The Significance of the January 12 Reauthorization of Carter Page’s FISA Order

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I’d like to riff on a small but significant detail revealed in the Schiff memo. This paragraph adds detail to the same general timeframe for the orders obtained against Page laid out in the Nunes memo: the first application approved on October 21, with reauthorizations in early January, early April, and late June.

Republican judges approved the Carter Page FISA orders

The passage also narrows down the judges who approved the orders, necessarily including FISC’s sole Reagan appointee Raymond Dearie and FISC’s sole Poppy appointee Anne Conway, plus two of the following W appointees:

 

  • Rosemary Collyer (worst FISC judge ever)
  • Claire Eagan (OK, she may be worse than Collyer)
  • Robert Kugler
  • Michael Mosman (a good one)
  • Dennis Saylor (also good)

I won’t dwell on this here, but it means the conspiracy theory that Obama appointee Rudolph Contreras approved the order, and because of that recused in the Flynn case, is false.

The first reapplication came days after the dossier and a second Isikoff article came out

Back to the timing. The footnotes provide the dates for two of the other applications: June 29 (in footnotes 12, 14, 15, 16) and January 12 (footnote 31), meaning the third must date between April 1 and 12 (the latter date being 90 days after the second application).

As I laid out here, the timing of that second application is critical to the dispute about whether FBI handled Michael Isikoff’s September 23 article appropriately, because it places the reapplication either before or after two key events: the publication of the Steele dossier on January 10 and Isikoff’s publication of this story on January 11. Isikoff’s January article included a link back to his earlier piece, making it fairly clear that Steele had been his source for the earlier article. The publication of that second Isikoff piece should have tipped off the FBI that the earlier article had been based on Steele (not least because the second Isikoff piece IDs Steele as an “FBI asset,” which surely got the Bureau’s attention).

FBI didn’t respond to Isikoff in time for the second application

Now, you could say that FBI should have immediately reacted to the Isikoff piece by alerting the FISC, but that’s suggesting bureaucracies work far faster than they do. Moreover, the application would not have been drafted on January 12. Except in emergency, the FISC requires a week notice on applications. That says the original application would have been submitted on or before January 5, before the dossier and second Isikoff piece.

FBI appears to have dealt with the Isikoff article interestingly. The body of the Schiff memo explains that Isikoff’s article, along with another that might be either Josh Rogin’s or Julia Ioffe’s articles from the time period, both of which cite Isikoff (Rogin’s is the only one of the three that gets denials from Page directly), were mentioned to show that Page was denying his Moscow meetings were significant.

That redacted sentence must refer to the January 12 application, because that footnote is the only footnote citing that application and nothing else in the paragraph discusses it.

An earlier passage describes the first notice to FISC, in that same January 12 application, “that Steele told the FBI that he made his unauthorized media disclosure because of his frustration at Director Comey’s public announcement shortly before the election that the FBI reopened its investigation into candidate Clinton’s email use.”

It’s possible that redacted sentence distinguishes what Grassley and Graham did in their referral of Steele. The first application stated that, “The FBI does not believe that [Steele] directly provided this information to the press.” Whereas the January reapplication stated in a footnote that the FBI, “did not believe that Steele gave information to Yahoo News that ‘published the September 23 News Article.” Within a day or so, the FBI should have realized that was not the case.

So it’s true FBI was denying that the September Isikoff article was based off Steele reporting after the time they should have known it was, but that can probably best be explained by the application timelines and the lassitude of bureaucracy.

The submission of the preliminary second application likely coincides with the Obama briefing on the Russian threat

As noted above, the second application would have been submitted a full week earlier than it otherwise would have had to have been given the 90-day term on FISA orders targeting Americans. That means the preliminary application was probably submitted by January 5. Not only would that have been too early to incorporate the response to the dossier, most notably the second Isikoff piece, but it even preceded Trump’s briefing on the Russian tampering, which took place January 6.

It’s also interesting timing for another reason: it means FBI may have submitted its reapplication targeting Page on the same day that Jim Comey and Sally Yates briefed Obama, Susan Rice, and Joe Biden, in part, on the fact that Putin’s mild response to the election hack sanctions rolled out in late December arose in response to requests from Mike Flynn to Sergey Kislyak. As I addressed here, that briefing has become a subject of controversy again, as Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham tried to suggest that the Steele dossier may have contributed to the investigation of Flynn.

But contrary to what the Republican Senators claimed in their letter to Rice on the subject, Rice claims the Steele dossier and the counterintelligence investigation never came up.

The memorandum to file drafted by Ambassador Rice memorialized an important national security discussion between President Obama and the FBI Director and the Deputy Attorney General. President Obama and his national security team were justifiably concerned about potential risks to the Nation’s security from sharing highly classified information about Russia with certain members of the Trump transition team, particularly Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. In light of concerning communications between members of the Trump team and Russian officials, before and after the election, President Obama, on behalf of his national security team, appropriately sought the FBI and the Department of Justice’s guidance on this subject. In the conversation Ambassador Rice documented, there was no discussion of Christopher Steele or the Steele dossier, contrary to the suggestion in your letter.

Given the importance and sensitivity of the subject matter, and upon the advice of the White House Counsel’s Office, Ambassador Rice created a permanent record of the discussion. Ambassador Rice memorialized the discussion on January 20, because that was the first opportunity she had to do so, given the particularly intense responsibilities of the National Security Advisor during the remaining days of the Administration and transition. Ambassador Rice memorialized the discussion in an email sent to herself during the morning of January 20, 2017. The time stamp reflected on the email is not accurate, as Ambassador Rice departed the White House shortly before noon on January 20. While serving as National Security Advisor, Ambassador Rice was not briefed on the existence of any FBI investigation into allegations of collusion between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia, and she later learned of the fact of this investigation from Director Comey’s subsequent public testimony. Ambassador Rice was not informed of any FISA applications sought by the FBI in its investigation, and she only learned of them from press reports after leaving office.

Grassley and Graham appear to have confused the IC investigation with the counterintelligence investigation, only the latter of which incorporated the Steele dossier.

In any case, one reason the apparent coincidence between the January 5 briefing and the reapplication process is important is it suggests it was also pushed through a week early to provide room for error with the inauguration. If a FISA order on January 19 goes awry, it might not get approved under President Trump. But if anything happened to that application submitted around January 5, it’d be approved with plenty of time before the new Administration took over.

Intelligence from Page’s FISA collection helped support the government’s high confidence that Russia attempted to influence the election

Here’s one of the most interesting details in the Schiff memo, however. This passage describes that the wiretap on Page obtained important intelligence, though it won’t tell us what it is.

That redacted footnote, number 14, describes that the redacted intelligence is part of what gave the Intelligence Community “high confidence”

Admittedly, this footnote, with its citation to the October and June applications, is uncertain on this point. But for the wiretap on Page to have supported the December ICA assessment of the Russian tampering, then it would have had to have involved collection from that first period.

If that’s right, then it suggests the reason the Obama Administration may have applied for the order renewal early, the same day Comey and Yates briefed Obama on the ICA and Flynn, is because something from that order (possibly targeting Page’s December trip to Moscow) added to the IC’s certainty that the Russians had pulled off an election operation.

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Abbe Lowell’s Unusual Silence in the Face of Jared Kushner’s Clearance Woes

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Abbe Lowell’s a very good defense attorney. He’s also of the ilk that works the press.

As one example, note Lowell’s false bravado quotes from one of the first stories to contemplate how John Kelly’s new rules about long term clearance problems would (not) affect Jared’s work.

Abbe Lowell, an attorney for Kushner, said Kelly’s directive “will not affect Mr. Kushner’s ability to continue to do the very important work he has been assigned by the president.” White House officials declined to comment on how the new policies would specifically affect Kushner.

[snip]

Lowell, Kushner’s attorney, said Kushner had disclosed more information on his security forms than was required out of an abundance of caution.

“My inquiries to those involved again have confirmed that there are a dozen or more people at Mr. Kushner’s level whose process is delayed, that it is not uncommon for this process to take this long in a new administration, that the current backlogs are being addressed, and no concerns were raised about Mr. Kushner’s application,” he said in a statement.

[snip]

Lowell said Kushner’s job is “to talk with foreign officials, which he has done and continues to do properly.”

Which is, in my opinion, why the following detail, in three different stories about the “important new information” DOJ obtained that would delay Jared’s clearance, is so significant. Lowell declined to comment to the original story in WaPo.

Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, declined to comment.

Then there was this NYT story which seems to reflect White House officials and Jared’s lawyers realizing (for the first time?!?!?!) that he’s not just a witness in this investigation.

The White House was not told what the issues were involving Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. But the notification led White House lawyers and aides to believe that they were more problematic than the complexity of his finances and his initial failure to disclose contacts with foreign leaders.

[snip]

The interview led Mr. Kushner’s lawyers to believe that he was considered a witness, not a target, in the special counsel investigation.

For that story, too, Lowell went silent.

[A] lawyer for Mr. Kushner, Abbe D. Lowell, declined to comment.

With Axios, Lowell appears to have just blown off the request for comment.

Kushner’s lawer, Abbe Lowell, did not immediately respond to Axios’ request for comment.

I don’t mean to make light of this. It’s no laughing matter. But Lowell’s silence appears to indicate either that he is sussing out second-hand — or he has since the February 16 story learned directly — that his client is in deeper shit than he realized.

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Schiff Memo Reveals that Mifsud Specifically Told Papadopoulos Russia Would Release Hillary Emails to Help Trump Campaign

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“If it’s what you say I love it” – Don Jr., gleefully accepting Russian dirt after George Papadopoulos had been told Russia would release emails to help the campaign

HPSCI just released the Schiff memo responding to the Nunes memo. Mostly, it’s underwhelming.

But there is one piece of important news. The memo provides more details about what George Papadopoulos told Australian Ambassador, Alexander Downer, about the Russian outreach via Joseph Mifsud. That passage reads:

George Papadopoulos revealed [redacted] that individuals linked to Russia, who took interest in Papadopoulos as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, informed him in late April 2016 that Russia [two lines redacted]. Papadopoulos’s disclosure, moreover, occurred against the backdrop  of Russia’s aggressive covert campaign to influence our elections, which the FBI was already monitoring. We would later learn in Papadopoulos’s plea that the information the Russians could assist by anonymously releasing were thousands of Hillary Clinton emails.

While the description of what Papadopoulos said is redacted, the context makes it clear (as does this Adam Schiff tweet) that Papadopoulos didn’t tell Downer specifically what Russia had told him was available, only that they could release it to help Trump.

But that Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russians were thinking of releasing it to help Trump is news, important news. It means the discussions of setting up increasingly senior levels of meetings between Russia and the Trump campaign took place against the offer of help in the form of released kompromat.

Which, particularly given the evidence that Papadopoulos shared that information with the campaign, makes the June 9 meeting still more damning.

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The Silent Cast of Characters in the Very Noisy Recent Mueller Moves

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A fuck-ton has happened in the Mueller investigation already this month. Amid the noisy pleas and indictments, we’ve seen indications of hidden cooperation from a range of people, cooperation that may point to where Mueller’s next steps are.

Here, arranged by the date of the development, are hints at who either was or soon is likely to be talking to Mueller’s team.

February 1: In a proffer to Mueller’s team, Rick Gates lied about a March 19, 2013 meeting with Paul Manafort, Vin Weber, and Dana Rohrabacher.

Rohrabacher’s statement in response to the guilty plea is inconsistent with the version laid out in the plea, suggesting he’s not the means by which Mueller’s team learned it was a lie.

After the guilty plea on Friday, a spokesman for Rohrabacher, who has sought better relations with Russia, said: “As the congressman has acknowledged before, the meeting was a dinner with two longtime acquaintances –- Manafort and Weber –- from back in his White House and early congressional days.”

“The three reminisced and talked mostly about politics,” the spokesman said. “The subject of Ukraine came up in passing. It is no secret that Manafort represented Viktor Yanukovych’s interests, but as chairman of the relevant European subcommittee, the congressman has listened to all points of view on Ukraine.”

This suggests someone else provided the version of the meeting the government included in the plea. While it’s possible the other version came from Gates’ former lawyers, it’s more likely the version came from someone else. Vin Weber is the most likely source of that information.

Back in August 2016, as news of the secret ledger was breaking,Weber suggested he may have been misled by Manafort, both as to the purpose of his lobbying and regarding the need to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine. If he felt that way in August 2016, I imagine he came to feel that even more strongly as Manafort’s legal woes intensified.

February 9: Returning a call from John Kelly but speaking to Don McGahn, Rod Rosenstein spoke of “important new information” about Jared Kushner that will delay his clearance.

Given all the evidence that suggests Jared faces very significant exposure in this investigation, this new information could be any number of things. But two possibilities are likely. First, it might reflect Jared’s January 3 disclosure of additional business interests in yet another update to his SF-86, or his family’s increasing debt over the last year.

More likely, it reflects things the government has learned from Mike Flynn (who has an incentive to burn Jared, given that the President’s son-in-law was asked for and didn’t provide exonerating information tied to Flynn’s own lies to the FBI). Indeed, that seems to be one theory of those who reported on this phone call.

Kushner’s actions during the transition have been referenced in the guilty plea of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted he lied to the FBI about contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Prosecutors said Flynn was acting in consultation with a senior Trump transition official, whom people familiar with the matter have identified as Kushner.

All that said, there are two more possibilities. Given that she appears to have lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her confirmation process, KT McFarland would be an obvious follow-up interview after the Mike Flynn plea; she asked Trump to withdraw her nomination to be Ambassador to Singapore on February 3. And February 9 might be (though probably isn’t, quite) late enough to catch the first sessions of Steve Bannon’s 20 hours of interviews with Mueller, and Bannon has long had it in for Jared.

February 14: Alex Van der Zwaan got caught and pled guilty to lying about communications he had with Rick Gates, Konstantin Kilimnik, and Greg Craig in September 2016. On top of whatever he had to say to prosecutors between his second interview on December 1 and his plea on February 14, both Craig and Skadden Arps have surely provided a great deal of cooperation before and since September 2016. (As I was finishing this, NYT posted this story that details some, but not all, of that cooperation.)

February 16: As I noted in my post on the Internet Research Agency indictment, Rod Rosenstein was quite clear: “There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity.” That said, there are three (presumed) Americans who, both the indictment and subsequent reporting make clear, are treated differently in the indictment than all the other Americans cited as innocent people duped by Russians: Campaign Official 1, Campaign Official 2, and Campaign Official 3. We know, from CNN’s coverage of Harry Miller’s role in building a cage to be used in a fake “jailed Hillary” stunt, that at least some other people described in the indictment were interviewed — in his case, for six hours! — by the FBI. But no one else is named using the convention to indicate those not indicted but perhaps more involved in the operation. Furthermore, the indictment doesn’t actually describe what action (if any) these three Trump campaign officials took after being contacted by trolls emailing under false names.

On approximately the same day, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the email address of a false U.S. persona, [email protected], to send an email to Campaign Official 1 at that donaldtrump.com email account, which read in part:

Hello [Campaign Official 1], [w]e are organizing a state-wide event in Florida on August, 20 to support Mr. Trump. Let us introduce ourselves first. “Being Patriotic” is a grassroots conservative online movement trying to unite people offline. . . . [W]e gained a huge lot of followers and decided to somehow help Mr. Trump get elected. You know, simple yelling on the Internet is not enough. There should be real action. We organized rallies in New York before. Now we’re focusing on purple states such as Florida.

The email also identified thirteen “confirmed locations” in Florida for the rallies and requested the campaign provide “assistance in each location.”

[snip]

Defendants and their co-conspirators used the false U.S. persona [email protected] account to send an email to Campaign Official 2 at that donaldtrump.com email account.

[snip]

On or about August 20, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the “Matt Skiber” Facebook account to contact Campaign Official 3.

Again, the DOJ convention of naming makes it clear these people have not been charged with anything. But we know from other Mueller indictments that those specifically named (which include the slew of Trump campaign officials named in the George Papadopoulos plea, KT McFarland and Jared Kushner in the Flynn plea, Kilimnik in the Van der Zwaan plea, and the various companies and foreign leaders that did Manafort’s bidding, including the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs in his indictment) may be the next step in the investigation. As a reminder: Florida Republicans are those who most tangibly can be shown to have benefitted from Russia’s hack-and-leak, given that Guccifer 2.0 leaked a slew of Democratic targeting data for the state. (In perhaps related news, this week Tom Rooney became the third Florida Republican member of Congress to announce his retirement this cycle, which is all the more interesting given that he’s been involved in the HPSCI investigation into Russian tampering.)

February 23: Manafort’s superseding indictment (a version of which was originally filed February 16) added the description of the Hapsburg Group for former European officials who lobbied at the direction (to some degree via cut-outs) of Manafort.

MANAFORT explained in an “EYES ONLY” memorandum created in or about June 2012 that the purpose of the “SUPER VIP” effort would be to “assemble a small group of high-level European highly influencial [sic] champions and politically credible friends who can act informally and without any visible relationship with the Government of Ukraine.” The group was managed by a former European Chancellor, Foreign Politician A, in coordination with MANAFORT.

It may be that the government only recently obtained this document (meaning it was not among the 590,000 pages of documents obtained and turned over to Manafort in discovery thus far). But it’s likely this also reflects further testimony. Former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer denied he is Foreign Politician A to BBC, though that may be a non-denial denial tied to his claim he wasn’t directed by Manafort and only met him a few times (this Austrian story suggests only he doesn’t remember what American or English firm paid him). NYT reported that Gusenbauer’s lobbying during the relevant time period was registered under Mercury Public Affairs. This is another piece of evidence suggesting the group — and Vin Weber personally — has been cooperating since the original indictment.

Note, I assume that Mercury/Weber’s cooperation has been mirrored by Tony Podesta’s.

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Konstantin Kilimnik’s PRISM-Accessible Communications

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I doubt I’ll be done working my way through the new Paul Manafort and Rick Gates charges before such analysis would be overtaken by events (like the on-again flip of Gates). For now, Quinta Jurecic’s analysis is quite good.

Before I start, though, I want to go back and look at a detail from the Alex van der Zwaan plea materials (information, plea, statement of offense).

Best as we understand, former Skadden associate van der Zwaan pled guilty, with no forward cooperation requirement, for having hidden some communications he had with Rick Gates, Greg Craig (who must be the senior partner described), and Konstantin Kilimnik (believed to be Person A) in September 2016 about the aftermath of a report Skadden had done on the prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko.

In or about September 2016, VAN DER ZWAAN spoke with both Gates and Person A regarding the Report. In early September 2016, Gates called VAN DER ZWAAN and told him to contact Person A. After the call, Gates sent VAN DER ZWAAN documents including a preliminary criminal complaint in Ukraine via an electronic application called Viber. VAN DER ZWAAN then called Person A and discussed in Russian that formal criminal charges might be brought against a former Ukrainian Minister of Justice, Law Firm A, and Manafort. VAN DER ZWAAN recorded the call. VAN DER ZWAAN then called the senior partner on the Report at Law Firm A and partially recorded that call. Finally, VAN DER ZWAAN called Gates and recorded the call. VAN DER ZWAAN also took notes of the calls.

Prior to the November 3, 2017, interview, VAN DER ZWAAN did not produce to Law Firm A and deleted and otherwise did not produce emails he possessed that he understood had been requested by either the Special Counsel’s Office or Law Firm A, or both, including an email in Russian dated September 12, 2016 in which Person A asked VAN DER ZWAAN to contact Person A and to use an encrypted application.

One thing Van der Zwaan would have hidden was that he communicated with Gates after Paul Manafort had left the campaign, September 2016, as the Trump campaign was trying to clean up their taint from Manafort’s Ukraine stench.

Given the details in the information, it appears that in his November 3, 2017 interview, after he lied about when he had most recently talked with Kilimnik and Gates, he was asked about the email he didn’t turn over to Skadden and the government.

During the November 3, 2017, interview, VAN DER ZWAAN knowingly and intentionally falsely stated the following:

a. his last communication with Gates was in mid-August 2016, which consisted of an innocuous text message;

b. his last communication with a longtime business associate of Manafort and Gates in Ukraine (Person A) was in 2014, when he talked with Person A about Person A’s family; and

c. he did not know why Law Firm A had not produced to the Special Counsel’s Office a September 2016 e-mail between him and Person A.

This seems to suggest that before the end of Van der Zwaan’s first interview, they already confronted him with the fact that he was lying.

But that wasn’t his only interview. Van der Zwaan had a second interview (where he apparently added to his lies) on December 1. (NYCSouthpaw made this observation.)

I’ll probably return to the second interview.

For now, what I’m primarily interested in is that on November 3, 2017, the government had the email between Van der Zwaan and Kilimnik where the latter told the former to move their conversation to an (unnamed) encrypted app, and by the end of the interview confronted him with that fact.

I previously noted (with surprise) that Kilimnik used Gmail for his November 2017 correspondence with Paul Manafort helping to edit an op-ed to push back against his charges. If Manafort didn’t already know the Feds had obtained a bunch of Gmail (and — as  yesterday’s superseding indictment makes clear, his own firm’s email), a sealed December 8 declaration that was unsealed on January 3 would have made that clear.

It continues to surprise me that these thugs never thought about how accessible PRISM-based communications were to the Feds, unless Kilimnik has reason to be happy that his American correspondents will be seen by the FBI.

I guess it’s not just Hope Hicks who underestimates how accessible email is to criminal investigators.

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So — What’s New, Rick? Paul? Fresh Indictments Today on Bank, Tax Fraud

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Open thread for you folks to talk about the latest developments in the Trump-Russia investigation.

Earlier this afternoon, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected the bail package offered by Paul Manafort as the property offered as collateral wasn’t free and clear.

From reports about this rejection there were hints another shoe would drop soon.

Bingo — multiple counts of bank and tax fraud levied against each and both Manafort and his partner, Rick Gates.

Manafort was charged with a count each for each year:
Subscribing to False U.S. Individual Income Tax Returns for years 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
Failure to File Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts for years 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

Gates was charged with a count each for year:
Assisting in the Preparation of False U.S. Individual Income for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
Subscribing to False U.S. Individual Tax Returns for years 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014
Subscribing to False Amended U.S. Individual Tax Returns for 2013
Failure to File Reports of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts for 2011, 2012, 2013

Both Gates and Manafort were charged with one count for each year:
Bank Fraud Conspiracy (Lender B/$3.4 million)
Bank Fraud (Lender B/$3.4 million)
Bank Fraud Conspiracy (Lender C/$1 million)
Bank Fraud (Lender C/$1 million)
Bank Fraud Conspiracy (Lender B/$5.5 million)
Bank Fraud Conspiracy (Lender D/$9.5 million)
Bank Fraud (Lender D/$9.5 million)
Bank Fraud Conspiracy (Lender D/$6.5 million)
Bank Fraud (Lender D/$6.5 million)

That’s 18 counts for Manafort, 23 counts for Gates. (Do check my math, I am working off a ridiculously small mobile device screen – thanks!)

These charges open many questions, but perhaps we ought to spend our time looking at the indictment itself. I know you’ll find parts amusing.

You can read it at this link (pdf).

Quentin Hardy observed via Twitter:

Nice touch in the new indictment: Manafort has “a lavish lifestyle,” while Gates is portrayed as just a simple suburban money launderer.

Better buy up extra popcorn, gang. We’re going to need it.

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Speaking of Manafort’s Efforts to Make Bail Doing Him In

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Mueller watchers are abuzz with the news that the Special Counsel filed new, sealed charges in the Paul Manafort/Rick Gates docket. The move comes in advance of Gates’ 5PM deadline to tell the court which lawyers he’s going to the prom with.

As Josh Gerstein noted, the new charges might be related to new evidence obtained relating to some bank fraud.

Last week, prosecutors told the court they’d received new evidence that Manafort took part in “a series of bank frauds and bank fraud conspiracies” in connection with a loan he sought in 2016. Mueller’s team said Manafort obtained the loan using “doctored profit and loss statements” that overstated “by millions of dollars” the income of his consulting business.

The bank fraud allegations were disclosed in a bail-related court filing made public on Friday that did not contain any indication of what action, if any, Mueller’s team planned to take over the alleged fraud.

Meanwhile, NBC reports that Mueller’s team has been focusing on loans Manafort obtained in the wake of leaving the campaign that might be that newly identified fraud; they suggest Manafort may have promised the banker who made the loans a position in the Trump White House.

Manafort received three separate loans in December 2016 and January 2017 from Federal Savings Bank for homes in New York City, Virginia and the Hamptons.

The banker, Stephen Calk, president of the Federal Savings Bank, was announced as a member of candidate Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers in August 2016.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is now investigating whether there was a quid pro quo agreement between Manafort and Calk. Manafort left the Trump campaign in August 2016 after the millions he had earned working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine drew media scrutiny. Calk did not receive a job in President Donald Trump’s cabinet.

They point specifically to loans for which Manafort used his Hamptons and Alexandria homes — the same homes at the center of his effort to make bail — as collateral.

Manafort’s LLC, Summerbreeze, then took out a new $9.5 million loan in December using the Hamptons property and house in Alexandria, Virginia, as part of the collateral. The lender was Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, whose chief executive, Calk, was an economic adviser to the Trump campaign.

Yesterday, Manafort submitted additional paperwork on the collateral for precisely this loan.

The business attorney who handled the mortgage refinancing transaction relating to the Bridgehampton, NY property was contacted upon the conclusion of the hearing held on February 14, 2018 and asked to provide an analysis of the mortgage loan documents and the parties’ understanding at the time, of which he had first-hand knowledge. Specific attention to the additional collateral provided by the Alexandria property was requested. The attorney’s letter, with exhibits, is attached to this submission. (See Attachment A.)

Although the document speaks for itself, in general, the business attorney confirms the following: the primary collateral for the Bridgehampton loan refinancing was the real property itself, valued at [redacted], and the substantial deposit account of [redacted] established with the lending institution to be used by the bank in the event of a default on the mortgage. Importantly, the lawyer notes that “[t]he property at [redacted–his Alexandria property], is merely additional collateral with no expectation that its foreclosure would be necessary in the event of a default. These facts were discussed between myself and representatives of FSB well before the closing of the loan, and the loan documents were prepared accordingly.”

Next, the defendant wishes to advise that upon further investigation and inquiry with Mr. Manafort’s business attorney, the [redacted] on deposit with the lender was tied to the Union Street property in New York, not the Bridgehampton property. Regardless of the defendant’s intent to use these deposited funds – upon the satisfaction of certain requisite conditions – for the payment of Bridgehampton loan expenses, there is no contractual or legal obligation to do so in a hypothetical default scenario. Nevertheless, as the letter states, the appraised value of the Bridgehampton property plus the deposit account noted above totals [redacted] and would be more than sufficient to satisfy the [redacted] loan to Summerbreeze, LLC. Id.

After Manafort submitted that, the government asked for and obtained access to the sealed transcripts from that hearing.

Which is to say, the government has gotten sworn statements about the property Manafort has been trying to use to make bail, statements that, if he is found to lie on them, he’ll lose his current release conditions.

Call me crazy, but I think Manafort might finally spend his first night in jail.

Not to mention Manafort and these bankers are probably in a bigger heap of trouble.

I’m betting he’s going to get a lot closer to flipping after he spends a bit of time in jail.

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Jared’s Clearance and the Foreign Policy Version of Conspiracy to Defraud America

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I confess there is no multi-day Trump story I’ve looked forward to more than the problem with Jared Kushner’s clearance. And it is officially here. Last night, the NYT described how Jared is butting heads with John Kelly over whether he’ll lose clearance under Kelly’s post-Rob Porter mandate that people who can’t be cleared won’t be kept around anymore.

Kushner, frustrated about the security clearance issue and concerned that Mr. Kelly has targeted him personally with the directive, has told colleagues at the White House that he is reluctant to give up his high-level access, the officials said. In the talks, the officials say, Mr. Kushner has insisted that he maintain his current level of access, including the ability to review the daily intelligence briefing when he sees fit.

Today CNN and WaPo weigh in, with CNN nodding towards the conflict this will present Trump.

Though a source familiar with the situation said Kushner has not yet appealed to the President directly about his access to highly classified information, those close to Trump believe he would be inclined to grant his son-in-law access if asked. This source pointed to the fact that Kushner is part of the President’s family and has outlasted all of his rivals in Trump’s inner circle, including former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former deputy campaign manager David Bossie.

Trump, however, has given Kelly his full support in efforts to reform the White House’s system of security clearances, and has told his chief of staff that changes need to be made to bring the system into order, according to a person who has spoken to him about the matter. Kelly has interpreted that as a wide-ranging mandate that would include Kushner, a person familiar with the matter said. The person said Trump and Kelly would likely discuss the matter this week, if they haven’t already, before Kelly’s self-imposed Friday deadline.

WaPo brings the appropriate level of skepticism over whether Kushner can really do his Fake Peace Plan job without clearance.

It is not clear how Kushner could perform his job without a high-level security clearance.

He holds a broad range of responsibilities, from overseeing peace efforts in the Middle East to improving the efficiency of the federal government. And he is the administration’s interlocutor with key allies, including China and Saudi Arabia, where he has developed a personal relationship with the young crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

[snip]

And apart from staff on the National Security Council, he issues more requests for information to the intelligence community than any White House employee, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

More importantly, WaPo includes a series of false bravado quotes from Jared’s defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, who bizarrely offered up his judgement that Jared is speaking with foreign officials “properly.”

“My inquiries to those involved again have confirmed that there are a dozen or more people at Mr. Kushner’s level whose process is delayed, that it is not uncommon for this process to take this long in a new administration, that the current backlogs are being addressed, and no concerns were raised about Mr. Kushner’s application,” he said in a statement.

[snip]

Lowell said Kushner’s job is “to talk with foreign officials, which he has done and continues to do properly.”

I’ve come to think of Kushner’s clearance process in similar terms to the way I’ve thought of the bail process Mueller has used with Paul Manafort and Rick Gates: While Gates ultimately did make bail, Manafort is still (!) almost four months after his arrest, struggling to show enough liquidity free of taint from his money laundering to alter his release conditions. The process of making bail (and having to serially beg to attend his kids’ soccer events) seems to have been one of the factors that brought Gates to the point of flipping, but along the way, he probably gave Mueller’s team far more leverage in plea negotiations, because they know how little Gates actually has to pay a defense attorney to oversee the flip (indeed, that may lie behind the confusion over Gates’ current legal representation).

Kushner’s liquidity problems are literally an order of magnitude greater than these men. But unlike them, he made the idiotic decision to work in the White House, and thereby to undergo the scrutiny of sworn statements laying out all the financial vulnerabilities and foreign entanglements that might make him susceptible to blackmail.

Which brings me back to my description of how Mueller is leveraging “conspiracy to defraud the United States” (what I will henceforward refer to as ConFraudUS*) charges to prosecute political influence peddling for which our regulatory system has completely collapsed. With the Internet Research Agency indictment, Mueller charged ConFraudUS because the trolls bypassed a campaign finance system that no longer works. With Manafort and Gates, Mueller charged ConFraudUS because they bypassed Foreign Agents Registration Act requirements that have never been enforced.

In the old days, to pursue the kind of quid pro quo we see outlines of, in which Trump officials (from George Papadopoulos’ proposed business with Sergei Millian to the possibility Kushner might get bailed out by the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which is itself a cut-out for the sanctioned Vnesheconombank, whose head, Sergey Gorkov, Kushner met in December 2016), you’d pursue bribery. But post-Bob McDonnell, bribery is a far tougher charge to make stick, as Mueller prosecutor Andrew Goldstein, who worked on the Sheldon Silver prosecution team, knows well.

What if, however, you could charge people whose meetings seamlessly tie the foreign policy decisions of the United States with discussions of their own financial interests, with ConFraudUS? That might make it easier to charge someone whose foreign policy decisions don’t serve the US interest but might enrich them for the quid pro quo entailed.

Which is why I’m interested in the report that Mueller has shown increased interest (almost certainly tied to Steven Bannon’s public pronouncements that, “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit”) in Jared’s foreign financial dealings, how he has mixed his business interests and US foreign policy.

One line of questioning from Mueller’s team involves discussions Kushner had with Chinese investors during the transition, according to the sources familiar with the inquiry.
A week after Trump’s election, Kushner met with the chairman and other executives of Anbang Insurance, the Chinese conglomerate that also owns the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, according to The New York Times.

At the time, Kushner and Anbang’s chairman, Wu Xiaohui, were close to finishing a deal for the Chinese insurer to invest in the flagship Kushner Companies property, 666 Fifth Avenue. Talks between the two companies collapsed in March, according to the Times.

Mueller’s team has also asked about Kushner’s dealings with a Qatari investor regarding the same property, according to one of the sources. Kushner and his company were negotiating for financing from a prominent Qatari investor, former prime minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, according to The Intercept. But as with Anbang, these efforts stalled.

Lowell’s false bravado in this report is even more ridiculous than that in the clearance stories.

A representative for Kushner declined to comment prior to the publication of this story. After publication, Kushner attorney Abbe Lowell told CNN in a statement, “Another anonymous source with questionable motives now contradicts the facts — in all of Mr. Kushner’s extensive cooperation with all inquiries, there has not been a single question asked nor document sought on the 666 building or Kushner Co. deals. Nor would there be any reason to question these regular business transactions.”

Lowell may not have turned over any documents relating to 666 Fifth Avenue. But Deutsche Bank got subpoenas even before Bannon started running his mouth (albeit in a separate EDNY probe). Moreover, the key detail under my imagined ConFraudUS charge would be whether Kushner did things — like try to get Chinese investors visas — that didn’t serve or indeed violated the interests of the United States. Admittedly, the President gets largely unfettered control over the foreign policy of the United States (though Trump has defied Congress in areas where they do have some control). But to the extent Jared pursued his own business interests during the transition, he wouldn’t be able to claim to rely on presidential prerogative.

Which brings me back to Jared’s long struggle to get a security clearance.

Abbe Lowell may not have turned over the financial documents on 666 Fifth Avenue that would show how susceptible Jared’s debt woes make him to foreign influence. But he has serially provided that evidence in support of Jared’s almost certainly futile attempt to convince the FBI he should get a permanent TS/SCI security clearance.

I laid this out yesterday at the very end of my Democracy Now appearance:

I think—the reason why Kushner’s business deals are important, we’ve talked—and in the intro, this wasn’t the only example of—there’s the Don Jr. We’ve talked about how poorly Trump’s people have separated his business interests from the interests of the country. The same is even more true for Jared Kushner, whose family business is basically bankrupt. And over and over again, he’s been shown to be in negotiations with entities, including Russians, but also Chinese and Middle Eastern. So, you know, he’ll go in and say, “OK, we’ll talk about this grand peace plan,” which is not about peace at all, “but, oh, by the way, can you bail out our 666 Park Avenue building, which is badly underwater?” And I think Mueller could make the same argument he’s made with the IRA indictment and the Manafort indictment, and say that Jared Kushner is pretending to be serving America’s foreign policy interests, but in fact he is just doing his own bidding. He’s just trying to bail out his own company. So I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s moving towards a very similar indictment on conspiracy to defraud the United States, having to do with his conflicts of interest.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, interesting that Kushner also hasn’t managed to get top security clearance, when he’s a senior adviser to President Trump, as Porter didn’t because he beat his wives, etc. And then you’ve got Donald Jr. now in India promoting Trump businesses, as, of course, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. And he’s standing with the prime minister of India as he does this, promoting the Trump brand, Marcy.

MARCY WHEELER: Exactly. I mean, if Trump and his son and his son-in-law are pretending to be doing the business of the United States but are instead just trying to enrich themselves, again, I don’t think it’s a—you know, we’ve talked about the Emoluments Clause and how you go after the Trump campaign—the Trump officials for their egregious conflicts of interest. And, frankly, it extends into his Cabinet. But what Mueller seems to be doing, with some very good appellate lawyers, by the way, is to be laying out this framework that if you are pretending to be doing something in the interest of the United States but are actually doing something else, serving somebody else’s bidding, whether it’s Russia, pro-Russian Ukrainian political party, or whether it’s your own family business, then they’re going to go after you for a conspiracy charge. And I wouldn’t be surprised if these conspiracy charges all kind of link up at the end, in this kind of grand moment of—I think that’s where he’s headed.

Remember, Trump and his spawn never really thought they’d win the election. Instead, they seemed interested in, among other things, a Trump Tower in Moscow and refinancing 666 Fifth Avenue. But if they made deals with Russians in hopes such personal financial benefits would result, a ConFraudUS charge might be a way to prosecute them for it.

*I originally shortened this “CTDTUS,” but following Peter Crowley’s suggestion, I’m instead using “ConFraudUS.”

 

[Note: At the top of this post there is an embedded video of Marcy’s interview with Democracy Now. It isn’t rendering properly on all browsers and operating systems and may appear as a blank space. You can watch the video or listen to audio at this link. /~R]

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Open Thread: All in the Families?

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This is an open thread dedicated to this morning’s news. By now many of  you have heard that Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer at mega-lawfirm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, was charged today by Team Mueller for making false statements while answering questions about his work for the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice in its case against Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

The “materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements and representations” arose from questions about interactions related to Paul Manafort’s partner Rick Gates and “Person A.”

[insert blogger’s laugh] Gee, I wonder who Person A could be? *

You can read the short and sweet court filing here (pdf).

These folks from Team Mueller signed the filing: Andrew Weissman, Greg Andres, Kyle Feeny, Brian Richardson. Add them and this assignment to Marcy’s bingo card

Richardson is a new name, which Marcy noted, already wondering if he is Mystery Prosecutor 17? She’ll probably elaborate in a separate post.

For a little background on Skadden Arps’ relationship to Ukraine, see this this NYT piece from September 21 last year: Skadden, Big New York Law Firm, Faces Questions on Work With Manafort

There was related legal news last autumn — emphasis on related.

Alfa Bank co-owners German Khan, Mikhail Fridman, and Peter Aven filed suit last October against Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson claiming the Steele dossier was defamatory. Their reputations were “gravely” damaged as the dossier indicated they were engaged in criminal activity with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Khan just happens to be van der Zwaan’s father-in-law. It’s a small world, yes?

It’ll be amusing if the Mueller-led investigation ends up unintentionally corralling multiple families.

* EDIT — 1:30 pm EST — I meant to add that  Andrea Manafort Shand, Paul Manafort’s daughter, was an associate at Skadden Arps-Washington DC office. I haven’t seen anything to suggest she’s involved in any way with today’s charges or that she’s Person A but stranger things have happened. Like the leaking of hacked text messages between Manafort’s daughters which have not been disavowed.

– – – – –

In case you missed it this morning, Marcy was on Democracy Now this morning, talking about the Mueller probe and the IRA indictment last Friday.

A transcript isn’t up as I type this but the video and audio are up on the main site under the Daily Show at the right side of Democracy Now’s homepage. I’ll add a link to the transcript as it becomes available.

Have at it!

 

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In Two So-Called Fact Checks of Facebook, NYT Forgets Everything It Knows about Indictments

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In both this Scott Shane article and this “fact check” of Facebook VP Rob Goldman’s recent tweets on Russian trolls’ use of Facebook (which President Trump then picked up), the NYT has twice forgotten everything it knows about indictments, and in the process failed to properly analyze last week’s Internet Research Agency indictment.

In Shane’s article, he attempts to fact check Goldman using the indictment.

Facebook’s vice president for advertising, Rob Goldman, said on Twitter on Friday, “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal” — a statement that President Trump retweeted.

But Mr. Mueller’s indictment repeatedly states that the Russian operation was designed not just to provoke division among Americans but also to denigrate Hillary Clinton and support her rivals, mainly Mr. Trump. The hashtags the Russian operation used included #Trump2016, #TrumpTrain, #MAGA and #Hillary4Prison, and one Russian operative was reprimanded for “a low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton,” the indictment says.

On Twitter, Shane even suggested Goldman hadn’t read the indictment.

Wonder if Rob Goldman has read the indictment. Mueller appears to disagree.

Then, Sheera Frenkel extends the purported fact check.

“I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.” Tweet #2

Not according to the indictment.

The grand jury indictment secured by Mr. Mueller asserts that the goal of Russian operatives was to influence the 2016 election, particularly by criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination.

The Russians “engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump,” the indictment said.

Mr. Goldman later wrote in another tweet that “the Russian campaign was certainly in favor of Trump.”

Both Shane and Frenkel don’t consider what I laid out here:

[T]here are hints that Mueller is using this indictment to set up a more important point.

For example, the indictment (perhaps because of Mueller’s mandate) focuses on political activities supporting or opposing one or another 2016 candidate. Even where topics (immigration, Muslim religion, race) are not necessarily tied to the election, they’re presented here as such. Unless Facebook’s public reports are wrong, this is a very different emphasis than what Facebook has said the IRA focused on. Which is to say that Mueller’s team are focusing on a subset of the known IRA trolling, the subset that involves the 2016 contest between Trump and Hillary.

Goldman was addressing all of IRA’s activity on Facebook, which it described this way in September:

  • The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.
  • Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.
  • About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.
  • The behavior displayed by these accounts to amplify divisive messages was consistent with the techniques mentioned in the white paper we released in April about information operations.

Nowhere in the indictment does Mueller describe the scope of what IRA activity his team investigated, though it does describe how “over time” the IRA activity came to focus on the 2016 election.

These groups and pages, which addressed divisive U.S. political and social issues, falsely claimed to be controlled by U.S. activists when, in fact, they were controlled by Defendants. Defendants also used the stolen identities of real U.S. persons to post on ORGANIZATION-controlled social media accounts. Over time, these social media accounts became Defendants’ means to reach significant numbers of Americans for purposes of interfering with the U.S. political system, including the presidential election of 2016.

Indeed, the indictment makes it clear that the universe of IRA activity is larger than the election-related activity, in part by tying two counts of identity theft to crimes that happened after the election, as recent as May 2017.

Eight of the usages of fake credentials described in ¶92 also postdate the election. That’s presumably part of what Goldman was pointing to when he tweeted,

The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Tump and the election.

Even as they, a mainstream media outlet, ignored how Goldman’s invocation of this spending detail and the inclusion of 2017 activities in the indictment is proof that not all of the IRA activities Mueller investigated did pertain to the election, NYT deemed that claim lacking in context.

According to figures published by Facebook last October, 44 percent of the Russian-bought ads were displayed before the 2016 election, while 56 percent were shown afterward. Mr. Goldman asserted that those figures were not published by the “mainstream media” — however, many mainstream news outlets did print those numbers, including CNN, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.

The point is that there are two universes of IRA Facebook activities: the entire universe, for which Goldman’s claims are generally true, and the activities that Mueller has chosen to focus on, which Shane and Frenkel mistake as the entire universe, and in the process blow their fact checks.

This disjunct continues to the citation of real life events planned using Facebook. Goldman pointed to two May 21, 2016 Houston events, where an Islamophobic event was planned on the same day as a United Muslims event, as the quintessential example of how Russia was trying to pit Americans against each other.

The single best demonstration of Russia’s true motives is the Houston anti-islamic protest. Americans were literally puppeted into the streets by trolls who organized both the sides of protest.

Frenkel doesn’t even get Goldman’s reference correct, in spite of his link to a story on it, and instead apparently takes the citation to be a reference to this passage from the indictment.

By in or around early November 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the ORGANIZATION-controlled “United Muslims of America” social media accounts to post anti-vote messages such as: “American Muslims [are] boycotting elections today, most of the American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the middle east and voted yes for invading Iraq.”

From which she concludes,

The protests in Houston in November 2017 were among many rallies organized by Russian operatives through Facebook. While the Houston protest was anti-Islamic, as Mr. Goldman said, he failed to note that the goal in promoting the demonstration was to link Mrs. Clinton’s campaign with a pro-Islamic message.

Again, the indictment is focusing on a particular subset of the IRA activity, whereas Goldman is commenting on the larger universe, arguably to say the indictment understates the threat.

With NYT’s mad, repeated rush to fact check Facebook using an indictment that never claims to be addressing the same universe of IRA activity Goldman was commenting on, they commit some pretty significant analytical errors, errors that extend to their ability to understand what Mueller is doing with the indictment.

I can’t say for certain why Mueller focused on certain kinds of IRA activity, but I can think of three likely possibilities:

  • Since his mandate is to investigate Russian tampering in the 2016 election, he is focusing on that subset of the IRA activity
  • Because it is tied to election law, the conspiracy to defraud the US charge in the indictment depends on activity that violates election law, and much of the IRA Facebook trolling does not
  • The events on which Mueller does focus — notably, twin events at key times in NYC and activities in FL that involve three identified Trump campaign officials — may hint at further crimes or more sophisticated cooperation between the campaign and Russian agents

The last possibility is (as I noted in my earlier post) one of the most intriguing parts of the indictment. But the NYT won’t see it because they’re so busy fact checking claims made about different sets of data.

I get the urge to beat up Facebook. They’ve got a lot to pay for in permitting Russia to abuse their platform. But (I suspect entirely because Trump used Goldman’s tweet to try to exonerate himself) in doing so, NYT has missed Goldman’s larger point, which isn’t an apology at all. Indeed, Goldman was saying that the problem is far bigger than what Mueller lays out in the indictment, and that our continued divisions are a vulnerability Russia continues to exploit.

As Mueller moves forward, we’re likely to see similar kinds of confusion between the specific crimes he addresses in indictments and pleas and the larger toxins that hurt our democracy. So long as we confuse Mueller’s investigation for the larger, still vulnerable whole, we’re never going to do the things as a society we need to prevent this from happening again.

Update: My apologies to Frenkel for misspelling her name originally in this.

Update: On the limits of what is and is not illegal for foreigners to engage in see this Rick Hasen post.

Update: I had an exchange on Twitter with Frenkel about this, and the so-called article has what purports to be a correction.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the month when protests organized by Russian operatives were held in Houston. It was March 2016, not November 2017.

Except that as corrected (by me, though I got no attribution), the piece compounds its error.

The protests in Houston in May 2016 were among many rallies organized by Russian operatives through Facebook. While the Houston protest was anti-Islamic, as Mr. Goldman said, he failed to note that the goal in promoting the demonstration was to link Mrs. Clinton’s campaign with a pro-Islamic message.

According to the indictment secured by Mr. Mueller, there were many other examples of Russian operatives using Facebook and Instagram to organize pro-Trump rallies. At one protest, the Russian operatives paid for a cage to be built, in which an actress dressed as Mrs. Clinton posed in a prison uniform.

None of the materials or contemporary coverage associated with the anti-Islamic side of the protest associated it with Clinton’s campaign. On the contrary. the protest was about a local Islamic center.

A group calling themselves Heart of Texas called for the rally to protest what they consider “Islamization” of Texas – sparked in part by the recent opening of a privately funded library inside the downtown center. The group had also encouraged followers to bring legal firearms.

Although the Heart of Texas group never showed, about 10 people bearing flags of the United States, Texas and the Confederacy were there. “This is America. We have the right to speak out and protest,” said Ken Reed, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “White Lives Matter.” “We feel Texas, our great state and the United States is being threatened by the influx of Islam.”

Again, I agree that Facebook is a shitty company. But a newspaper doubling down on its errors to attack Facebook’s errors is … doing what it is complaining about.

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