Bill Barr, “So Far as We Knew”

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As I described, the book written by Aaron Zebley and two of Robert Mueller’s other former prosecutors breaks most new ground in its description of discussions between Mueller’s team, Trump’s lawyers, and those supervising the investigation at DOJ.

As it describes, for months, the investigation was working towards a January 27, 2018 interview of Trump, to be held at Camp David. But shortly after Mike Flynn pled guilty, Trump attorney John Dowd (whose call to Rob Kelner floating a pardon made it into the report but not the book), started getting cold feet. On January 30, Dowd told Jim Quarles, “I can’t let this guy testify. I will resign before he does.” On March 1, Dowd and Jay Sekulow first pitched the idea of written questions. Four days later, Mueller first raised the possibility of a subpoena; Dowd said that would be war. Trump would plead the Fifth before he’d respond to a subpoena.

Three weeks later, Dowd resigned.

On April 18, Sekulow told Quarles that Trump was close to bringing on new lawyers. Of Jane and Marty Raskin, Sekulow spoke of their high stature.

“We are talking to people with high stature to take over the representation,” Sekulow said. “Just finalizing everything now.”

“Good,” Jim said.

“You know them, actually. I think you’ve worked with them in the past. They are like-minded people who share our desire to get to the goal line.”

Of Rudy Giuliani (who was officially disbarred in DC yesterday), Sekulow said he hoped he wouldn’t join the team.

Sekulow continued, “There’s a third person too, but I’m hopeful he won’t join.” He did not divulge this person’s identity.

[snip]

Sekulow then said, “And the third person is, well, America’s Mayor.”

Jim thought for a brief moment. “Rudy?”

“That’s correct,” Sekulow said. “Rudy Giuliani is coming on too.”

Rudy almost immediately ran afoul of the Mueller team.

At a meeting on April 24, there was a discussion about whether Trump even could be charged. Bob told Rudy that “we plan to follow the [OLC] regulations” prohibiting the indictment of a sitting President, though in a way that left wiggle room in case (as the book describes) the team found “evidence proving Trump truly was a Manchurian candidate.” Rudy asked whether Trump was a witness, a subject, or a target; Mueller answered he was a subject.

Giuliani asked, “Is he a subject regardless of the OLC opinion?” In other words, were we not labeling Trump a “target” simply because he couldn’t be indicted? Or was he a subject because there was not enough evidence to make him a target?

Bob said that we had deliberately withheld making a judgment about the president’s conduct, but we would get back to them if we could say more.

In spite of repeated assurances the meeting was confidential, Rudy promptly ran to the press and (per the book, at least) misrepresented what Mueller said. As the book describes, Rudy told journalists that if Trump couldn’t be indicted, he couldn’t be subpoenaed.

That’s all background to the discussion of whether Trump could be charged with obstruction. As the book describes, Trump’s request that Don McGahn make a false statement disclaiming Trump’s effort to replace Mueller involved the creation of a false record in an attempt to obstruct the investigation; it clearly involved creating a false evidentiary record, and so would qualify no matter how you interpret 18 USC 1512(c)(2). But the other obstruction incidents did not (this issue has now been decided by Fischer to require evidentiary impairment, meaning the only obstruction incident that could be charged against Trump, ignoring the immunity opinion, is the McGahn one). So there was an extended dispute, starting in May 2018, which a long chapter discusses at length.

But then, unbeknownst to Mueller, Bill Barr weighed in, writing Rod Rosenstein and OLC head Steven Engel that Mueller’s views on obstruction were wrong.

As the book describes, Barr’s allegedly unsolicited memo was “remarkably timely,” because, from that point forward, Rosenstein’s team seemed to adopt precisely the analysis Barr offered.

We didn’t know it at the time, but just as we were starting our subpoena discussion with the DOJ, another person weighed in with the department on these very issues.

On June 8, 2018, the once-and-future attorney general, William Barr, submitted a nineteen-page memo to Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, who was then head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. In his memo, Barr argued that section 1512 did not apply to President Trump in the manner Barr imagined we might be seeking to apply it. We say “imagined” because Barr had no actual insight into our work, so far as we knew.

Given that Barr was a private citizen at that time, his memo was remarkably timely. It posited (fairly accurately) that we were then “demanding that the President submit to interrogation about [obstruction] incidents, using the threat of subpoenas to coerce his submission.” Barr’s bottom line was that a prosecutor, even a special counsel, should not be allowed to require an examination of the president regarding these incidents, end of story. According to Barr, section 1512 prohibited only corrupt acts that impaired the integrity or availability of evidence, for instance, an act that destroyed a document or induced a witness to change his testimony. Barr’s memo stated that a president’s conduct can “obviously” be considered obstruction of justice in the “classic sense of sabotaging a proceeding’s truth-finding function. Thus, for example, if a President knowingly… induces a witness to change testimony… then he, like anyone else, commits the act of obstruction.”

But Barr maintained that the obstruction statute did not apply to what he termed the president’s “facially-lawful” actions—such as firing an FBI director or ending a federal criminal prosecution—even if such an action were done with corrupt intent and impacted a grand jury proceeding. In other words, even if Trump fired Comey for a corrupt purpose, that could not be a crime, in Barr’s view.

We wouldn’t become aware of Barr’s memo until December 2018, the day before his Senate confirmation hearing for attorney general. Nevertheless, his memo seemed to capture the fundamental issues Rosenstein and the department would raise throughout that summer when it came to subpoenaing the president. Barr may have previewed the department’s position when he wrote: “It is inconceivable to me that the Department could accept Mueller’s interpretation of 1512(c)(2). It is untenable as a matter of law and cannot provide a legitimate basis for interrogating the President.” [my emphasis]

A couple of points about this.

First, the Zebley book doesn’t address any documents that have subsequently been released. Most notably, while the book discusses the events immediately following the conclusion of the report at length, it doesn’t address Bill Barr’s memo declining prosecution on obstruction (the chapter on Barr’s letter to Congress is called “The Barr Report”), even though Barr egregiously avoided comment on the pardons that Trump was using to silence Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone.

Similarly, it doesn’t address the communications with OLC that were liberated via FOIA. Those show that starting on July 12 — the day before the GRU indictment incorporating reference to Roger Stone — Ed O’Callaghan shared everything that went between Mueller and Trump’s lawyers with Engel who, like Rosenstein, got the Barr obstruction memo, and along with O’Callaghan would “advise” Barr to release his letter to Congress. Starting on July 26, National Security Division head John Demers got added. Those things, taken together, strongly suggest that OLC was involved from the start to find a way to find that Trump couldn’t be charged (remember that Engel did similar cover-up work during impeachment).

All that is not that suspicious if, indeed, “Barr had no actual insight into our work.”

“So far as we knew.”

But it would be if Barr did have actual insight into what Mueller was doing.

LOLGOP and I are hard at work on our Ball of Thread episode on precisely how Bill Barr killed the Mueller investigation. And in that context, I’ve returned to something I’ve puzzled over for years: Barr’s description, in his book, of his decision to return to government with the intent of killing the Mueller investigation and starting an investigation without a crime, the Durham investigation.

I would soon make the difficult decision to go back into government in large part because I saw the way the President’s adversaries had enmeshed the Department of Justice in this phony scandal and were using it to hobble his administration. Once in office, it occupied much of my time for the first six months of my tenure. It was at the heart of my most controversial decisions. Even after dealing with the Mueller report, I still had to launch US Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the genesis of this bogus scandal. At the end of my first year in office, the President was impeached over a harebrained effort, involving Rudy Giuliani, to push back on the Russia collusion canard by digging up an alleged counter-scandal in Ukraine implicating the Clinton campaign or Vice President Biden and his son Hunter.

The fallout from Russiagate continued during my last year in office. My relationship with the President frayed as he became frustrated by my failure to bring charges against those who had ginned up Russiagate and the failure of Durham’s investigation to produce more rapid results.

I’ve always believed — even already taped for the podcast my belief — that you need no more than Barr’s reactionary views (which happen to match those of several SCOTUS justices), his past work obstructing Iran-Contra, and years of submersion in Fox News propaganda to explain his actions. Just like you need no more than Trump’s narcissism to explain his actions, you need no more than those three characteristics of Barr to explain his willingness to chase Russian disinformation in his effort to kill concerns about Trump’s ties to  Russia.

You need no more to explain their actions, but I can never shake the possibility there’s more.

All the more so given Lev Parnas’ claim, in interviews after the release of From Russia with Lev, that Victoria Toensing got Barr hired.

Now, Parnas’ reference — and his visibility on interactions between Toensing, Rudy, and Barr — post-dates Barr’s June 2018 memo. He’s talking about Toensing’s assurances to Trump, after he fired Jeff Sessions, that Barr would make the Mueller investigation go away (though if Toensing made that assurance, the Ukraine stuff looks far different, as does Barr’s treatment of it as a mere “counter-scandal”).

But Toensing was involved in the effort to make the Mueller investigation go away far earlier.

She represented Sam Clovis (who was interviewed, without an attorney, in two parts on October 3, 2017, and interviewed, including before a grand jury, with Toensing, on October 26, 2017). George Papadopoulos probably told Clovis that Russia had Hillary’s emails and Clovis was involved in Papadopoulos’ apparent discussions about setting up a September 2016 meeting with Russia, but Clovis testified that he had no memory of either of those things. And she represented Erik Prince (who was interviewed on April 4 and May 3, 2018) — who, like Steve Bannon, deleted their texts to each other from during the period when Prince was meeting with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles, but has no memory of doing so.

Indeed, Toensing’s spouse, Joe DiGenova, even briefly said he was representing Trump, during that transition where Rudy got added. During his Ukraine caper a year later, Rudy repeatedly proposed that he do the work while Toensing billed for it. So if you got Rudy, you got Toensing.

And if Toensing later was involved in getting Barr hired, it would be unsurprising if she was a contact with him before that.

Incidentally, Barr never once mentions Toensing in his book. He mentions Rudy, who is a central focus of his book, around 44 times. He exercised his right to remain silent about Toensing.

In a follow-up, I’m going to talk (again) about the blind spot that connects the Mueller investigation and the Durham investigation — the blind spot at the core of Bill Barr’s effort to cover up Trump’s ties to Russia.

For now, though, consider the possibility that Barr had a great deal more insight into the Mueller investigation when he wrote that memo than he let on.

Scott Schools Got the [Trump Subpoena] Memo — Then Left DOJ

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As noted, while the book by Aaron Zebley et al does not reveal a single new detail from the Russian investigation, it provided a bunch of new details on discussions between Mueller’s team, Trump’s lawyers, and DOJ. Two chapters focus almost entirely on discussions about an interview and, after Trump’s new legal team in May 2018, reversed earlier assurances Trump would sit for an interview, discussions about a subpoena.

The book describes how, after getting nowhere with requests for a voluntary interview, Zebley approached Scott Schools (then the senior non-political appointment at DOJ) about subpoenaing Trump. Schools asked for a memo making the case.

Three days after Mueller delivered it, Schools left DOJ.

Bob’s May 16 letter about the importance of an interview did not get an immediate response from Trump’s lawyers. Instead, after a series of emails, calls, and meetings during the ensuing weeks, the Raskins told us that they would agree to an interview on preelection Russia-related topics only. There could be no questions on obstruction. Bob rejected this proposal.

By the end of June, it was becoming clear that a subpoena might be the only way to secure the president’s testimony on obstruction. Aaron called Schools at the DOJ and relayed the president’s latest position. Aaron explained that “evidence from the president is likely to be of significant value to our evaluation of the issues.”

Schools did not immediately respond, so Aaron continued: “If we can’t negotiate a resolution, we’d like to point to a subpoena as our next step.” Aaron told Schools we wanted the department to agree to enforce a subpoena in the courts, including the Supreme Court if it came to that. “We have written materials that go through the evidence and our analysis” as to why a subpoena was necessary and appropriate, Aaron said.

Schools responded in his muted southern drawl, “Think we’ll want to see those.”

Four days later, on July 3, we delivered to Schools and O’Callaghan a memo, “Preliminary Assessment of Obstruction Evidence,” with a set of supporting documents. The takeaway was on page 1: the president had refused an interview; we had gathered significant evidence on obstruction and had determined that the law enabled us to compel the president’s testimony; and, finally, “we have concluded that the issuance of a subpoena is justified.” There was no immediate response from the department. (On July 6, 2018, after a decades-long career at the Department of Justice, Schools left to take a job in the private sector.)

There’s no evidence, here, that the memo was the reason Schools left, apparently with no notice to Mueller’s team.

But eight months later, in advance of the first meeting between Mueller and Barr, Ed O’Callaghan probed what would appear in the report on obstruction.

He specifically referred to the memo justifying the subpoena as “aggressive.”

We knew that one of the main issues for our March 5 meeting with Barr would be obstruction of justice. In the days leading up to the meeting, O’Callaghan had asked Aaron how we planned to handle our obstruction findings. “Will your report be as aggressive as your legal analysis from last summer?” he asked, referring to the memo we submitted in July 2018 about a subpoena for the president’s testimony. “That is a topic we want to discuss.”

As it happens, almost immediately after Mueller gave DOJ the memo in June 2018, according to files released under FOIA, they pulled in Office of Legal Counsel and (at least for a few meetings), National Security Division. It’s not entirely clear Mueller’s team realized Rod Rosenstein’s people were doing that.

Don’t Make the Same Mistake with Iran that Denialists Made with Russia

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I read the book by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein on the Mueller investigation. Regarding the investigation itself, there were no new details. Where the book does break new ground is in describing the discussions with Trump’s attorneys and DOJ officials, especially with regards to the debate about whether to subpoena Trump. I’ll return to those details in a follow-up.

But I want to point to something they said in their afterward. They describe that Barr’s treatment of the report helped sow doubt about the import of the Russian attack on US democracy in 2016.

Perhaps the most significant casualty of Barr’s handling of the report was the truth about Russia’s attack on the United States during the 2016 election. The Russian government interfered in our democracy in sweeping and systematic fashion. Those are the first substantive words of our report. This statement is beyond dispute, and yet many in America do not know that, and still others deny it.

As detailed in volume I of our report, Russian operatives working for the Internet Research Agency visited the United States in 2014 to gather intelligence for what they called “information warfare” against the United States. They returned to Russia and—sitting at their desks in Saint Petersburg—planned and advertised rallies to support Trump at specific US locations, invited Americans to attend, provided banners for Americans to wave, and then handed off logistical responsibilities for the events to real Americans. The goal of these activities, along with their yearslong campaign of false-name social media accounts, was to further divide Americans and cause them to think and behave in particular ways—including at the voting booth in 2016.

Meanwhile, Russian military intelligence hacked into email accounts belonging to the Democratic team supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then dumped emails and other documents they had stolen at specific times during the campaign to harm Clinton and bolster Trump. The Russians also leveraged WikiLeaks to release the stolen information, and, like the Russians, WikiLeaks timed its releases to favor Trump’s candidacy.

While these operations were underway, Russian government officials and their proxies reached out to multiple Trump campaign officials. George Papadopoulos was one example. A month after Trump appointed him as a foreign policy adviser in March 2016, Papadopoulos received word about a Russian government offer to assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information information damaging to Clinton—“dirt” in the form of “thousands of emails.” This offer coincided with the Russian military’s then secret hack-and-dump operation.

It is beyond dispute that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to support Trump—that was no hoax. They worked to secure his win. Our investigation of this work was no witch hunt.

[snip]

It has not seemed to matter, for instance, that our hack-and-dump indictment, which was backed by financial, email, and other records, demonstrated irrefutably that the Russian military executed this operation. Three days after the indictment came out, Trump dismissed it all in a press conference in Helsinki, Finland, after Putin—standing a few feet to Trump’s left—told him, “It’s not Russia.” Trump and his advocates declared it all a hoax, taking Putin’s word over the plain facts. And millions of Americans have taken this as truth, siding with Kremlin propaganda over the US Department of Justice.

We are now heading into another election. Russia interfered before, Russia is emboldened, and Russia is interfering again. Bob described Russia’s actions as one of the most serious attacks on democracy he has seen in his career—chilling words from the person who helped lead America’s fight against terrorism following the 9/11 attacks. As he put it in his 2019 testimony, the Russians are interfering in our democracy “as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

I’ve obviously written a lot about this. It’s the central focus of the Ball of Threads podcast that LOLGOP and I are doing.

I fear that, because of the polarization Trump has deliberately stoked, many lefties are doing the same thing that Trump’s MAGAts did with Russia: treat credible allegations that Iran is targeting him, both for hacking and assassination, as a hoax.

Regarding the hacking, as happened in 2016, it is not just the Intelligence Community (one, two) attributing the hack in real time. Both Microsoft and Google have described the operation. As I explained repeatedly regarding the 2016 Russian attack, big American tech companies have a similar kind of global reach as the NSA, and when someone uses their infrastructure to target someone, they have both the tools and an independent incentive to get the attribution right. There’s really no reason to doubt the attribution, from three of the entities with the best global reach in the world, that Iran targeted Trump’s campaign.

Regarding Iran’s attempt to assassinate Trump, there’s also no reason to doubt that. While the case against Asif Merchant, whom DOJ accused of trying to solicit a variety of operations targeting Trump, does rely on undercover FBI employees posing as wannabe hitmen, the underlying tip — from the guy Merchant allegedly asked for help recruiting a hit team — appears to be organic, just someone calling the cops. Plus, the effort bears certain resemblance to the effort to solicit assassins for John Bolton, arising from the same motive of revenge for the Qassem Soleimani killing.

According to court documents, on Oct. 22, 2021, Poursafi asked Individual A, a U.S. resident whom Poursafi previously met online, to take photographs of the former National Security Advisor, claiming the photographs were for a book Poursafi was writing. Individual A told Poursafi that he/she could introduce Poursafi to another person who would take the pictures for $5,000-$10,000. Individual A later introduced Poursafi to an associate (referred to in court documents as the confidential human source or CHS).

On Nov. 9, 2021, Poursafi contacted the CHS on an encrypted messaging application, and then directed the CHS to a second encrypted messaging application for further communications. Poursafi offered the CHS $250,000 to hire someone to “eliminate” the former National Security Advisor. This amount would later be negotiated up to $300,000. Poursafi added that he had an additional “job,” for which he would pay $1 million.

As I noted in my first post on the Merchant arrest, the Pakistani man took 20 minutes before he let the FBI in to arrest him, meaning he may have had time to destroy evidence. There’s no reason to assume Merchant’s efforts to hire assassins was limited to the NYC source who called the FBI, nor is there reason to assume that Merchant was the only one recruiting assassins.

Indeed, as I keep noting, we can’t rule out that Ryan Routh (who was indicted yesterday and will face trial before Aileen Cannon, and whose son was arrested Monday after the FBI found CSAM at his house while conducting a search presumably related to his father) was recruited by Iran. His sympathy for Iran and his antipathy for Trump were both public, he imagined himself a fighter, and he had international ties from his efforts to recruit fighters for Ukraine. Both the Bolton efforts and the Merchant plot relied on secure digital operational security, and the six phones Routh had in his truck indicate he was communicating in unusual ways, even for — especially for — a person with possible mental illness. And the timing of Routh’s movements — he left North Carolina August 14 and traveled to Florida, scoped out Trump events in August, September, and October, and conducted reconnaissance for much of the month leading up to his arrest — match the planned timing of the Merchant plot. For a variety of reasons (not least that Routh has due process rights and an incentive to flip, if he did have co-conspirators), if the FBI did suspect an Iranian tie, they wouldn’t say more than they already have done, including references to Iran in his detention memo.

In the wake of Routh’s indictment yesterday, the IC briefed Trump on ongoing assassination threats from Iran. And while his comments to Fox — suggesting that Kamala Harris was weak on Iran — were typical Trump garbage, Trump’s Xitter account posted something that — for him — is downright gracious, recognizing the bipartisan support to expand Secret Service funding.

It is perfectly reasonable to call out the double standards of Trump himself, in responding stupidly to the hacking attempt, in ignoring his own role in the stalking of Barack Obama and pretending he has faced unique threats, in media outlets refusing to publish stolen emails.

Trump’s narcissistic behavior is one reason it’s so easy for hostile countries like Russia and Iran to stoke division.

But that doesn’t mean you should make it easier for them, by doubting the word of neutral parties who attest the threat to Trump is real. The Russian attack continues to do real damage, to this day, because the investigation into it led to such polarization. If I’m right about the Steele dossier (Ball of Thread version), some of that was by design, while some of it was the auspicious upside (from the perspective of Russia) of targeting a narcissist. But the result is the same: By targeting Trump, you can elicit the tribalism that damages the US, regardless of Iran’s (or Russia’s) other efforts. A great deal of the polarization in the US, a great deal of the conspiracism on the part of Trump supporters, and therefore a great deal of the extremism, stems from the response to the Russian attack and investigation.

Whether a country backs Trump or wants revenge against him, the goal is the same: to end US hegemony and extend authoritarianism. There are public, rational reasons to believe that Iran really is targeting Trump. There are no good reasons to instead irrationally doubt those public attributions.

Update: In an appearance in North Carolina, Trump said there could be a tie to Iran, and complained that DOJ had not yet broken into the six phones found in Routh’s truck.

The Habitual Lies on Which Trump Has Built His Attack on Rule of Law

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Credit where it’s due: WaPo has already published two stories this week that attempt to cover Trump like the conman he is, rather than the good faith politician he is often treated as.

Yesterday, Ashley Parker wrote about how Trump spins ridiculous lies to gin up fear against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.

Later yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey described what Trump was trying to do with a statement that — among other things — said Trump wanted Florida to take the lead in investigating the Ryan Routh suspected assassination attempt: He was trying to “foment distrust of federal law enforcement.”

His statement sought to implicate President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, picking up on other recent remarks blaming them for failing to protect him. There is no evidence that Biden or Harris were involved in any security decisions leading up to the apparent assassination attempts, and Biden has since ordered the administration to provide the Secret Service with every available resource and asked Congress for more funding.

These pieces treat Trump’s language as utilitarian means to accrue power, rather than transparent statements of truth, something that — in my opinion — is necessary to reclaim truth from him. It’s a rare moment of a news outlet applying savviness to the manipulation Trump is attempting rather than how it fits into a campaign strategy.

The means of manipulation are the news, not (primarily, anyway) the measure of their success.

That said, while the Arnsdorf/Dawsey story fact checks two of Trump’s claims,

There is no evidence that Biden or Harris were involved in any security decisions leading up to the apparent assassination attempts, and Biden has since ordered the administration to provide the Secret Service with every available resource and asked Congress for more funding.

[snip]

He also complained that FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, who Trump appointed, testified to Congress in July that he was not certain what struck Trump’s ear at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pa. The FBI quickly clarified that Trump was injured by a bullet or a fragment.

They don’t fact check the lies on which Trump’s grievances are based. For example, they misstate what Trump claimed that Director Wray said:

[T]he FBI Director went before Congress and falsely said that it may not have been a bullet, “It was just glass or shrapnel — a lie condemned by even my worst enemies. What he said was disgraceful, especially since it was witnessed LIVE by millions of people, and he was forced to immediately retract.

This quotation, presented as such, completely misstates what Chris Wray said.

He said, “there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.” As the FBI clarified immediately, what hit Trump was, “a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces.” Bullet fragments are shrapnel.

Wray never raised glass (from the teleprompter).

Similarly, WaPo never debunks Trump’s false claim that the “Biden/Harris DOJ/FBI [have] control over local D.A.s and A.G.s.”

Perhaps the most curious choice, however, is how WaPo defined half a paragraph of shorthand for readers…

In the statement, Trump proceeded to recite a long list of legal problems that he attributed to his political opponents, using shorthand familiar to his fans, including:

  • “Russia, Russia, Russia,” meaning special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election
  • “Impeachment Hoax Number One,” again meaning the 2019 impeachment, for which the Senate acquitted him; and “Impeachment Hoax Number Two,” meaning his 2021 impeachment for inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, again resulting in acquittal
  • “the Lawless Documents Hoax,” meaning the court-authorized search of his Mar-a-Lago estate as part of a federal prosecution for mishandling classified documents, which a Trump-appointed judge dismissed in July
  • “the January 6th Hoax” and “the J6 Unselect Committee,” meaning the House investigation into the attack on the Capitol
  • “the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case,” meaning his conviction in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a 2016 hush money scheme
  • “the New York A.G. Scam,” meaning New York Attorney General Letitia James’s lawsuit accusing Trump’s businesses of fraud, resulting in a $450 million judgment in February

… without debunking the lies.

For example, DOJ has repeatedly debunked Trump’s claim that the January 6 Committee deleted documents and Republicans haven’t been able to prove it with their majority either.

Letitia James didn’t just accuse Trump and win a judgment, she proved that Trump and his sons are fraudsters.

And the balance of that paragraph includes a set of lies implicating Hunter Biden and his father. Trump invented the quote, “Russian interference and disinformation;” the false claim that the former spooks used the word “disinformation,” rather than “information operation,” has always been central to an orchestrated campaign claiming they lied. Moreover, the letter expressed a non-falsifiable opinion; to this day many of the former spooks who signed it stand by that opinion that the laptop “has the earmarks of a Russian influence operation.” (And contrary to some WaPo reports, FBI has never claimed to have done the things it would need to do to dispute it.)

Nothing in the laptop shows evidence of Joe Biden’s grift (indeed, after six years of investigation, DOJ didn’t substantiate any unlawful grift on the part of Hunter).

In other words, it’s not just the general insinuation that the Deep State can’t be trusted. WaPo is right that Trump uses a lot of shorthand when he attacks the Deep State.

But even that shorthand is riddled with deliberate false claims. In each instance, Trump transforms something that has a perfectly understandable explanation — Chris Wray was trying hard to avoid overstating what the FBI had concluded, the spooks expressed an opinion — and by misrepresenting it, makes it appear far worse, Wray dismissing the seriousness of Trump being hit, former spooks trying to cover for the Biden family.

I don’t mean to be greedy. I’m grateful that WaPo has, at long last, started explaining how Trump exerts his power, rather than treating his false claims as if they were delivered in good faith.

But if we’re going to unpack the very cynical way Trump has deployed lie after lie to get his supporters and the Republican Party generally to hate rule of law, this cumulative process needs to be unpacked. The press has, for years, simply let Trump repeat those underlying claims without contest, as WaPo again does here. None of them are true, but his followers believe them, not least because the press disseminates them in various ways without contest.

There is no underlying basis for Trump’s grievances about the Deep State. None.

To invent that grievance, Trump has created lie after lie, and built them together into a caricature of the Deep State that his loyal followers have been trained to attack.

Ball of Thread: The Mueller Investigation

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LOLGOP had already started the (probably two) posts on how Bill Barr bolloxed the Mueller Report when we realized we hadn’t actually done the report itself! So here’s my take, in readily accessible format.

The Patreon site has a rough transcript; remember: subscribing to that is separate from my own Patreon, but we’re also releasing bonus episodes.

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Useful Idiots: DOJ Moves from Name-and-Shame to Name-and-Disrupt

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In the Election Task Force presser at which DOJ also rolled out two operations against Russian foreign malign influence last week, Merrick Garland described that the investigation into RT’s efforts to hide its efforts in the US was ongoing. “The charges unsealed this morning do not represent the end of the investigation. It remains active and ongoing.”

Indeed, last week, Tim Pool (believed to be Commentator-2 in the RT indictment) revealed that he would assist in the investigation (presumably meaning he’ll sit for the interview the FBI requested).

The language Pool used — the emphasis on a voluntary interview, one echoed by Benny Johnson’s more equivocal statement about his response to a similar FBI invitation — suggests DOJ is treating Pool, and so presumably most of the other commentators described in the indictment, as media under DOJ’s recently updated media guidelines.

Not so Lauren Chen herself — or at least, not Tenet Media. After all, the indictment describes several Discord servers — a general one, one focused on “funders,” another on “producers,” and another for one of the commentators — that all seem to be part of Tenet’s overarching Discord server run by Chen. To get legal process on that, as they clearly did, prosecutors would have had to convince DOJ’s National Security Division head, Matt Olsen, that Tenet or Chen either aren’t media or fit into one of the designated exceptions to the media rule.

Prosecutors might do that through Chen’s (or her spouse, Liam Donovan’s) past work with RT, after such time as it had registered as an agent of Russia in 2017. Or, if DOJ could prove that Chen knew the Russians she was working for were just an extension of her pre-existing RT contract, that might also satisfy the exception for “a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.” But even Chen’s acceptance of US-bound payments via wire from “Turkish Shell Entity-1” described as, “BUYING GOODS-INV.013-IPHONE 15 PRO MAX 512GB” would likely reach an aid-and-abet standard for RT’s alleged money laundering.

According to the indictment, the many cut-outs via which she (and by association, the podcasters) were being paid, were visible to her. None were in France, where the fictional funder of the project purportedly lived. She was witting to the money laundering alleged in the indictment, which probably qualifies her for an exception to the media guidelines. Charging that money laundering may be one step in justifying a broader investigation into Chen, including one that extends into her other roles in the far right network at Glenn Beck’s show and on Turning Point USA.

This post, which I started last week, was going to be a post laying out how all of last week’s activities seem to be an attempt to move beyond DOJ’s prior approach of name-and-shaming foreign hackers, to a name-and-disrupt approach. Lawfare did such a post earlier this week, and Alex Finley did one focused on RT and Doppelganger.

But I’m going to post the part of that larger post focused on RT now, because State just rolled out the next step of this name-and-disrupt operation: sharing intelligence showing how RT has become a front for Russia’s broader intelligence operations.

The State Department revealed declassified US intelligence findings that suggest RT is fully integrated into Russia’s intelligence operations around the world and announced it is launching a diplomatic campaign to provide countries with information about the risks associated with RT activities.

“Thanks to new information, much of which originates from RT employees, we know that RT possessed cyber capabilities and engaged in covert information and influence operations and military procurement,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday.

A key finding from the new US intelligence is that, for more than a year, the Russian government has quietly embedded an intelligence-gathering unit within RT that is focused on influence operations globally. That activity has been part of US officials described as a big expansion of RT’s role as an arm and mouthpiece of the Kremlin abroad. The activity goes beyond propaganda and covert influence operations to even include military procurement, according to US officials.

The flyer from State laying this out lists cover operations in Germany, France, and Argentina.

DOJ presumably timed last week’s indictment to beat the 60-day prohibition on announcements that might effect an election. But it was presumably also coordinated with Anthony Blinken’s trip to Eastern Europe, whence he just returned.

It appears that rolling out the indictment did two things. First, it laid out how this works, how a persona sets up an allegedly witting front, like Lauren Chen, to effectively recruit useful idiots on Russia’s behalf.

But by unrolling the indictment last week, DOJ likely facilitated further investigation of the Tenet operation.

It’s likely, for example, that DOJ needs cooperation from the podcasters like Benny and Pool to pursue an investigation into Chen any further. At the very least, prosecutors would have to lock them into statements that they had no idea they were working for RT. Those statements might not be entirely persuasive, mind you, but such statements would be crucial to showing that Chen was part of the RT deception, part of an effort by an agent of Russia to spread their propaganda via unwitting cut-outs.

By rolling out the indictment in the way they did, DOJ gave all the podcasters an incentive to immediately claim ignorance, if for no other reason than to preserve their own brand. As NBC curated, several of the podcasters did claim they were victims, within a day.

Pool said, in part, in a lengthy statement on X: “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.”

[Benny] Johnson, also on X, said: “A year ago, a media startup pitched my company to provide content as an independent contractor. Our lawyers negotiated a standard, arms length deal, which was later terminated. We are disturbed by the allegations in today’s indictment, which make clear that myself and other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme. My lawyers will handle anyone who states or suggests otherwise.”

[Tayler] Hansen said, in part, on X: “These allegations come as a complete shock to me and the other hosts at TENET Media. I want to be as clear as possible, I was never directed to report on any topic and had complete freedom and control over my reporting at all times. I would never agree to any arrangement where I am not the sole person in charge of the stories I cover and content I create.”

[Dave] Rubin said, in part, on X:” These allegations clearly show that I and other commentators were the victims of this scheme. I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

[Matt] Christiansen said, in part, on X: “At no point has anyone ever directed me what to say or not to say, and I would never agree to anything otherwise. My videos and streams for Tenet are exactly the same as my videos and streams on my personal channels. Every word is from me and me alone.” [my emphasis]

And after they did claim to be victims, the FBI called them up and said, “how would you like to sit for a voluntary interview … you know, as a victim?”

This is why I’m way more sympathetic to Pool and Benny’s claims they’re victims than others, who rightly argue they had to have known something sketchy was going on: not because I believe they were that stupid (both could have been, but Pool, who hired Cassandra Fairbanks after she was already tainted as a Sputnik persona, has been swimming in these waters for years). But because DOJ set this up to highly motivate them to position themselves, publicly, as victims and then capitalized on that to take further investigative steps.

But this operation also served to disrupt Russian support of propaganda, which is one of the reasons I view the efforts rolled out last week as an attempt to disrupt ongoing efforts, rather than just an attempt to name-and-shame.

After all, the podcasters (Rubin and Benny had already moved on; the others had not) are out of a hefty paycheck. Tim Pool will either have to find some right wing billionaire to pay wildly inflated rates for his apology for Russia from here on out, or he’ll have to scale back. It might take some weeks to do that. He might even have to give up politicizing the local skateboard park.

By sanctioning RT, among others, upon release of this indictment, not just the Tenet podcasters, but anyone else in the US knowingly on the RT grift, has to drop their gig immediately.

Presumably, a number of other people are doing quietly what former weapons inspector Scott Ritter did quite boisterously last week. Ritter — who, last month, had his house searched — posted that the sanctions on RT meant he had to immediately drop his RT gigs.

Per his claims in a Substack post released since then, Ritter was getting nothing close to what the podcasters were.

Amidst revelations of multi-million dollar deals where influencers were paid $100,000 a week to produce video content, and on-air hosts given million dollar salaries along with other perks, my relationship with Russian state-owned media pales into insignificance, contracted as an outside contributor compensated with what now, by comparison, seems a paltry $250-280 per item published, with the total amount received amounting to less than 7% of my total annual income.

Apparently, my negotiating skills are lacking—rather than insisting that I would not consider any offer under $5 million, I was content with compensation that matched the industry “norm” of between $150-300 per item published. Earlier this year, when RT thought that my interest in contributing had waned, they offered to double the price paid per article; I declined, insisting that we adhere to the letter of our agreement.

And now having done that — having forced people who were being supported by RT to drop their gigs — partners around the world can turn to unpacking similar operations in their own countries.

There are, undoubtedly, other nodes like the Tenet one, both in the US and around the world. This one may have been particularly important to disrupt before the election, because of Chen’s involvement with Turning Point, which will have a key role in Trump’s GOTV.

But whatever she was doing, TPA has cut her off.

Don Jr’s Online Buddies Allegedly Demand $5 Million from Russian Shell Companies to Say Nice Things about His Daddy

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When DOJ announced today it would unseal legal actions against Russian influence operations, the former President’s failson complained, “Here we go again. LOL”

Some hours later, it became clear that a number of right wing influencers, including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, were unwittingly on the take from Russia, via Tenet Media, which DOJ alleges in a new indictment is a front company for RT.

I consider myself a connoisseur of a well-written indictments. And this, released days after Labor Day and implicating a number of Americans, may be one of my favorites.

Start with the two crimes alleged, like the innermost layer in a matryoshka doll.

The indictment only charges two things. First, conspiracy to violate FARA (18 USC 371), based on just only charges four overt acts, all pertaining to RT persona Elena Afanasyeva:

  • Konstantyn Kalashnikov’s addition of Afanasyeva to Tenet’s Discord Server in August 2023.
  • Afanasyeva’s circulation fo 841 video clips that got posted onto Tenet’s social media channels, possibly including the video of Tucker Carlson getting off after shopping in a Moscow grocery store.
  • Tenet’s June 2024 authorization for Afanasyeva and Kalashnikov to post on Tenet’s platform.
  • 30 wire transfers to Tenet, though countries including Türkiye, the Emirates, Mauritius, Czechia, and Hungary, all ultimately going through a bank in NYC.

The second charge, conspiracy to commit money laundering, describes only that Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva used a variety of means to hide that RT was paying for all this.

To prove the FARA charge — one you’d only need to prove if Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva showed up in the US for arrest — you’d need to prove that the two RT people succeeded in influencing US politics, and deliberately hid that they were doing so on behalf of a Russian entity. And RT is sufficient — you wouldn’t need to show that RT was paid by the Russian government.

So you have to show how they worked through cut-outs, the two people who run Tenet media and through them the influencers like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson who got duped.

And that requires you showing how RT set up fake personas, including a fake funder named Eduard Grigoriann, as a front to use to convince Pool and Johnson this was all legit, so that after one of them — I believe this is Pool — asked for more information about whom he’d be working with, they would have ready answers.

One of the other figureheads — either Johnson or Dave Rubin — complained about this fake funder (FBI mocks them all because they keep spelling his name wrong), because he used woke language:

Commentator-1 had “a problem with the profile we sent over, specifically the reference to ‘social justice.” I think it may be because that’s usually a term used by liberals, but we’re trying to create a conservative network.”

That led to a Zoom meeting that the persona, Grigoriann may have missed, because they fucked up the time difference between Paris and Moscow.

At approximately 8:58 a.m. Central Time that day, “Eduard Grigoriann” replied to his earlier email: “I am there guys.” The time, in fact, was 3:58 p.m. in Paris — but it was 4:58 p.m. in Moscow. Approximately two minutes later, “Eduard Grigoriann” performed a Google search for “time in Paris.” “Eduard Grigoriann” them replied to his email, in part: “Sorry, wrong hour. Didn’t sync the calendar.”

There’s some real clown show stuff in this. But it didn’t matter for Pool and whichever one is Commentator-1, because they signed contracts worth almost $5 million a year or $100,000 per non-exclusive video.

The money laundering part of the indictment describes that RT has laundered $10 million to pay for Tenet’s work.

Which brings me back to the logic of this indictment. As noted, it’s all focused on the Russians, and even there, the evidence in the indictment consists of IP addresses showing they accessed Tenet servers from the same IP address they used to access their Gmail accounts from Moscow. There’s undoubtedly a lot of SIGINT behind what the US government knows about the operation.

It’s not necessary to prove criminal charges.

And there’s no First Amendment equities, because Afanasyeva and Kalashnikov are both overseas.

Even if DOJ hadn’t missed the 60-day window for the election by two days, there’d be no election implications for the same reason.

But this indictment will continue to work for the next two months, until the election and thereafter.

In the presser announcing this and another legal action, DOJ emphasized that this investigation is very much ongoing.

For people like Pool and one of the other Commentators, so long as they claim to be duped by these awful Russians, they’re in the clear, legally (interestingly, Pool has ties to Cassandra Fairbanks, who was targeted by RT in 2016). In fact, Pool has posted to just that effect.

My statement regarding allegations and the leaked [sic] DOJ Indictment

Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed

The Culture War Podcast was licensed by Tenet Media, it existed well before any license agreement with Tenet and it will continue to exist after any such agreement expires. The only change with the agreement was that the location of the live broadcast moved to Tenet’s Youtube Channel.

Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show and the contents of the show are often apolitical. Examples include discussing spirituality, dating, and videos games.

The show is produced in its entirety by our local team without input from anyone external to the company

TCW is separate company not associated with http://Timcast.com or other properties. It exists solely for the production of the Culture War Podcast

That being said, we still do not know what is true as these are only allegations.

Putin is a scumbag, Russia sucks donkey balls

And to the journalists who wish to jump the gun, create their own narrative, or lie about what is currently going on,

you can eat my irish ass

Tim Pool is now on the record with “donkey balls.”

But there are other people — certainly the two founders of Tenet — whose actions might be crimes, either Foreign Agent and/or sanctionable crimes.

DOJ doesn’t tell us about the fate of those people. Perhaps there are other indictments buried somewhere. Perhaps they are coming.

Anyway, read the whole thing: It’s a tale of right wing grift, sloppy operational security that was nonetheless adequate to satisfy far right grifters, and a far bigger spend on the part of Russia to play in this year’s election.

And read it, too, for how even the producers who worked for Tenet, who also appear to have known the gig, thought that Tucker Carlson’s video, pretending to be wowed by a Russian supermarket was too much. “It just feels like overt shilling.”

Nevertheless they shilled away.

ABC Treats Kamala’s 21-Year Old Misstatement about Prosecutions as News but Not Trump’s Daily Lies about His Own Crimes

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As the mainstream press continues to soil itself like toddlers over Kamala Harris’ interview tonight, I was going to use this CNN piece — suggesting questions about how the VP’s stance on immigration has changed — as an example of the complete collapse of any sense of newsworthiness.

After all, Donald Trump has still never been asked, much less answered, how he plans to fulfill his promise of mass deportations, something that might be impossible without dramatic escalation of police force against both citizens and not. He hasn’t been asked how he’ll pay for it, which would be prohibitively expensive. He hasn’t asked who will do the jobs, such as in agriculture, that keep America’s cost of living relatively low. He hasn’t been asked if he’ll separate families, especially marriages empowered by Obergefell.

Trump hasn’t been asked the most basic questions about one of his only policy promises.

CNN’s Eva McKend has really good questions about immigration policy. In another place and time they’d be totally valid questions!

But given the failure by the entire press corps to ask Trump about a policy promise that would serve as — and assuredly is intended to serve as — a bridge to fascism, it is the height of irresponsibility to waste time on the shifts in Harris’ immigration views, because they don’t matter in the face of Trump’s promises to sic cops on American families in pursuit of brown people.

So that was going to be my exemplar of how completely the press corps has lost any sense of proportionality regarding what counts as news.

Then I read this piece from ABC, which makes a big deal out of the fact that in 2003 — 21 years ago!!! — some Kamala Harris campaign fliers said she prosecuted over a hundred cases, when she should have said she was involved in that many.

But during a debate held in the runup to Election Day 2003 on KGO Radio, Harris’ then-opponent, veteran criminal defense attorney Bill Fazio, accused her of misleading voters about her record as a prosecutor and deputy district attorney in California’s Alameda County.

“How many cases have you tried? Can you tell us how many serious felonies you have tried? Can you tell us one?” Fazio asked Harris, according to audio ABC News obtained of the debate, which also included then-current San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan.

“I’ve tried about 50 cases, Mr. Fazio, and it’s about leadership,” Harris responded.

Fazio then pointed out campaign literature where Harris had been claiming a more extensive prosecutorial record.

“Ms. Harris, why does your information, which is still published, say that you tried hundreds of serious felonies? I think that’s misleading. I think that’s disingenuous. I think that shows that you are incapable of leadership and you’re not to be trusted,” Fazio said. “You continue to put out information which says you have tried hundreds of serious felonies.”

[snip]

Asked this week about Harris’ prosecutorial experience before she became district attorney, a spokesperson for Harris’ presidential campaign used slightly different language to describe her record — saying she was “involved in” hundreds of cases.

This is insane!! Having prosecuted 50 felonies is a lot, for an entire career! To make a stink about this 21-year old misstatement would be unbelievable on its face.

But it is just contemptible, given the amount of lies Donald Trump tells about his own crimes that ABC lets go unmentioned.

Just as one example, check out how ABC covered Donald Trump’s August 8 Mar-a-Lago presser. In that presser, Trump seems to have falsely claimed he did oversee a peaceful transfer of power (the only lie NYT called out in its coverage of this presser). He lied about the four people who were killed that day. He lied about his role in sending his mob to the Capitol. He lied about what those mobsters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” were seeking to do. He lied about how Jan6 defendants are being treated. [All emphasis here and elsewhere my own.]

QUESTION: Mr. President, you were – you just said that it was a peaceful transfer of power last time when you left office. You didn’t (inaudible) …

TRUMP: What – what’s your question?

QUESTION: My question is you can’t (inaudible) the last time it was a peaceful transfer of power when you left office?

The second one (ph) …

TRUMP: No, I think the people that – if you look at January 6th, which a lot of people aren’t talking about very much, I think those people were treated very harshly when you compare them to other things that took place in this country where a lot of people were killed. Nobody was killed on January 6th.

But I think that the people of January 6th were treated very unfairly. And they – where – they were there to complain not through me. They were there to complain about an election. And, you know, it’s very interesting. The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken to, and I said peacefully and patriotically, which nobody wants to say, but I said peacefully and patriotically.

Trump made a misleading crack meant to suggest that Arthur Engoron undervalued Mar-a-Lago.

TRUMP: It’s a hard room because it’s very big, if you don’t …

(LAUGHTER)

… this is worth $18 million.

Trump lied that the prosecutions against him — all of them — are politically motivated. He lied that “they” have weaponized government against him. He lied that the Florida case, in which he was investigated for the same crime as Joe Biden, was weaponized. He falsely claimed that the NY cases are controlled by DOJ.

TRUMP: Because other people have done far bigger things in see a ban [ph] and sure, it’s politically motivated. I think it’s a horrible thing they did. Look, they’ve weaponized government against me. Look at the Florida case. It was a totally weaponized case. All of these cases.

By the way, the New York cases are totally controlled out of the Department of Justice. They sent their top person to the various places. They went to the AG’s office, got that one going. Then he went to the DA’s office, got that one going, ran through it.

No, no, this is all politics, and it’s a disgrace. Never happened in this country. It’s very common that it happens, but not in our country. It happens in banana republics and third-world countries, and that’s what we’re becoming.

Trump claimed he wouldn’t have wanted to put Hillary in jail when, on his orders, DOJ investigated the Clinton Foundation for the entirety of his term and then John Durham tried to trump up conspiracy charges against her (and did bring a frivolous case against her campaign lawyer). Trump also lied about calming, rather than stoking, the “Lock her up” chants at rallies. Trump lied about what files Hillary destroyed after receiving a subpoena (and who destroyed them).

TRUMP: I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to talk about it. I think it’s a tragic story, if you want to know the truth. And I felt that with Hillary Clinton, too. You know, with Hillary Clinton, I could have done things to her that would have made your head spin. I thought it was a very bad thing, take the wife of a President of the United States and put her in jail. And then I see the way they treat me. That’s the way it goes.

But I was very protective of her. Nobody would understand that, but I was. I think my people understand it. They used to say “lock her up, lock her up,” and I’d say “just relax, please.” We won the election. I think it would be very – I think – I think it would have been horrible for our country if I – and we had her between the hammering of all of the files.

And don’t forget, she got a subpoena from the United States Congress, and then after getting the subpoena, she destroyed everything that she was supposed to get. I – I – I could – it – I didn’t think – I thought it was so bad to take her and put her in jail, the wife of a President of the United States. And then when it’s my turn, nobody thinks that way. I thought it was a very terrible thing. And she did a lot of very bad things. I’ll tell you what, she was – she was pretty evil.

But in terms of the country and in terms of unifying the country, bringing it back, to have taken her and to have put her in jail – and I think you know the things as well as I do. They were some pretty bad acts that she did.

Depending on how you count, that’s around twelve lies in one hour-long press conference. They’re proof of Trump’s abuse of the presidency, his refusal to cooperate with an investigation like Joe Biden had, his lifelong habits of fraud, and his assault on democracy.

And these are only the lies about his own (and his eponymous corporation’s) crimes! They don’t include the lies about abortion or gun laws and shootings, other lies about the law he told in that presser.

And yet ABC covered none of those lies, focusing instead on Trump’s false claims about crowd size.

Crowd size.

These aren’t the only lies about justice Trump routinely tells. He routinely lies that he “won” the documents case, that he was declared innocent or that Biden was only not prosecuted because he was too old. They don’t include the lies Trump has told about the Hunter Biden case, the Russian investigation, his actual actions in the Ukraine impeachment. Trump continues to lie about whether he sexually assaulted E Jean Carroll. He lies about his Administration’s jailing of Michael Cohen to shut him up.

Then there are Trump’s renewed false claims, in the last day, about the superseding indictment against him.

Trump lies all the time. He lies about the cases against him, about his own crime. He lies with a goal: to present rule of law as a personal grievance. Those lies go to his core unfitness to be President.

And yet, aside from some good reporting (particularly from Katherine Faulders) on these crimes, ABC never bothers to fact check Donald Trump’s lies about rule of law, not even his own prosecutions.

It is the height of irresponsibility to adopt this double standard — to ignore Trump’s corruption of rule of law while chasing a campaign exaggeration made two decades ago. It was bad enough that the press corps sits there, docilely, as Trump corrupts rule of law every time he opens his mouth. But to then try to make a campaign issue about whether Kamala Harris was involved in or prosecuted 50 cases decades ago?

ABC claims that Kamala Harris made misstatements. But their own failure to report on Trump’s false claims is a far, far greater misrepresentation of the truth, and it’s a misrepresentation of the truth they repeat every day.

America’s Whimpering Democracy Is Trump’s Past, as Well as Future

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There was a bit of a kerfuffle yesterday in response to an Erik Wemple claim that the media has not shirked media coverage of the risk posed by Trump while focusing non-stop on Biden’s (but not Trump’s) age.

Wemple made a list — and given the prevalence of lefty columnists, not a particularly impressive one, once you look closely.

But it also betrays the degree to which journalists have the same blind spots I have noted in NYT’s series on the subject (which makes up 15 entries in Wemple’s list): they ignore or understate how much of this Trump did in his first term and continues to do it via his right wing allies in Congress.

Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan keep teaming up to write the same story over and over: A second Trump term is going to be bad … really bad.

Just some of these stories, in reverse order from Tuesday’s latest installment, are:

There are several aspects to these stories: a bid to eliminate civil service protections, a personalization of power, and the elevation of people who proved willing to abuse power in his first term: Russel Vought (who helped obstruct the Ukraine investigation), Stephen Miller, and Johnny McEntee (who even before January 6 was making a willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act a litmus test for hiring at DOD), and Jeffrey Clark.

The series, thus far, skirts the language of authoritarianism and fascism.

[snip]

These stories admit that Trump did some of this in his first term. But they describe a process of retribution by the guy who got elected — with abundant assistance from Maggie Haberman — on a platform of “Lock her up!,” who breached the norm of judicial independence 24 days into office when he asked Jim Comey to “let this” Mike Flynn “thing go,” as something that took a while to “ramp up.”

[snip]

[T]hese pieces always vastly understate how much politicization Trump pulled off in his first term, and never describe how that politicization continues at the hands of people like Jim Jordan.

Such reporting will be most salient, I believe, if reports show voters the costs of such abuses of the judicial system have already had and are already having.

Even as the kerfuffle was unrolling, Rosa Brooks published a piece in The Bulwark describing the lessons from a series of five nonpartisan simulations on how American democracy might fare if Trump wins in November.

The simulations showed that the risk Trump poses isn’t necessarily the immediate totalitarianism or civil war liberals sometimes raise, but instead targeted persecution against those who speak up.

The exercises produced some “good news”: None of the simulations devolved into mass violence or civil conflict, and Team Trump found it difficult to fully execute its most ambitious plans. For instance, in one of our exercises, Trump’s efforts to detain millions of undocumented migrants floundered; the money and infrastructure for such a massive operation proved too challenging.

[snip]

High-profile nonprofit groups are undergoing IRS audits, forcing their senior staff to spend most of their time huddled with accountants and lawyers. More university presidents have resigned in the face of investigations, audits, and threats to yank federal funding over curricula and the actions of student protests. Meanwhile, a number of high-profile journalists are the targets of leak investigations. The owners of several major media outlets are under investigation for specious criminal tax code violations, and the FCC is considering revoking the broadcast licenses of a dozen television stations. Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, and retired Gen. Mark Milley are under investigation for allegedly mishandling classified materials.

The nation’s streets are largely peaceful. But around the country, numerous civil servants, reporters, teachers, librarians, election officials, and other community leaders are being doxxed and threatened.

You can imagine how this unfolds. Most people will see the writing on the wall: Speak out, and life becomes unpleasant. Your address and children’s names will be posted on social media. You’ll get a nasty letter from the IRS. Perhaps your brother’s undocumented girlfriend will go to work one day and never come home, and you won’t know if she’s been detained or deported. Your pregnant niece might be stopped by police as she drives from Texas to New Mexico, and grilled about whether she’s heading to an abortion clinic. Maybe the FBI and Homeland Security will use undercover agents—or even government surveillance capabilities—to spy on organizations from school boards to church groups, in search of “illegals,” “Christian-hating communists,” the “woke,” and other “vermin.”

The chilling effect on our politics would be intense. Ordinary citizens would self-censor. Many federal, state, and local leaders, rightly worried about the effects on themselves and their families, will quietly step down from their roles.

Definitely read the piece. As you do, though, consider the ways that this, too, is a story of Trump’s past and present, not just his future.

Just yesterday, for example, FBI’s Deputy Direct Paul Abbate said that he “absolutely did not” sign off on the settlement of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s lawsuits and “would never sign off on something like that.”

The allegations in the Privacy Act part of the complaint — the only part included in the settlement — show that before the misconduct allegations against Peter Strzok had been resolved, someone shared his texts with the White House, which in turn got leaked to the press before Sarah Isgur released them en masse, with Rod Rosenstein’s approval.

59. Between late July and December 2017, someone from the Department of Justice alerted the White House to the existence of these texts and, at least, their general content. On information and belief, officials in the White House, in turn, began to contact members of the news media about the texts as a means to try to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation.

60. No later than December 2, 2017, at least two news organizations printed stories including characterizations of the contents of some of Special Agent Strzok’s texts.

[snip]

62. On December 12, 2017, DOJ willfully and intentionally disclosed to numerous news outlets approximately 375 text messages to, from, and about Special Agent Strzok. In a press release, DOJ called this act a “public release” of the messages.

Years ago, I was told this was a clear violation of the Privacy Act. Having gone through discovery, DOJ appears to agree.

By saying he would never sign a settlement with someone targeted in violation of the law, Abbate was (wittingly or not) stating an unwillingness to make things right after the government violates the rights of a long-valued FBI employee. And Abbate has to know that there are plenty of right wing agents who never got disciplined for sending pro-Trump texts on their phones, including the agents who handled one of the informants targeting the Clinton Foundation.

Republicans threw a similar tizzy fit after DOJ settled Andrew McCabe’s lawsuit for a similar violation of his rights — in that case, of his due process rights. And in McCabe’s case, granting McCabe’s due process would likely have revealed that the allegations he willfully lied about his role in a story that exposed the investigation into the Clinton Foundation were unproven.

The time to stand up to the kind of individualized targeting that Trump has long used is now, was last year, was seven years ago, when the extended campaign to turn Strzok and Page into the face of the Deep State first began.

Waiting to learn the outcome of the election is a cop out.

The time to catalog the damage Trump has already done by the kind of treatment the Bulwark projects in the future is now. All the more so given that its anonymous participants, described to include “former senior officials from President Trump’s first administration, along with former senators and members of Congress,” surely include a number of people who’ve received this treatment. If the way to combat Trump involves solidarity to prevent this isolating doxxing, then such a group is precisely the kind of group that should set an example.

LOLGOP and I are working on a podcast episode that talks about all the people at the FBI that Trump targeted: in addition to Strzok and Page, McCabe and Jim Comey, every person mentioned in the Carter Page IG Report, a number of key witnesses in the Durham investigation, often leveraged to cultivate the testimony Durham needed to sustain his conspiracy theory. That retaliation did real damage to the FBI’s expertise on Russia.

But it has continued even since Trump left office. After first being investigated in the wake of the IG Report, a top Russian analyst, Brian Auten, remains a target because he tracked Russia efforts to influence the 2020 election. Laura Dehmlow — then a unit chief in FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and now the Deputy Director of the National Counterintelligence Center, was bullied because she didn’t come out and say that the FBI had obtained a laptop attributed to Hunter Biden from a computer repairman (which remains inconclusive regarding any Russian influence). Tim Thibault, who in 2016 was one of the people who predicated investigations of the Clinton Foundation, was targeted in part because he made the decision — at the request of FBI agents trying to preserve the integrity of the Hunter Biden investigation — to shut down Peter Schweizer as an informant. Elvis Chan, long one of the most important FBI agents in fighting Russian hacking, was misrepresented as part of the Twitter Files, and ever since, the House GOP has been demanding he sit for a deposition either represented by his personal lawyer or the FBI’s lawyer.

Other members of the “Deep State” that Trump or his flunkies have targeted include:

  • The 51 former spooks who signed a letter stating that the release of the Hunter Biden laptop before the 2020 elections “has the earmarks of a Russian information operation”
  • Witnesses at either of Trump’s impeachments
  • January 6 Committee witnesses and members
  • Capitol Hill Police who testified in January 6 trials
  • Witnesses in the Durham investigation
  • Former Trump officials who’ve spoken out against Trump (again, these likely include some participants in Bulwark’s simulations)
  • Members of the Hunter Biden investigative team, including those who were engaged in the more aggressive targeting of him
  • Every judge, prosecutor, and identified FBI agent who has investigated Trump (note: Aileen Cannon was also targeted)
  • Judges who’ve overseen January 6 trials or those of Trump’s associates
  • Those who didn’t support Jim Jordan as speaker

This has a noticeable effect. Not only does Abbate (along with Chris Wray) cow before Congress rather than explain that Trump’s Administration violated the law, which has repercussions, but it led the FBI to hesitate before going after Trump and his people both before January 6 and during the stolen documents case.

There are those outside of government, too.

A sustained campaign to shut down efforts, both within and outside social media companies, to limit mis- and disinformation has led many programs and experts to quit, largely after sustained doxing and disinformation campaigns.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Trump and his mob have targeted election administrators around the country, both prominent and not. Even if Kamala Harris wins more votes than Trump in November, there are known localities and states where there’s real question whether election denying voting officials will certify the vote. Patrick Byrne has even started issuing death threats against those prosecuting Tina Peters for tampering with election equipment back in 2020.

This is not just about loyalty. This is not just about cowing law enforcement. This is not just retribution — though that serves as cover.

Particularly taking account of the election workers targeted in service of Trump’s Big Lie, this must be understood as systematic: an attack on particular institutions and norms of liberal society: the rule of law, elections, and truth.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting until after November to start defanging the right wing’s stochastic terrorism. That’s true, because they’ll be using it to stoke fear leading up to the election. That’s true because Jim Jordan still has three months wielding a gavel to elicit lynching threats. But it’s also true because the guy managing the FBI is so afraid of Congress that he’s unwilling to say that people selectively targeted for such treatment by Donald Trump are entitled to due process.

Ball of Thread: Devin Nunes’ Collusion

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While we were distracted over the week, LOLGOP released the fourth installment of our Ball of Thread podcast, in which we explain how the House Intelligence Committee helped Trump deflect from his Russian entanglement.

LOLGOP is also doing a Patreon for this effort (which is separate from my own Patreon), where we’re doing bonus releases. The Steve Bannon one associated with this — in which I lay out how Trump scripted Bannon to deny talking about sanction relief, after the inauguration but not before, incorporates Nixon talking about his own limited hangout.

You can also listen to the podcast itself on these outlets:

Listen on Apple

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Listen on Podcast Addict