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Mueller’s Inquiry Expands and Contracts: The Rat-Fucking Is More Interesting than the Manafort Plea

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There were two pieces of news today on the Mueller inquiry.

Most intriguing is the news that the FBI has told Republican operative Cheri Jacobus that their investigation of her hack and catfish in 2016 has been referred to Mueller. Click through for the full account of what happened to Jacobus after she exposed a Corey Lewandowski PAC to be coordinating with the campaign. The short version, though, is that the campaign first used deceit to try to collect information on what anti-Trump PACs were planning, later carried out a sustained campaign of abuse, and finally hacked her email when she prepared to reveal the catfishing scheme.

The FBI has been investigating ever since. But on September 10, the agents she had been working with let her know that their inquiry had grown beyond the hack itself and so had referred the case.

Jacobus has been in regular contact with FBI agents since the bureau opened an investigation into the hacking of her email after Jacobus filed a complaint around September 2016.

Following Trump’s election, Jacobus relayed additional incidents she considered suspicious to the agents investigating the hack.

Jacobus said she was also interviewed by FBI agents in the Southern District of New York for several hours in February 2017 and has had dozens of phone calls with the agents over the past two years. A lawyer who worked for Jacobus at the time, Jay Butterman, said he also attended the February 2017 meeting and had follow-up conversations with FBI agents.

In November 2017, the FBI asked Jacobus to turn over the remainder of her communications related to the catfishing scheme, some of which she had already submitted, according to an email reviewed by POLITICO.

On Sept. 10 of this year, an FBI agent wrote to Jacobus that he would be calling her, which is when, she said, the bureau informed her of the case’s referral to Mueller.

To answer a question many have posed, I don’t think any investigation into what I perceived as threats mirrors this. That’s in part because the technical threats were more oblique. But it’s also because the FBI really doesn’t want to talk to me, and so (with one exception) generally only followed up via my lawyer. The one instance I involved the cops may have been different, but if so, I never heard about it directly.

I’m more interested in the possibility that Jacobus’ treatment mirrors some of the stuff that Roger Stone was doing with his Stop the Steal çampaign.

The possibility that Mueller’s interest in Stone (and Manafort) extends back to the primary is all the more interesting given how centrally some of Stone’s core skill-sets played out in the lead-up to the Convention. There were veiled threats of violence (and in the home of his dark money, actual violence), a smear story projecting on Cruz the infidelity more typical of Trump, and lots of money sloshing around.

It’s not entirely clear what crime that would implicate — besides potential campaign finance violations (particularly, given Trump’s repeated disavowals of any coordination between Stone and his old buddy Manafort).

And, given how rabidly Republican base voters support Trump, I could see why Republicans would let bygones be bygones. It’s not like the Republican party has ever before shown distaste for Stone’s rat-fucking. Plus, no one likes Ted Cruz, and he may not even survive his race against Beto O’Rourke. So, no, Republicans won’t be any more disposed against Stone if he is shown to have helped Trump cheat in the primary.

All that said, if Mueller indicts Stone in other crimes that Republicans would like to distance themselves from, any allegations about the primary may provide cover.

Indeed, the comparison is one a number of people made when I started focusing on Stone’s PACs.

With one caveat, I’d think these would probably be parallel efforts, with two different sets of dark money groups funding two different sets of dirty tricks, violating both campaign law and probably some other fraud statutes. I say that because Corey Lewandowski, who was behind the attack on Jacobus, and Roger Stone really don’t get along.

That said, the two parallel tracks likely show a tolerance among the principals who did get along with both Lewandowski and Stone (starting with Trump) for this kind of rat-fucking. And to the extent that some of the rat-fucking involved either intelligence obtained from Russians or coordinated voter suppression later in the campaign, then it’d have a solid Russian nexus.

The one caveat is this tweet from Jacobus, which reveals a text she received from a guy making explicit threats, which she clearly identifies as a Stone-related threat. (h/t TC)

So maybe Stone just took over all the rat-fucking after Jacobus busted Lewandowski’s PAC for illegal coordination?

Also remember that, the illegal coordination between PACs and the campaign is likely one way that the campaign benefitted from Cambridge Analytica.

And that’s why I find the referral of the attack on Jacobus to be one of the most important details to provide insight onto the Mueller investigation in some time.

I find the news that money laundering expert Kyle Freeny and National Security Division prosecutor Brandon Van Grack are moving back to their normal homes at DOJ less intriguing.

Kyle Freeny and Brandon Van Grack, two prosecutors who worked on Paul Manafort’s criminal cases, are ending their tenure working for special counsel Robert Mueller.

Van Grack left recently to return to his job in the National Security Division of the Justice Department, and Freeny will leave the office in mid-October to return to the Criminal Division.

The most obvious explanation for both moves is that the Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn plea deals have been sealed (CNN notes that Van Grack will continue to work on the Flynn sentencing, but has mostly moved back to NSD for now). Which would make the different timing — Van Grack has already left, apparently, whereas Freeny has a few more weeks of work — the most interesting part of the report. Perhaps Van Grack left as soon as Flynn got a sentencing date?

Though there is another possibility, particularly in Freeny’s case.

I’ve long said that it’s possible once Mueller puts together the conspiracy case, he may farm out the “garden variety” corruption to other parts of DOJ. One key part of that, for example, is the non-Russian inauguration pay-for-play. That might be the kind of thing Freeny would move with to another part of DOJ.

As for Van Grack, I don’t rule out a tidbit or two that he had touched being moved back under NSD, though if so, it’s not a part of the investigation that has any public sign yet.

Remember: We still haven’t seen what a good number of Mueller’s prosecutors have been up to for the last 15 months. Those are some of the prosecutors who remain quietly busy.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post. 

Why Republicans Launched the GSA Email Attack Now

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I think most people are missing the significance of why the Republicans launched their attack on the GSA over the weekend (this post is a summary of what we know, with updates).

That’s true, in part, because people are misunderstanding what the Trump for America team recently learned. It’s not — as many have claimed — that they only recently learned Mueller had emails beyond what TFA had turned over to Congress and through that to Mueller. As Axios reported, “Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.” That is, Mueller has been asking questions based off these emails for months.

The timing of this complaint — not the complaint itself — is key

What TFA only discovered last week, according to their letter, at least, is how Mueller obtained them — by asking, just like prosecutors reviewing government communications in the course of investigating possible violations of the Espionage Act always do, especially if the subjects of the investigation have access to classified documents.

We discovered the unauthorized disclosures by the GSA on December 12 and 13, 2017. When we learned that the Special Counsel’s Office had received certain laptops and cell phones containing privileged materials, we initially raised our concerns with Brandon Van Grack in the Special Counsel’s Office on December 12, 2017. Mr. Van Grack confirmed that the Special Counsel’s Office had obtained certain laptops, cell phones, and at least one iPad from the GSA – but he assured us that the Special Counsel’s investigation did not recover any emails or other relevant data from that hardware. During this exchange, Mr. Van Grack failed to disclose the critical fact that undercut the importance of his representations, namely, that the Special Counsel’s Office had simultaneously received from the GSA tens of thousands of emails, including a very significant volume of privileged material, and that the Special Counsel’s Office was actively using those materials without any notice to TFA.1 Mr. Van Grack also declined to inform us of the identities of the 13 individuals whose materials were at issue.

The government has great leeway to access government communications, as Peter Strzok, the former counterintelligence FBI Agent who just had his own communications leaked and then released to the world, would probably be all too happy to tell you. All the more so given allegations that files went missing from the Transition SCIF, just as Jared Kushner was talking about back channel communications with the Russians.

So what’s new is not that Mueller had the emails (about which no one has complained before). But that he obtained the email inboxes of 13 people, including Jared, from GSA without letting the Transition do their own review of what to turn over.

Trump’s team may face obstruction charges

As I made clear here, it appears that one reason the Trump people are so angry is that Mueller has probably caught them failing to turn over emails that are absolutely material to the investigation, such as KT McFarland’s “Thrown election” email. Whoever did these document reviews may now be exposed to obstruction charges for withholding such material, which in turn would give Mueller leverage over them for their own further cooperation.

[Update: I should have said, withholding emails will only be a problem if the Transition was otherwise obligated (say, by subpoena) to turn them over. Mueller did subpoena the campaign for a similar set of emails; but since he didn’t need to from GSA, he may not have here.]

Mueller has far more damning information on Jared than Trump’s folks expected

Just as importantly, Axios explicitly said the emails include Jared Kushner’s emails (indeed, given his public claims about how many people he spoke to during the transition, I wouldn’t be surprised if his was the email box that had 7,000 emails).

As I have shown, Jared has been approaching disclosure issues (at least with Congress) very narrowly, ignoring clear requests to turn over his discussions about the topic of the investigation, and not just with the targets of it. If Mueller obtained all his emails, he’d have those “about” emails that Jared purposely and contemptuously has withheld from others.

We know that Jared is a key interim Mueller target here (and Abbe Lowell’s search for a crisis communications firm to help sure suggests Jared’s defense team knows that too). We know he felt the need to explain how he went from responding to a personalized Vladimir Putin congratulatory email on November 9 to asking Dmitri Simes for Sergei Kislyak’s name.

Take, for example, the public statement prepared for testimony to congressional committees by the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner. There, he revealed that on the day after the election, in response to a congratulatory email from Russian President Vladimir Putin, he asked the publisher of The National Interest, Dimitri Simes, for the name of Russia’s ambassador to the United States. “On November 9, the day after the election, I could not even remember the name of the Russian ambassador,” Kushner claimed. “When the campaign received an email purporting to be an official note of congratulations from President Putin, I was asked how we could verify it was real. To do so, I thought the best way would be to ask the only contact I recalled meeting from the Russian government, which was the ambassador I had met months earlier, so I sent an email asking Mr. Simes, ‘What is the name of the Russian ambassador?’”

We also know that Mueller’s team has expressed some skepticism about Kushner’s previous public claims — and I would bet money this includes that email.

CNN recently reported, however, that in an interview conducted in the weeks before Flynn’s plea deal, “Mueller’s team asked Kushner to clear up some questions he was asked by lawmakers and details that emerged through media reports.” So Mueller’s team may now have doubts about the explanation Kushner offered for his interest in speaking with Kislyak as one of the first things he did after his father-in-law got elected.

If Mueller has all Jared’s emails and those emails disclose far more about the negotiations with all foreign powers conducted during the transition (including with Bibi Netanyahu on settlements, but obviously also with Russia), and Trump’s people recognize those emails expose Jared to serious charges, then of course they’re going to complain now, as the expectation that Mueller might soon indict Kushner grows.

Mueller has an outline of places where Trump was personally involved

Most importantly, consider what those morons laid out: they want to claim that these emails from the transition period — emails they insist were not government emails — are protected by Executive Privilege.

The legal claim is ridiculous; as I and far smarter people have noted, you don’t get Executive Privilege until you become the actual Executive on inauguration day.

But that they made the claim is telling (and really fucking stupid).

Because that tells us which emails Trump officials believe involve communications directly with Trump. The KT McFarland email, which we know was written from Mar-a-Lago, is a case in point. Did they withhold that because they believe it reflects a conversation with Trump? If so, then we know that Trump was personally involved in the orders to Mike Flynn to ask the Russians to hold off on retaliating for Obama’s sanctions. It might even mean that the language attributed to McFarland — about Russia being the key that unlocks doors, efforts to “discredit[] Trump’s victory by saying it was due to Russian interference, “thrown elections,” and Obama boxing Trump in — is actually Trump’s own language. Indeed, it does sound like stuff he says all the time.

And given that the emails include “speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes,” it might even reflect Trump’s own explanations of why — for example — he couldn’t nominate Flynn to be CIA Director because of his ties to Russia and Turkey.

In the wake of his plea agreement, Flynn’s surrogate made it clear that Trump ordered him to carry out certain actions, especially with Russia. That’s likely a big reason why, in the wake of the Flynn plea, Trump’s people are now squawking that Mueller obtained these emails, emails that may lay out those orders.

Heck. These emails might even reflect Trump ordering Flynn to lie about his outreach to Russia.

Maybe that’s why Trump’s aides have promised to demand Mueller return the emails in question.

All of which is to say, there are things about these emails that explain why this attack is coming now, beyond just a generalized effort to discredit Mueller. The attack is designed to discredit specific avenues of investigation Mueller clearly has in hand. And those avenues reveal far more about the seriousness of the investigation than anything Ty Cobb is willing to claim to appease the President.

That said, the attack is probably too little, too late.