had links to the U.K. — like Cambridge Analytica/SCL and Brexit? Did somebody manipulate an autistic U.K. teenager into work assisting larger aims?

~ | ~

Facebook’s Chancellor — Prof. David Carroll asked a very good question: why didn’t any member of Congress on either the Senate Judiciary Committee or the House Energy & Commerce Committee ask about Facebook employee Joseph Chancellor, a psychologist who had been hired away from Cambridge Analytica. Well?

Speaking of Facebook, there are several folks who’ve been all over the this scandal, some of whom have been responsible for the public’s awareness that Facebook data had been acquired without users’ consent. Give them a follow:

Carole Cadwalladr — reporter-writer for Guardian-UK and Observer who has doggedly covered Cambridge Analytica/SCL links to Facebook user data and their impact on the Brexit referendum in June 2016. Her Guardian content here (consider throwing them a few bucks for her great work.)

Chris Wylie — Cambridge Analytica’s former director of research now whistleblower who revealed much of the workings between CA/SCL and Facebook’s ill-gotten data.

David Carroll — Associate professor of media design at the School of Art, Media, and Technology at The New School’s Parsons School of Design; he’s been chasing his personal data located in the U.K and is now suing Cambridge Analytica’s parent, SCL, for U.S. data it obtained without consent. (Read about the case and chip into the legal fund at this link.)

Also note that Verge senior writer Sarah Jeong generously tweeted all the members of Congress who’d received donations from Facebook as they questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Check it out.

~ | ~

Content bias — During this week’s committee hearings with Facebook CEO, GOP members of Congress tried repeatedly to make a case that Facebook was biased against conservative content. Too bad Facebook helped get a GOP POTUS elected, shooting that narrative in the ass.

But one related thing has stuck in my craw for quite some time, and I can’t help wonder if it was yet another way in which Facebook was manipulated by a disinformation operation.

Remember back in 2016 stories reporting Facebook’s contract content editors complained that Facebook was biased against conservatives? The story first appeared in Gizmodo on May 9, then got picked up by other outlets. A political story during the campaign season usually happens the other way around — covered first in a big national outlet then picked up in lesser outlets. Why did this story happen via Gizmodo first? This would be the perfect manner in which to launder information; the point of origin is obscured by the second and third outlets to pick it up as they typically go to the biggest source to confirm their story. In this case, an outlet like NYT or WaPo would go to Facebook and put them on the spot. They wouldn’t bug Gizmodo or the leakers who went to Gizmodo.

Another important factor: Gizmodo was part of beleaguered Gawker Media, which was about to implode and bought out months later by Univision. Anybody remaining at the time this story hit was uncertain about the security of their job. Journalists would have been ripe for manipulation because they needed an attention-getting story to improve their odds for a next gig.

In fact, Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy one month after the Facebook bias story was published — on June 10, 2016. Think of this 30-day time frame as two very stressful paydays for beleaguered Gawker employees who were trying hard to keep on keeping on but probably frantically wallpapering prospective media employers with resumes.

One more important factor: the reporter who covered this story was a technology editor whose beat wasn’t politics or free speech issues. This changed the way the story was covered and rolled out; if a reporter with more savvy and experience covering politics had been approached with this particular tip, they might have known there was something more to this than poor-conservatives-being-suppressed-by-liberal-bias. A political contributor might have questioned the insistance that outlets like Breitbart and Newsmax weren’t being included alongside NYT and WaPo.

Watching GOP congresspersons repeatedly bash Zuckerberg about media bias, I could see the same deer-in-the-headlights reaction Facebook had back in 2016 when these contract editors complained about bias. There was no bias; the hearings this week and the story in 2016 were naked attempts to screw with Facebook’s algorithms so that POS outlets like Mercer-funded, Bannon-operated Breitbart and Alex Jones’ InfoWars could get the same attention as legitimate outlets like NYT and WaPo.

We’re still going to have to press Facebook and other social media outlets to address this problem. It’s just not a problem of bias but identifying legitimate reported journalism. And we all have a problem with being easily played for our lack of sufficient skepticism.

~ | ~

Go for it. What detritus have you been carrying around that doesn’t fit anywhere else? Share in comments.

Bannon Aims to Best Jared Kushner’s Biggest Mistake in Modern Political History

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Back in September, Steve Bannon agreed on 60 Minutes that firing Jim Comey was the stupidest decision in modern political history.

In a “60 Minutes” interview that was posted online Sunday night, Bannon was asked whether he considered Comey’s dismissal — which ignited a political firestorm and directly led to the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including potential ties to Trump’s campaign — the biggest mistake in political history.

Bannon responded, “That would be probably — that probably would be too bombastic even for me, but maybe modern political history.

“He went on to acknowledge that if Comey had not been let go, it’s unlikely that the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller would have been established.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that if James Comey had not been fired, we would not have a special counsel, yes,” he said. “We would not have the Mueller investigation. We would not have the Mueller investigation and the breadth that clearly Mr. Mueller is going for.”

At that time, Bannon insisted that he faced no risk from even the expanded Mueller investigation, and hadn’t even lawyered up.

All that changed, of course, after he ran his mouth to Michael Wolff. Bannon claimed to be offended by the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting. In his apology he would even say the entire meeting offended his life’s work making movies about fighting “the evil empire.”

“My comments about the meeting with Russian nationals came from my life experiences as a Naval officer stationed aboard a destroyer whose main mission was to hunt Soviet submarines to my time at the Pentagon during the Reagan years when our focus was the defeat of ‘the evil empire’ and to making films about Reagan’s war against the Soviets and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in selling uranium to them.”

But what really irked Bannon is that when Don Jr, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with Russians in an effort to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton, they didn’t use lawyers as cutouts.

“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero,” said an astonished and derisive Bannon, not long after the meeting was revealed.

“The three senior guys in the campaign,” an incredulous Bannon went on, “thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the twenty-fifth floor—with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately. Even if you didn’t think to do that, and you’re totally amoral, and you wanted that information, you do it in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people and go through everything and then they verbally come and tell another lawyer in a cut-out, and if you’ve got something, then you figure out how to dump it down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication. You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to. . . . But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

On Monday, the home, hotel, and office of the lawyer Trump has long used as such a cutout, Michael Cohen, got raided. Among the things the FBI sought — in addition to information on Cohen’s own corrupt business — were communications Trump and that lawyer and others had about the Access Hollywood video.

FBI agents who raided the home, office and hotel of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer sought communications that Trump had with attorney Michael Cohen and others regarding the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump making lewd remarks about women a month before the election, according to sources familiar with the matter.

[snip]

The search warrant also sought communications between then-candidate Trump and his associates regarding efforts to prevent disclosure of the tape, according to one of the sources. In addition, investigators wanted records and communications concerning other potential negative information about the candidate that the campaign would have wanted to contain ahead of the election. The source said the warrant was not specific about what this additional information would be. [my emphasis]

Bannon — and Marc Kasowitz, who sent a lawyer to meet with Trump in the wake of news of the raid — was probably among those associates. After all, Bannon also told Wolff that he and Kasowitz had to deal with a number of “near-death problems on the campaign” pertaining to women — like Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal — making legal threats against Trump.

Unable to hire prestige talent, Bannon turned to one of the president’s longtime hit-man lawyers, Marc Kasowitz. Bannon had previously bonded with Kasowitz when the attorney had handled a series of near-death problems on the campaign, including dealing with a vast number of allegations and legal threats from an ever growing list of women accusing Trump of molesting and harassing them.

Now, Steve Bannon, the guy who claimed firing Jim Comey was the stupidest recent political decision, the guy who wasn’t so much opposed to political rat-fucking as he was opposed to doing it without using lawyers as a cutout, is shopping a new plan to get Trump out of his legal woes: fire Rod Rosenstein.

Stephen K. Bannon, who was ousted as White House chief strategist last summer but has remained in touch with some members of President Trump’s circle, is pitching a plan to West Wing aides and congressional allies to cripple the federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

The first step, these people say, would be for Trump to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the work of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and in recent days signed off on a search warrant of Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Bannon also wants to fire Ty Cobb, one of Trump’s remaining semi-legit lawyers, as part of an effort to invalidate all the testimony from White House officials — including himself!!!! — based on the claim it should have been covered by executive privilege.

And he is telling associates inside and outside the administration that the president should create a new legal battleground to protect himself from the investigation by asserting executive privilege — and arguing that Mueller’s interviews with White House officials over the past year should now be null and void.

“The president wasn’t fully briefed by his lawyers on the implications” of not invoking executive privilege, Bannon told The Washington Post in an interview Wednesday. “It was a strategic mistake to turn over everything without due process, and executive privilege should be exerted immediately and retroactively.”

[snip]

Bannon believes Trump can argue he was given poor counsel by his lawyers on Russia, including Ty Cobb, who has encouraged a cooperative approach to Mueller’s team.

“Ty Cobb should be fired immediately,” Bannon said.

I’m agnostic about whether the Access Hollywood video actually relates to the Russian investigation. If it does, the only conceivable reason to refer it to Southern District of NY would be to establish a clean team — but Mueller’s team has already handled interactions with investigations involving two lawyers and/or legal teams, Melissa Laurenza (who testified that Manafort led her to lie on FARA forms), and Skadden Arps. I do think it possible — highly likely, actually — that Cohen may have been used as a cutout in some hotel room in New England to cover-up other sensitive issues.

But given Bannon’s response, the investigation into Cohen’s cover-up of Trump’s problems with women — including both the Access Hollywood tape and the legal negotiations with Daniels and McDougal — probably implicates Bannon as well as Cohen.

And so Bannon wants to do what Kushner did when he, similarly, realized how much a legal investigation jeopardized him personally: fire the guy running the investigation.

Indeed, Bannon seems so panicked he can’t even remember that such moves rank among the stupidest in modern political history.

Update: One more thing about the Stormy/McDougal/Access investigation. That may come directly out of Bannon’s own testimony, which would explain why he’d want to try to invalidate it.

Manafort Wants DOJ to Return Some of the Information Seized in His [Condo*] Search

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Paul Manafort has submitted two motions to suppress information collected pursuant to two warrants. The first, to suppress the fruits of a May 27, 2017 search of a storage facility in Alexandria, was submitted in timely fashion on April 6. The second, to suppress the fruits of the widely publicized no-knock search of his Alexandria condo on July 27, 2017 [note, Mueller filings make clear it was not a no-knock search], was submitted late, though Judge Amy Jackson Berman let him do so even though he only asked permission to do so hours before the deadline.

While I don’t think these motions, particularly as submitted, will succeed, I think they’re interesting because in addition to seeking to suppress evidence in the ConFraudUs prosecution he has already been charged with, appears to seek to suppress any evidence obtained relating to the election tampering conspiracy.

The storage unit search feeds the base but misrepresents the facts

For reasons I don’t understand, Manafort has argued these two motions in nested fashion. He argues the storage unit search was improper and collected data outside the scope of the warrant, meaning any fruit of that search should also be suppressed (though that may aim to suppress other searches not at issue here).

The storage unit search is one that online conspirators have talked a lot about, suggesting the search was done pursuant to FISA order, or in other ways done improperly. So by seeking to suppress this search, Manafort is doing what is expected of him by Trump’s frothy base.

That said, the motion itself makes a number of claims that the exhibits submitted to support the motion don’t support. The motion argues that:

  • The person who voluntarily let the FBI into the storage unit, Alexander Trusko, was a former employee (and may not have been acting voluntarily), and so no longer entitled entry to the storage unit
  • That person was otherwise not authorized to have access to the storage unit
  • The FBI took virtually everything in the storage unit

That’s not backed by the exhibits. For example, the affidavit notes that, while Trusko showed the FBI the storage facility was a former employee of Davis Manafort (the allegation in the motion), he was still an employee of Paul Manafort, just another company Manafort ran.

On May 26, 2017, your Affiant met with [redacted], a former employee of Davis Manafort Partners, and a current employee of Steam Mountain, LLC, which is a business currently operated by Paul Manafort. [redacted] advised that he is a salaried employee of Manafort’s company, and that he performs a variety of functions for Manafort and his companies as directed by Manafort.

The storage facility lease clearly shows Trusko to be the occupant, with Rick Gates listed as an alternate contact and Manafort just as an Authorized Access Person.

Manafort’s going to have a tough time arguing that the person on the lease is not a person with the authority to enter the facility.

Finally, the FBI agent who did the search counted “approximately 21 bankers’ boxes that could contain documents, as well as a five-drawer metal filing cabinet.” But the return of the search warrant appears to show just nine boxes of documents, meaning the FBI took just a fraction of what was in the storage unit.

While this application asks for records on the Podesta Group (but not, curiously, Vin Weber or his Mercury group, the other lobbying company Manafort got to work for the Party of Regions), it doesn’t ask for anything specifically related to the election conspiracy.

Even before you consider the fact that FBI got this warrant without hiding any of the details that Manafort claims makes the search suspect, those claims seem misleading at best. This motion is almost certainly going nowhere, except to feed the frothing conspiracists.

The condo search focuses on the Ukraine crimes but asks for June 9 meeting materials

I’m more interested in the motion to suppress the condo search and its fruits.

As a threshold matter, between May and July 2017, the scope of crimes being investigated mushroomed, to include both the fraudulent loans obtained during the election and afterwards, as well as foreign national contributions to an election, with a broad conspiracy charge built in.

Compare the list of crimes in the storage unit affidavit:

  • 31 USC 5314, 5322 (failure to file a report of foreign bank and financial amounts)
  • 22 USC 618 (Violation of FARA)
  • 26 USC 7206(a) (filing a false tax return)

With the list in the residence affidavit:

  • 31 USC 5314, 5322
  • 22 USC 611 et seq (a broader invocation of FARA)
  • 26 USC 7206
  • 18 USC 1014 (fraud in connection with the extension of credit)
  • 18 USC 1341, 1343, 1349 (mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud)
  • 18 USC 1956 and 1957 (money laundering)
  • 52 USC 30121 (foreign national contributions to an election)
  • 18 USC 371 and 372 (conspiracy to defraud the US, aiding and abetting, and attempt to commit such offenses)

So this motion to suppress would suppress both evidence used to prosecute Manafort in the EDVA case, as well as the eventual hack-and-leak conspiracy.

And in addition to records on Manafort, Gates’, and (another addition from the storage unit warrant), the warrant permits the seizure of records tied to the June 9 meeting and Manafort’s state of mind during all the enumerated crimes (but that bullet appears right after the June 9 meeting one).

It also includes an authorization to take anything relating to Manafort’s work for the foreign governments, including but not limited to the Ukrainians that have already been charged, which would seem to be a catchall that would cover any broader conspiracies with Russia.

This makes sense. The June 9 story broke in July 2017 based off documents that Jared Kushner and Manafort had provided to Congress in June — though I do wonder whether there were any records relating to the meeting in the storage unit.

To be fair, this motion is not much stronger than the first one. Manafort doesn’t even present as much reason to throw out this search as he did for the storage unit. He basically just argues the warrant is overbroad, agents exceeded the scope of it, and DOJ improperly has held on to things not covered by the scope of the warrant. He does claim the warrant doesn’t incorporate the affidavit that lays out what can be searched, which I don’t understand because the application does say to refer to the affidavit. Curiously, while in the aftermath of the search, stories reported that the search had improperly seized privileged materials, he doesn’t complain about that in this motion (the docketed materials make it clear that FBI separated out any potentially privileged materials).

That said, I think some of the claim that the warrant was overbroad will need a careful response.

Three specific complaints may suggest what Manafort’s really worried about

Amid the larger argument about overbroad search, Manafort says several things that I find of particular interest. For example, the motion complains that by asking for Manafort’s “state of mind” (either specifically as it relates to the June 9 meeting more broadly).

a warrant directing agents to seize all evidence of the subject’s “state of mind” does not restrict the agent’s discretion at all. Indeed, the warrant may just as well have told agents to search for and seize any evidence that the subject committed the subject offenses – all of which require knowledge and intent.

It seems DOJ may have more specific concerns about Manafort’s state of mind when dealing with Russians, because it goes to his many mixed motivations tying to the election.

Then, Manafort argues, curiously, that the FBI took devices that could not conceivably include evidence like some iPods.

For example, the search warrant inventory of electronic devices seized or imaged includes things such as an Apple iPod music device and some Apple iPod Touch music and video devices.

Except that’s not right: you can use Signal on iPods, so these might have stored communication. Which would be precisely the kind of thing that would be of most interest: devices that could be used for encrypted comms that would not show up on cell records.

Finally, Manafort complains, at length, that DOJ hasn’t given any of this back.

To date, the government has not represented that the materials seized were subject to any process or procedure to insure the government only retained materials within the scope of the search warrant. The government has only represented that the materials have been subject to a privilege review. The government is required to review seized materials and “identify and return those materials not covered by the warrant.”

They do so citing longer periods of review, so it’s unlikely this complaint will go anywhere.

But as I’ve said, Manafort has a great incentive, in his likely futile suppression motions, to try to force DOJ to cough up more information about the case in chief. And by demanding that DOJ start giving stuff back, he may force them to show what they consider valuable or at least still can’t make sense of.

Ultimately, this suppression motion may be more about trying to prevent the government from keeping stuff supporting even more charges while it pursues the two classes of charged crimes and the soon to be charged crimes named in the affidavit.

bmaz was proved fucking right

Finally, just to prove that bmaz was right all along, I’ll note that this search warrant permits the FBI to take things relating to Manafort’s wife Kathleen.

bmaz has long been wondering why DOJ didn’t also charge her, which might provide more leverage to get Manafort to flip than charging Gates would. References in the affidavit to them reorganizing their lives suggests Kathleen might not have been as persuasive as she once would have been.

*Update: In Mueller’s response to this, they make it clear this was not a no-knock warrant, and I’ve corrected the title accordingly.

The warrant application had not sought permission to enter without knocking. In issuing the warrant, the magistrate judge authorized the government to execute the warrant any day through August 8, 2017, and to conduct the search “in the daytime [from] 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.” Doc. 264-1 at 1. The government complied fully with those date and time conditions, and Manafort does not contend otherwise.

Yet More Proof Facebook’s Surveillance Capitalism Is Good at Surveilling — Even Russian Hackers

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I’ve long tracked Facebook’s serial admission to having SIGINT visibility that nearly rivals the NSA: knowing that Facebook had intelligence corroborating NSA’s judgment that GRU was behind the DNC hack was one reason I was ultimately convinced of the IC’s claims, in spite of initial questions.

Among all his evasions and questionably correct answers in Senate testimony yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg provided another tidbit about the visibility Facebook had on the 2016 attacks.

One of my greatest regrets in running the company is that we were slow in identifying the Russian information operations in 2016. We expected them to do a number of more traditional cyberattacks, which we did identify, and notified the campaigns, that they were trying to hack into them. But we were slow to identifying [sic] the type of new information operations.

Not only did Facebook see GRU’s operations in real time, but they notified “the campaigns” about them.

Note, Zuck didn’t describe the targets in any more detail than “campaigns.” That led Robby Mook to dispute Zuck, eliciting more details from Facebook CISO Alex Stamos.

Aside from illustrating how routinely those involved in and covering the 2016 hacks confuse the possible affected targets (resulting in some real misunderstanding of what happened), Stamos’ clarification provides important new details: these hacks affected both the DNC and RNC’s key employees, and Facebook alerted the FBI (something we’ve previously heard).

The DNC likes to claim they never got any warning they were being hacked. But apparently, in addition to the FBI’s serial attempts to lead them to discover Russia was hacking them, Facebook let them know too.

Elsewhere in his testimony, Zuck got coy about the degree to which Facebook remains involved in the Mueller investigation, a fact that should have been obvious to anyone who has read the Internet Research Agency indictment, but which numerous news outlets treated as news anyway.

Facebook has a lot to answer for (this David Dayen piece on yesterday’s testimony is superb).

But one thing that has continued to trickle out is that Facebook’s surveillance capitalism is good at what it’s designed for: surveillance, including of Russian hackers.

Why Are Republicans Still Squealing about FISA Applications If HPSCI Report Cedes Carter Page Concerns?

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Republicans in Congress continue to make fairly breath-taking demands on Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray in what seems to be an attempt to create a bogus claim of non-responsiveness that Trump can use to fire one or both of them.

First there was the demand that the House Intelligence Committee get all of FBI’s non-grand jury records on the Mueller investigation, a demand Paul Ryan backed. Then there was the push to publish the Nunes memo over DOJ’s objections. More recently, after Wray’s doubling the number of FBI staffers (to 54) in an attempt to meet a Bob Goodlatte document deadline for FISA, Hillary investigation, and McCabe firing materials proved insufficient, Jeff Sessions has put Chicago’s US Attorney, John Lausch, in charge of the response. As with Sessions’ selection of Utah US Attorney John Huber to review other GOP demands, Sessions seems to be giving himself and his deputies cover from fairly ridiculous GOP demands.

Nevertheless, such concessions have not entirely sheltered Trump’s main targets from the kinds of complaints that might expose Robert Mueller’s investigation below them. Mark Meadows, one of the lead attack dogs in this congressional obstruction effort, even suggested Congress might impeach Rosenstein for failing to meet a 2-week deadline on a Bob Goodlatte subpoena.

Through it all, the complaints that FBI used the Steele dossier as one piece of evidence in Carter Page’s FISA application, persist. This, in spite of the fact that Page had been under FISA surveillance years before, and in spite of the fact that all sides agree that the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s aides started in response to the George Papadopoulos tip from Australia.

This, in spite of the passage from the Schiff memo (including one redacted sentence) that seems to assert that FBI considered Page an on-going counterintelligence concern.

DOJ cited multiple sources to support the case for surveillance Page — but made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016, chiefly his suspected July 2016 meetings in Moscow with Russian officials. [entire short sentence redacted] In fact, the FBI interviewed Page in March 2016 about his contact with Russian intelligence, the very month candidate Donald Trump named hi a foreign policy advisor.

And the Schiff memo is consistent with what Sheldon Whitehouse (among the few other people who had read the application at the time) said.

Whitehouse: I’ve got to be careful because some of this is still classified. But the conclusion that I’ve reached is that there was abundant evidence outside of the Steele dossier that would have provoked any responsible FBI with a counterintelligence concern to look at whether Carter Page was an undisclosed foreign agent. And to this day the FBI continues to assert that he was a undisclosed Russian foreign agent.

Importantly, however, it’s no longer just former prosecutors in the Democratic party who seem to confirm that Page was a real counterintelligence concern, and therefore legitimately a FISA target. At least, that’s what these two passages from the GOP House Intelligence Report suggest.

If you’re complaining that the Intelligence Community didn’t inform Trump about that members of his campaign team were “assessed to be potential counterintelligence concerns,” (and this likely includes Paul Manafort, as well as Page), then you can’t very well complain if FBI obtained a FISA warrant once those counterintelligence concerns left the campaign team. Hell, you’re practically inviting the FBI to obtain such a warrant while the counterintelligence concern is on the campaign, to help warn the candidate.

I know this is a bit to ask, but the GOP should not be able to have it both ways, to try to discredit the Trump investigation by pointing to the use of the Steele dossier in targeting Page, even while demanding FBI should have shared what it knew about Page because he posed a risk to Trump.

Michael Cohen’s Stormy Weather: Four Observations

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As you’ve no doubt heard, the FBI raided Michael Cohen’s office, home, and hotel today. They were looking for stuff related to his payoff to Stormy Daniels … and other things, including (per the WaPo) “possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations.”

Some thoughts:

Geoffrey Berman, a symptom of Trump’s corruption, is responsible

As NYT first reported, this raid was a referral from Robert Mueller, not something executed by his team.

The prosecutors obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but most likely resulted from information that he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York.

That means Mueller would have presented the evidence to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who would have made the decision to hand off the lead to Southern District of NY, with the folks there buying into not the investigation but the unusual raid of an attorney’s office.

Which, in turn, means it was approved by the US Attorney for SDNY. After Trump fired Preet Bharara (who was honing in on some of Trump’s corruption), he prioritized replacing Preet’s deputy, Joon Kim (who very recently returned to his former law firm). He replaced him not by elevating someone else, but by installing someone — Geoffrey Berman — he had interviewed personally. Berman is, if anything, a symbol of Trump’s abuse, not least because he hasn’t even been nominated formally. He’s a bureaucratic end-around.

And he had to have signed off on this raid (unless he recused, which will earn him the wrath of Trump all by itself).

Update: ABC did confirm yesterday that Berman did recuse. Daily Beast describes that Republican Robert Khuzami’s in charge.

[T]he recusal by Berman the developer’s son, the referral from Mueller is being handled by the deputy U.S. Attorney, Robert Khuzami. He is the son of two professional ballroom dancers.

That’s right, Mr. President, his dad and mom are ballroom dancers!

Deputy U.S. Attorney Khuzami is a Republican and even spoke at the 2004 Republican convention in support of George W. Bush.

But that will only make it harder for Trump to say he is the victim of Democrats.

And Khuzami is an expert at financial crimes, having ordered the arrest of 120 people for securities fraud in a single day during his earlier time as a Manhattan federal prosecutor. He subsequently served as head of enforcement at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Trump’s Friday comments probably made this worse

This raid is not all about Stormy Daniels, but some of it is. Which suggests Trump’s comments on Friday, in which he disavowed the payment Cohen made on his behalf, probably made this worse.

Q Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?

THE PRESIDENT: No. No. What else?

Q Then why did Michael Cohen make those if there was no truth to her allegations?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, you’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael is my attorney. And you’ll have to ask Michael Cohen.

Q Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don’t know. No.

By claiming — almost certainly falsely — not to have known about the payment to Daniels, Trump probably scotched any claim Cohen might make to privilege. It also meant that Cohen either claimed to be representing Trump falsely, or is lying in sworn documents about doing so.

This raid would have had to have been approved over some time, not Friday afternoon. But one way or another, I imagine these comments made it easier for DOJ and a judge to approve the raid, at least with respect to the Stormy Daniels material.

Manafort will shortly get this raid approved for Mueller

Last week, in my analysis of the Mueller filing explaining his mandate, I suggested he was getting some things approved that weren’t relevant to the Manafort challenge but were relevant to the larger investigation.

Like this:

The filing includes a quotation from DOJ’s discussion of special counsels making it clear that it’s normal to investigate crimes that might lead someone to flip.

[I]n deciding when additional jurisdiction is needed, the Special Counsel can draw guidance from the Department’s discussion accompanying the issuance of the Special Counsel regulations. That discussion illustrated the type of “adjustments to jurisdiction” that fall within Section 600.4(b). “For example,” the discussion stated, “a Special Counsel assigned responsibility for an alleged false statement about a government program may request additional jurisdiction to investigate allegations of misconduct with respect to the administration of that program; [or] a Special Counsel may conclude that investigating otherwise unrelated allegations against a central witness in the matter is necessary to obtain cooperation.”

That one is technically relevant here — one thing Mueller is doing with the Manafort prosecution (and successfully did with the Gates one) is to flip witnesses against Trump. But it also makes it clear that Mueller could do so more generally.

So when Amy Berman Jackson rules against what was ultimately a desperate bid by Trump’s campaign chair, she’ll be implicitly approving of practices like “investigating otherwise unrelated allegations against a central witness” if it’s “necessary to obtain cooperation.”

And just to be sure, Michael Dreeben will be on hand for this argument.

Trump has no appropriate lawyer to this task

Trump is wailing right now about this raid.

So I just heard they broke into the office of one of my personal attorn[ey]s…It’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt. I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down. I’ve given over a million pages in documents to the special counsel. They continue to just go forward and here we are talking about Syria, we’re talking about a lot of serious things…and I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now. Actually it’s much more than that. You could say right after I won the nomination it started.

When I saw this, when I heard about it, that is a whole new level of unfairness.

This has been going on. I saw one of the reporters who is not necessarily a fan of mine…he said this is now getting ridiculous. They found no collusion what so ever with Russia.

This is the most biased group of people. These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I have ever seen. Democrats — all. Either Democrats or a couple of Republicans who worked for President Obama. They’re not looking at the other side — Hillary Clinton… all of the crimes that were committed, all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about from the Republican side and the independent side. They only keep looking at us.

They raided the office of a personal attorney early in the morning. It’s a disgrace. So we’ll be talking about it more.

[snip]

The stock market dropped a lot today as soon as they heard the noise you know of this nonsense that was going on. It dropped a lot. It was up — it was way up. It dropped quite a bit at the end. That we have to go through that. We’ve had that hanging over us from the very, very beginning. And yet the other side they’re not even looking. And the other side is where there are crimes and those crimes are obvious — lies under oath all over the place, emails that are knocked out, that are acid washed and deleted, 33,000 emails were deleted after getting a subpoena from Congress. And nobody bothers looking at that.

Amid the wailing, Trump suggested he might fire Mueller.

“Why don’t I just fire Mueller? Well, I think it’s a disgrace what’s going on. We’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “Many people have said you should fire him. Again, they found nothing. And in finding nothing, that’s a big statement.”

As he nudges closer to firing Mueller, remember: after having chased John Dowd off, Trump has no competent defense attorney.

He may well fire Mueller. But he has no one to guide him out of the morass that doing so will cause.

What Did Wikileaks Do with the DCCC Emails It Monopolized?

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Yesterday Buzzfeed did a story that adds important details to this report from the New Yorker last year.

In mid-August, Guccifer 2.0 expressed interest in offering a trove of Democratic e-mails to Emma Best, a journalist and a specialist in archival research, who is known for acquiring and publishing millions of declassified government documents. Assange, I was told, urged Best to decline, intimating that he was in contact with the persona’s handlers, and that the material would have greater impact if he released it first.

First, Buzzfeed describes the emails clearly as the DCCC documents (though elsewhere this article remains unreliable on some facts about what documents were what).

As Best describes, she had reached out to Guccifer 2.0 when he had asked for assistance from journalists, and ultimately then reached out to Wikileaks.

Best told BuzzFeed News she first reached out to Guccifer 2.0 in August 2016 after it posted on its WordPress account a call for journalists who wanted its files. “I sent them a Direct Message and referred to that, asking what they had in mind,” Best told BuzzFeed News over Signal. Best has experience posting large data sets, and wondered if she could host the files on archive.org, a nonprofit digital library.

But Guccifer 2.0 had another idea. “[I] gonna send a large trove to wikileaks,” it said. Best, who had DMed with WikiLeaks before, relayed that message to WikiLeaks in a direct message on Twitter. Neither party conveyed to her whether they had interacted together before.

“I told them that Guccifer 2.0 was considering giving me at least part of the cache, which is when they asked me to be their ‘agent,’ which they said I would get ‘credit’ for,” Best said. She didn’t agree to act as Assange’s agent, she said, but stopped messaging with Guccifer 2.0.

Note, this exchange shortly follows the release by Best and Wikileaks of some Turkish emails under some interesting circumstances.

Best’s outreach led to the conversation with Wikileaks, the Wikileaks side of which Buzzfeed includes.

The following is the entirety of WikiLeaks’s messages to Best that night, according to the emails she provided. All times are ET. (Twitter does not send a user copies of their own messages, so the contents Best provided are one-sided.)

8:43 p.m.: please “leave” their conversation with them and us

8:43 p.m.: we would appreciate it if you did not dump the docs and obviously archive.org will delete them anyway

9:12 p.m.: Impact is very substantially reduced if the “news” of a release doesn’t co-incide with the ability to respond to the news by searching

9:13 p.m.: non-searchable dumps are just channeled into a few orgs with technical resources. then others won’t touch them because they perceive that the cherries have all been picked by techdirt or whatever.

9:14 p.m.: and these other media groups are very likely to take a stupid initial angle

9:15 p.m.: “We don’t know if its true. Possibly russians who knows blah blah blah” because they don’t properly verify prior to publication and are scared because they’re not us, contaminating the entire release

9:18 p.m.: in that regretable event, from our perspective, please just act as our agent we can ensure you get the right credit, cross promotion etc.

As Buzzfeed notes, at 10:16 PM ET that day, Guccifer 2.0 tweeted that he would give the documents to Wikileaks (though Buzzfeed incorrectly says Guccifer 2.0 said “it had handed those documents over” to Wikileaks; the tweet in fact describes doing so prospectively).

Buzzfeed emphasizes that this proves Wikileaks knew that it obtained documents from Guccifer 2.0, and not Seth Rich (though this is one reason why Buzzfeed’s conflation of the email sets is problematic, as the Rich conspiracy pertains necessarily to the DNC documents, not the DCCC ones). Showing Wikileaks in direct coordination with Guccifer 2.0 is important.

Equally important, however, is that Wikileaks never released the DCCC documents. Having laid out reasons why it, rather than Best, should release them (because they could make them searchable, because other media outlets would take a stupid initial angle, because other outlets would emphasize the Russian source), Wikileaks then sat on them, if indeed they ever obtained them.

Meanwhile, five minutes after saying he’d dump the DCCC documents to Wikileaks, at 10:23 PM, Guccifer 2.0 sent the first tweet in what would become an exchange via DMs with Roger Stone.

Among the things Guccifer 2.0 did in that exchange was twice try to get Stone interested in the DCCC documents he was posting (though Stone did not respond).

Similarly, also on August 12, Guccifer 2.0 started discussing sharing the emails with a Republican operative named James Bambanek who says, in a recently published report that probably misunderstands one goal of Guccifer 2.0’s actions, he was conducting infosec research.

Elsewhere, Bambanek says he turned over every message immediately to the FBI, but as he notes, they would have been monitoring all this in any case.

Every [direct message] I sent, every [one] I received was turned over to the FBI immediately. I assumed they would have been monitoring the account to begin with,” Bambenek said.

Publicly, we know that Guccifer was also sharing the DCCC documents with other Republican operatives around the country. While some of these documents were unexciting, others provided the Democrats’ oppo research for congressional races. Florida was one of the states where the documents might be said to have helped Republicans (which is not coincidentally where Mueller’s focus on the Internet Research Agency seems to be).

What seems to have happened, then, is that by getting Best to agree not to publish the emails, Guccifer 2.0 then offered them up to a series of Republicans who would (whatever value the actual documents did or didn’t have) then be implicated in obtaining campaign documents from a presumed Russian source.

Contrary to what Wikileaks said, there’d be no way Republican operatives would let actually useful documents go unused, regardless of how much work they had to do to search for them. But by convincing Best not to publish them in bulk (and by not publishing them themselves!), Wikileaks created the opportunity for Guccifer 2.0 to implicate at least a handful of Republican operatives around the country.

Yes, in Bambanek’s case that happened with the knowledge of the FBI. But how many other Republicans didn’t think to admit to the FBI what they were doing?

Update: When the New Yorker story came out last August, Best said she did not know what she was being offered. I’m assuming they were the DCCC docs from the context, timing, and related actions with state based Republicans, but that may not be the case.

In Addition to Mueller, Six People Are Prosecuting Paul Manafort … and Trump Has No Appropriate Defense Attorney

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Because I’ve been obsessing about how Robert Mueller is using his 17 prosecutors, I wanted to note that three different collections of people have signed the responses to Paul Manafort’s challenges to his indictment. On Monday’s response to the challenge to Mueller’s authority generally, Michael Dreeben and Adam Jed appeared, but Kyle Freeny, who has been a member of this team, did not.

On the response to Manafort’s challenge of a money laundering charge and its forfeiture allegation, Freeny is included, as well as Scott Meisler, but not the other two appellate specialists.

On the response to Manafort’s bid to dismiss one of his two false statements charges, just Weissmann, Andres, and Meisler appear.

So even the prosecution of just one defendant, Mueller has now deployed three primary prosecutors and three different appellate specialists.

Meanwhile, the President can’t even find one competent defense attorney to represent him.

Update: Not fucking around.

Is Manafort Getting Close to Crying “Uncle”?

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Even before this hilarious Zoe Tillman report on a hearing in Paul Manafort’s civil suit against Robert Mueller, I was going to point to the things Manafort has learned that we haven’t. But the report that Manafort’s lawyers are trying to “Stop Bobby Three Sticks, before he indicts again!!!” makes the details all the more interesting.

In the hearing, Manafort’s lawyers tried to rescue their desperate lawsuit arguing Mueller’s appointment is improper by arguing they’re only trying to prevent prospective actions with this lawsuit — that is, they’re trying to prevent Mueller from larding on more charges.

During arguments Wednesday about whether Manafort’s lawsuit challenging special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment could go forward, Manafort’s lawyer said the case wasn’t about getting the existing indictments tossed out — it was about stopping future prosecutions against Manafort by the special counsel’s office.

Pressed by the judge about how Manafort could sue now if he was trying to stop activity by the special counsel’s office that hadn’t happened yet, Manafort’s lead attorney Kevin Downing argued that the harm to Manafort was ongoing because the special counsel’s investigation and the grand jury were still active.

Without an order from the court stopping Mueller’s office from pursuing other charges in the future — based on an appointment order that Downing contends was unlawful — Manafort would have to “sit and wait” and keep chasing the special counsel’s office wherever they decided to prosecute him next in order to challenge Mueller’s appointment, Downing said. He didn’t specify what other types of charges he thought the special counsel might be investigating against Manafort.

Manafort’s civil lawsuit against the Justice Department and the special counsel’s office, filed in January in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, asked the court to not only declare Mueller’s original appointment in May invalid, but also to set “aside all actions taken against Mr. Manafort pursuant to the Appointment Order.”

But Downing has since walked that back, saying that they’re only asking for a forward-looking order that blocks future action.

As I noted, there are several apparently unrelated things that Mueller’s team may have shown Manafort that they haven’t shown us.

First, back on March 1, Mueller’s team moved to unseal transcripts of some sidebar conferences from the status conferences on January 16 and February 14, as well as an ex parte discussion they had with the judge on February 14 (as well as discussions about why Manafort couldn’t yet, and still can’t, make bail from February 14).

The United States of America, by and through Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, respectfully moves to unseal the sealed portion of the transcripts of sidebar/bench conferences that occurred during the status conferences held in this matter on January 16, 2018, and February 14, 2018. The transcripts of these bench conferences were sealed at the government’s request. At the time, the government indicated that the cause for sealing was likely to be mooted in the near future and that the government had no objection to making the transcript available to the public once that happened. The government respectfully submits that unsealing is now appropriate. The government also submits that the transcript of an ex parte sidebar discussion between the government and the Court, conducted at the February 14, 2018, status conference should also be unsealed and made available to the public, the cause for sealing having been mooted. [my emphasis]

The cause for sealing that would soon be mooted might either be the larding on of new charges against Manafort related to his more recent money laundering between 2015 and 2017 (which took place on February 22), or Rick Gates’ anticipated plea (which took place on February 23).

On March 7, Gates’ team asked for more time to object to the unsealing, until five days after they got the transcripts, based on the fact that Tom Green had just joined the case and wasn’t present at those hearings. On March 9, Manafort’s team asked for the same five days after they got the transcripts. Judge Amy Berman Jackson granted both those requests. Since then, there’s been no further developments on this unsealing reflected in the unsealed docket, though there are skips in the numbering (230 and 231, and 238). While it’s possible those transcripts aren’t ready yet, the original version of the January 16 transcript was ready in 7 days (there’s no notice for the February 14 transcripts, though two hearings since that one have been docketed).

So it’s quite possible Manafort now has the transcript of that ex parte sidebar from February 14, but has decided he doesn’t want us to see it.

Then there’s the minute notice from yesterday granting the government’s request to seal an exhibit from its Monday filing.

Berman Jackson’s approval notes that the government has already released a redacted version of the exhibit, meaning the exhibit in question must be the Rod Rosenstein memo. I suggested yesterday that the government was effectively providing Manafort a less redacted copy showing what else it was investigating Manafort for, which might well pertain to Oleg Deripaska, given that Mueller dropped an otherwise superfluous reference to Deripaska in Monday’s motion.

But who knows? There are definitely possible investigative prongs that might be even more damaging for Manafort than just his well-known relationship with Deripaska.

Whatever it is, Manafort’s team went from reading that memo to making a desperate bid to prevent Mueller from bringing any more indictments against Manafort.

That bid — as well as the bid to throw out the indictments — appears to be doomed. Based on Tillman’s report, Berman Jackson seems to have already read Monday’s filing, given that the doubts she raised in today’s hearing all were all laid out in that.

US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson — who is also handling Manafort’s criminal case in DC — expressed significant doubts on Wednesday about whether Manafort could pursue a civil lawsuit. She questioned whether there was a clear limit on how broad a special counsel’s authority could be from the get-go; how Manafort had standing to sue over a possible future prosecution that hadn’t yet happened; and why he should be able to bring a civil lawsuit when he could make the same arguments in the criminal cases, where he clearly had the right to challenge the indictments.

The judge noted that the Justice Department regulations Manafort cited explicitly said that they did not create rights that could be enforced in a civil lawsuit.

That she’s raising objections from that motion suggests she finds them (unsurprisingly) persuasive.

Which means, absent some action from Trump or Rosenstein, Manafort will have to just sit there trying to negotiate bail and waiting for new charges until such time as he screams “uncle.”

Mueller Tells Guy Who Legally Can’t Be a Target That He’s Not a Target, Perhaps in a Bid to Make Him Legally Targetable

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The WaPo has a fascinating report describing that Robert Mueller informed Trump’s lawyers “in early March” that he doesn’t consider Trump a target in his investigation. That news made Trump even more determined to sit for an interview with Mueller, a decision which some of Trump’s less appropriate lawyers seem to have supported. That’s what led John Dowd to quit on March 22 (which would presumably have been two weeks or so later).

John Dowd, Trump’s top attorney dealing with the Mueller probe, resigned last month amid disputes about strategy and frustration that the president ignored his advice to refuse the special counsel’s request for an interview, according to a Trump friend.

Of course, as many people have pointed out, a sitting President can’t be indicted. NYCSouthpaw pointed to the appropriate section of the US Attorney’s Manual, which states that, “A ‘target’ is a person as to whom the prosecutor or the grand jury has substantial evidence linking him or her to the commission of a crime and who, in the judgment of the prosecutor, is a putative defendant.”

If Trump, as President, can’t be indicted, then he can’t be a putative defendant. So he’ll never be a target so long as he remains President. Dowd is likely the only lawyer on Trump’s team who has enough defense experience to understand that this should offer the President zero assurance at all.

He left when the other, ill-suited attorneys refused to believe him on this point.

Which is why the other main thrust of the story is so interesting. Mueller has also indicated that Mueller wants to start writing his report on obstruction — according to Robert Costa, with the intent of finishing it by June or July, just before Congress breaks for August recess, the official start of campaign season — with plans for a second report on the election conspiracy to follow.

The special counsel also told Trump’s lawyers that he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

Mueller reiterated the need to interview Trump — both to understand whether he had any corrupt intent to thwart the Russia investigation and to complete this portion of his probe, the people said.

[snip]

Mueller’s investigators have indicated to the president’s legal team that they are considering writing reports on their findings in stages — with the first report focused on the obstruction issue, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

Under special counsel regulations, Mueller is required to report his conclusions confidentially to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who has the authority to decide whether to release the information publicly.

“They’ve said they want to write a report on this — to answer the public’s questions — and they need the president’s interview as the last step,” one person familiar with the discussions said of Mueller’s team.

Trump’s attorneys expect the president would also face questions about what he knew about any contacts by his associates with Russian officials and emissaries in 2016, several White House advisers said. The president’s allies believe a second report detailing the special counsel’s findings on Russia’s interference would be issued later.

That leads us to the question of how a report that Rod Rosenstein has authority to quash could be assured of “answering the public’s questions.” One option is Mueller could propose charges he knows Rosenstein won’t — or can’t — approve, which guarantees that the Chairs and Ranking Members of the Judiciary Committees (currently, Bob Goodlatte, who is retiring, Jerry Nadler, Chuck Grassley, and Dianne Feinstein, who faces a real challenge this year) will get at least a summary.

Mueller could trigger a reporting requirement in the special counsel regulations under which the attorney general must inform “the Chairman and Ranking Minority Member of the Judiciary Committees of each House of Congress” — both parties, in other words — at the end of the special counsel’s investigation, of any instance in which the attorney general vetoed a proposed action. Simply by proposing to indict Trump, Mueller could ensure that Congress gets the word. But this would be of only limited scope: instead of an evidence dump, it need only be a “brief notification, with an outline of the actions and the reasons for them.”

Alternately, Mueller could recommend impeachment, but Rosenstein would be bound by grand jury secrecy rules.

If Mueller believes he has information that could warrant impeachment, he could weave it into a narrative like the Starr Report. But even if Rosenstein wanted to make the report public, he would be limited by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which imposes strict limits on the disclosure of grand jury materials. This rule, which has the force of law, is intended to preserve the integrity of grand jury investigations and encourage witnesses to testify fully and frankly. Rosenstein could, if he chose, issue a redacted report that conveys the gist of Mueller’s findings.

While the election conspiracy has involved grand jury subpoenas (to people like Sam Nunberg and Ted Malloch, most recently), the obstruction investigation into Trump has involved (as far as I remember) entirely voluntary interviews and mostly, if not entirely, voluntarily produced evidence. So whereas for the larger investigation, Rosenstein will face this limit (but not if the targets — like Roger Stone — are indicted), he may not here.

All of which is to say we may be looking at a public report saying that Trump should be impeached just as Republicans attempt to keep Congress.

Even as some of Mueller’s 17+ prosecutors write that up (by my estimate, only Watergate prosecutor James Quarles has been working the Trump obstruction full time), the rest will continue to roll out evidence — possibly in the form of very inflammatory indictments — of what Trump was trying to obstruct.

Effectively, I think Mueller is giving the GOP Congress a choice. They impeach Trump on the less inflammatory stuff,which will remove all threat of firing and/or pardons to threaten the investigation, not to mention make Trump eligible to be a target for the actual election conspiracy he tried to cover up. Or after they fail to hold the House while explaining why they’re covering up for Trump’s cover up, they will face a more serious inquiry relating to Trump’s involvement in the election conspiracy.