Marjorie Taylor Greene Admits Kevin McCarthy Should Have Considered National Security before Harming It
CNN reports that in a GOP leadership meeting, concerns were (anonymously) expressed about the way that Kevin McCarthy gave exclusive access to sensitive security footage from the Capitol to a self-described fan of Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson.
[S]ome lawmakers in the closed-door leadership meeting asked whether sensitive security protocols or certain evacuation routes would be exposed by taking that step.
Others questioned how long the footage is going to be dragged out in the press, with some lawmakers concerned about the optics of appearing to try to downplay a deadly insurrection in the US Capitol.
“Let’s just rip the Band-aid off and get this over with,” one GOP lawmaker told CNN.
Sources said McCarthy assured his leadership team that he wants to move swiftly, but said they need to be deliberate about how they handle it to ensure the release does not endanger their security.
Remarkably, it was Marjorie Taylor Greene who had to voice, on the record, the potential danger of showing where the secure back hallways of the Capitol were.
[Marge] told CNN she played a role in McCarthy’s decision to turn the footage over to Carlson, but she wouldn’t go into further detail.
Greene, who was not in the Monday night meeting, said she’s spoken with McCarthy, and that the speaker’s office is coordinating a process for how to release the footage more widely, beyond Fox News, while also ensuring it doesn’t violate any security concerns.
“We can’t give away our national security,” Greene said, “Everyone in Congress agrees. And I think the American people agree. We don’t want Russia or China or any of these other countries being able to study all the entries and exits of our capital. That’s foolish.”
Greene told CNN that Carlson’s team was also given certain parameters for what they could and couldn’t air. “Yes … of course (there were parameters) they’re being extremely careful and responsible.”
Except no one cited in this article — not Marge, not Elise Stefanik (who showed less understanding about the security concerns than Marge), and not CNN itself — raised the problem here.
Kevin McCarthy has already shared this sensitive video with someone that — as a Gang of Eight member — he must know was in discussions about setting up a back channel with Putin, purportedly a long-term effort to set up an interview. Tucker’s own FOIA suggests that effort extended for at least thirty months, as of July 2021. Tucker continues to proudly root for Putin.
The problem is not, just, in Tucker airing surveillance footage that compromises the security of the Capitol. It’s not just that Russian spies might watch Tucker Carlson and decide how to attack the Capitol.
The problem is also that Tucker will either give it to Putin, or store it insecurely and make it available to Russian hackers, a means of obtaining sensitive records that Russia has used in the past.
One of the first things Kevin McCarthy did as Speaker was to give exclusive access to security information to someone openly rooting for Putin, someone who has launched hostile operations against US democracy in recent years.
And McCarthy is only now considering the security implications of having done so.
BREAKING from Fox News: Trump Cheated … and He Still Couldn’t Beat Joe Biden
Rupert Murdoch, in a sworn deposition as part of Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox, confessed that he helped Donald Trump cheat during the 2020 election. He provided Jared Kushner confidential information about Joe Biden’s ads, the kind of information that Trump had to rely on Russian spies to obtain from Hillary in 2016.
During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor,Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy. Ex.600, R.Murdoch 210:6-9; 213:17-20; Ex.603 (providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public).
On January 5, Rupert and Suzanne Scott talked about having their top opinion shows, in concert, admit the truth: The election is over. Joe Biden won. The claim that the election was stolen was nothing but a Trump myth.
On January 5, Rupert and Scott discussed whether Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham should say some version of “The election is over and Joe Biden won.” Ex.277. He hoped those words “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen. Id;Ex.600, R.Murdoch 258:5-14.
But Scott didn’t want to do that publicly, because she wanted to avoid pissing off viewers.
Scott told Rupert that privately they are all there but we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers . Ex.277. So nobody made a statement.
The next day, her pissed off viewers attacked the Capitol.
And all the while, while Fox News assisted Trump’s efforts to weaponize a mass of angry Fox and InfoWars viewers, Rupert Murdoch knew that he had — personally! — helped Trump cheat and it still wasn’t enough for Trump to beat Joe Biden.
Again, I highly encourage you to take the time to read this. It’s another devastating indictment of the propaganda network run by Rupert.
Because, ultimately, when Rupert is forced to answer questions under oath, it becomes clear the extent to which Fox was covering up what a loser (Rupert knows that) Trump is.
The Search For The Origins Of The State
Related posts
Posts on The Dawn Of Everything: Link
Posts on Pierre Bourdieu and Symbolic Violence: link
Posts trying to cope with the absurd state of political discourse: link
Posts on Freedom and Equality. link
In Chapter 10 of The Dawn Of Everything the authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, take up the search for the origins of the state. They discuss current theories of the nature of the state. They provide a different framework for understanding the term in ancient times, and even suggest that the earliest versions of these organizational structures were part-time, just as agriculture was part-time. Then they give examples of how their theory works.
Theories of the State
Today almost everyone lives under the governance of a nation-state. The generally accepted definition was suggested by Rudolph von Ihering in the late 1800s and is now associated with Max Weber: “… any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory….” P. 359. But that’s not the way things worked in the earliest large groups.
Marxists suggested that states emerged to protect the power of an emerging ruling class, but the authors reject this theory.
A third theory is quite common: as the population in any area increases, you need top-down authority to coordinate and plan. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t right, because a large number of ancient polities operated quite well without an autocratic leader endowed with the power of violence.
The authors suggest that at least for ancient societies we should consider three factors:
Sovereignty, meaning the control of violence directed at members of the group and the right to authorize other to inflict violence;
Administration, meaning control over information. This can be of two kinds. Frequently it means factual information necessary to keep things operating, for example taxes due and collected, or corvée obligations. Particularly in early societies it means esoteric or cultic knowledge, for example, explanations of the cosmos and the roles of people in it.
Charisma, meaning a personal power of persuasion that enables one to dominate others.
Each of these factors is a form of dominance, which the authors see as the basis of the state. The authors rephrase the search for the origins of the state from their perspective:
How did large-scale forms of domination first emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day? P. 370.
Dominance in early societies
This material takes up most of the chapter. The authors give examples of societies organized under one form of dominance, which they call First-Order Societies, then societies with two of the forms of dominance, Second-Order Societies. The material is fascinating, and the examples support the use of their categories. I’m only going to discuss one illustration, the Chavin Culture, a pre-Inca group located on the western slopes of the Andes down to the sea near what is now Lima Peru.
This culture seems to have arisen around 3000 BCE, and flowered around 1200 BCE. It lasted another 800 years before disappearing. The authors say there is little evidence of the use of violence, no evidence of a formal bureaucracy, and no evidence of a monarch with sovereign or political power.
The archaeological record is dominated by imagery, primarily carved stone. Here’s a description.
Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns. P. 388.
The authors characterize these as “shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.” The society was held together by rituals and cultic knowledge. The people seem to have enjoyed rituals oriented to hallucinogenic substances made from local plants.
This is an example of a First-Order Society.
Discussion
1. I do like the idea of a stoner kingdom.
2. The authors possibly think that societies are held together through domination. Like power, this is a term they don’t discuss. I did a digression on power, link above. I’ve discussed Pierre Bourdieu’s work on domination, link above. And I’ve discussed some current ideas about freedom, which is the complement to the idea of both, link above.
But they give plenty of examples where that isn’t so. In fact, they seem to think we’d be better off if we lived without domination, or at least in a society where decisions are made in a more democratic system. That contradiction is confusing.
3.
Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. P. 276.
Large social units may exist in the imagination, but they have roots in reality. I live in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. I only know a few of my neighbors, but we are bound together by a number of links. We care about local schools, local traffic, local businesses and our parks in a particular way. If these are threatened, say by a local developer trying to replace a park or increase the traffic burden, we cooperate to deal with it.
I’m bound to other Chicagoans by crucial ties: they staff my doctor’s office, my dry cleaner, and my grocery store, and everything else I need. My life is smooth and pleasant because of them. I care that they are safe and healthy. I care that they have paved streets so they can get to work, and so I care about the people who pave those streets, clear off the snow, fill the potholes, and replace the bulbs in the stoplights. I want everybody’s kids to have good schools, just like I want good schools for my grandkids.
We have other ties. We like brats and argue about pizza. We ride public transport and we talk about the best way to get around in our miserable traffic. We go to movies, theater, concerts, and restaurants together. We can always talk about something here that affects us all, the latest corruption story, property taxes, who the Bears should draft, and the weather.
As I read it, the authors think those ties are strong enough to pull us together as a group without a dominating force.
4. Each of the societies described in the book has a mental component that goes deeper than just being neighbors. They share rituals, cosmologies, stories about themselves as a people, cultic practices, and there’s a shared understanding of themselves as a group. These are taught to children and reinforced by ritual and practice throughout the lives of members. They are at least as important to the maintenance of the group as any of the forms of dominance.
The Founders rejected the idea of a state religion, and we’ve mostly abandoned cultic practices. I think we Americans share a sort of secular religion based on the founding myths of our country and a weak allegiance to what Jefferson called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. The latter is a formulation that originally meant Natural Law but I think now includes a science-based mental stance and values based on a vaguely Christian moral sense. The founding myths include our commitment to freedom, as “all men are created equal”; a government of laws, not of men; a form of capitalism; and representative democracy.
This, roughly, is the mental component that up til now has bound us into a nation. I think the authors miss this point.
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Photo credit: Cbrescia.
How Holes in Ivanka’s Testimony Could Help Make an Obstruction Case against Her Father
When Ivanka Trump was first invited to testify to the January 6 Committee, at least as she tells it, her father encouraged her to testify.
I-after the letter was made public inviting me to attend, I was actually traveling with my children at the time. So I was I was not — I was not in Florida. But I remember him saying something in a subsequent conversation to the effect of, “Great, you should do it,” or something something like that. It was sort of very casual.
Because I told him immediately upon receiving it, I indicated my willingness to participate in these hearings and be as forthright as possible, and he didn’t discourage that in any way.
Her testimony was pretty helpful to him. She had no recall of most damning details of his role in a coup attempt (the record shows that, with the exception of a speech in Georgia on January 4, of which she also claimed to have no recall, Ivanka wasn’t closely involved in the Big Lie). She claimed to “perceive” that he was shocked about the attack on the Capitol, though she could provide no explanation for why she concluded that. And she affirmatively claimed that his failure to respond to the attack on the Capitol was instead a strong response.
Any testimony Ivanka gives to a grand jury in response to a recent subpoena may be less helpful, because in the interim, J6C and — undoubtedly — Jack Smith’s team have developed far more evidence that Donald Trump affirmatively refused to ask rioters to leave the Capitol during the height of the attack, something that would meet a key element of the offense for obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct the vote certification charges.
Per the J6C Report, the process of trying to get Trump to give a statement started before the first breach of the Capitol, by 1:57PM, according to the timing of a call Eric Herschmann placed to Jared.
And I got a call, I think it was from Herschmann, basically saying like, you know, this is getting pretty ugly, people are trying to break into the Capitol, you know, we’re going to, you know — and I said, you know, basically saying — I think he started by saying, “Where are you?”
And I said, “I’m on an airplane.”
And he said, “Okay, we’ve got to deal with this here. People are trying to break into the Capitol. We’re going to see what we can do here. We’re going to try to get the President to put out a statement.”
After the initial breach at 2:13 PM, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, Pat Cipollone pushed Mark Meadows to barge into the dining room and do something to stop the attack.
No more than a minute, minute and a half later, I see Pat Cipollone barreling down the hallway towards our office; and rush right in, looked at me, said, is Mark in his office? And I said, yes. He just looked at me and started shaking his head and went over — opened Mark’s office door, stood there with the door propped open and said something to — Mark is still sitting on his phone.
I remember like glancing and he’s still sitting on his phone. And I remember Pat saying to him something to the effect of, the rioters have gotten to the Capitol, Mark. We need to go down and see the President now. And Mark looked up at him and said, he doesn’t want to do anything, Pat. And Pat said something to the effect of — and very clearly had said this to Mark — something to the effect of, Mark, something needs to be done or people are going to die and the blood is going to be on your f’ing hands.
This is getting out of control. I’m going down there.
But that may have made things worse. Ten minutes later, at 2:24PM, Trump tweeted out his attack on Mike Pence, then attempted to call Tommy Tuberville, effectively ignoring the pleading of his aides and focusing instead on trying to organize objections to the vote.
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
While the timeline is uncertain, seemingly after this tweet, Eric Herschmann was involved in two separate efforts to get Trump to call on rioters to leave.
One effort pertained to the contested note — a contest the stakes of which are more clear given Ivanka’s testimony.
As I laid out here, at a time when he believed (having been told as much from Hutchinson’s then-attorney Stefan Passantino) that Hutchinson had completed her testimony with J6C without mentioning this note, Herschmann claimed to remember one thing above all about his interactions with the President that day: that he wrote this note.
In later testimony, Hutchinson said she wrote it, on Meadows’ order.
The difference is subtle. As Hutchinson tells it, Meadows referred to the rioters being present at the Capitol “illegally,” but Herschmann offered “without proper authorization,” to give Trump something more palatable to adopt. Some time later, after Meadows came back from the dining room with the card, the “illegally” language had been crossed out entirely, but with Trump failing to act on either action.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: The chief of staff was in a meeting with Eric Hirschman and potentially Mr. Philbin, and they had rushed out of the office fairly quickly. Mark had handed me the note card with one of his pens, and sort of dictating a statement for the president to potentially put out.
LIZ CHENEY: And — no, I’m sorry. Go ahead.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: That’s Ok. There are two phrases on there, one illegal and then one without proper authority. The illegal phrase was the one that Mr. Meadows had dictated to me. Mr. Herschmann had chimed in and said also put without legal authority. There should have been a slash between the two phrases. It was an — an or if the president had opted to put one of those statements out. Evidently he didn’t. Later that afternoon, Mark came back from the Oval Dining Room and put the palm card on my desk with illegally crossed out, but said we didn’t need to take further action on that statement.
But it didn’t work. Herschmann concedes that the effort to get Trump to send out the message on the card — “anyone who entered the Capitold illegally without proper authority should leave immediately” — failed. Trump wouldn’t ask rioters to leave the building for at least another hour.
Q So I’m more interested, though, in the “should leave immediately” point which the President didn’t say in his ensuing tweets. Did anybody push back on your suggestion that the President should say that the people who entered the Capitol should leave immediately?
A No, nobody pushed back on that.
Q Do you have any idea why the statement didn’t go out?
A Why what I wrote didn’t go out.
Q Yes?
A I don’t. I mean, he decided not to issue this statement and issued one when lvanka went back there.
Q Okay. Do you know who made the decision not to issue this statement?
A I do not. I don’t think there was an issue of an idea that someone would be saying you shouldn’t leave immediately. I think it was presumed that that was the point of a statement, of any statement, was, no violence, leave the Capitol. But I don’t remember a discussion about that topic individually or particularly.
Before Hutchinson gave her later testimony, Herschmann managed to flush the discussion with Trump about asking rioters to leave down a black hole of his failed memory. With it, though, she changes his own involvement, from taking the lead on the note, to trying to find a palatable statement for Trump to make.
Given the reference to “Ivanka went back there,” his second effort seems to have followed the effort with the card. Herschmann ran to Ivanka’s office and got her to ask Trump to make a statement.
Ivanka’s testimony, given weeks before that of two of her staffers, Rachel Craddock and Julie Radford, was that the first she heard of the violence at the Capitol was when Herschmann burst into her office.
But Radford testified that, after her own spouse texted her to ask if she was alright, she went into Ivanka’s office, turned on the TV, checked Twitter. Then they called in Craddock and they all started drafting Ivanka’s own tweet to call for peace, one she would eventually send out and then delete after catching heat for referring to the attackers as “Patriots.”
That’s when, per the staffers, Herschmann came in to get her.
The difference, of course, is not just whether Ivanka knew of the violence at the Capitol, but whether she knew her father had already targeted Pence. Ivanka claimed not to know what even Trump knew when she went into the dining room, even dodging a question about whether (!!!) he had the TV on.
Q Do you know whether or not he was aware of the violence that you had seen on your television when you first arrived in the dining room?
A I don’t know when he learned of the violence. I believe that he was aware of it because he immediately started the process of crafting a statement, and I don’t recall me bringing him up to speed.
Like I think he generally was aware when I entered. I don’t know when, though, he became aware, and I don’t know we didn’t have a specific conversation about what he knew or didn’t know.
I felt it was incredibly important that he issue a strong statement. Twitter was an obvious place for him to do tt because it was authentic to his voice, He would often a tweet. And it was fast.
So — but I don’t recall who said it should — if there was a discussion about Twitter versus not. I just recall the discussion of the statement itself
In her testimony, Ivanka gave Trump credit for the language used in the tweet.
Q Do you remember the President proposing any specific language, any particular words?
A I think it was all largely his language. I remember at the end we said, you know, in addition to the condemnation of violence and the need to respect law enforcement, I remember there was a discussion about adding the words “be peaceful” that I believe he suggested — he suggested or I suggested. You know, it was part of a discussion.
But I think the content was not in debate while I was present.
But Kayleigh McEnany told J6C that that language came from Ivanka, not Trump. And Sarah Matthews passed on, second-hand, that Kayleigh had described a dispute about even this lukewarm language.
[S]he said that he did not want to put that in and that they went through different phrasing of that, of the mention of peace, in order to get him to agree to include 2 it, and that it was Ivanka Trump who came up with “stay peaceful” and that he agreed to that phrasing to include in the tweet, but he was initially resistant to mentioning peace of any sort.
Most importantly, though, the second effort, too, failed to convince Trump to ask his rioters to leave the Capitol.
When committee personnel asked Ivanka why the tweet didn’t ask rioters to leave and didn’t ask them to condemn violence, she bullshitted, and claimed those ideas were incorporated in the tweet.
Now, the statement doesn’t ask people to leave the Capitol. It actually uses the word “stay,” “stay peaceful.” Do you remember any discussion about whether the tweet should directly encourage people to leave or disperse?
A Well, definitely the intention of “stay peaceful” was not to tell people to remain. It was to – for anyone who was not being peaceful should stop, and anyone who was, don’t get involved.
Q Uh-huh. The tweet also says nothing about violence, doesn’t condemn violence or reference violence. It just calls on people to support law enforcement because they’re truly on the side of the country and stay peaceful.
Do you remember any discussions about more explicitly condemning violence?
A That was the intention. And I believe that a subsequent tweet shortly there after did that. I think the immediate urgency was to try to deescalate the situation–
Q Uh-huh
A – as effectively as possible. So think everyone believed this would be an effective way to do it.
As far as is publicly known, Ivanka is at no risk of charges for obstructing the vote count. Her intention does not matter. Her father’s does. And her statement that the goal was to get people to leave but that Trump, for a second time within an hour, refused to make that ask says a great deal about Trump’s approval of the bodies preventing the certification of the vote count by violently remaining in the Capitol.
This is the kind of ratification of the mobsters obstruction that Amit Mehta talked about when letting a lawsuit against Trump proceed, only with far more detail that Trump affirmatively refused to do anything, not even when his daughter implored him.
Even ignoring the greater tools DOJ will have to clarify both the timing of these two efforts and the contacts involving others — most notably, Kevin McCarthy, who called several of the key players during this time period — interspersed with them, it would be harder for Ivanka to deny remembering this. Four witnesses friendly to Ivanka — Craddock and Radford, Matthews and Kayleigh — have challenged key parts of Ivanka’s earlier testimony. Whatever success Trump would one day have at discrediting Hutchinson’s testimony, it has been backed by multiple other witnesses (and Kayleigh’s testimony that Ivanka, not her dad, wrote the tweet is backed by the former press secretary’s own notes).
Plus, Ivanka would be reckless to assume no one else’s testimony has changed or expanded, particularly given that the two Pats — Cipollone and Philbin — testified under an Executive Privilege waiver last year.
The most important change, however, is the uncertain fallout of suspicions that Hutchinson’s former attorney was trying to limit her testimony in order to protect Herschmann.
Aside from Herschmann’s silence as Trump gave Mike Pence an order to violate the Constitution, there’s nothing independent of attempts to coach Hutchinson’s testimony and involvement in the financial aftermath of the election that give him any legal exposure. A slew of witnesses testified that he made sustained attempts to get Trump to call off his mob. But Passantino’s alleged efforts to alert Herschmann to Hutchinson’s testimony, and Herschmann’s 30-minute phone call to her afterwards, means Herschmann’s forgetfulness about his interactions with Trump on January 6 may evolve as well. One way or another, Hutchinson’s split from Passantino gives Smith one more tool to use to obtain testimony.
At least last year, Jared, Ivanka, her staffers, and Herschman, as well as Alex Cannon and two of Trump’s other gatekeepers were all represented by the same attorney from Kasowitz (one, Molly Michael, has been sucked into the stolen document case).
Ivanka’s grand jury testimony may do little more than lock her into her past testimony to the J6C. But it’s possible either her testimony or Herschmann’s before Smith’s grand jury will be more forthcoming.
Between Herschmann and Ivanka, there are several other conversations from January 6 they disclaimed remembering before J6C: Herschmann called Ivanka just before 10AM on January 6. The two spoke after Ivanka left the Oval Office meeting from which Trump called Pence, directly before both changed plans and went to the rally. Ivanka spoke to her father just before he started speaking at the Ellipse rally, followed, separately, by Herschmann. Anything Herschmann and Trump said to each other as Herschmann oversaw the filming of Trump’s videotaped response. The substance of the five minute call Herschmann had with Trump at 10:50PM on January 6. All of that may well remain unrecalled, to say nothing of Ivanka’s wildly incredible claim that she and Jared never spoke about January 6 afterwards.
But the testimony of all these people put together may well provide Smith enough to prove that Trump affirmatively refused to ask his supporters to leave after he attacked Mike Pence at 2:24PM. And that may be a big factor in whether Smith charges Trump with obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct the vote certification.
The Biden Administration Staved Off Russia’s First Round of InfoWar on Ukraine, But How about the Second?
As I’ve noted (most recently in my series on Jeff Gerth’s error-ridden screed about “Russiagate” [sic]), Russian denialists cling to the John Solomon report, from the period when he and Rudy Giuliani were chumming up people like Dmitry Firtash, that Konstantin Kilimnik was really a State Department source, which — they fancy — proves he was not a Russian spy.
The actual communications between Kilimnik and people at State show him attempting to stovepipe shoddy propaganda to his State contacts, not offering useful information.
But a potentially more telling example of Kilimnik’s contacts with State are his description, after going out to drinks with John Kerry’s then-Chief of Staff, Jonathan Finer, just before Klimnik traveled to New York to meet with Paul Manafort about the election, that “Finer or whatever the fuck is his name,” was, “In total space.”
On the evening of May 6, 2016, Kilimnik’s communications suggest he met for “off the record” drinks with Department of State employees.368 Kilimnik was frustrated by this meeting, stating that he met “Finer or whatever the fuck is his name. In total space.”369
Patten said he understood “[i]n total space” to mean “in outer space” and.therefore not well informed on issues involving Ukraine. Patten Tr., p. 79; FBI, FD-302, Patten 5/22/2018.
In 2016, Paul Manafort’s handler was pissed that Finer wasn’t buying his bullshit about Ukraine.
Which is why I find these passages, from Politico’s oral history of the events leading up to Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine, a good place to start reading it. Finer — now Biden’s Deputy National Security Adviser — described bringing allies around to preparing for Russia’s attack by “bombarding them” with so much information they could no longer ignore evidence of Russia’s likely attack.
AMANDA SLOAT: It got to the point where we had to say to the Europeans, “Fine, we can agree to disagree analytically, but let’s start planning as if we are right. If we are right, then we’re in a good place because we’ve got all our planning. If you’re right, that’s the best possible outcome because then there’s not going to be an invasion — at best, this will have just been a waste of time.”
JON FINER: We eventually brought people around by bombarding them with information that you could not ignore.
More importantly, Finer — the guy who, Kilimnik scoffed, was “in total space” about Ukraine — described how Biden’s team preempted Russia’s efforts to use disinformation to justify their attack.
JON FINER: There was a very high likelihood that Russia would use disinformation — which is a fancy word for lies — to create some pretext for invading. By putting out information well in advance of their inevitable attempts to create this justification, we thought that we would be able to discredit any attempt by Russia to portray this as a just war.
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you set some time aside to read the whole thing. It’s a remarkable account of American efforts to do what’s right.
It’s also an expression of the auspicious collection of people in place for the fight against Ukraine. At various times, I’ve thought about how lucky the US was to have lifelong diplomat Bill Burns at CIA, to have no-drama Avril Haines at DNI, to have an expert like Tony Blinken at State. This piece provides a glimpse of how well they all worked together, little over a year after taking over from the shambolic Trump Administration.
As Burns — who spent over thirty years at State — described, this is the way government is supposed to work.
BILL BURNS: It’s the way government should work, in my opinion. The president set a very clear sense of direction. There was a shared understanding of the problem and coordination amongst the principals. Broadly speaking, the U.S. government performed the way it should perform in a situation like that.
There are specific details I’ll likely return to: comments suggesting the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was a necessary step before Putin would launch the invasion, descriptions from deputy NSA for international economics Daleep Singh and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco about how they’re targeting corrupt oligarchs.
But the most salient comments are about something that has already gotten a lot of coverage: the decision to declassify a great deal of information to undercut Russia’s information advantage.
EMILY HORNE: Many of the senior policymakers who were in and still are in the administration remember vividly seeing these intel streams in 2014 and then seeing what had been predicted come to life. There was this feeling of: “We knew this was coming, but we couldn’t say so because it was classified.” People remember that frustration and felt that we couldn’t let that happen a second time. All the conditions were there for us to try something new and bold, but risky. It was a gamble that this would work.
JAKE SULLIVAN: We convened a meeting of our team to talk through a strategy of downgrade [declassification], and then I engaged directly with the senior most people in the intelligence community about how we could do this.
BILL BURNS: The president made the decision to declassify some of our intelligence relatively early on, which is always a complicated choice to make. Along with my colleagues in the intelligence community, the DNI and others, I believe strongly that it was the right choice. I had seen too many instances where Putin had created false narratives that we never caught up to.
AVRIL HAINES: I remember quite clearly when [the president] directed me to do this. I have this sense of “OK, we’ve got to figure out how to do this in a way that protects sources and methods and understand what it is that we’re trying to achieve here.” It became a real team sport. How do we do this in a way that allows us to protect what we hold dearest?
JAKE SULLIVAN: What we would do is send to [the intelligence community] in classified form the things that we wanted to be able to say, they would tell us what could be declassified, and what couldn’t. We would take what they declassified and put it out. That began in early December and became a central feature of our approach through the beginning of the invasion — and since.
[snip]
GEN. PAUL NAKASONE: People are always asking, “Hey, did you ever think you’d be releasing your most sensitive intelligence to the American public?” I thought to myself, “Little bit of change.” But what I really think: “This is the nation’s intelligence. This isn’t an agency or the intelligence community’s or anyone else’s intelligence. When it benefits our national security, why do we not do that?”
JOHN KIRBY: I think this is one of the most valuable lessons that we have learned from a communications perspective — the real benefit to downgrading intelligence and making it public. You can really affect the decision-making process of a potential adversary. We were beating Putin’s lie to the punch, and we know that by doing so we got inside his decision-making loop.
Between this and extensive efforts to avoid the invasion, which have gotten less focus, this represented several departures from the poisonous secrecy of “the Deep State” in the decades leading up to it. Those complaining about “the Deep State” likely won’t notice, though, since they’re re-reading a debunked Sy Hersh story for the fourth time.
The oral history doesn’t address several questions I have about US efforts to anticipate and undercut Russia’s information war.
While the piece talks a lot about increased intelligence sharing, it doesn’t discuss the extent to which increased information sharing is a factor in the large number of spy networks — in Europe — that have been rolled up in recent years, starting before the invasion but accelerating since, as WaPo recently laid out.
Over the past year, as Western governments have ramped up weapons deliveries to Ukraine and economic sanctions against Moscow, U.S. and European security services have been waging a parallel if less visible campaign to cripple Russian spy networks. The German case, which also involved the arrest of a senior official in the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, followed roll-ups of suspected Russian operatives in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Poland and Slovenia.
The moves amount to precision strikes against Russian agents still in Europe after the mass expulsion of more than 400 suspected Russian intelligence officers from Moscow’s embassies across the continent last year.
U.S. and European security officials caution that Russia retains significant capabilities but said that its spy agencies have sustained greater damage over the past year than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
Russia laid the groundwork for this invasion for years, and it seems Europe is only now reversing some of Russia’s efforts behind it.
But what hasn’t been rolled back — and where this oral history seems overly optimistic — is a Russian backed network of propagandists who have gotten louder with the anniversary of the war.
No one has gotten louder than Tucker Carlson, who seems to be making support for Russia a litmus test in his support for 2024. In his anniversary special, he made the following baseless claims:
There was no proof that Russia hacked the DNC (Tucker alters the timeline by a month to sustain this claim); the Democrats weren’t even hacked.
The investigation into Trump was all a hoax.
If the Ukraine war continues, the US will lose.
Biden never mentioned the costs on the support for Ukraine.
Biden is censoring information about the war.
Zelenskyy is a destroyer who wants US troops to fight.
Ukraine is “the least free place in all of Europe, which is why it’s Joe Biden’s favorite place.”
Biden was elected in a sketchy election and has never had a majority of support in this country, so he has no legitimacy (Tucker made no mention of Trump’s failure to ever get majority support).
Extremism (he doesn’t say terrorism) will have been caused by neglect.
Bolsonaro and Trump are moderates.
The Biden Administration blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
This is Tucker doing what he balked at doing during the transition, until he grew desperate to stave off the “demonic force” that is Trump: undermining the legitimate President of the US. This is Tucker simply making stuff up about Russia’s attack on the US in 2016, taking the already baseless claims of denialists and pushing them five steps further.
He’s doing it, of course, while mining exclusive access of footage to the most sensitive spaces in the Capitol.
I think Tucker is right about one thing: Biden sounds overly optimistic. Because the Republican Party — and a large number of horseshoe leftists — would rather Russia win this war than let him succeed. And that’s a harder information battle to win.
Trump’s “Receptionist of the US” Deletes Her Trip to Russia
When Chamberlain Harris’s name first started getting bandied about as the woman in whose possession additional documents with classified markings were found last year at Mar-a-Lago, her LinkedIn bio described how, in addition to a trip to Spain in summer 2018, she also made a trip to St. Petersburg in Summer 2019, immediately before she took an internship at the White House.
Since then — perhaps today, after the Guardian published a follow-up on the story of those classified documents — the reference to Russia was removed.
In its first story on the documents, Guardian described that Molly Michael, then Trump’s Executive Assistant, ordered the woman in question to make a digital copy of the documents.
Then, at Mar-a-Lago in December, the contractors found a box that mainly contained presidential schedules, in which they found a couple of classified-marked documents to also be present and alerted the legal team to return the materials to the justice department, the sources said.
The exact nature of the classified-marked documents remains unclear, but a person with knowledge of the search likened their sensitivity to schedules for presidential movements – for instance, presidential travel to Afghanistan – that are considered sensitive until they have taken place.
After the Trump legal team turned over the box of schedules, the sources said, they learned that a junior Trump aide – employed by Trump’s Save America political action committee who acted as an assistant in Trump’s political “45 Office” – last year scanned and uploaded the contents of the box to a laptop.
The junior Trump aide, according to what one of the sources said, was apparently instructed to upload the documents by top Trump aide Molly Michael to create a repository of what Trump was doing while in office and was apparently careless in scanning them on to her work laptop.
Today’s update, in addition to identifying the woman as ROTUS — a made-up title that Harris has not yet deleted from her LinkedIn bio — described that the aide in question first had the box at a bungalow at Mar-a-Lago, then brought it to an off-site office, then brought it with her to occupy the desk that Molly Michael once had (in which at least two classified documents likely were found during the August 2022 search).
Known internally as ROTUS, short for Receptionist of the United States, the junior aide initially kept the box at a converted guest bungalow at Mar-a-Lago called the “tennis cottage” after Trump left office, and she soon took it with her to a government-leased office in the Palm Beach area.
The box remained at the government-leased office from where the junior aide worked through most of 2022, explaining why neither Trump’s lawyer who searched Mar-a-Lago in June for any classified-marked papers nor the FBI agents who searched the property in August found the documents.
Around the time that Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago from his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey at the end of the summer, the junior aide was told that she was being relocated to a desk in the anteroom of Trump’s own office at Mar-a-Lago that was previously assigned to top aide Molly Michael.
The junior aide retrieved her work belongings – including the box – from the government-leased office and took them to her new Mar-a-Lago workspace around September. At that time, the justice department’s criminal investigation into Trump’s retention of national security documents was intensifying.
[snip]
But the justice department was not satisfied, and it pressed the Trump legal team to get the contractors to conduct the third known search of Mar-a-Lago in early December – at which point the contractors discovered the box of presidential schedules, some with classified markings.
The Trump legal team alerted the FBI, which sent federal agents down to collect the box and its contents the following day.
A few weeks later, Trump’s lawyers started exploring whether they could get a better understanding of the sensitivity of the small number of schedules marked as classified, for the junior aide had kept sole custody of the box throughout that period.
It was at that point that the junior aide revealed for the first time that she could find out exactly what they were, because Michael – who left the Trump political team at the end of the summer – had told her to scan all of the schedules to her laptop.
Trump’s people are trying to shift the blame to her — but the documents were in Trump’s possession when he was subpoenaed last summer, so the failure to find them still arises from Trump’s failure to do a thorough search of the offices he controlled.
And this woman — whom Trump tried to forestall being subpoenaed in the laptop handover — just gave the FBI reason to look a whole lot more closely at her.
Update: Some have mentioned the report that this got uploaded to the cloud. That’s from this CNN report.
“Wink:” Where Jeff Gerth’s “No There, There” in the Russian Investigation Went
On July 28, 2017, Robert Mueller’s investigators served two warrants on the company (probably Rackspace) that hosted Paul Manafort’s DMP emails to obtain Manafort, Rick Gates, and Konstantin Kilimnik’s company emails.
Mueller obtained several things with that warrant that remain unresolved. Those are just some of the many things about the Russian investigation — the one Jeff Gerth claims had no there, there — that remain unanswered, four years after Mueller closed up shop.
Manafort’s lies about the plan to carve up Ukraine
One thing Mueller obtained with that warrant would have been an email Manafort sent Konstantin Kilimnik on April 11, 2016, “How do we get whole” with Oleg Deripaska, Manafort asked. The email showed that Manafort was using his position as the “free” campaign manager for Donald Trump to fix his legal and financial woes.
Another was an email Kilimnik wrote, but did not send, on December 8, 2016, but which Manafort knew to and did read, a “foldering” technique to prevent interception also used by terrorists. The email referenced a plan to carve up Ukraine that Kilimnik had first pitched to Manafort on August 2, 2016.
Russians at the very top level are in principle not against this plan and will work with the BG to start the process of uniting DNR and LNR into one entity, with security issues resolved (i.e. Russian troops withdrawn, radical criminal elements eliminated). The rest will be done by the BG and his people.
[snip]
All that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from DT saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass [sic] back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.
The email — and a text Kilimnik sent around the same time — talked about “recreating old friendship” with Deripaska at an in-person meeting. Less than a month later, Manafort flew to Madrid and met with a different Deripaska associate.
Six years later, we don’t know the fate of Manafort’s efforts to “get whole” with Deripaska, to recreate that old friendship.
It’s something that Manafort promised to tell Mueller’s prosecutors on September 13, 2018, when he entered into a plea agreement that averted a damaging trial during the election season. But it’s something that, Judge Amy Berman Jackson found, Manafort lied to hide from prosecutors in the ensuing weeks. We know that the last thing on Manafort’s schedule before he met with Kilimnik on August 2, 2016 was a meeting with Trump and Rudy Giuliani. We know that during the period when Manafort was lying to hide what happened with this plan to carve up Ukraine, his lawyer was speaking regularly with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. We know that during the period when Rudy Giuliani was seeking campaign assistance from Ukraine, he was consulting with Manafort. We know that Trump tried to coerce Volodymyr Zelenskyy to enter into a quid pro quo on July 25, 2019, but was caught by a whistleblower. We know that Bill Barr went to extraordinary lengths to protect Rudy Giuliani from any consequences for his dalliance with Russian agents in Ukraine.
We know that on December 24, 2020, Donald Trump pardoned Manafort, rewarding him for his lies. Yesterday, a judge in Florida approved a $3 million fine to settle Manafort’s failure to reveal the money he earned from working in Ukraine, money Manafort got to keep as a result of Trump’s pardon.
SDNY alleges that even as Manafort was lying about his plans with Kilimnik in September 2018, a different Deripaska associate was cultivating recently retired FBI Special Agent in Charge Charles McGonigal, someone who could tell him about what DOJ was learning (or not learning) from Manafort. We know that Seth DuCharme, who played a key role in Barr’s efforts to protect Rudy, now represents McGonigal.
We know that after Trump’s efforts to exploit dirt from Ukraine failed and Joe Biden became President, Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine, trying to achieve by force what it attempted to achieve by coercing Trump’s “free” campaign manager and his personal attorney.
When I wrote the last installment of my series demonstrating the false claims about “Russiagate” made by Jeff Gerth, I wrote a long passage (included below) that showed what Mueller was discovering in August 2017, a period when Gerth falsely claimed prosecutors had determined there was “no there, there” to Trump’s ties to Russia.
There was not only a lot there, where Gerth never bothered to look. In fact, the “there, there” remains unresolved and raw, six years later.
The investment in Michael Cohen
Take the investigation into Michael Cohen. One thing Mueller would discover in August 2017 is that Trump Organization was not fully complying with subpoenas, at least not subpoenas from Congress. As I noted in my piece, Mueller almost certainly obtained an email with an August 1, 2017 warrant that showed Michael Cohen had direct contact with the Kremlin during the campaign. The email also showed, Mueller would learn once Felix Sater and Cohen began to explain this to investigators, that Cohen and Trump were willing to do business with a former GRU officer and sanctioned banks in pursuit of an impossibly lucrative real estate deal in Moscow. The email obtained in August 2017 was proof that Trump was publicly lying about his ongoing pursuit of business in Russia. And for two more years, Trump kept that secret from the American public. That entire time, Russia knew he was lying to the American people. Russia knew, the American public did not.
Mueller got that email by asking Microsoft, not Trump Organization, for the email. But shortly after Mueller did so, Microsoft made it far harder to obtained enterprise emails without notifying Microsoft’s client. There are other questions about missing records — such as a letter Trump sent to then Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko — that might have been answered with more records from Trump Organization.
There’s also the matter of the big infusion of money — more than $400,000 over the course of a few months — that Cohen got from a Columbus Nova, in investment fund controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Mueller investigated whether the money had some tie to the different Ukrainian peace deal that Felix Sater got Cohen to bring to the White House.
It didn’t. As Cohen explained to Mueller in 2018, he got the money to explain how Trump worked to Andrew Intrater, who claimed to be looking to spend money on an infrastructure project in the US.
The pitch was to assist in Columbus Nova’s infrastructure fund. [redacted] invests in several different areas. At the time, there were discussions of significant foreign investment interest dedicated to U.S. infrastructure.
[snip]
In Cohen’s discussions with [Intrater] Cohen did not provide any non-public information. Cohen was not selling non-public information. Cohen could assist [Intrater] because Cohen understood Trump and what Trump was looking for.
But the payment, while legal, remains dodgy as hell.
Republicans, certainly, don’t want to talk about it. When Mark Meadows accused Cohen of omitting his contracts with foreign companies at his 2019 testimony before the Oversight Committee, Trump’s future Chief of Staff made no mention of Columbus Nova.
Mr. MEADOWS. Mr. Cohen, I’m going to come back to the question I asked before, with regards to your false statement that you submitted to Congress. On here, it was very clear, that it asked for contracts with foreign entities over the last two years. Have you had any foreign contract with foreign entities, whether it’s Novartis or the Korean airline or Kazakhstan BTA Bank? Your testimony earlier said that you had contracts with them. In fact, you went into detail——
Mr. COHEN. I believe it talks about lobbying. I did no lobbying. On top of that they are not government——
Mr. MEADOWS. In your testimony — I’m not asking about lobbying, Mr. Cohen.
Mr. COHEN. They are not government agencies. They are privately and——
Mr. MEADOWS. Do you have—do you have foreign contracts——
Mr. COHEN [continuing]. publicly traded companies.
Nor did Republicans include Nova in the FARA referral they sent to DOJ.
But Viktor Vekselberg was among the oligarchs Treasury would sanction in in 2018, along with Deripaska and Alexandr Torshin, and he was among the first people hit with expanded sanctions last year, after the invasion.
A December 2018 article about those payments to Cohen and the sanctions against Vekselberg was likely the article that Vekselberg associate Vladimir Voronchenko was sharing in 2018, which was cited as proof he knew of the sanctions, in his indictment for maintaining Vekselberg’s US properties in his own name after Vekselberg was sanctioned. Today, the government started the process of seizing Vekselberg’s US properties.
Then there’s the matter of Julian Assange, whose extradition remains hung up at the final approval stage.
When Candace Owens confronted Trump about why he didn’t pardon Assange last year, he got really defensive, folding his arms. He explained, seemingly referring to Assange and probably referencing the Vault 7 and Vault 8 releases of stolen CIA hacking tools, “in one case, you have sort of a spy deal going on … there were some spying things, and there were some bad things released that really set us back and really hurt us with what they did.”
But Twitter DMs Mueller obtained with the first August 2017 warrant targeting Roger Stone showed that, in the wake of Mike Pompeo’s designation of WikiLeaks as a non-state intelligence service in the wake of that release, Stone and Assange discussed a pardon. On June 4, 2017, Stone said, “I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for.” On June 10, Stone told Assange, “I am doing everything possible to address the issues at the highest level of government.”
Nine days later, on June 19, 2017, Trump ordered Corey Lewandowski to order Jeff Sessions to limit the investigation to prospective meddling from Russian, an order that — had Lewandowski obeyed — would have had the effect of shutting down the entire investigation, including that into Assange’s role in the hack-and-leak.
Texts obtained from Stone much later would show that he and Randy Credico discussed asylum for Assange on October 3, 2016 — before WikiLeaks started releasing the John Podesta emails.
Stone claimed to be pursuing a pardon for Assange at least through early 2018. It was only after Mueller asked Trump about such pardon discussions in September 2018 that Don Jr’s close friend Arthur Schwartz told Cassandra Fairbanks the pardon wouldn’t happen.
Those pardon discussions are just one of the things that Stone held over Trump’s head to ensure he’d never do prison time.
After the win, STONE tried a full court press in order to get a meeting with TRUMP. [redacted] eventually set up a meeting with TRUMP and STONE in early December 2016 on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. TRUMP didn’t want to take the meeting with STONE. TRUMP told BANNON to be in the meeting and that after 5 minutes, if the meeting hadn’t concluded, to throw STONE out. STONE came in with a book he wrote and possibly had a folder and notes. [full sentence redacted] TRUMP didn’t say much to STONE beyond “Thanks, thanks a lot.”. To BANNON, this reinforced STONE [redacted] After five to six minutes, the meeting was over and STONE was out. STONE was [redacted] due to the fact that during the meeting TRUMP just stared.
After Stone was convicted of lying to cover up the real nature of his contacts with Russia during the election, he lobbied for a pardon by claiming, repeatedly and publicly, that prosecutors offered him a deal if he would reveal the content of the phone conversations he had with Trump during the election.
On December 23, 2020, Stone got that pardon. Four days later, Stone and Trump spoke about January 6 at Mar-a-Lago. That same day, also at Mar-a-Lago, Kimberly Guilfoyle, started the planning for Trump to speak (at that point, the plan included a march to the Capitol).
Earlier this month, DOJ included Stone’s contacts with Proud Boy Dan Scott at a January 3 Florida rally in Scott’s statement of offense for attempting to obstruct the January 6 vote certification. It included Stone’s ties to various Oath Keepers as part of the proof DOJ used to prosecute Stewart Rhodes of sedition.
“The boss is aware”
It took an extra week for prosecutors in the Mike Flynn case to get approval for his sentencing memo in early 2020. So senior officials at DOJ had to have approved of the explanation of why Flynn’s lies about calling the Russian Ambassador to undermine Obama’s sanctions on Russia were serious. “Any effort to undermine the recently imposed sanctions, which were enacted to punish the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election,” the memo explained, “could have been evidence of links or coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia.”
From the time that Mueller’s team obtained KT McFarland’s transition device and email on August 25, 2017, they had reason to believe Flynn’s calls with the Russian Ambassador were a group affair, not (as Trump had claimed) simply Flynn’s doing. McFarland’s emails showed that before Flynn called Kislyak, he had received an email from Tom Bossert reporting on what Lisa Monaco told him about Russia’s response to the sanctions, immediately after which he spoke to McFarland from his hotel phone for 11 minutes.
Mueller came pretty close to concluding that was why Flynn intervened with the Russian Ambassador, too. “Some evidence suggests that the President knew about the existence and content of Flynn’s calls when they occurred,” the Mueller Report explained in laying out reasons why Trump might have wanted to fire Jim Comey. “[B]ut the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the President’s knowledge.” That’s because, after first denying that such calls happened at all, KT McFarland ultimately claimed not to remember telling Trump about the calls and Steve Bannon claimed not to remember discussing it with Flynn.
That was the conclusion Mueller reached in early 2019, a conclusion that already didn’t account for the fact that Flynn called the Russian Ambassador from a hotel phone, not his cell, or that he admitted that he and McFarland had deliberately written a text to cover up the contact. But the following year, in his effort to protect Trump, Bill Barr and other Republicans made available multiple pieces of evidence that make Trump’s knowledge of Flynn’s contacts more clear.
For example, after the House Intelligence Committee transcripts came out in 2020, it became clear that the White House had used Steve Bannon’s two appearances, with the assistance of Devin Nunes, to script certain answers. One of those answers denied continuing to discuss how to end sanctions against Russia after the inauguration. That scripting process happened between the time Flynn pled guilty and the time Bannon first denied remembering knowing of the sanctions discussion. Effectively, the White House scripted Bannon to deny knowledge of those sanction discussions in December 2016.
Then, in September 2020, as part of his efforts to justify overturning the prosecution of Flynn, Barr released the interview report from FBI agent Bill Barnett, who reportedly sent pro Trump texts on his FBI issued phone. It described how, after refusing to take part in that part of the Flynn investigation four different times, he nevertheless, “decided to work at the SCO hoping his perspective would keep them from ‘group think.’” He described being told that “was the only person who believed MCFARLAND was not holding back the information about TRUMP’s knowledge of [the sanction discussions].” He then asked a series of questions that would provide space for a denial: “BARNETT asked questions such as ‘Do you know that as a fact or are you speculating?’ and ‘Did you pass information from TRUMP to FLYNN?’”
Importantly, Barnett claimed it was “astro projection” that Trump directed Flynn’s contacts with the Ambassador.
He said that even after John Ratcliffe declassified the evidence that Mueller could never have used in the investigation, but which proved it wasn’t projection at all: the transcripts of Flynn’s calls with then-Ambassador Kislyak. They reveal that in the call on December 31, 2016, which Kislyak made to tell Flynn that “our conversation was also taken into account in Moscow” when Putin decided not to retaliate against the US for its sanctions, Flynn told Kislyak that “the boss is aware” of a plan to speak the day after Trump would be inaugurated. That would only be possible had Flynn either told Trump directly or had McFarland passed it along.
Once Barr came in, Flynn attempted to unwind all the things he had said to Mueller, directly contradicting multiple sworn statements. Just weeks after DOJ noted the centrality of Flynn’s lies to the question of whether Trump attempted to reverse sanctions just after Russia helped get him elected, Barr, too, joined the process of attempting to reverse the impact of the things Flynn had admitted to under oath. That effort extended to introducing notes with added, incorrect dates that Trump used in an effort to blame Biden for the investigation into Flynn. “We caught you,” Trump claimed to Biden in a prepared debate attack about the investigation that showed how his team first contacted Obama’s team to learn what they knew of the Russian response to sanctions, minutes before they called Russia to undermine those sanctions.
On November 25, Trump pardoned Flynn not just for his lies about the calls to the Russian Ambassador and working for Türkiye, but for any lies he told during the period he was reneging on his plea agreement. That same week, Flynn and Sidney Powell were in South Carolina together plotting ways to undermine Joe Biden’s election. Three weeks later, they would pitch Trump on a plan to seize the voting machines so he could stay in office.
When Bill Barr wrote his corrupt memo claiming there was no evidence that Trump obstructed the Mueller investigation, he was silent about the topic he had admitted, three times, would amount to obstruction: those pardon dangles. Those pardons aren’t just proof that Trump obstructed the investigation, stripping prosecutors of the leverage they might use to get Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Mike Flynn to tell the truth. But they’re also some of the most compelling proof that the secrets Stone and Manafort kept would have confirmed the suspicions that Trump coordinated with Russia in an attack on US democracy.
Update, 3/14: Corrected that Mueller closed up shop four years ago, not three. Time flies!
Just days earlier, on July 28, 2017, DOJ had already established probable cause to arrest George Papadopoulos for false statements and obstructing the investigation. His FBI interviews in the days after August 2 would go to the core questions of the campaign’s knowledge and encouragement of Russia’s interference. On August 11, Papadopoulos described, but then backed off certainty about, a memory of Sam Clovis getting upset when Papadopoulos told Clovis “they,” the Russians, have Hillary’s emails. On August 19, Papadopoulos professed to be unable to explain what his own notes planning a September 2016 meeting in London with the “Office of Putin” meant.
The investigation into Paul Manafort, too, was only beginning to take steps that would reveal suspect ties to Russia. Also on July 28, for example, DOJ obtained the first known warrant including conspiracy among the charges under investigation, and the first known warrant listing the June 9 meeting within the scope of the investigation. On August 17, DOJ would show probable cause to obtain emails from Manafort’s business involving Manafort, Gates, and Konstantin Kilimnik that would (among other things) show damning messages sent between Manafort and Kilimnik using the foldering technique, likely including Manafort’s sustained involvement in a plan to carve up Ukraine that started on August 2, 2016 (which Gerth omits from his description of that meeting).
Similarly, Mueller was still collecting evidence explaining why Flynn might have lied about his calls with Sergey Kislyak. On August 25, Mueller obtained a probable cause warrant to access devices owned by the GSA showing that Flynn had coordinated his calls with other transition officials, including those with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, when he called Kislyak to undermine Obama’s sanctions against Russia.
Plus, Mueller was just beginning to investigate at least two Trump associates that Rosenstein would include in an expanded scope in October 2017. On July 18, Mueller would obtain a probable cause warrant that built off Suspicious Activity Reports submitted to Treasury. That first known warrant targeting Michael Cohen never mentioned the long-debunked allegations about Cohen in the Steele dossier. Instead, the warrant affidavit would cite five deposits in the first five months of 2017 from Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Group, totaling over $400K, $300K in payments from Korean Aerospace Industries, and almost $200K from Novartis, all of which conflicted with Cohen’s claim that the bank account in question would focus on domestic clients. On August 1, Mueller would obtain a probable cause warrant for Cohen’s Trump Organization emails from Microsoft. Mueller did so using a loophole that Microsoft would sue to close shortly afterwards, a move which likely stymied the investigation into a suspected $10 million donation to Trump, via an Egyptian bank, that kept him in the race in September 2016. That warrant for Trump Organization emails likely obtained Cohen’s January 2016 contact with the Kremlin – the one not turned over, to Congress at least, in response to a subpoena – a contact that Cohen would lie to Congress about four week later.
On August 7, Mueller used a probable cause warrant to obtain Roger Stone’s Twitter content, which revealed a mid-October 2016 exchange with WikiLeaks that disproved the rat-fucker’s public claims that he had never communicated with WikiLeaks during the campaign (a fact that Gerth gets wrong in the less than 1% of his series he dedicates to Stone). It also revealed that the day after the election, WikiLeaks assured Stone via DM that “we are now more free to communicate.” Those communications would, in one week (the subsequent investigation showed), turn into pardon discussions, which provides important background to the June 2017 Twitter DMs Stone had with Julian Assange, obtained with that August warrant, about “doing everything possible to address [Assange’s] issues at the highest level of Government.”
Maggie Haberman’s Foray into Campaign Finance Journalism
It was an unusual story. Love or hate Maggie, she’s a really hard working journalist. But her forté is working phones, not documents.
Nevertheless, Maggie set out alone, without the involvement of an expert on documents generally or the FEC specifically (someone like David Fahrenthold) to explain why Jack Smith’s prosecutors are subpoenaing vendors of Trump’s Save America PAC.
The Justice Department has been subpoenaing documents from vendors paid by the PAC, including law firms, in an effort to determine what they were being paid for.
It seemed to be a follow-up to this story, which, by suggesting that JP Cooney had only joined the team with Smith’s hiring, falsely implied that DOJ had only started pursuing this angle after his appointment.
Three of his first hires — J.P. Cooney, Raymond Hulser and David Harbach — were trusted colleagues during Mr. Smith’s earlier stints in the department. Thomas P. Windom, a former federal prosecutor in Maryland who had been tapped in late 2021 by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s aides to oversee major elements of the Jan. 6 inquiry, remains part of the leadership team, according to several people familiar with the situation.
In addition to the documents and Jan. 6 investigations, Mr. Smith appears to be pursuing an offshoot of the Jan. 6 case, examining Save America, a pro-Trump political action committee, through which Mr. Trump raised millions of dollars with his false claims of election fraud. That investigation includes looking into how and why the committee’s vendors were paid.
But Maggie, writing on her own, focuses instead on prospective crimes: the possibility that continuing to pay legal bills out of money raised starting in 2020 would be a different campaign finance violation.
Some of the $16 million appears to have been for lawyers representing witnesses in investigations related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power. But the majority of it — about $10 million — went to firms directly representing Mr. Trump in a string of investigations and lawsuits, including some related to his company, the filings showed.
Back in November, CLC did a report noting that Trump was doing that more generally, not just with lawyers.
All that’s not actually why I was interested in the story, but if you want an accounting of how much PAC money Trump is spending on legal services, Daily Beast’s tally includes the money spent by the MAGA PAC as well, adding up to $29.1 million since leaving office.
After I started unpacking Maggie’s story, I got distracted with the possibility that DOJ will tie Trump and Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman directly to the almost-murder of Michael Fanone. So, in the interim, Maggie broke the news that Smith’s prosecutors had subpoenaed Jared and Ivanka.
That story, written with Mike Schmidt, is exceptional only for the fact that they managed to avoid most of the hype about “aggressive steps” that peppers most reporting on Jack Smith. It pointed to things like the morning Oval Office meeting (Ivanka’s response to which her Chief of Staff Julie Radford was likely already questioned about, since — as the J6C Report noted explicitly — Radford was far more candid about it than Ivanka) and efforts to get Trump to call off his mob as likely topics of questioning.
Smith no doubt wants to get Jared and Ivanka’s stories about such topics locked in. Given questions about their candor before J6C, too, Smith will likely also give them an opportunity to revise their prior answers so they more closely match known facts.
Back to Maggie’s solo endeavor to read FEC filings.
There are two reasons I was interested in the story. First, having looked at FEC filings, Maggie seems to have discovered that the $195,000 in services that Boris Epshteyn billed to Save America PAC last year were not for legal services, but instead strategic consulting.
Another $1.3 million went to Silverman Thompson Slutkin and White, the firm of Evan Corcoran, a lawyer who began working with Mr. Trump last spring. Mr. Corcoran was brought into Mr. Trump’s orbit by Boris Epshteyn, a strategist who has played a coordinating role with some of the lawyers in cases involving Mr. Trump, as the investigation related to the Mar-a-Lago documents was heating up. (Mr. Epshteyn’s company was paid $195,000, but for broader strategic consulting, not legal consulting specifically.)
This is an important point, but one Maggie did not highlight (nor issue corrections on past stories). For the entirety of the time that Epshteyn was quarterbacking Trump’s response to the stolen documents probe, someone in his immediate vicinity has been telling reporters that he was playing a legal function, all the while billing Trump for the same old strategic consulting his firm, Georgetown Advisory, normally provides (though the two payments the campaign made to Epshteyn after Trump formalized his candidacy, totalling $30,000, were filed under “communications and legal consulting”).
NYT has, in various stories including Maggie in the byline, described Epshteyn’s role in the stolen documents case as “an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Mr. Trump’s legal efforts,” “in-house counsel for the former president who has become one of his most trusted advisers,” and “who has played a central role in coordinating lawyers on several of the investigations involving Mr. Trump.” Another even describes that Epshteyn “act[ed] as [a] lawyer [] for the Trump campaign.” The other day, Maggie described his role instead as “broader strategic consulting.”
All the time that NYT was describing Epshteyn as playing a legal role — and NYT is in no way alone in this — he was telling the Feds he wasn’t playing a legal function, he was instead playing a strategic consulting one. Many if not most of these stories also post-date the time, in September, when the FBI seized Epshteyn’s phone, which would give him a really good reason to try to claim to be a lawyer and not a political consultant.
DOJ is more likely to take FEC’s word on this issue than claims Epshteyn made to the press after his phone seizure.
Like I said, virtually every media outlet seems to be repeating the claim that Epshteyn has been playing a legal, not political role. But there’s one Maggie story, in particular, where the question of Epshteyn’s role is central: This story, quoting Eric Herschmann calling Epshteyn (and Evan Corcoran) idiots, a habit that made Herschmann a star witness for the January 6 Committee. Herschmann’s glee about calling Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and now Epshteyn and Corcoran idiots always distracted from sketchier aspects of Herschmann’s behavior, such as Keith Kellogg’s puzzlement about why a lawyer sat in the Oval Office while Trump ordered Mike Pence to break the law and said nothing.
Anyway, this Maggie story focusing on Epshteyn’s role not only called him an idiot, but also insinuated he was witness tampering.
To the extent anyone is regarded as a quarterback of the documents and Jan. 6-related legal teams, it is Boris Epshteyn, a former campaign adviser and a graduate of the Georgetown University law school. Some aides tried to block his calls to Mr. Trump in 2020, according to former White House officials, but Mr. Epshteyn now works as an in-house counsel to Mr. Trump and speaks with him several times a day.
Mr. Epshteyn played a key role coordinating efforts by a group of lawyers for and political allies of Mr. Trump immediately after the 2020 election to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from becoming president. Because of that role, he has been asked to testify in the state investigation in Georgia into the efforts to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory there.
Mr. Epshteyn’s phone was seized by the F.B.I. last week as part of the broad federal criminal inquiry into the attempts to overturn the election results and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
[snip]
In his emails to Mr. Corcoran and Mr. Rowley, Mr. Herschmann — a prominent witness for the House select committee on Jan. 6 and what led to it — invoked Mr. Corcoran’s defense of Mr. Bannon and argued pointedly that case law about executive privilege did not reflect what Mr. Corcoran believed it did.
Mr. Herschmann made clear in the emails that absent a court order precluding a witness from answering questions on the basis of executive privilege, which he had repeatedly implored them to seek, he would be forced to testify.
“I certainly am not relying on any legal analysis from either of you or Boris who — to be clear — I think is an idiot,” Mr. Herschmann wrote in a different email. “When I questioned Boris’s legal experience to work on challenging a presidential election since he appeared to have none — challenges that resulted in multiple court failures — he boasted that he was ‘just having fun,’ while also taking selfies and posting pictures online of his escapades.”
[snip]
In language that mirrored the federal statute against witness tampering, Mr. Herschmann told Mr. Corcoran that Mr. Epshteyn, himself under subpoena in Georgia, “should not in any way be involved in trying to influence, delay or prevent my testimony.”
“He is not in a position or qualified to opine on any of these issues,” Mr. Herschmann said.
Mr. Epshteyn declined to respond to a request for comment. [my emphasis]
The story ends by reporting that Herschmann’s, “testimony was postponed.”
I’m not aware of any report that describes Herschmann has been called back to testify.
The story is dated September 16, 2022.
Two days earlier, Cassidy Hutchinson had testified to the January 6 Committee (after already beginning to cooperate with DOJ) that after she testified on May 17 that Herschmann was present for a conversation about Trump saying that “Hang Mike Pence” chants were justified, her then-lawyer Stefan Passantino seemingly contacted Herschmann who then called Hutchinson and told her, “I didn’t know that you remembered so much.”
Ms. Cheney. When Stefan said “I’ll talk to some people,” do you know who he was referring to?
Ms. Hutchinson. I didn’t ask. assume it was the same entourage of people that he had been conferring with for the past few weeks.
You know, I had also received a call from Eric Herschmann, I believe on Friday, May 20th. I believe it was Friday, May 20th. It was, because this was after the interview.
And Eric called me that evening, and I just apologized. And he was like, you know, “I didn’t know that you remembered so much, Cassidy. Mark [Meadows] really put you in bad positions. I’m really sorry that he didn’t take care of you better. You never should’ve had to testify to any of that. That’s all of our jobs. I don’t know why they didn’t ask us, they asked you instead.”
And I was just like, “Look, Eric like, it is what it is.” And he kind of talked for — it was probably a 30-minute conversation.
In the same J6C appearance two days before that Maggie story painting Ephsteyn as a witness tamperer, Hutchinson told the committee that she suspected that Passantino had spoken to Maggie about her testimony, something that, if true, would have had the effect of sharing her testimony with other witnesses without appearing to obstruct the investigation. She also described Alex Cannon to be involved in the outreach to Maggie.
The next day, September 15, Hutchinson provided the committee more detail about Passantino’s alleged efforts to share her testimony with Herschmann and others. Passantino told her to call Trump’s lawyer, Justin Clark, as well as Alex Cannon and Eric Herschmann, Hutchinson told the committee on September 15.
The day after my third interview with the committee, on Wednesday, May 18th, Stefan let me know that I — he spoke with Justin Clark, Alex Cannon, and Eric Herschmann and suggested that I call — that I have a call with all three of them.
I reached out to initiate the call with Alex Cannon and Justin Clark per Stefan’s instruction. And the that Friday, May 20th, received a call on Signal from Eric Herschmann.
So on September 14, Hutchinson told J6C about behavior involving Herschmann resembling witness tampering, including behavior involving Maggie Haberman! On September 15, Hutchinson told J6C about behavior involving Herschmann resembling witness tampering. And on September 16, Maggie Haberman quoted Herschmann blaming Epshteyn for any witness tampering.
All that background is why I find the way Maggie ended her foray into campaign finance journalism so interesting. She quotes anonymous sources — not the public J6C transcripts showing that Passantino and Alex Cannon were sourcing her earlier reporting on this — attributing Hutchinson’s testimony as the genesis of this focus on paying law firms.
The questions of which lawyers and vendors have been paid, and for what, intensified after the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power told the Justice Department that it had evidence that a lawyer representing a witness had tried to coach her testimony in ways that would be favorable to Mr. Trump. The witness in question was later identified by people familiar with the committee’s work as Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide.
Her lawyer at the time, Stefan Passantino, was a former White House deputy counsel under Mr. Trump and was paid through Save America.
The reason I’m interested in this is because the point of Passantino’s alleged efforts to coach Hutchinson’s testimony was not, primarily, to protect Trump. According to Hutchinson’s testimony, at least, it was to protect Eric Herschmann, someone who has had tremendous success (like his close associate Jared Kushner) laundering his reputation through Maggie Haberman.
Ms. Hutchinson. ~ You previously asked about individuals he had raised with me. In my conversation with him earlier that afternoon, when I [sic] asking him about the engagement letter, I did also ask Stefan if he was representing any other January 6th clients. And he had said, “No one that I believe that you would have any conflicts with.”
And I said, “Would you mind letting me know?” Now, again, to this day, I still don’t know if that’s really a kosher question to ask an attorney, if they can share their clients with me, but I wanted to make sure that there actually weren’t any conflicts, because I didn’t have anything in writing.
He wouldn’t tell me anybody he was representing before the January 6th Committee, but he did tell me that he had previously represented Eric Herschmann and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in unrelated matters.
And in that same conversation, he said, “So if you have any conversations with any of them, especially Eric Herschmann, we want to really work to protect Eric Herschmann.”
And I remember saying sarcastically to him, “Eric can handle himself. Eric has his own resources. Why do I have to protect Eric?” He said, “No, no, no. Like, just to keep everything straight, like, we want to protect Eric with all of this.”
Ms. Cheney. Did he explain what he meant?
Ms. Hutchinson. No. And, to be honest, I didn’t ask. I didn’t have anything with Eric anyway that I felt that I had to protect. And I say that because, at the time of being back in Trump world — this is where I look back and regret some of this, but — like, I did feel a need to protect certain people. But with somebody like Eric, I didn’t feel that need, I didn’t find it necessary. didn’t — I didn’t think that Eric did anything wrong at the time.
Ms. Cheney. Did it have something to do with NARA?
Ms. Hutchinson. He never really explained to me what it was exactly that we wanted to protect Eric on. I sort of erred on the side of: Maybe he just represents Eric in ongoing litigation, whether it’s financial disclosures or whatever it might be.
And, again, I just didn’t prod too much on that either, because, you know, I was under the impression that Eric helped set me up with Stefan, so I didn’t — I was worried that Stefan would then go back-channel to Eric and — this is my very paranoid brain at the time, but I was worried that if I, you know, pushed this subject a little too much, that he would then go back to Eric Herschmann and say, “Cassidy asked a lot of questions about you, like, why she needs to protect you.” So just didn’t really press the subject too much on that.
And as Hutchinson learned somewhat belatedly, Passantino had business ties to Alex Cannon and, possibly, Herschmann.
So I — “I want to make sure that I’m getting the dates right with these things?
He goes, “No, no, no.” He said, “Look, we want to get you in, get you out.
We’re going to downplay your role. You were a secretary. You had an administrative role. Everyone’s on the same page about this. It’s extremely unfair that they’re” “they’re” being the committee – “that the committee is putting you in this position in the first place. You really have nothing to do with any of this. It’s Mark’s fault that you’re even involved in this. We’re completely happy to be taking care of you now. We had no idea that you weren’t being taken care of this last year. So we’re really happy that you reached back out to us. But the less you remember, the better. I don’t think that you should be filling in any calendars or anything.”
[Redacted] When he said a
Ms. Cheney. Go ahead.
[Redacted] So everyone’s on the same page about this, did he explain who he was referring to when he said “everyone”?
Ms. Hutchinson. He didn’t at that moment. Then there are times throughout my working relationship with Stefan where he said similar things that I asked.
Later that day, sort of put together that the “they” he was referring to then were Justin Clark, Alex Cannon, Eric Herschmann. I think that’s — yeah, think that’s all of them.
Ms. Cheney. And how did you put that together?
Ms. Hutchinson. Because he — he had said that — Justin — yeah, Justin Clark. Stefan had told me that — towards the end of the day that because he was involved with Elections, LLC, and tangentially, I guess Trump’s PACs, he had law partners. And unless I was extremely unwilling for him to share, he said it would be natural for him to have to share that information with the people that he works with that are his partners that are involved in Trump world.
That is, Hutchinson testified that Passantino’s alleged effort to coach her testimony was not (necessarily) an effort to protect Trump. It was an effort to protect his business scheme, a business scheme that may have included Herschmann.
In Maggie’s foray into campaign finance journalism, she did not calculate payments to Elections LLC in her discussion of law firms paid by Save America PAC, though it was paid upwards of $400,000 since Trump left office. The last of those payments — for $10,000 — was on December 7, after Trump formalized his 2024 presidential bid. So if Maggie’s right that these payments are illegal, then that $10,000 would be one of the first overt acts in this new criminal exposure.
As it happens, all this ties back to Maggie’s newest story breaking the news of a subpoena to Ivanka and Jared. I’m sure Jack Smith wants to ask Ivanka and Jared about their efforts to get dad to call off his mob.
But he may also want to know why Herschmann — a lawyer whose legal status in the White House remains entirely unexplained — why Herschmann, according to Pat Cipollone’s testimony, told the White House Counsel not to join in that Oval Office meeting where Trump ordered Pence to break the law because “this is family.”
“This is family,” Cipollone said Herschmann told him before he walked in the door. “You don’t need to be here.”
I would imagine that Jack Smith wants to know why, at that moment when Trump prepared to give his Vice President an illegal order, Herschmann was treated as family.
served as a legal, communications, and policy advisor to President Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign; and he continues to serve as legal counsel to President Trump to this day.
He cited NY state’s bar rules to argue that his ethical obligations extend well beyond attorney-client privilege.
In contrast, the client confidences that Mr. Epshteyn is required to safeguard as a New York-licensed attorney pursuant to Rule 1.6 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct (“NYRPC”)4 reach a broader and less easily identifiable array of communications and information. Like its corollary rule in virtually every U.S. jurisdiction, NYRPC 1.6 provides that “[a] lawyer shall not knowingly reveal confidential information … or use such information to the disadvantage of a client or for the advantage of the lawyer or a third person” absent client consent or “to comply with other law or court order.” NYRPC l.6(a)-(b). The rule defines “Confidential Information” to mean “information gained during or relating to the representation of a client, whatever its source, that is (a) protected by the attorney-client privilege, (b) likely to be embarrassing or detrimental to the client if disclosed, or ( c) information that the client has requested be kept confidential.” NYRPC 1.6(a)(3). The duty to preserve client confidences under Rule 1.6 is much broader that the attorney-client privilege, it includes any information gained during the representation regardless of its nature or source, and it necessarily includes information that is not subject to any other privilege or protection, provided that it is not already generally known in the community.
Epshteyn has always had a far stronger case he was working in a legal role starting in April or May of last year than while he was on the campaign (where he was described by other witnesses, like Jenna Ellis was also described, as playing a PR role).
In public comments from Emily Kohrs, she suggested that Rudy, who was barred in NY still when he represented Trump during the 2020 election, provided thoughtful question by question answers about whether he could answer questions.
Trial by Combat: Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman Speeches Included in Ed Badalian Exhibit List
In a pre-trial filing in the case of Ed Badalian — who is charged with conspiring with Michael Fanone’s now admitted assailant, Danny Rodriguez, to obstruct the vote certification — the government identified at least six exhibits pertaining to the events at the Ellipse on January 6 it may introduce at trial.
That includes not just video and a transcript of Trump’s speech, but also of John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani’s speeches.
Exhibit 311 likely references the documentary clip showing Rodriguez, seemingly responding to Trump’s call-out of Pence in his speech, turning to the camera, stating “Joe Biden,” and making a throat-slitting movement several times (See 25:43 in this video).
Focusing on what happened at the Trump rally is unusual in January 6 trials.
Not even with some of the defendants who seemed most enraged by Trump — such as Kyle Fitzsimons — did the government rely on more than a still picture of the Ellipse event. In the Dustin Thompson case, where Thompson had affirmatively claimed that Trump’s speech had authorized him to storm the Capitol (and where Thompson had falsely testified Rudy’s speech had done so too), the government included just a YouTube of Rudy’s speech that had been sent to Thompson. They had Trump’s speech available as an exhibit, but relied, instead, on Thompson’s Uber and GPS records to prove he hadn’t seen Rudy’s speech.
The government has more often than not tried to keep the Ellipse rally out of January 6 trials than include it.
But in this case, the government may be in a position to do something else: to tie Trump, Rudy, and Eastman directly to the violence at the Capitol, to tie Trump directly to the attack that almost killed Michael Fanone.
As DOJ has done with other charged conspiracies, the indictment, Rodriguez’ statement of offense, as well as that of co-conspirator Gina Bisignano trace how the co-conspirators — here, a group of anti-maskers from Southern California — responded to Trump’s call by arming themselves, traveling together to DC, getting riled up at Trump’s speech, then going to the Capitol to engage in some of the most important violence and destruction during the attack.
In response to Trump’s December 19 tweet, for example, someone in the group described that, “Trump is calling on everyone to go to DC Jan 6th.” Two days later, Badalian announced, “we need to violently remove traitors and if they are in key positions rapidly replace them with able bodied Patriots.” On December 29, Rodriguez boasted, “Congress can hang. I’ll do it. Please let us get these people dear God.” Sometime before leaving for DC, Rodriguez told someone else, he would “assassinate Joe Biden” if he got the chance. On January 5, Badalian said, “we don’t want to fight antifa lol we want to arrest traitors.” Also on January 5, Rodriguez promised, “There will be blood. Welcome to the revolution.”
In this case, they also have a remarkable confession. DOJ has Rodriguez explaining to the FBI that he didn’t plan on murdering anyone like Fanone, he just thought there might be casualties because, he believed, he was fighting a civil war.
I kept thinking that we were going to go to, like, a civil war and it’s going to go hot and we’re just — it’s all going to — you know? I don’t know. I didn’t know — we didn’t — nobody knew, so we just thought that it was going to — we were preparing for the — we’re trying to save the country. We thought we were saving the country. I thought I was helping to save the country.
[snip]
A. I didn’t go planning to murder anybody.
Q. I’m not saying that.
A. But I knew that it was a possibility that —
BY AGENT ELIAS: Q. There could be causalities and —
A. There could be causalities. That, like, if this was another civil war, this was another 1776, another 4th of July or something, that that could be a possibility and —
But what they also have are the immediate reactions to Trump’s speech (and perhaps Eastman and Rudy’s, too), that turn to a camera and the show of slitting Biden’s throat. Rodriguez is not the only one who responded to Trump’s incitement by voicing plans to attack the Capitol. Bisignano (who may yet live to regret her nine month effort to renege on her plea deal) also responded directly to Trump’s incitement. “I hope Mike Pence is going to do the right thing,” Trump called out. “I hope so too,” Bisignano responded, “he’s deep state.” And as she marched to the Capitol, Bisignano filmed herself describing that “we are marching to the Capitol to put some pressure on Mike Pence.” Once there, she described, “we are storming the Capitol,” before she, Rodriguez, and Badalian did just that together.
One of the key pieces of evidence Jack Smith’s prosecutors have tying Donald Trump and John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani to the attack on the Capitol are Greg Jacob’s retorts to Eastman that day. “The knowing amplification of [Eastman’s] theory through numerous surrogates, whipping large numbers of people into a frenzy over something with no chance of ever attaining legal force through actual process of law,” Jacob told Eastman at 3:05 PM on January 6, as he sheltered with the Vice President from Danny Rodriguez and Gina Bisignano and thousands of other attackers, “has led us to where we are.” At 2:14PM, just as attackers broke through a window of the Capitol, Jacob was more succinct: “[T]hanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.”
An hour after that initial breach, Danny Rodriguez would grab Fanone and, using a taser he was handed inside the Tunnel, tase the officer twice in the neck, leading to a heart attack and other injuries that remain redacted in Rodriguez’ statement of offense. In the morning, Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” John Eastman told listeners, “We no longer live in a self governing republic” if they couldn’t get Pence to let Republicans investigate further. Trump told his followers that if they didn’t fight, they wouldn’t have a country anymore.
In the morning, Trump’s speech led Rodriguez to imagine knifing Joe Biden, and in the afternoon, Danny Rodriguez almost killed Michael Fanone.
I don’t know if DOJ intends to do this (and as noted in the exhibit list, Badalian wants these exhibits excluded from trial on relevance grounds), but Amit Mehta certainly believed Trump might bear Aid and Abet liability for assaults like the one Rodriguez committed on Michael Fanone.
And in the case where you can draw the clearest line between things that Trump and Rudy and Eastman said at the rally to an assault and other violence at the Capitol, DOJ has laid the ground work to make that case.
Update: Here’s the updated exhibit list for the trial with specific times for the video of Trump and Giuliani’s speeches. The times from the latter are from when Rudy spoke, not John Eastman; it appears to include his “trial by combat” line.
The Evolving Robert Costello – Steve Bannon Timeline
Robert Costello’s law firm, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, is suing Steve Bannon.
Can you blame them? According to the complaint, Bannon has stiffed the firm on $480,487.87 out of $855,487.87 they’ve billed him.
I’m interested in the complaint, though, for something other than the details of what a cheapskate Bannon is.
Here’s how the complaint describes the firm’s work for Bannon.
From on or about November 2020 through on or about November 2022, DHC provided legal services on behalf of the Defendant regarding several matters that included, but not limited to, a federal action captioned, United States v. Stephen Bannon, 20 Cr. 412 (AT) (S.D.N.Y.) which was dismissed against Defendant subsequent to a presidential pardon of him that was secured through the aid of DHC, represented Defendant with regards to a subpoena issued by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (“Subpoena”), subsequently represented Defendant in response to a criminal contempt proceeding captioned, United States v. Stephen K. Bannon, 21Cr. 670 (CJN) (D.D.C.) regarding that Subpoena, and represented Defendant in a case brought by the former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, captioned In the Matter of the Application of Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. (collectively the “Legal Services”)
That mostly tracks what we know about Costello’s representation of Bannon. He publicly took over representing Bannon in the Build the Wall case on December 11, 2020 after Bannon’s prior criminal defense attorney, Bill Burck, fired him for threatening to execute Anthony Fauci and Chris Wray.
Costello represented Bannon in his contemptuous refusal to show up before the January 6 Committee and invoke Executive Privielge, and participated in twodiscussions with the government that the government treated as material to the contempt case against Bannon. There was a brief moment after Bannon was indicted on November 12, 2021, where it looked like David Schoen and Evan Corcoran would represent Bannon, alone. But on December 2, Costello filed to join the case, setting off a long discussion about whether Costello would be a witness or a lawyer on the case. That charade continued until July 2022, when Costello decided he might need to be a witness after all. See this post for some of that timeline.
It is true that Costello represented Bannon in the early period of NY State’s investigation into Bannon for the same fraud for which he was pardoned in the federal Build the Wall case. Though the November 2022 date roughly coincides with Bannon’s sentencing in October 2022.
Again, it mostly checks out.
The reason I’m interested, however, is that back in July 2022, when Costello was withdrawing from the Bannon contempt case, he gave a different timeline for his representation of Bannon, indicating that it went back two years earlier than the timeline DHC has laid out.
I am an attorney and Partner in the firm of Davidoff, Hutcher & Citron, LLP located at 605 Third Avenue, New York, New York. For the past 49 years I have been admitted to the bar of the State of New York, the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, the Second and Third Circuit Courts of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court. I have been counsel to the above listed Defendant, Stephen K. Bannon on a number of different matters for the past three years. I am admitted to the bar of this District by way of pro hac vice motion. I have been co-counsel to Mr. Bannon throughout these proceedings as well as in connection with all interactions with the Select Committee which preceded the filing of Contempt of Congress misdemeanor charges in this Court. [my emphasis]
I noted at that time that it was a different timeline than was publicly known, the timeline that DHC lays out in its complaint.
Still, there may be a ready explanation for this discrepancy too: That Costello is including the period when he played a key role in the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” operation in the time period he represented Bannon, but DHC is not.
Even so, that timeline is a bit hazy, given some variation regarding whether he reached out in 2019 or 2020 in Mac Isaac’s story.
In any case, the discrepancy between DHC’s story and Costello’s about the length of time he represented Bannon may be of interest to Abbe Lowell, as he asks the Feds to investigate — among others — Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and Costello.
These disputes are interesting for another reason. As the Daily Beast laid out, Bannon has also been stiffing Evan Corcoran. And his third lawyer from the contempt case, Schoen, said last month he can no longer work with him in the NYS Build the Wall charges.
Even after the irreparable split in NYS, Schoen remained on Bannon’s appeal, where he has been stalling and where briefing won’t be done until May. Any appeal would be premised on Bannon’s understanding of the expectations surrounding Executive Privilege, which would seem to rely on Costello’s testimony.
I have no idea where this is going. Perhaps Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Lowell, can sort it out.
