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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
- October 31: If Trump Wins, His Allies Want Lawyers Who Will Bless a More Radical Agenda
- July 17: Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025
- June 21: Few of Trump’s G.O.P. Rivals Defend Justice Dept. Independence
- June 15: The Radical Strategy Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden
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:
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.
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:
Donald Trump is already furious with Christopher Wray — because he testified that Joe Biden retains his faculties, because he revealed that Trump might have been hit by a fragment of the bullet shot at him.
And now, because DOJ has begun to reverse Trump’s six year war on Peter Strzok.
Yesterday, DOJ settled the Privacy Act lawsuits of both Strzok and Lisa Page.
According to Politico, Strzok will get $1.2 million (of which $200,000 would be a downpayment if Amy Berman Jackson awards him anything further on his remaining claims) and Page will get $800,000.
On Friday, Strzok’s lawyers announced his $1.2 million agreement as attorneys for both sides notified a federal judge in Washington that the privacy-focused portion of that dispute was resolved.
[snip]
Page, who resigned amid the controversy, settled her own Privacy Act claim with the department Friday. Copies of the settlement agreements for Strzok and Page obtained by POLITICO indicate Page is to receive $800,000. The documents state that the U.S. government is not admitting or conceding legal liability.
Strzok has filed an amended complaint, with the Privacy Act violations redacted, leaving two more claims:
But the two sides are apparently already fighting about what happens next, in part because DOJ provided discovery yesterday, seemingly showing that in 2022 (in the wake of the Andrew McCabe settlement), FBI instituted a new policy giving the Deputy Director authority to override a final settlement determination from Office of Professional Responsibility.
As an initial matter, Defendants produced additional documents just before 1:00 pm today, July 26th. Mr. Strzok is in the process of evaluating those documents and considering the impact of their belated production on testimony that was—and was not—obtained in this case. One of the documents is dated March 2022 and appears critical. It delegates from the FBI Director to the FBI Deputy Director the power to impose summary dismissals and to overrule disciplinary decisions issued by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (“OPR”). Mr. Strzok has long argued that the Deputy Director could not possibly overturn a binding last chance agreement executed between an employee and the FBI OPR Assistant Director acting for and on behalf of the FBI. Mr. Strzok has further argued that even if the Deputy Director could have had that power, he did not have it in 2018. Today’s production appears to confirm Mr. Strzok’s argument. Counsel for all parties conferred this afternoon regarding the potential remedies for this belated production, and the parties will continue to confer to determine whether a request for additional relief from the Court is necessary.
That would seem to help Strzok’s case, proving that when David Bowdich fired him, he was not permitted to override OPR.
More telling, DOJ wants to draw out briefing such that even if Strzok files right away, this won’t be fully briefed until after whoever wins in November is inaugurated.
Strzok argues that Amy Berman Jackson can rule in favor of his due process claim right away. The viewpoint discrimination claim, though, could get interesting, as there are allegedly other FBI agents who sent pro-Trump texts on their phones, with no discipline. And that’s where Strzok argues he’ll prove that he was fired because Trump demanded it.
[T]here is a significant dispute of material fact as to Deputy Director Bowdich’s rationale and motive for terminating Mr. Strzok’s employment. That disputed issue pins Bowdich’s version of events against a mountain of evidence indicating that he fired Mr. Strzok because of the demands of former President Trump and Bowdich’s own politics and interests.
But again, DOJ intends to push this out past the election (and these initial filings would be largely redacted under the protective order).
A jury found Robert Menendez guilty on all charges yesterday, including those alleging he accepted payments from Egypt and Qatar (I didn’t follow the trial closely enough to figure out which country ultimately provided the gold). The verdict marks DOJ’s first successful conviction under 18 USC 219, basically, working for a foreign country while serving as a member of Congress.
Henry Cuellar faces the same charge.
While the RNC largely overshadowed the verdict, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, and Governor Phil Murphy have all called on Menendez to step down.
The reasons why he should resign seem obvious: You can’t continue to serve the people of New Jersey after a jury determined you were actually using your position of power to serve two wealthy foreign countries.
And yet we are two days into Trump’s nomination party, and no one has asked — much less answered — whether Donald Trump is a business partner, paid foreign agent, or merely an employee of Saudi Arabia.
This is not a frivolous question. Since Trump left office, his family has received millions in four known deals from the Saudis:
These Saudi deals come on top of Trump’s testimony that Turnberry golf course and his Bedford property couldn’t be overvalued because some Saudi would be willing to overpay for them.
But I believe I could sell that LIV Golf for a fortune, Saudi Arabia. I believe I could sell that to a lot of people for numbers that would be astronomical because it is like — very much like owning a great painting.
[snip]
I just felt when I saw that, I thought it was high. But I could see it — as a whole, I could see it if this were s0ld to one buyer from Saudi Arabia — I believe it’s the best house in the State of New York.
And while Eric Trump, not his dad, is running the company, Eric also has a role in the campaign and his spouse Lara has taken over the entire GOP.
Trump never fulfilled the promises to distance himself from his companies in the first term. A very partial review of Trump Organization financial records show the company received over $600K from the Saudis during his first term. As far as I’m aware, no one has even asked this time around.
Which means as things stand, Trump would be the sole beneficiary of payments from key Saudi investors if he became President again. Trump would be, at the very least, the beneficiary of a business deal with the Saudis, as president.
Admittedly, under the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on gratuities, it might be legal for Trump to get a bunch of swank branding deals as appreciation for launder Saudi Arabia’s reputation (one of the things for which Menendez was just convicted).
But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored, politically. It doesn’t mean American voters shouldn’t know these details. It doesn’t mean journalists (besides NYT’s Eric Lipton, whose most recent story on this was buried on page A7) shouldn’t demand answers.
At some point at the RNC, Don Jr claimed that his Daddy would get poor coverage from real journalists because “they lied about Russia Russia Russia.”
Only, they didn’t.
In guilty pleas, Trump’s people confessed that they were the ones lying. George Papadopoulos lied to hide when he learned of the Russian hack-and-leak operation. Mike Flynn lied to hide his efforts to undermine Barack Obama’s foreign policy with Russia. Micahel Cohen lied to hide his contact with the Kremlin during the campaign in pursuit of the kind of Trump Tower deal Trump has since inked with the Saudis.
Don Jr was spared charges, in part, because he’s too dumb to be expected to know he shouldn’t accept campaign dirt from Russian nationals.
Robert Mueller found that Trump’s campaign manager briefed someone Treasury has since labeled a Russian spy, Konstantin Kilimnik, on his plan to win the Rust Belt, even while discussing a deal to carve up Ukraine and get tens of millions in benefits. Kilimnik passed on polling data and the campaign strategy to Russian spies. Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Paul Manafort lied to hide that.
At the time the FBI obtained Roger Stone’s cell site location in August 2018, they had reason to believe he had gotten advance notice of both the dcleaks and the Guccifer 2.0 releases. Stone had multiple contacts with Trump about the releases and prosecutors hoped to obtain a notebook where Stone documented all of those conversations. A jury found that Stone lied to hide whence he learned all this.
Trump pardoned all but Cohen and Jr for the lies they told to hide what really happened with Russia. And we still don’t know why the clemency for Roger Stone Trump stashed in his desk drawer had a Secret document on Macron associated with it.
And Trump has only gotten more shameless since. In 2019, during his impeachment for extorting Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his kid, Trump was warned that among the Ukrainians from whom Rudy Giuliani was soliciting dirt on the Bidens was at least one Russian agent, Andrii Derkach.
Trump did nothing to stop Rudy from sidling up to a Russian agent. And when Rudy came back, Bill Barr set up a side channel to ingest that dirt — a side channel the resulted in an FBI informant with self-professed ties to Russian spies attempting to frame Joe Biden for bribery, an attempt to frame Biden that likely goes a long way to explain why the plea deal against Hunter Biden collapsed.
Once upon a time, it was a big deal that Trump refused to let an activist make the RNC platform’s defense of Ukraine more hawkish.
Now, however, Trump no longer hides that he’s willing to let Putin dismember Ukraine. He welcomed Viktor Orbán’s pitch of a plan to do just that — but there has been no readout from Trump’s side of what happened. Orbán, however, has told other EU nations that Trump will moved for “peace” immediately after being elected — a replay of what Flynn lied to cover up in 2017 — largely by withdrawing US support for Ukraine.
In the past, Trump has gone even further than this, suggesting he’ll do nothing as Putin invades NATO states.
Meanwhile, JD Vance is, if anything, even more pro-Russian than Trump, as are some of the Silicon Valley oligarchs who now back Trump’s campaign since the Vance pick.
Trump’s plan of capitulation to Russia will go a long way to ending the Western rules-based order, the greatest wish of Putin and Xi Jinpeng.
And thus far we know just one of the things that Russia seems to be doing to help Trump’s campaign: detaining WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich until Trump gets elected, just as Iran held onto hostages to help Reagan get elected. Avril Haines recently made clear Russia is planning on helping in other ways as well.
That’s how “Russia Russia Russia” has worked. It’s a shameless lie that Mueller found nothing, a lie built off years of propaganda. Indeed, Trump’s willing acceptance — or, in Rudy’s case, outright solicitation — of Russia’s help to get elected has only gotten more brazen. Yet rather than call Don Jr on his “Russia Russia Russia” lie, reporters simply let the pressing question of whether Trump will end the alliance of democracies in a second term go unasked.
Amid the focus on Aileen Cannon’s stall then dismissal of Trump’s stolen documents charges, something has been missed: There appear to be documents missing. Here’s what we know:
Given FBI’s failure to do a complete search adn Parlatore’s failure to find documents at Bedminster, the most likely way to learn what happened to them would be to get Walt Nauta to flip, something that, as I suggested here, his indictment might normally have done. But (correct, as it turned out) expectations that the prosecution would go away kept Nauta from cooperating.
And as a result, we have literally no idea how many documents Trump managed to withhold from the FBI’s search, or what he did with them.
Again, this kind of betrayal of America once mattered in Trump’s campaigns.
No longer.
It’s not happening because journalists are so cowardly they can be cowed with a mere “Russia Russia Russia” chant.
And it’s not happening because journalists have lost all sense of proportion — and for many of them, all sense of public good.
Journalists are making much of a confrontation between Jason Crow and Biden, related by Julia Ioffe, in which Biden insisted he had been great on foreign policy.
The campaign did not, however, dispute this next part, about Crow and his Bronze Star. In a video of the Zoom that I was able to view, you can hear Biden chastising Crow, who asked about the importance of national security to voters. “First of all, I think you’re dead wrong on national security,” the president says, the emotion at times garbling his words. “You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific basin! Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son—and I’m proud of your leadership, but guess what, what’s happening, we’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I put Aukus together, anyway! … Things are in chaos, and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever—”
“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President,” said Crow, “to our voters.”
“You oughta talk about it!” Biden shot back, listing his accomplishments yet again. “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”
It’s another instance where Biden responds stubbornly when Democrats try to push the president to drop out of the race. And that’s why reporters are gleefully dunking on Biden’s comments.
But it’s also an instance where Biden is making a really good point: He has restored America’s alliances to what they were before Trump destroyed them.
And the press is only telling that story — and doesn’t even realize that they are only telling that story — as part of their singular obsession with Biden’s age.
It’s a confession, really, that they have abdicated any concern for the kind of accomplishments of which Biden is justifiably bragging (ignoring Gaza). They have been bullied out of covering any of Trump’s glaring betrayals of the country the leadership of which he wants to monetize.
Trump might literally be an agent of a foreign power — just like Robert Menendez has been adjudged — and this mob calling themselves journalists would exhibit the least interest, much less persistent concern. Journalists don’t even care that both of Trump’s most suspect foreign allegiances involve the exploitation of journalists for political gain, first Jamal Khashoggi and then Gershkovich. Journalists have ignored that recent history, even after he picked Vance, someone who formally asked Merrick Garland to criminally investigate Robert Kagan (a neocon whom Vance called left wing) for inciting insurrection because he discussed liberal states resisting Trump in a second term.
Trump might literally sell out the next journalist who opposes him to be chopped up by some foreign dictator. And yet the press corps seems not to give a rat’s ass.
Because Joe Biden is three years older than Donald Trump.
In his latest effort to use the House Judiciary Committee as a goon squad to intimidate Donald Trump’s enemies, Jim Jordan actually developed proof that John Ratcliffe — and not the 51 former spooks he was after — inappropriately politicized intelligence to manufacture debate props.
And then Jordan did it himself.
I have the perfectly curated Xitter account to learn when Jim Jordan has released his latest installment of weaponization against democracy.
Last week, he issued his latest attempt to make a scandal out of the true free speech of the 51 former spooks who wrote a letter saying that the release of a Hunter Biden laptop days before the election “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” My replies were overrun with trolls chanting incoherent claims.
Of course the trolls in my Xitter feed didn’t know the most basic details of the letter or known facts about the copy of a hard drive referred to as a Hunter Biden laptop:
Even though Jordan’s latest report substantiates absolutely no misconduct, the trolls nevertheless yapped and yapped about it. Jordan showed:
In other words, the 51 spooks followed the rules, and Jordan was stuck trying to turn it into a scandal.
The Jordan report was only 31 pages and, like a college freshman composition paper, blew entire pages with big screen caps repeating the complaints of two random spooks complaining about “random signatures” on the letter and some discussion of Mark Polymeropoulos getting something excluded from a follow-up.
Polymeropoulos’ attorney, Mark Zaid, explained that CIA redacted two lines, which had nothing to do with Hunter Biden, from the Polymeropoulos follow-up — but that was precisely how preclearance is supposed to work.
Mr. Polymeropolous submitted to the PCRB a two page talking points memo about the subject matter. Obviously, he knew that there was going to be media attention concerning the issue and he wanted to be properly prepared to address the topic if asked. He followed the standard procedure for review of information intended to be made public. No different than any other individual who has a prepublication review requirement. As part of its review, which was handled in the normal timely fashion for such a short document, CIA redacted two lines of information as being classified. Those two lines had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden laptop specifically and concerned Mr. Polymeropolous’ background experience with Russia and a comment concerning that country’s activities generally. Of course, that information was properly protected by Mr. Polymeropolous and never used. To say that this constituted an attempt to use classified information is farcical and reflects a complete lack of understanding how the prepublication review process works. The system operated exactly how it was supposed to and is being distorted for political purposes.
That’s it. That’s the best Jordan could rush out to give Trump something to complain about in a presidential debate over and over.
To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking.
It’s the same thing. Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation. He made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.
[snip]
I’ve dealt with politicians all my life. I’ve been on this side of the equation for the last eight years. I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it. He could look you in the face. So – and about so many other things, too.
And we mentioned the laptop, We mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. The “losers and suckers” story that he made up is a total lie on the military. It’s a disgrace.
This was Trump’s prepackaged answer to attempt to projection his own lying onto Biden. It was barely more vigorous than Biden’s rebuttals.
As flimsy as it was, though, Trump’s use of the 51-spook letter was part of a larger effort, one designed to bully those who speak up against Russian disinformation, disinformation generally, or in favor of rule of law. As John Brennan described, it created a furor about the letter that distracted from Russian intervention, which in turn serves to divide the country.
I think the firestorm, the furor has been created responding to the letter as opposed to the letter itself, as I responded to one of the Congressmen earlier. So it’s unfortunate that this is taking up all your time, it’s taking up my time, and it is, again, further dividing the country.
And, by design, it has chilled speech that talks about Russian interference.
One after another of the spooks interviewed confessed they or others would be chilled by the precedent of Jordan investigating private citizens for their free speech. Kristin Wood described how Mike Flynn put out all their names on a Telegram chat, leading to stalking and death threats.
Several ways. First of all, I’ve received death threats. I’ve received vicious calls, texts, emails from all sorts of random people. Mike Flynn — General Flynn posted on Telegram all of our names and said, you know, let them know how we feel. It unleashed this viciousness that had several other folks calling the police, calling the Threat Management Unit at CIA, to let them know what was happening.
And so for the first time ever, I looked at getting a gun and getting a concealed carry permit because it’s not just that people have been mean or say horrific things, but we’ve seen them take action. And so that feeling of vulnerability for speaking, exercising a First Amendment right, and for saying what I thought was as obvious as there’s air in — there’s air. Let’s just let the FBI do their work.
It has a profound effect on health as well. I’ve been to the emergency room for stress because of all of this. And so when you ask would I do this again, I would insist on a little more precision of language. But it has the effect of censoring people who have more than a thousand years of experience in this topic. And I would think the focus would be on stopping Russia and not on what feels like persecution.
Several of the spooks admitted the mob treatment would lead them to decline further involvement in anything political. Most described that it would chill others.
At that level, the spooks are just like the disinformation experts Jordan also targeted, those who tracked efforts to muddy reason and truth. Their lives have been upended because they attempted to track Russian disinformation that served Republican interests, and the personal and financial cost is shutting down those efforts during an election year.
But then something funny happened.
House Republicans kept pushing the spooks, arguing — notwithstanding the public reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to solicit dirt from known Russian agent Andrii Derkach — that the spooks should have known, somehow, that the hard drive called a Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t Russian disinformation (which, as noted, the spooks didn’t claim).
Republicans — often Jordan himself — kept asking whether the spooks knew that John Ratcliffe had claimed the laptop was not disinformation (which, again, was not what the letter claimed).
Chairman Jordan. Were you aware of Mr. Ratcliffe’s statement on the morning of the 19th, prior to the letter being sent, where he said in an interview on FOX News that morning that this is not part of the Russian disinformation campaign?
And that led multiple witnesses to explain why Ratcliffe simply wasn’t credible. Wood described that a proper counterintelligence investigation takes longer than would have transpired (no one knew how long the FBI had had the laptop).
Ms. Wood. So, I think what I would say in response to that is that the letter — the purpose of the letter was to say, Let’s not rush to judgment. Everyone, regardless of who they are as Americans, deserves due process. Let’s let the FBI do their work. And when DNI Ratcliffe said that — so as you have seen from all of these investigations, right, they take a very long time to do, to do the considered judgment of 17 or 18 intelligence agencies, and to come up with that to do the exhaustive search of asking new sources, of pulling in every bit of signals intelligence, there’s just no way that’s possible to have been done in the timeframe in which that statement was made. So our whole point was to say, Be careful here. Let us — we don’t know if this is all real. We don’t know if all the emails are real, and we don’t know if this is tied to the Russians. Let’s let the process work
James Clapper described that, not only didn’t he consider Ratcliffe a reliable source, but that he made the statement before any investigation of the laptop.
Mr. Clapper. Well, if the Department of Justice or the FBI or some other legitimate credible source of — who had done a credible forensic analysis — certainly I would accept that. That’s why I suggested that would be a good — would have been a good fix — a good addition to the letter had we said that.
Mr. Gaetz. Are you aware of Director Ratcliffe, the DNI at the time, contradicting the thrust of this letter you signed?
Mr. Clapper. Well, okay. He said that statement before, I think, an investigation had begun of the laptop. So I don’t know where he’s coming from making a statement like that.
In response to a follow-up question from the Minority, Clapper also agreed that Ratcliffe himself was making public statements in anticipation of the debate.
Q It’s an article reporting on Ratcliffe’s remarks, and it’s dated October 19th, 2020, 1:49 p.m. And we’re just introducing it for the fact of the date. The New York Post story in question was released on October 14th, correct?
A Yes.
Q So that would have been 5 days before Ratcliffe made his remarks?
A Right.
Q And I think you said earlier he couldn’t have even begun an investigation in that time period. Is that correct?
A Correct.
Q And can you explain what you mean by that?
A Well, I don’t know how — what his basis for making that statement is when the laptop itself hasn’t been investigated. The DNI, Office of the Director National Intelligence, has no organic forensic analysis capability at all. So they’re dependent on other components of the intelligence community, in this case the FBI, to render such a judgment, which hadn’t been rendered. So I don’t know how he could make that statement.
Q Okay. And even assuming that Ratcliffe — sorry. Withdraw that. And he made these remarks on October 19th, which was the day before the second debate, correct? The second Presidential debate was the 20th.
A Uh-huh.
Q So isn’t it possible that Ratcliffe also made his remarks in the hope that they would impact the debate?
A Well, one could conclude that, yes.
John Brennan was even more disdainful of Ratcliffe’s actions. He described that Ratcliffe’s release of his briefing notes, for the first 2020 debate, made it clear that Ratcliffe was involved in politics.
Chairman Jordan. Director, were you aware of what Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on the morning of October 19th regarding this Biden laptop story, where he said that it wasn’t a Russian disinformation operation?
Mr. Brennan. I don’t know if I was aware of it at the time, but I would have dismissed it anyway.
Chairman Jordan. Why would you have dismissed it?
Mr. Brennan. Because I don’t think John Ratcliffe was an independent, objective leader of the intelligence community at the time.
Chairman Jordan. So you would dismiss the statement from the Director of National Intelligence — the Acting — the Director of National Intelligence at the time, in the administration, getting intelligence in real-time, you would just dismiss that out of hand?
Mr. Brennan. Not out of hand, but I think it was — a week or two prior to that, there was a selective release of information that included my briefing notes to President Obama in the White House Situation Room that was misrepresenting, in fact, the facts, where it was pushed out in redacted version. And I did think that was a very, very unfortunate, unprofessional, unethical engagement on the part of the Director of National Intelligence in a Presidential election.
Mr. Gaetz. So your dismissing Mr. Ratcliffe was somehow payback for the fact that you thought that your briefing to President Obama had been mischaracterized?
Mr. Brennan. No, that’s not what I said.
Mr. Gaetz. Okay. Well, I’m trying to understand how this event that seems to have aggrieved you regarding the briefing to President Obama impacted your view of the Ratcliffe assessment.
Mr. Brennan. It didn’t aggrieve me. It just indicated to me that John Ratcliffe was not going to be an independent, nonpartisan, apolitical actor.
Brennan is referring to the notes he got about materials found among hacked documents in Russia, which Republicans and John Durham spun up, first of all, as true (rather than suspected Russian disinformation), and then misrepresented to claim that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump.
Not only did Brennan see this as an election season stunt (which I observed at the time), but he described that Ratcliffe “misrepresent[ed] the facts” about the materials.
Jim Jordan has been searching for a former spook to accuse of politicizing intelligence in 2020 for years, and he finally found one! Trump’s hand-picked Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who was doing precisely what Jordan falsely accused the former spooks of doing, but did so while still an employee of the Intelligence Community.
Update: Corrected that the “laptop” was not just a “hard drive,” but in fact a copy of another hard drive.
Back on September 19, 2018, then DC Chief Judge Beryl Howell denied a motion brought by an Egyptian bank to quash a subpoena for information on a suspected $10 million payment made to then-candidate Trump in fall 2016. That set off litigation that continued, at the District, Circuit, and Supreme Courts, for at least nine months.
As CNN described in 2020, not long after the investigation got shut down under Bill Barr, investigators had been trying to see whether Egypt (or some entity for which Egypt served as go-between) provided the money that Trump spent on his campaign weeks before the election.
For more than three years, federal prosecutors investigated whether money flowing through an Egyptian state-owned bank could have backed millions of dollars Donald Trump donated to his own campaign days before he won the 2016 election, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
The investigation, which both predated and outlasted special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, examined whether there was an illegal foreign campaign contribution. It represents one of the most prolonged efforts by federal investigators to understand the President’s foreign financial ties, and became a significant but hidden part of the special counsel’s pursuits.
The investigation was kept so secret that at one point investigators locked down an entire floor of a federal courthouse in Washington, DC, so Mueller’s team could fight for the Egyptian bank’s records in closed-door court proceedings following a grand jury subpoena. The probe, which closed this summer with no charges filed, has never before been described publicly.
Prosecutors suspected there could be a link between the Egyptian bank and Trump’s campaign contribution, according to several of the sources, but they could never prove a connection.
It took months of legal fight after Judge Howell denied that motion to quash before the Egyptian bank in question complied, and once they got subpoena returns, prosecutors repeatedly complained that the bank was still withholding information, which led prosecutors to reopen the investigation with a new grand jury.
That much we know from documentation unsealed back in 2019 (part one, part two, part three), in response to a Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press request for unsealing.
On August 17, 2023, while she was still Chief Judge, Beryl Howell ordered the government to post newly unsealed sets of some of the orders she issued during the litigation. On Thursday, Chief Judge Boasberg ordered that newly redacted set of opinions to be released. While Howell released six opinions in June 2019 along with the other materials from the case — with redactions done digitally, thereby hiding the length of redactions — just three new versions of her orders got released last week:
These may be limited to orders incorporated as appendices in prior appeals, which might also explain why the first two appear twice in the newly-released materials.
Much of the newly unsealed material pertains to a fight over how much Alston & Bird, the law firm representing the Egyptian bank, could say about the litigation publicly. Among other things, prosecutors under Robert Mueller objected to their own names appearing publicly, out of a desire to tie this litigation to the narrow scope of Mueller’s investigation into interference in 2016.
One thing made clearer by a redaction in that January 2019 opinion on public comments is that the DC Circuit considered what public comments the two sides could make, in addition to SCOTUS, as part of its denial of cert.
It’s possible that the DC Circuit has weighed in, secretly. Among the details newly unsealed in the original opinion are the names of two of the bank’s other lawyers: Ashraf Shaaban (who appears to be or have been in-house counsel) and Mona Zulficar (who runs a Cairo corporate law firm). Those lawyers were named in conjunction with declarations they submitted arguing some part of the claim that Egyptian Anti-Money Laundering law would prohibit compliance with the subpoena as would unspecified law in a third country, described as Country B.
Howell described that Alston & Bird are relying on,
conclusory declarations by [redacted] own Country A in-house and retained counsel, which themselves cite no legal authority on this question of [redaction] See Decl. of Ashraf Shaaban,, Mov’s Group Legal Counsel (“Shaaban Decl.”)¶7, ECF No. 3-6; Suppl. Decl. of Mona Zulficar, “Suppl. Zulficar Decl.”)¶ 4, ECF No. 12. The Court gives these declarations little weight. [bold newly unsealed, compare this passage with this one]
So if we can figure out who Shaaban works or worked for to ID the bank.
It’s the unspecific third country, Country B, that is the most interesting new disclosure, however.
The newly unsealed passages do not identify which country, described as Country A and which CNN identified as Egypt, owns this bank. But they do show that the bank or its lawyers wanted to share the subpoena with personnel in Cairo.
The newly unsealed passages do identify which third country’s laws, unspecified laws, might prohibit lawyers from searching for responsive documents in that country: China.
In other words, a bank owned by Egypt said it couldn’t comply with a subpoena seeking information on a suspected payment to Trump during the 2016 election, in part, because China’s laws would prevent that.
Update: Ashraf Shaaban works for the National Bank of Egypt.