The Steele Dossier and WaPo’s Trump Tower Scoop

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For some reason, many people who’re convinced the Trump Russia investigation will hit paydirt but who haven’t been particularly attentive believe the Steele dossier must all be true. This, in spite of the fact that some parts of it clearly are not true. The best example of that is report 086, labeled as July 25, 2015 (but which must actually date to July 2016), which quotes a former senior Russian intelligence official claiming FSB was having difficulty compromising western and G7 government targets. In the previous year, the Russians had been enjoying quite a lot of success against just those kinds of targets, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Russia’s APT 29 is also believed to have compromised the DNC in July 2015), making it surprising anyone following Russian matters even marginally closely could present that report as credible.

The Steele dossier is not a document that is either credible or not as a whole; it is a series of raw intelligence reports based off a series of sources, some of which conflict with each other, some of which may be credible, others of which are less so. Moreover, there are a number of details about the dossier as we received it or as we’ve since learned about its production that raise legitimate questions about its quality.

Two seemingly contradictory claims provide one example that is especially noteworthy given WaPo’s report that the Trump organization inked a branding deal in Russia in late 2015. The very first report released as the Steele dossier, dated June 20, claims that the FSB has, for years, been trying to cultivate Trump by offering him “lucrative real estate development deals in Russia” but “for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.”

The sourcing on this claim definitely includes “a close associate of TRUMP who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow” (though how would they know FSB was dangling real estate to compromise Trump unless they were themselves tied to FSB?) and may include the trusted compatriot of a “senior Foreign Ministry figure.”

Compare that with the undated report (it probably dates to between July 19 and July 30, 2016) crediting “a separate source with direct knowledge” claiming that Trump’s “claimed minimal investment profile in Russia … had not been for want of trying.”

Which is it? Has Trump been pushing for real estate deals but failing, or have figures close to Putin been trying to entice him with such deals only to have him respond with remarkable coyness?

A September 14 report, reported second-hand from two people in Petersburg, goes so far as to claim Trump had even paid bribes to get business deals in the city, but offered little more. Significantly, the sources said Aras Agalarov — who was involved in the June 9, 2016 meeting offering dirt on Clinton in New York’s Trump Tower — would have any details on real estate deals and sex parties and the clean-up thereof.

All of which is to say that in three different reports, Steele’s sources offered conflicting details about whether Trump was trying to get business in Russia but had failed, or Russia was trying to suck Trump into business deals as part of a program to compromise him, only to have him inexplicably resist.

Which brings us to the WaPo’s latest scoop, which reveals that between November 2015 and January 2016, the Trump organization signed a licensing deal for a big real estate project in Moscow, which ended up flopping because there was actually no deal behind it.

As part of the discussions, a Russian-born real estate developer urged Trump to come to Moscow to tout the proposal and suggested he could get President Vladimir Putin to say “great things” about Trump, according to several people who have been briefed on his correspondence.

The developer, Felix Sater, predicted in a November 2015 email that he and Trump Organization leaders would soon be celebrating — both one of the biggest residential projects in real estate history and Donald Trump’s election as president, according to two of the people with knowledge of the exchange.

Sater wrote to Trump Organization Executive Vice President Michael Cohen, “something to the effect of, ‘Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?’ ” said one person briefed on the email exchange. Sater emigrated to the United States from what was then the Soviet Union when he was 8 and grew up in Brooklyn.

Trump never went to Moscow as Sater proposed. And although investors and Trump’s company signed a letter of intent, they lacked the land and permits to proceed and the project was abandoned at the end of January 2016, just before the presidential primaries began, several people familiar with the proposal said.

[snip]

Discussions about the Moscow project began in earnest in September 2015, according to people briefed on the deal. An unidentified investor planned to build the project and, under a licensing agreement, put Trump’s name on it. Cohen acted as a lead negotiator for the Trump Organization. It is unclear how involved or aware Trump was of the negotiations.

For six months, Christopher Steele pushed his sources for information on any deals Trump had planned in Russia. And only one of them — the one suggesting his go-between consult with Agalarov — offered any hint that a deal might have actually been done. Yet just months earlier, a deal had purportedly been signed, a deal personally involving Michael Cohen, who figures prominently throughout the dossier.

At least on their face, those are contradictory claims, ones that (because the WaPo story is backed by documents Congress will shortly vet) either emphasize how limited Steele’s collection was, even on one of his key targets like Cohen, or may even hint he was getting disinformation.

Or perhaps reading them in tandem can elucidate both?

First, some comments on the WaPo story.

It seems the real story here is as much the details as the fact that the deal was proposed. For example, I’m as interested that Felix Sater, from whom (as the story notes) Trump has been trying to distance himself publicly for years, was still brokering deals for the Trump organization as late as November 2015 as any other part of the story. See this post for some reasons why that’s so interesting.

It’s also quite significant that whoever leaked this to the WaPo did not explain who the investors were. Schedule another scoop in a week or so for when some outlet reveals that detail, because I suspect that’s as big a part of the story as the fact that the deal got signed. What entity came to Cohen months after Trump had kicked off his presidential campaign, and offered up the kind of branding deal that Trump loves (and which at least some of Steele’s sources say Trump had been seeking for over a decade), yet without the permits that would be a cinch if Putin and the FSB were really pushing the deal as part of a plan to compromise the candidate?

The sourcing, too, is of particular interest. WaPo describes its story as coming from, “several people familiar with the proposal and new records reviewed by Trump Organization lawyers;” in another place it describes its sources as, “several people who have been briefed on his correspondence.”  It explains that the emails are going to be turned over to Congress soon.

The new details from the emails, which are scheduled to be turned over to congressional investigators soon, also point to the likelihood of additional contacts between Russia-connected individuals and Trump associates during his presidential bid.

This all feels like an attempt, on the part of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, to reveal to Trump via non-obstructive channels what he has found in a review of documents he’s about to turn over, with an emphasis on some of the most damning parts (Sater and the timing), but without yet revealing the public detail of the investors. By releasing it in this form, Cohen’s associates give Trump warning of what’s about to come, while blunting the damage the revelation will have in more fleshed out form.

Finally, the WaPo emphasizes Sater’s push for Trump to get Putin to say nice things. Particularly given the lack of permits here, that suggests Sater recognized the deal was not actually done, it needed powerful push from Putin. A push that, given the January collapse, apparently didn’t come in timely fashion. That may be the more interesting take-away here. The deal was, when Sater bragged about it to the guy who (according to Steele’s dossier) would shortly go on to clean up Paul Manafort’s earlier corrupt discussions with Russia, illusory. But it makes it clear that Cohen, if and when he had those discussions, was aware of the Trump organization’s earlier, failed effort to finally brand a building in Moscow. It would mean that if those dodgy meetings in Prague actually happened, they came against the backdrop of Putin deciding not offer the help needed to make the Trump deal happen in the months before the election started.

All that may suggest the Steele dossier may instead be rich disinformation on a key point, disinformation that hid how active such discussions really were.

In any case, the WaPo story is not definitive one way or another. It may be utterly damning, the kind of hard evidence Cohen is about to turn over that he is aware could really blow the investigation into Trump wide open, or it could be yet more proof that Trump continued to resist the allure of real estate deals in Russia, as some of Steele’s sources claimed. But it does raise some important questions that reflect back on the Steele dossier.

Update: NYT got the actual language of two of the Sater emails, which have now been delivered to HPSCI.

Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins [sic] private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.

[snip]

Michael we can own this story. Donald doesn’t stare down, he negotiates and understand the economic issues and Putin only want to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to negotiate. “Business, politics, whatever it allis the same for someone who knows how to deal.”

Why does Sater tie the Trump Tower deal so closely with getting Trump elected?

The Arpaio Pardon — Don’t Obsess about the Russian Investigation

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It seems there are two likely responses to the Arpaio pardon: to use it as a teaching opportunity about race, or to use it to panic about the Russian investigation.

I’m seeing far too many people choosing the latter option, focusing on what Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio might do for the Russian investigation. That, in spite of the fact that Trump has already spoken openly of pardoning Mike Flynn, just like he did of Arpaio, to say nothing of his spawn or the father of his grandchildren.

The targets of the Russian investigation already know Trump can and is considering pardoning them.

But a pardon of them — at least some of them — is a very different thing than an Arpaio pardon. That’s because, for some of the crimes in question, in case of a pardon, Robert Mueller could just share the evidence with a state (usually NY) or NYC prosecutor for prosecution. It’s possible that accepting a pardon for Trump or Kushner business related crimes could expose those businesses to lawsuit, and both family’s businesses are pretty heavily in debt now.

Most importantly, a Paul Manafort or Mike Flynn pardon would deprive them of their ability to invoke the Fifth Amendment, meaning they could more easily be forced to testify against Trump, including to Congress.

Presidents implicated in crimes have used a variety of means to silence witnesses who could implicate them, but Poppy Bush’s Cap Weinberger pardon — the most recent example of a President pardoning a witness who could incriminate him — was not the primary thing that protected Poppy and Reagan, Congress’ immunization of witnesses was. Thus far, most Republicans in Congress seem determined to avoid such assistance, and Trump’s attacks on Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis for not sufficiently protecting him probably have only exacerbated the problem.

I wrote a piece explaining why (in my opinion) George W Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence, but never pardoned him: it kept Libby silent without adding any personal risk. If Trump were competent, he’d be making similar calculations about how to keep witnesses out of prison without making it easier to incriminate him. But he’s usually not competent, and so may fuck this up royally.

In any case, given that some Republicans (including both Arizona’s Senators) have made lukewarm objections to the Arpaio pardon, I’d imagine any pardons of Russian witnesses would meet more opposition, particularly if those pardons came before the 2018 elections. Add in the fact that sleazeball Manafort has no purported service to point to to justify a pardon, as Trump cited with Arpaio (and would to justify a Flynn pardon). The backlash against Trump pardoning witnesses against him will likely be far worse than the already existing backlash here.

Pardoning Arpaio was easy. Pardoning Manafort and Flynn and Don Jr and Kushner and everyone else who can implicate the President will not be easy, neither legally nor politically. So don’t confuse the two.

Meanwhile, Trump has just pardoned a man whose quarter century of abuse targeting people of color has made him the poster child of abuse, not just from a moral perspective, but (given the huge fines Maricopa has had to pay) from a governance perspective.

Like it or not, a lot of white people have a hard time seeing unjustified killings of people of color as the gross civil rights abuse it is, because when cops cite fear or danger in individual cases, fearful white people — who themselves might shoot a black kid in haste in the name of self-defense — side when them. Those white people might easily treat Black Lives Matter as an annoyance blocking their commute on the freeway.

The same white people might find Joe Arpaio’s tortuous camps for people of color objectionable, because those camps make the systemic aspect far more apparent. They’re far more likely to do so, though, if this pardon is primarily seen as Trump’s endorsement of systematic white supremacy rather than a test run to protect himself.

Moreover, white supremacy is something that will remain and must be fought even if Robert Mueller indicts Trump tomorrow. It was a key, if not the key, factor in Trump’s win. We won’t beat the next demagogue following in Trump’s model if we don’t make progress against white supremacy.

You can’t do anything, personally, to help the Robert Mueller investigation. You can do something to fight white supremacy. And if that doesn’t happen, then we’ll face another Trump down the road, just as surely as Sarah Palin paved the way for Trump.

The Arpaio pardon is an abuse, horrifying, yet more evidence of how outrageous Trump is.

But it’s also a teaching opportunity about white supremacy. Better to use it as such rather than cause for panic about the Russia investigation.

Related posts

emptywheel, You’re not the audience for the Arpaio pardon, cops are

bmaz, Some thoughts on the Arpaio pardon

 

 

Trump Bitched Out McConnell about Not Protecting Him in Russia Probe on Day Manafort Raid Story Broke

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Donald Trump continues his habit of alienating people he needs to help him survive his presidency. The NYT provides details of the souring relationship between Trump and Mitch McConnell, which it says culminated in an August 9 phone call.

In a series of tweets this month, Mr. Trump criticized Mr. McConnell publicly, then berated him in a phone call that quickly devolved into a profane shouting match.

During the call, which Mr. Trump initiated on Aug. 9 from his New Jersey golf club, the president accused Mr. McConnell of bungling the health care issue. He was even more animated about what he intimated was the Senate leader’s refusal to protect him from investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to Republicans briefed on the conversation.

Mr. McConnell has fumed over Mr. Trump’s regular threats against fellow Republicans and criticism of Senate rules, and questioned Mr. Trump’s understanding of the presidency in a public speech. Mr. McConnell has made sharper comments in private, describing Mr. Trump as entirely unwilling to learn the basics of governing.

In offhand remarks, Mr. McConnell has expressed a sense of bewilderment about where Mr. Trump’s presidency may be headed, and has mused about whether Mr. Trump will be in a position to lead the Republican Party into next year’s elections and beyond, according to people who have spoken to him directly.

In point of fact, the tweets started on August 9 (about 2:25PM) and continued through the next morning. Both the tweet described as occurring before and the one occurring after the phone call reference only the TrumpCare debacle, not the Russian investigation.

According to the NYT, Trump was “even more animated” about McConnell’s “refusal” to protect him from Russian investigations.

August 9 was the day the WaPo first broke (around 10:00AM) the story of the July 26 raid on Paul Manafort’s home. The raid itself, of course, was conducted by the FBI. But all the stories about it include allusions about the fact that it came after Manafort’s interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee and immediately after Manafort reluctantly agreed to cooperate with the Senate Judiciary Committee on threat of subpoena; Manafort had tried and failed to limit his appearance to SSCI.

Now go back to the language the NYT uses. “Refusal” to protect Trump.  That’s sure an interesting word, “refusal.” Did Trump contact McConnell about the subpoena to Manafort back on July 25? Or did McConnell refuse some other tangible request from Trump? If so does Robert Mueller know about it?

In response to reports on the raid, Trump lawyer John Dowd made all sorts of crazy comments to the press about how FBI had acted improperly because they hadn’t exhausted all options for obtaining the materials seized on July 26. Even Fox News said Dowd was trying to protect the President with his comments. And some of the reporting noted that among the seized documents were Manafort’s notes for his interview with SSCI.

That is, all the reporting on the raid intimated that it had as much to do with the Congressional testimony as Mueller’s own investigation.

And sometime that day, Trump called McConnell and complained the Majority Leader wasn’t providing him sufficient protection. Refused to protect him, in fact.

In any case, Trump’s attacks have gotten the thin-skinned McConnell wondering “whether Mr. Trump will be in a position to lead the Republican Party into next year’s elections and beyond,” which sure seems like a bad opinion for Trump to have fostered given that McConnell would have a big influence on how any impeachment trial would proceed if it ever got to the Senate.

Update: Coverage of the Glenn Simpson (head of Fusion GPS, which did the Steele dossier) interview with SJC makes clear that his was the first voluntary testimony, meaning Manafort (and Don Jr) have not sat for an interview yet.

Rohrabacher Can’t Remember Talking Assange Pardon with Trump But Is Sure Trump Wants Mind-Boggling Info from Julian Assange

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In this post, I noted that Dana Rohrabacher might try to broker a deal between Assange and President Trump trading information on WikiLeaks’ DNC email source for — it appears — a pardon. As I noted, the meeting was first reported — at 8:02 PM —- by the Daily Caller.

At 12:22 AM ET, Julian Assange tweeted that “I do not speak to the public through third parties. Only unmediated statements coming directly from me can be considered authoritative.”

This morning, Rohrabacher issued a statement (posted in my last post) that ends with a promise he will share information already in hand with the President.

The congressman plans to divulge more of what he found directly to President Trump.

The Daily Caller has written a new story, based on an interview with Rohrabacher. In it Rohrabacher first claimed that “he can’t remember” if he has spoken to anyone in the White House about a pardon for Assange.

A pardon of Assange would have to come directly from President Donald Trump, and Rohrabacher told TheDC, “I can’t remember if I have spoken to anybody in the White House about this.”

Apparently Rohrabacher has so many conversations with the White House that he can’t remember them all.

He goes on to suggest he hasn’t gotten the information he (in his statement) promised to divulge to Trump.

The congressman has yet to receive the information that has been promised to him by Assange, but he said he is confident he will receive it.

But — Rohrabacher is sure — the information his office thought he had this morning but which he doesn’t have any more is sure to  be mind-boggling.

“If I had to bet on it, I would bet that we are going to get the information that will be mind-boggling and of major historical significance,” Rohrabacher said. He said if it is significant enough, he will bring it directly to Trump.

After which Rohrabacher, who can’t remember whether he has talked to anyone at the White House about this — much less the President!!! — asserts that “there has already been some indication that the president will be very anxious to hear what I have to say.”

“And there has already been some indication that the president will be very anxious to hear what I have to say if that is the determination that I make,” Rohrabacher added.

Call me crazy, but I think Assange demanded the Daily Caller back off their prior reporting [see update], perhaps to get reassurances from Trump he’ll get a pardon before he (through his proxy Rohrabacher) actually hands over the information. I don’t blame Assange for that — as I noted earlier, he’s only got one shot to produce his case, and if it is easily debunked, both he and Trump will be screwed.

Assange sure seems pretty uncertain about this information that Rohrabacher — who may or may not have already received it — is sure will be mind-boggling.

Update: Here is Assange’s statement about the visit, which makes no mention of disclosing his source.

WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson met with U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher yesterday at the Congressman’s request. Mr. Assange explained how the ongoing proceedings against WikiLeaks over its publications on war, diplomacy and rendition violate the First Amendment rights of WikiLeaks and its readers. The grand jury proceedings against Mr. Assange and his staff started in July 2010 and have been repeatedly condemned by press freedom groups, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations. The proceedings are the largest ever conducted against a publisher and are widely viewed by legal scholars to be unconstitutional. The alleged source of the publications was granted clemency by President Obama in January. However the grand jury proceedings against the publisher continue and have expanded under the Trump administration. Mr. Assange faces potential life imprisonment. Now at seven years, the grand jury is one of the longest and most expensive in US history.

Mr. Assange does not speak through third parties. Only statements issued directly by him or his lawyers can be considered authoritative.

It also claims that Rohrabacher requested the visit, not vice versa.

Update: Curiously, Don Jr, who we know is happy to take meetings with just about anyone if they can produce information that damages dad’s enemies, just followed Assange on Twitter.

Update: The Daily Caller insists that Assange didn’t get them to back off any reporting, and instead explains that the contradictions between their Wednesday story and their Thursday one (and in Rohrabacher’s statements) derive instead from the poor wording of the statement from Rohrbacher’s office. My apologies for the insinuations that their failure to point out these multiple contradictions doesn’t just stem from bad reporting.

Update: Washington Times has more, which not only underscores how newsworthy are Daily Caller’s contradictions, but also confirms that Rohrabacher is now talking a back and forth process.

“I will have discussions with President Trump before going public, and that should happen hopefully within two weeks of now, by the end of the month,” he said. “In the end, the American people are going to know more than what they know now, and it will be with more certainty.”

Rohrabacher declined to say if he was given a physical set of files by Assange to support a counter-narrative on how WikiLeaks acquired emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. U.S. spy agencies say Russia hacked those emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.

“I told you, I’m not going to go into details on that,” said the Orange County conservative about whether he was given physical files. At one point, however, Rohrabacher implied he had not been given documents.

“We did not go into detail [about how WikiLeaks acquired Democratic emails], but that will obviously be something that will be provided in greater detail shortly,” he said.

“This is not a one step process, it’s a two-step or three step-process. There are some things we just have to go to the president with and see what he says, and then see how we can actually work its way so the American people know the truth,” he said.

Update, 8/19: In an article revealing that Charles Johnson has refused to cooperate with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request for information on how he helped now-deceased rat-fucker Peter Smith attempt to find hacked files from Hillary’s server, Michael Isikoff provides his own version of the Rohrabacher/Assange deal. His version lacks the contradictions of the right wing press. It explains that Assange would basically trade “irrefutable” evidence he didn’t get the DNC emails from Russia (which is different than proving they didn’t come from Russia) in exchange for a pre-emptive pardon.

Johnson said he and Rohrabacher came back from their meeting with a specific proposal that the congressman intends to present to President Trump soon: Grant a preemptive pardon to Assange (who has been under Justice Department investigation for years, although he has never been charged) and the WikiLeaks founder would, in exchange, turn over “irrefutable” evidence that he didn’t get the Democratic National Committee emails from Russia, but from another source.

“Assange wants to have a deal with the president,” Johnson said. “He believes he should be pardoned in the same way that Chelsea Manning was pardoned.” Once Assange turns his evidence over, showing the Russians were not the source of the DNC emails, then the “president could put the kibosh” on the whole Russia investigation being conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Johnson declined to say what Assange’s supposed evidence actually is (though he did say it did not include any documents). But he insisted he has spoken to unidentified figures in the White House who have told him the president wants to hear the proposal. “I know the president is interested in this,” he said. “There will be a meeting between Rep. Rohrabacher and President Trump.”

A spokesman for Rohrabacher confirmed that Johnson had arranged the meeting between the congressman and Assange. “My understanding is that there is not yet a concrete proposal, but that Dana does believe that if Assange does turn over the proof he’s promised, then he deserves a pardon,” the spokesman said.

There’s a lot that’s batshit about these claims, not least the suggestion that Chelsea Manning got a full pardon, rather than a commutation after 7 years of imprisonment and abusive treatment by the federal government.

But it’s also hard to imagine how, having laid out this deal in such stark terms, Robert Mueller won’t begin to show some interest in it.

Dana Rohrabacher Brokering Deal for Man Publishing a CIA Exploit Every Week

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Yesterday, right wing hack Charles Johnson brokered a three hour meeting between Dana Rohrabacher and Julian Assange. At the meeting, Assange apparently explained his proof that Russia was not behind the hack of the DNC. In a statement, Rohrabacher promises to deliver what he learned directly to President Trump.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday told Rep. Dana Rohrabacher that Russia was not behind leaks of emails during last year’s presidential election campaign that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and exposed the inner workings of the Democratic National Committee.

The California congressman spent some three hours with the Australian-born fugitive, now living under the protection of the Ecuadorian embassy in the British capital.

Assange’s claim contradicts the widely accepted assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that the thousands of leaked emails, which indicated the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process against Sen. Bernie Sanders in favor of Clinton, were the result of hacking by the Russian government or persons connected to the Kremlin.

Assange, said Rohrabacher, “emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.” Rohrabacher, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, is the only U.S. congressman to have visited the controversial figure.

The conversation ranged over many topics, said Rohrabacher, including the status of Wikileaks, which Assange maintains is vital to keeping Americans informed on matters hidden by their traditional media. The congressman plans to divulge more of what he found directly to President Trump.

I’m utterly fascinated that Assange has taken this step, and by the timing of it.

It comes not long after Rod Wheeler’s lawsuit alleging that Fox News and the White House worked together to invent a story that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks. Both that story and this one have been promoted aggressively by Sean Hannity.

It comes in the wake of the VIPS letter that — as I’ve begun to show — in no way proves what it claims to prove about the DNC hack.

It comes just after a very long profile by the New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian, who has previously written more sympathetic pieces about Assange. I have a few quibbles with the logic behind a few of the arguments Khatchadourian makes, but he makes a case — doing analysis on what documents got released where that no one else has yet publicly done (and about which numerous people have made erroneous claims in the past) — that Assange’s claims he wasn’t working with Russia no longer hold up.

But his protestations that there were no connections between his publications and Russia were untenable.

[snip]

Whatever one thinks of Assange’s election disclosures, accepting his contention that they shared no ties with the two Russian fronts requires willful blindness. Guccifer 2.0’s handlers predicted the WikiLeaks D.N.C. release. They demonstrated inside knowledge that Assange was struggling to get it out on time. And they proved, incontrovertibly, that they had privileged access to D.N.C. documents that appeared nowhere else publicly, other than in WikiLeaks publications. The twenty thousand or so D.N.C. e-mails that WikiLeaks published were extracted from ten compromised e-mail accounts, and all but one of the people who used those accounts worked in just two departments: finance and strategic communications. (The single exception belonged to a researcher who worked extensively with communications.) All the D.N.C. documents that Guccifer 2.0 released appeared to come from those same two departments.

The Podesta e-mails only make the connections between WikiLeaks and Russia appear stronger. Nearly half of the first forty documents that Guccifer 2.0 published can be found as attachments among the Podesta e-mails that WikiLeaks later published.

The Assange-Rohrabacher meeting also follows a NYT story revealing that the author of a piece of malware named in the IC’s first Joint Analysis Report of the DNC hack, Profexor, has been cooperating with the FBI. The derivative reports on this have overstated the connection Profexor might have to the DNC hack (as opposed to APT 28, presumed to be associated with Russia’s military intelligence GRU).

A member of Ukraine’s Parliament with close ties to the security services, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the interaction was online or by phone and that the Ukrainian programmer had been paid to write customized malware without knowing its purpose, only later learning it was used in Russian hacking.

Mr. Gerashchenko described the author only in broad strokes, to protect his safety, as a young man from a provincial Ukrainian city. He confirmed that the author turned himself in to the police and was cooperating as a witness in the D.N.C. investigation. “He was a freelancer and now he is a valuable witness,” Mr. Gerashchenko said.

It is not clear whether the specific malware the programmer created was used to hack the D.N.C. servers, but it was identified in other Russian hacking efforts in the United States.

But Profexor presumably is describing to the FBI how he came to sell customized access to his tool to hackers working for Russia and who those hackers were.

In other words, this bid by Assange to send information to Trump via someone protected by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause, but who is also suspected — even by his Republican colleagues! — of being on Russia’s payroll, comes at a very interesting time, as outlets present more evidence undermining Assange’s claims to have no tie to Russia.

Coming as it does as other evidence is coming to light, this effort is a bit of a Hail Mary by Assange: as soon as Trump publicizes his claims (which he’ll probably do during tomorrow’s shit-and-tweet) and they get publicly discredited, Assange (and Trump) will have little else to fall back on. They will have exposed their own claims, and provided the material others can use to attack Trump’s attempts to rebut the Russia hack claims. Perhaps Assange’s claims will be hard to rebut; but by making them public, finally, they will be revealed such that they can be rebutted.

I’m just as interested in the reporting on this, though, which was first pushed out through right wing outlets Daily Caller and John Solomon.

The story is presented exclusively in terms of Assange’s role in the DNC hack, which is admittedly the area where Assange’s interests and Trump’s coincide.

Yet not even the neutral LAT’s coverage of the meeting, which even quotes CIA Director and former Wikileaks fan Mike Pompeo,mentions the more immediate reason why Assange might need a deal from the United States. Virtually every week since March, Wikileaks has released a CIA exploit. While some of those exploits were interesting and the individual exploits are surely useful for security firms, at this point the Vault 7 project looks less like transparency and more like an organized effort to burn the CIA. Which makes it utterly remarkable a sitting member of Congress is going to go to the president to lobby him to make a deal with Assange, to say nothing of Assange’s argument that Wikileaks should get a White House press pass as part of the deal.

Dana Rohrabacher is perhaps even as we speak lobbying to help a guy who has published a CIA hack of the week. And that part of the meeting is barely getting notice.

Lawfare Disappears Democratic Support for Centrist Failures to Claim a “Sea-Change” because of Russia

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In a piece that calls Max Blumenthal — author of three books of original journalism — an “activist,” Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic attempts to lay out how the left has split on its response to Russia’s interference in last year’s election. She does a fine job avoiding generalizations about the current stance of the various parts of the left she portrays. But she creates a fantasy past, in which even the center-left has been distrustful of the intelligence community, to suggest the center-left’s embrace of the Russia investigation represents a “sea-change” in its comfort with the spooks.

The story of the American left under Trump, as in the larger story, is one of bifurcation and polarization. It’s a story of a profound emerging divide over the role of patriotism and the intelligence community in the left’s political life. To put the matter simply, some on the left are actively revisiting their long-held distrust of the security organs of the American state; and some are rebelling against that rapprochement.

[snip]

But these arguments have taken place against the backdrop of a much greater and more visible embrace of the investigation on the part of the center-left—and a concurrent embrace by many center-left commentators of actively patriotic vocabulary that is traditionally the province of the right, along with a skepticism about Russia that has not been in fashion in Democratic circles since the Scoop Jackson wing of the party bolted. As Trump has attacked and belittled the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian election interference, the center-left has embraced not only the report but also the intelligence community itself.

[snip]

Political leaders of the center-left always had a quiet peace with the national security apparatus. But the peace was a quiet one, generally speaking, one without overly demonstrative displays of affection or support.

[snip]

[B]roadly speaking, the center-left these days sounds a lot like the mainstream right of the last few decades before Trump came along: hawkish towards Russia and enthusiastic about the U.S.  intelligence apparatus as one of the country’s key lines of defense. And the mainstream right sounds a lot like the center-left on the subject—which is to say very quiet.

This new posture for the center-left, to some degree anyway, has politicians speaking the language of the intelligence world: the language of active patriotism.

Perhaps Jurecic has been asleep since 9/11, and has overlooked how aggressively supportive centrist Democrats have been of the National Security establishment? There’s no sea-change on the center left — none. What she actually presents evidence for is a sea-change on the right, with increased skepticism from some of those (like Devin Nunes) who have been the intelligence community’s biggest cheerleaders in the past.

To create this fantasy past, the foreign policy history Jurecic focuses on is that of the Cold War (a history that stops short of NATO expansion), not more recent history in which members of the center-left voted for a disastrous Iraq War (which Russia opposed), misrepresented (to both Russia and the left) the regime change goals of the Libya intervention, and applauded the CIA effort to back (al Qaeda allied) rebels to carry out regime change in Syria. To say nothing of the center-left’s failure to hold banks accountable for crashing the world economy. The only place those policies show up is in Jurecic’s explanation why “younger” people are more isolationist than their elders.

There’s another stream of thought too, from voices who tend to be younger and more focused on left-wing domestic policy, rather than Cold War-inflected foreign policy—people whose formative political experience dates to the Iraq War, rather than anything to do with the Soviet Union. This stream tends toward isolationism.

It’s not just that the Iraq War and the Wall Street crash, not the Cold War, provided the formative moment for these young people (though many of Jurecic’s claims about the young are immediately supported by descriptions of Glenn Greenwald or other old farts). It’s that these were disastrous policies. And through all of them, the center-left that Jurecic portrays as distrusting the IC were instead enabling and often — certainly for the entire Obama Administration — directing them.

Jurecic’s fantasy of past skepticism about the IC relies on the Democrats’ changing views towards Jim Comey, particularly the treatment of him (and to a lesser degree Robert Mueller) as messiahs.

As Americans gathered to watch James Comey testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a meme emerged on certain corners of the left-leaning internet: people had a crush on the former FBI director. It was his patriotism, his scrupulousness, his integrity that did it. “Get you a man who loves you like [C]omey loves the FBI,” wrote one commenter. “Is COMEY … attractive?” asked another. Declared one: “Comey should be the next Bachelor.”

The trend may have started with Comey, but it hasn’t ended with him. Earlier this month, Vogue reported that special counsel Robert Mueller, too, has been transformed into an unlikely object of adoration.

The point of these outbursts of affection—whatever level of queasiness or amusement they might inspire—is not actually that anyone finds the former FBI director or the special counsel attractive. In the odd parlance of the internet, this kind of language is a way to express intense emotional involvement with an issue. Half-jokingly and with some degree of self-awareness, the many people who profess their admiration are projecting their swirling anxiety and anticipation over the Russia investigation and the fate of the Trump presidency onto Mueller and Comey.

Not only does Jurecic ignore the wild swing Democrats exhibited about Comey, whom many blamed for Hillary’s loss (something both I and, later, Lawfare predicted). But she makes no mention of what happened in 2013 with Jim Comey’s confirmation process, in which a man who signed off on torture and legitimized an illegal dragnet by strong-arming the FISA Court was pushed through by Democrats with one after another fawning statement of admiration, where the only procedural or voting opposition came from Republicans.

You don’t approve Comey with no probing questions about his hawkish past if you’re at all embarrassed about your support for the IC. Yet that’s what the allegedly skeptical Democratic party did.

There’s a reason all this matters, especially given the way Jurecic wields the concept of patriotism in her invention of a sea-change in center-left support for spooks.

I’m on the more progressive (“hard”) left that Jurecic generally portrays as opposing the Russia investigation. Yet I may have written more, myself, than all of Lawfare about it. I think it is real and important. I support the investigations into Russian interference and Trump’s tolerance for it.

But I also think that as part of that review, the center-left — and institutions of centrist policy, starting with Brookings — need to reflect on how their own epic policy failures have discredited centrist ideology and created an opportunity that both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin found all too easy to exploit.

Trump succeeded, in part, because he deceitfully promised to reinvest in the crumbling US interior, rather than overseas. Putin has attracted support in a Europe still paying for the German banks’ follies, a Europe struggling to accommodate refugees escaping a destabilized Middle East. That doesn’t make either of them positive forces. Rather, it makes them opportunists capitalizing on the failures of centrist hegemony. But until the center is either replaced or offers policies that haven’t already failed, Trump and Putin will continue to exploit those failures.

I consider myself a patriot. But true patriotism — as opposed to the messianism she celebrates as patriotism on the center-left — requires honest criticism of America’s disastrous economic and foreign policy failures. Messianism, by contrast, is a position of impotence, where necessary work is supplanted by hope that a strong man will rescue us all.

Ben Wittes and Lawfare generally are right that caricatures of them as handmaidens of the Deep State are too simple. But Jurecic’s analysis is associated with a think tank paid for by funders that include entities that have backed disastrous destabilizing policies in the Middle East — like Qatar, UAE, Haim Saban — as well as those who profit from them — like Northrop Grumman  It was paid for by the banks that centrists didn’t hold accountable for the crash, including JP Morgan and Citi. It was paid for by big oil, including Exxon. It was even paid for by Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who presided over the solicitous Comey confirmation process Jurecic completely disappeared from her narrative of Democrats embracing Comey.

That a Brookings-affiliated analyst has just invented a fantasy past skepticism for spooks on the center-left — the center-left that has championed failed policies — even as she deems the tribalism she portrays as “patriotism” is itself part of the problem. It dodges the work of true patriotism: ensuring America is strong enough to offer the rest of the world something positive to support, rather than something that demagogues like Trump and Putin can effectively consolidate power over.

In Bid to Help Trump, John Dowd Suggests Manafort Raid Could Do Real Damage to the President

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This Bloomberg piece suggesting, improbably, Trump’s legal team will some day catch up to match the quality of Robert Mueller’s team, describes Trump’s lawyers — especially John Dowd — coordinating with lawyers for other witnesses in the inquiry, including those of Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn.

For the moment, Trump’s personal lawyers are focused on coordinating with lawyers for the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization, as well as for individuals involved in the investigation such as Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. Dowd also spends time communicating with Mueller—the two have known each other for years, says the person familiar with Trump’s legal strategy.

It also confirms that Dowd has been chatting regularly with Mueller, though doesn’t reveal — as the USA Today did — that those chats include passing on messages from the President.

“He appreciates what Bob Mueller is doing,” Trump’s chief counsel John Dowd told USA TODAY in an interview Tuesday. “He asked me to share that with him and that’s what I’ve done.”

Trump’s legal team has been in contact with Mueller’s office, and Dowd says he has passed along the president’s messages expressing “appreciation and greetings’’ to the special counsel.

“The president has sent messages back and forth,’’ Dowd said, declining to elaborate further.

All of which is useful background for this Fox News piece, which quotes from a letter Dowd sent to a WSJ reporter, complaining about the raid on Paul Manafort. Dowd’s chief concern is that Mueller allegedly didn’t exhaust other methods to obtain the materials seized in the raid.

The email reflects Trump’s legal team moving to protect the president, amid speculation that the raid could be part of a broader effort to squeeze Manafort for information on Trump.

Dowd, in his note, questioned the validity of the search warrant itself, calling it an “extraordinary invasion of privacy.” Dowd said Manafort already was looking to cooperate with congressional committees and said the special counsel never requested the materials from Manafort.

“These failures by Special Counsel to exhaust less intrusive methods is a fatal flaw in the warrant process and would call for a Motion to Suppress the fruits of the search,” Dowd wrote, arguing the required “necessity” of the warrant was “misrepresented to the Court which raises a host of issues involving the accuracy of the warrant application and the supporting FBI affidavit.”

Even assuming what Dowd claims is true (though given the reports that FBI seized financial records not known to have been requested by Congress, that’s doubtful), what does it say that Dowd knows so much about this raid and Manafort’s efforts to comply with all requests? What does it say that Fox presents Dowd’s email as “Trump’s legal team moving to protect the president”?

What is it about an investigation into Manafort’s corruption — and, yes, that June 9, 2016 meeting that Manafort attended, about which Trump dictated a response making false claims — that personally damages the President? I mean, sure, it is Fox claiming Dowd’s complaints protect Trump, not Dowd. But the panicked response here seems to hurt Trump, not help him. (And if you haven’t already, read Rayne’s point about Trump’s mid-twitter rant pause.)

But I am interested in this tidbit, claiming that the FBI seized materials Manafort was using to cooperate with Congressional investigators (and his testimony the day before and day of the raid.

Dowd also said agents seized “privileged and confidential materials prepared for Mr. Manafort by his counsel to aid him in his cooperation with the Congressional committees,”

This might explain the raid, as well as reporting from numerous outlets that suggested a connection with Manafort’s testimony to Congress. Manafort had materials that were timely, useful for the day before and day after, but which he might (rightly?) claim attorney-client privilege over were Mueller to subpoena them. Did staffers see something sketchy on July 25 and alert Mueller?

I actually am somewhat interested if this raid was used to get Manafort’s notes used to testify to Congress.

But given John Dowd’s panic in response — and all the reporting that he has consulted with Manafort’s lawyers — I’m really curious whether it is Dowd’s advice that Mueller was most interested in seeing.

Update: Just so it’s here, I wanted to show what happened with Manafort’s testimony on Tuesday, July 25. He had been asked to testify at a hearing that kept getting rescheduled (as much because of Fusion GPS CEO Glenn Simpson’s reluctance to testify as Manafort’s). On Monday, July 24 (“last night” in a July 25 release), Grassley and Feinstein issued a subpoena for Manafort in particular complaining that Manafort wanted to appear before just one committee.

While we were willing to accommodate Mr. Manafort’s request to cooperate with the committee’s investigation without appearing at Wednesday’s hearing, we were unable to reach an agreement for a voluntary transcribed interview with the Judiciary Committee.  Mr. Manafort, through his attorney, said that he would be willing to provide only a single transcribed interview to Congress, which would not be available to the Judiciary Committee members or staff.  While the Judiciary Committee was willing to cooperate on equal terms with any other committee to accommodate Mr. Manafort’s request, ultimately that was not possible. Therefore, yesterday evening, a subpoena was issued to compel Mr. Manafort’s participation in Wednesday’s hearing. As with other witnesses, we may be willing to excuse him from Wednesday’s hearing if he would be willing to agree to production of documents and a transcribed interview, with the understanding that the interview would not constitute a waiver of his rights or prejudice the committee’s right to compel his testimony in the future.

Later on Tuesday, Grassley and Feinstein announced that Manafort would cooperate, and started turning over documents.

Faced with issuance of a subpoena, we are happy that Mr. Manafort has started producing documents to the Committee and we have agreed to continue negotiating over a transcribed interview. It’s important that he and other witnesses continue to work with this committee as it fulfills its oversight responsibility. Our investigation is still in its early stages, and we will continue to seek information from witnesses as necessary. As we’ve said before, we intend to get the answers that we need, one way or the other. Cooperation from witnesses is always the preferred route, but this agreement does not prejudice the committee’s right to compel his testimony in the future.

This is the reluctant, last minute “cooperation” that Dowd is now pointing to as basis for his claim that Mueller could have gotten Manafort’s cooperation via other means.

As News of Raid Breaks, National Enquirer Discovers Manafort’s Long-Reported Mistress

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I was just asking why the news of the search on Paul Manafort’s home was breaking now. Only to discover that Trump buddy David Pecker’s National Enquirer is breaking “an investigation” about Manafort’s mistress, including this quote from a “White House insider.”

President Trump has been focused on draining the swamp in Washington D.C., … Meanwhile, one of his trusted advisers was bedding another woman behind his wife’s back, betraying her and his country.

Mind you, the affair is not news. Krypt3ia first reported it, based of hack and leaked texts, back in March.

I found conversations between Manaforts daughter and someone about how her father was having an affair with a girl younger than one of his daughters.

What is even more interesting is that the allegation here is that not only was Manafort having this affair but that girl (who is named in the chats and I have backstopped and was in fact in Ukraine at the time mentioned while Manafort was there) but that of all things Paul seems to have said that she was some “Russian friends” daughter. Though the text below states they don’t really think that the girl is Russian there are more down stream that talk about her father and her family and ties to Russia (maybe) but the sick burn here is if she is, well, that is a pretty direct tie to the country that might, ya know, use that as kompromat on Pauly eh?

screenshot-from-2017-03-03-12-05-41

Even the idea that Paul may have had a young trophy mistress is enough for blackmail but the texts go on to describe her travel with him all over the world including to Ukraine while he was working there. So, if the Russians did not have access to her or had placed her in the proximity of Paul this certainly would have been information they would not have passed up on to use. So, once more, if the sql database is legit and the information presented here is on the mark, it is quite possible that Manafort was at least in this instance easily vulnerable to compromise by the Russians.

screenshot-from-2017-03-03-08-16-42

As the chats went on though, it seems that the new girl was also straining Manafort’s money because he was being extravagant with her. As you can see from above, he allegedly rented her a house in the Hamptons by his own for a summer and bought a NYC apartment for her to be in. All of this money being spent also as it happens, was concurrent with his daughters wedding coming and Ukraine not paying him for his services.

As I noted in a comment on the raid thread, this mistress is one way Manafort’s money laundering could implicate his involvement with Trump’s campaign — which is interesting why an “insider” from the White House of a serial divorcé and philanderer deems an affair to be tantamount to betraying your country, especially given that nothing in the Enquirer supports that claim. And the Enquirer, which never met privacy violations it couldn’t profit off of, is guarding the mistress’ ID.

There is, however, one detail in the Enquirer’s short screed of interest, though not precisely in the marriage-saving context in which it presents it. It reveals that as all of this was breaking, Manafort reached out to the mistress again.

“But when he was warned about the messages being leaked on the dark web, he went into damage control mode — yet foolishly reached out to his mistress again!”

Reaching out to a mistress that may or may not have ties to his Russian friends during the middle of an investigation into any coordination with Russia’s tampering in the election Manafort briefly ran sound sounds stupid, but for entirely different reasons than his marriage.

On the Manafort Raid

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This morning, the WaPo reported that Paul Manafort’s Alexandria home was searched in a pre-dawn raid on July 26.

There are several notable details about WaPo’s report.

First, as Julian Sanchez notes, it makes no mention of the fact that to get a search warrant, you have to convince a judge you’ll find evidence of a crime.

Note, too, that WaPo talked to someone who has seen the warrant, which is almost certainly otherwise still sealed.

The search warrant was wide-ranging and FBI agents working with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III departed the home with various records.

[snip]

The search warrant indicates investigators may have argued to a federal judge they had reason to believe Manafort could not be trusted to turn over all records in response to a grand jury subpoena.

Having neglected to mention the probable cause bit and reviewed the warrant, WaPo goes to some lengths to suggest the seized documents are ones Manafort would have gladly given over had Robert Mueller’s inquiry just asked nicely.

The raid came as Manafort has been voluntarily producing documents to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

[snip]

The documents included materials Manafort had already provided to Congress, said people familiar with the search.

“If the FBI wanted the documents, they could just ask [Manafort] and he would have turned them over,” said one adviser close to the White House.

And it specifically points to documents pertaining to the June 9, 2016 meeting that Manafort and everyone else failed to disclose in timely fashion.

Manafort has provided documents to both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate and House intelligence committees. The documents are said to include notes Manafort took while attending a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016.

So the seized documents include documents Manafort turned over willingly, which in turn includes details on that June 9 meeting. But that doesn’t mean (contrary to some shitty derivative reporting on this) that the set of documents seized matches the set of documents provided to Congress. It may also include other things.

Manafort’s attorney is not the source for the story, but Manafort’s allies may be.

Josh Stueve, spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment, as did Reginald Brown, an attorney for Manafort.

[snip]

Manafort’s allies fear that Mueller hopes to build a case against Manafort unrelated to the 2016 campaign, in hopes that the former campaign operative would provide information against others in Trump’s inner circle in exchange for lessening his own legal exposure.

Now consider a detail included in the NYT version of this story but not (as far as I’ve seen) in any of the other coverage: the documents seized include tax documents and foreign banking records.

Investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, recently searched a home of President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for tax documents and foreign banking records, according to a person briefed on the matter.

These are money laundering documents, not campaign documents.

The NYT, curiously, doesn’t report where the raid was, which suggests it was not just a response to WaPo’s reporting, which clearly identified the raid as taking place in Alexandria.

Remember: when high powered people are being investigated, the safest way they can communicate to each other is via leaks to the press. Moreover, such leaks can help spin the story away from one area (perhaps, here, away from the financial documents) and towards another (that June 9 meeting about which Manafort spoke with Congress). Given the Manafort allies’ spin that Mueller may be investigating stuff unrelated to the election campaign, it suggests this may be as much about money laundering (which FBI has been investigating for over a year) that all involved worry will be used to flip Manafort to testify about Trump.

Update: One other interesting question about this story is why it is coming out now. Why did it take two weeks for this story to come out?

Robert Mueller’s Grand Jury and the Significance of Felix Sater

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In response to Monday’s server hiccups and in anticipation that Mueller is nowhere near done, we expanded our server capacity overnight. If you think you’ll rely on emptywheel reporting on the Mueller probe, please consider a donation to support the site. 

The world is abuzz with the news that Robert Mueller has impaneled a DC-based grand jury that he used to subpoena information on the June 9, 2016 meeting between Don Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and some Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. In reality, the Special Counsel had already been using a grand jury to get information on Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and we should always have expected a dedicated grand jury.

Nevertheless, the move has convinced the chattering classes that this investigation is for real.

This comes as a surprise to people, apparently, after reports of Mueller’s 16th hire, illegal foreign bribery expert Greg Andres. It’s almost as if people haven’t been making sense of where Mueller is going from the scope of his hires, which include:

  1. Mob specialists: Andrew Weissman and Lisa Page are mob prosecutors.
  2. Fraud specialists: Weissman and Rush Atkinson are also fraud prosecutors.
  3. Corporate crime specialists: Weissman also led the Enron Task force. One of Dreeben’s key SCOTUS wins pertained to corporate crime. Jeannie Rhee has also worked on white collar defense.
  4. Public corruption specialists: Mueller hired someone with Watergate experience, James Quarles. And Andrew Goldstein got good press in SDNY for prosecuting corrupt politicians (even if Sheldon Silver’s prosecution has since been overturned).
  5. International experts: Zainab Ahmad, who worked terrorism cases in EDNY, which has some of the most expansive precedents for charging foreigners flown into JFK (including Russia’s darling Viktor Bout), knows how to bring foreigners to the US and successfully prosecute them in this country. Aaron Zelinsky has also worked in international law. Elizabeth Prelogar did a Fulbright in Russia and reportedly speaks it fluently. And, as noted, Andres has worked on foreign bribery.
  6. Cyber and spying lawyers: Brandon Van Grack is the guy who had been leading the investigation into Mike Flynn; he’s got a range of National Security experience. Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s former chief of staff at FBI, also has that kind of NSD experience.
  7. Appellate specialists: With Michael Dreeben, Mueller already has someone on the team who can win any appellate challenges; Adam Jed and Elizabeth Prelogar are also appellate specialists. Mueller’s hires also include former clerks for a number of SCOTUS justices, which always helps out if things get that far.

I lay this out there to suggest that in addition to hiring a bunch of super stars, Mueller also appears to have picked people for their expertise. Those picks reflect an already well-developed theory of the case, one formed long before he impaneled his own grand jury. And many of them boast expertise fairly distant from the question of foreign adversary’s hacking a political party’s server.

And I’d suggest there’s good reason for that.

Some of Mueller’s theory of the case undoubtedly comes from whatever evidence Jim Comey’s FBI and Van Grack’s grand jury had already collected, which at least publicly pertains to Mike Flynn’s disclosure problems, his comments to the Russians, and Paul Manafort’s money laundering. Some of it comes from stuff that was being investigated in NY.

But remember: Trump’s sordid ties to Russian mobsters (see categories 1, 2, 3, and 5) go back a long way. One of the best ways to understand what and how close some of those ties are is to look at the case of Felix Sater. Josh Marshall’s description here gets at a lot of the important bits.

Sater is a Russian emigrant who was jailed for assault in the mid-90s and then pulled together a major securities fraud scheme in which investors lost some $40 million. He clearly did something for the US government which the feds found highly valuable. It seems likely, though not certain, that it involved working with the CIA on something tied to the post-Soviet criminal underworld. Now Bayrock and Trump come into the mix.

According to Sater’s Linkedin profile, Sater joined up with Bayrock in 1999 – in other words, shortly after he became involved with the FBI and CIA. (The Times article says he started up with Bayrock in 2003.) In a deposition, Trump said he first came into contact with Sater and Bayrock in the early 2000s. The Trump SoHo project was announced in 2006 and broke ground in November of that year. In other words, Sater’s involvement with Bayrock started soon after he started working with the FBI and (allegedly) the CIA. Almost the entire period of his work with Trump took place during this period when he was working for the federal government as at least an informant and had his eventual sentencing hanging over his head.

What about Salvatore Lauria, Sater’s accomplice in the securities swindle?

He went to work with Bayrock too and was also closely involved with managing and securing financing for the Trump SoHo project. The Timesarticle I mentioned in my earlier post on Trump SoHo contains this …

Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.

All sounds totally legit, doesn’t it?

But there’s more!, as they say.

Sater’s stint as a “Senior Advisor” to Donald Trump at the Trump Organization began in January of January 2010 and lasted roughly a year. What significance that has in all of this I’m not sure. But here’s the final morsel of information that’s worth knowing for this installment of the story.

How exactly did all of Sater’s secret work and the federal government’s efforts to keep his crimes secret come to light?

During the time Sater was working for Bayrock and Trump he organized what was supposed to be Trump Tower Ft Lauderdale. The project was announced in 2004. People paid in lots of money but the whole thing went bust and Trump finally pulled out of the deal in 2009. Lots of people who’d bought units in the building lost everything. And they sued.

In other words, an FBI (and, possibly, CIA) informant had links with two of Trump’s business with ties to the Russian mob for — effectively — the entire extended Mueller tenure at FBI.

This is a point one of the few other people with reservations about Mueller as Special Counsel made to me not long ago. The FBI — Mueller’s FBI — has known about the ties between Trump’s businesses and the Russian mob for well over a decade. The FBI — Mueller’s FBI — never referred those ties, that money laundering, for prosecution in that entire time, perhaps because of the difficulties of going after foreign corruption interlaced with US businesses.

Now, in a remarkably short timeframe, former mob prosecutor Robert Mueller has put together a dream team of prosecutors who have precisely the kind of expertise you might use to go after such ties.

Because now it matters. It matters that the President has all these obligations to the Russian mob going back over a decade, because he can’t seem to separate his own entanglements from the good of the country.

Yes, Robert Mueller convened a grand jury and he has used it to go after the records of a meeting set up by one of Trump’s key Russian allies, Aras Agalarov, and his campaign, the guy who, at the very end of Mueller’s tenure at FBI, helped Trump stage the Miss Universe pageant in Russia, an event that may have marked significant new levels of Trump exposure to Russian compromise. But Mueller was on the trail of Trump and his Russian crime ties long before that. (The person with Mueller reservations actually wondered whether Trump himself wasn’t cooperating with the FBI in this period.)

Folks have made much of this exchange in the NYT’s long interview with Trump.

SCHMIDT: Last thing, if Mueller was looking at your finances and your family finances, unrelated to Russia — is that a red line?

HABERMAN: Would that be a breach of what his actual charge is?

TRUMP: I would say yeah. I would say yes. By the way, I would say, I don’t — I don’t — I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows? I don’t make money from Russia. In fact, I put out a letter saying that I don’t make — from one of the most highly respected law firms, accounting firms. I don’t have buildings in Russia. They said I own buildings in Russia. I don’t. They said I made money from Russia. I don’t. It’s not my thing. I don’t, I don’t do that. Over the years, I’ve looked at maybe doing a deal in Russia, but I never did one. Other than I held the Miss Universe pageant there eight, nine years [crosstalk].

SCHMIDT: But if he was outside that lane, would that mean he’d have to go?

[crosstalk]

HABERMAN: Would you consider——

TRUMP: No, I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia. So I think if he wants to go, my finances are extremely good, my company is an unbelievably successful company. And actually, when I do my filings, peoples say, “Man.” People have no idea how successful this is. It’s a great company. But I don’t even think about the company anymore. I think about this. ’Cause one thing, when you do this, companies seem very trivial. O.K.? I really mean that. They seem very trivial. But I have no income from Russia. I don’t do business with Russia. The gentleman that you mentioned, with his son, two nice people. But basically, they brought the Miss Universe pageant to Russia to open up, you know, one of their jobs. Perhaps the convention center where it was held. It was a nice evening, and I left. I left, you know, I left Moscow. It wasn’t Moscow, it was outside of Moscow.

Technically, Trump was only asked about whether he’d consider Mueller’s review of finances unrelated to Russia to be outside his lane. But Trump largely answered it about Russia, about business deals — the condos, the pageant — with Russia going back to the time Mueller’s FBI would have been working with Felix Sater to learn about the Russian mob.

Yeah. It’s no surprise Mueller has impaneled a grand jury.