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As Kevin McCarthy Embraces James Comer’s Wet Dreams of Dick Pics, George Santos Discusses “Paths Forward”

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I don’t, yet, have the stomach to write up the shittiness of the Hill reporting on Kevin McCarthy’s embrace of James Comer’s wet dreams of dick pics and SARs.

Suffice it to say access merchants like Jake Sherman are transcribing Big Kev’s preordained decision to back impeachment without mentioning that he is supporting an inquiry because he has no evidence of wrongdoing on Biden’s part, a constitutional abomination.

This WaPo story is the rare story on the development that makes the corruption behind McCarthy’s decision — and his own weakness in adopting it — the story, as it should be.

To appease those lawmakers, Republican leaders are weighing whether to use a potential impeachment inquiry vote as a bargaining chip in the funding negotiations. But even if the inquiry is included in the talks, it’s not certain that Republicans have the necessary 218 votes to pass it. Some lawmakers are staunchly against it, and McCarthy has said that an impeachment inquiry would occur through a vote on the House floor, as opposed to his unilateral decision-making.

“I think it’s abusing the process,” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) said, lamenting how political impeachments have become. “We’ve been good about letting [the] Judiciary and Oversight [committees] run their course, and I’ve not seen a compilation of facts or evidence that had been put together that would convince me or anybody else at the moment that the next step is an impeachment inquiry.”

House Republicans have been investigating whether Biden benefited from his son Hunter’s business dealings, but they have yet to discover evidence directly connecting the two. While they have uncovered allegations that the Justice Department stymied the investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial misdeeds, along with testimony about his penchant for touting the family brandto reel in business deals, investigators on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees have not unearthed any evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

The fact that McCarthy is capitulating to the most radical members of his own party out of desperation makes developments in Brooklyn more significant.

On August 15, EDNY indicted George Santos’ fundraiser, Samuel Miele, for impersonating McCarthy’s former Chief of Staff, Dan Meyer, in conversations with fundraisers.

That case was reassigned, as a case related to Santos‘ own fraud prosecution, to Judge Joanna Seybert. Within a week of the charges, the Miele case shifted to discussions of “possible dispositions,” code for a plea agreement, as suggested in a letter asking for a continuance of even an initial hearing to September 5.

Since that date, the parties have engaged in meaningful discussions about possible dispositions of this matter without the need for a trial. The parties are jointly requesting that the Court exclude the time from today’s date through September 5, 2023, to allow the parties to focus on those discussions instead of trial preparation.

Last week, after EDNY had provided some discovery to Miele, both sides joined in asking for another longer continuance to discuss what was explicitly described as a plea.

The parties now write to advise the Court that the government has made two substantial discovery productions in accordance with Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and that negotiations concerning a potential resolution of this case without the need for a trial are active and ongoing. Under these circumstances, the parties respectfully submit that excluding additional Speedy Trial time to accommodate the defendant’s ongoing discovery review and facilitate plea discussions will serve the ends of justice and outweigh the best interests of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial.

The day after the continuance in Miele’s case, prosecutors in Santos’ case asked for a continuance of a status hearing that had been scheduled for Thursday, in part, to “discuss possible paths forward in this matter.”

Further, the parties have continued to discuss possible paths forward in this matter. The parties wish to have additional time to continue those discussions.

By all appearances, Santos is further from a plea than Miele is, probably for good reason. Miele has testimony against Santos to offer as leverage; Santos has his seat in the House (though depending on the precise nature of his relationship with Andrew Intrater and Viktor Vekselberg, Santos might be able to trade testimony as well).

But this is a public integrity case, and as such, a resignation is one of the things that prosecutors are permitted to use in negotiating a plea deal.

And EDNY is discussing very short timelines, with Miele’s next hearing currently scheduled for October 6, and Santos’ next status hearing scheduled for October 27.

Which is to say that Big Kev may lose the deciding vote that made him Speaker even before discussions of impeachment and shutdowns are resolved.

David Weiss May Have More Bluster than Tactical Leverage

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There’s something missing from coverage of the claim, made in the second-to-last sentence of a Speedy Trial filing submitted Wednesday, that David Weiss will indict Hunter Biden before September 29, when — according to calculations laid out by prosecutor Leo Wise in the filing — the Speedy Trial Act mandates an indictment.

None of the coverage has considered why David Weiss hasn’t already charged the President’s son.

The filing was submitted in response to an August 31 order from Judge Maryellen Noreika; its very last sentence politely asked her to butt out: “[T]he Government does not believe any action by the Court is necessary at this time.” Given the unusual nature of this legal proceeding, there may at least be question about Wise’s Speedy Trial calculations. One way or another, though, the Speedy Trial clock and the statute of limitations (which Wise said in July would expire on October 12) are ticking.

It would take probably half an hour to present the evidence for the weapons charge — which would consist of the form Hunter signed to purchase a gun, passages from Hunter’s book, a presumed grand jury transcript from Hallie Biden, and testimony from an FBI agent — to a grand jury. It would take maybe another ten minutes if Weiss wanted to add a false statements charge on top of the weapons charge. There certainly would be no need for a special grand jury.

Any tax charges would be more complicated, sure, but they would be in one or another district (probably Los Angeles), ostensibly severed from the weapons charge to which the misdemeanors planned as part of an aborted plea deal were linked.

So why wait? Why not simply indict and avoid any possible challenge to Speedy Trial calculations?

The answer may lie in something included in a long NYT story citing liberally from an anonymous senior law enforcement official who knew at least one thing that only David Weiss could know. That story explains that Weiss sought Special Counsel status, in part, to get, “added leverage in a revamped deal with Mr. Biden.”

If Weiss indeed sought Special Counsel status to get leverage for a deal, then at least last month when he asked for it, he wasn’t really planning on indicting Hunter Biden. He was hoping to get more tactical leverage to convince Hunter Biden to enter into a plea agreement that would better satisfy GOP bloodlust than the plea that failed in July.

Now he has used the opportunity presented by Noreika’s order to claim he really really is going to indict Hunter, a claim that set off predictably titillated reporting about the prospect of a Hunter Biden trial during the presidential election.

Again, if you’re going to charge Hunter Biden with a simple weapons charge, possibly a false statements charge, why not do it already, rather than threatening to do it publicly? Why not charge him in the week after Noreika entered that order, mooting all Speedy Trial concerns?

Abbe Lowell appears unimpressed with Weiss’ promised indictment. He repeated in both a separate filing and a statement to the press that Weiss can’t charge Hunter because he already entered into a diversion agreement pertaining to the charge.

We believe the signed and filed diversion agreement remains valid and prevents any additional charges from being filed against Mr. Biden, who has been abiding by the conditions of release under that agreement for the last several weeks, including regular visits by the probation office. We expect a fair resolution of the sprawling, five-year investigation into Mr. Biden that was based on the evidence and the law, not outside political pressure, and we’ll do what is necessary on behalf of Mr. Biden to achieve that.

I think few stories on this have accounted for the possibility that that statement — “we’ll do what is necessary … to achieve” a fair resolution of the case — is as pregnant a threat as DOJ’s promise to indict in the next several weeks. That’s because everything leading up to David Weiss obtaining Special Counsel status actually squandered much of any leverage that Weiss had, and that’s before you consider the swap of Chris Clark as Hunter’s lead attorney for the more confrontational Lowell, making Clark available as a witness against Weiss.

As Politico (but not NYT, working off what are presumably the same materials) laid out, Hunter’s legal team has long been arguing that this investigation was plagued by improper political influence.

But even before the plea deal was first docketed on June 20, the GOP House started interfering in ways that will not only help Abbe Lowell prove there was improper influence, but may well give him unusual ability to go seek for more proof of it.

It appears to have started between the time the deal was struck on June 8 and when it was docketed on June 20. AUSA Lesley Wolf, who had negotiated the deal, was replaced by Leo Wise and others. When Weiss claimed, with the announcement of the deal, that the investigation was ongoing and he was even pursuing dodgy leads obtained from a likely Russian influence operation, it became clear that the two sides’ understanding of the deal had begun to rupture. This is the basis of Lowell’s claim that Weiss reneged on the deal: that Weiss approved an agreement negotiated by Wolf but then brought in Wise to abrogate that deal.

Whatever the merit of Lowell’s claim that the diversion agreement remains in place — the plea deal was such a stinker that both sides have some basis to defend their side of that argument — by charging Hunter, Weiss will give Lowell an opportunity to litigate the claim that Weiss reneged on the diversion agreement, and will do so on what may be the easier of the two parts of the plea agreements to make a claim that Weiss reneged on a deal, with Judge Noreika already issuing orders to find out why this stinker is still on her docket. I’m not sure how Lowell would litigate it — possibly a double jeopardy challenge — but his promise to do what’s necessary likely guarantees that he will litigate it. He’ll presumably do the same if and when Weiss files tax charges in California. It’s not necessarily that these arguments about reneging on a deal will, themselves, work, but litigating the issue will provide opportunity to introduce plenty more problems with the case.

That’s part of what was missed in coverage of this development this week. Weiss promised to indict. Lowell responded, effectively, by challenging the newly-minted Special Counsel to bring it on, because it will give Lowell opportunity to substantiate his claim that Weiss reneged on a deal because of political influence.

And those IRS agents claiming to be whistleblowers have only offered gift after gift to Lowell to destroy their own case. In their own testimony they revealed:

  • From the start, a supervisor documented concerns about improper influence and Sixth Amendment problems with this investigation
  • Joseph Ziegler, the IRS agent who improbably claims to be a Democrat, treated such concerns as liberal bias, evincing political bias on his own part
  • DOJ didn’t do the most basic due diligence on the laptop and may have used it in warrants, creating poisonous fruit problems
  • Ziegler treated key WhatsApp messages obtained with a later warrant with shocking sloppiness, and may even have misidentified the interlocutors involved
  • Ziegler didn’t shield himself from the taint of publicly released laptop materials (and Shapley was further tainted by viewing exhibits during his deposition)
  • Gary Shapley is hiding … something … in his emails

These two self-proclaimed whistleblowers have made evidence from this case public — all of which would never have seen the light of day if Weiss had honored the plea agreement — without the filter of a prosecutor to clean it up in advance.

All that’s before you consider the rampant leaking.

In both their depositions and their giddy public testimony before the House both Shapely and Ziegler did plenty of things that will provide basis to impeach them, not just as witnesses, but even as investigators, as did their anonymous FBI agent colleague’s laughable claim in his deposition that this was not an investigation riddled with leaks. James Comer seems intent on inviting all the other investigators who have complained they weren’t able to bulldoze rules designed to protect sensitive investigations to be deposed in an adversarial setting, which will provide still more surface area that Lowell can attack.

The gun charge is simple. But what investigative witnesses would present any tax case against Hunter Biden and would their testimony be impressive enough to sustain a case after Lowell serially destroyed Ziegler as the key investigator? And because Weiss has left Lowell with a viable claim that the diversion remains valid, he may be able to introduce the taint of the tax case into any gun prosecution.

Some of this shit goes on in any case, though not usually this much with politically exposed people like the President’s son. But prosecutors have a great number of tools to prevent defendants from learning about it or at least keeping it off the stand. Many of the IRS agents’ complaints were really complaints about Lesley Wolf’s efforts to preserve the integrity of the case. By bitching non-stop about her efforts, the IRS agents have ensured that Hunter Biden will get access to everything that Wolf tried hard to stave off from the investigation.

And there’s something more. Ziegler provided the name of his initial supervisor, who documented concerns that this case was politicized from the start. Both IRS agents identified for Lowell a slew of irregularities he can use to undermine any case. Republicans in Congress have bent over backwards to expose witnesses against Hunter to adversarial questioning (and both IRS agents got downright reckless in their public testimony). The way in which this plea collapsed provides Lowell reason to challenge any indictment from the start.

But the collapse also provided something else, as described in the NYT story: a David Weiss associate told the NYT that Weiss told them that any other American would not be prosecuted on the evidence against Hunter.

Mr. Weiss told an associate that he preferred not to bring any charges, even misdemeanors, against Mr. Biden because the average American would not be prosecuted for similar offenses. (A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.)

If this witness makes themselves available to Lowell, it provides him something that is virtually unheard of in any prosecution: Evidence to substantiate a claim of selective prosecution, the argument that Weiss believes that similarly situated people would not have been prosecuted and the only reason Hunter was being prosecuted was because of non-stop GOP bloodlust that originated with Donald Trump. It is darn near impossible for a defense attorney to get discovery to support a selective prosecution claim. Weiss may have given Lowell, one of the most formidable lawyers in the country, a way to get that discovery.

And all that’s before Lowell unveils whatever evidence he has that Joseph Ziegler watched and did nothing as Hunter Biden’s digital life was hijacked, possibly by people associated with the same Republicans driving the political bloodlust, possibly by the very same sex workers on which the case was initially predicated. That’s before Lowell unveils evidence that Ziegler witnessed what should have been clear alarms that Hunter Biden was a crime victim but Ziegler chose instead to trump up a weak criminal case against the crime victim. I suspect that Weiss doesn’t know what Lowell knows about this, either, adding still more uncertainty to any case he charges.

Over four weeks ago, Leo Wise asked Noreika to dismiss the misdemeanor tax charges against Hunter so they could charge them in another venue.

In light of that requirement, and the important constitutional rights it embodies, the Government moves the Court to dismiss the information without prejudice so that it may bring tax charges in a district where venue lies.

Now he and Weiss have made promises of another upcoming indictment, without yet charging it. At the very least, that suggests that there are a number of challenges to overcome before they can charge Hunter.

They likely still have time on any 2019 tax charges — the ones where, reportedly, both sides agree that Hunter overstated his income, which will make a tax case hard to prove. I’m not saying that Weiss won’t charge Hunter. Indeed, he has backed himself into a corner where he likely has to. But with each step forward, Lowell has obtained leverage to make Weiss’ own conduct a central issue in this prosecution (and even Wise may have made himself a witness given the centrality of his statements during the plea colloquy to Lowell’s claim that the diversion remains valid).

The Speedy Trial filings seem to have hinted at an intense game of chicken between Weiss and Lowell. And thus far at least, Weiss seems more afraid of a Hunter Biden indictment than Lowell is.

How James Comer’s Counsel, James Mandolfo, Conducts an Investigation

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Amid the excitement yesterday, the Oversight Committee released the transcript of the now-retired FBI Agent who would have interviewed Hunter Biden if a bunch of things had gone differently on December 8, 2020.

Because I appear to be the only one who read the Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler interviews closely, I wanted to make sure to describe this one — to describe how James Comer’s counsel, James Mandolfo, simply ended the interview when the witness started describing how the rules about lawyers, sensitive persons, and elections — the same rules that Republicans claimed to care about with Carter Page — would have required the FBI to adopt less intrusive methods than they might otherwise have done.

As to the topic that the Oversight Committee cared about, the agent admitted he was upset that the Biden Transition Team learned of the interview in advance (though as he described, he only heard that from Gary Shapley). He also revealed that he and Shapley had another person to interview that day.

A We waited a period of time.    You know, I will add, it was frustrating, and I know supervisor number two was very frustrated, and I understood that frustration, but I also ‐‐ we had other ‐‐ another interview to conduct.    So after a certain period of time, and I don’t exactly recall how long, we transitioned to make an attempt to interview another ‐‐ or a witness as part of the investigation.

Shapley didn’t describe that detail. When being questioned by Democrats, the agent described that he simply moved on after this, and said he personally had not witnessed any politicization.

When Mandolfo asked for more background on Shapley’s claim that the FBI agent had asked, in May 2022, why the IRS weren’t asking for a Special Counsel, the agent’s attorney advised him not to answer on deliberative privilege basis.

The agent retired just a month after that, after the normal 20-year career at the FBI.

When the Democrats questioned the witness, though, he provided answers that were less helpful to James Comer’s conspiracy theories. He described how careful the FBI has to be when investigating attorneys and that such an investigation might require using least intrusive investigative methods. He described addition approvals required for Sensitive Investigative Matters. He described the care required during an election.

Effectively, he described that the FBI applied the rules required by the FBI’s investigative manual, the same ones that protected Donald Trump’s during the 2016 election.

Things got weirder when the Democratic staffers asked about the leaks. They appeared to be doing the same thing, basically getting this witness to explain why the things Shapley and Ziegler complained about all had ready explanations. And ultimately, the FBI agent did concede that if leaks got really bad it might make sense to reassign a team.

But when asked if he had ever been part of an investigation from which there were leaks, he denied it.

Q Generally speaking, do you think it could be problematic for agents’ views in 4 any ongoing investigation to be publicly reported or released to news sources?

A Yes.

Q And it could create problems potentially for the integrity of an investigation?

A Yes.

Q In your career, have you ever worked on an investigation in which there were leaks?    And you don’t need to be specific, just yes or no.

Mr. Zink [the Agent’s attorney]. Leaks to the press?

[Dem staffer]: To the press.

[Retired FBI Agent] Sorry. My pause is I’m thinking back through my career.

[Dem staffer] No, that’s fine.

[Retired FBI Agent] Not that I recall.

Wrong answer!!

The Hunter Biden investigation had several major leaks, starting in 2020, and continuing through the period when he retired (he was also part of the Duke Cunningham investigation, though I don’t recall major leaks from that).

Having not recalled that this investigation had serial major leaks, his answer about what he would do if he learned of one was still weirder.

[Retired FBI Agent] Not being part of one previously, I’d ‐‐ I, you know, believe it would 10 go to our Internal Investigations Section.    Whether there was ‐‐ now, if you’re asking if it  was an unsubstantiated allegation versus something I did believe happened, you know, then maybe potential removal of ‐‐ of, you know, the agent in question from the case to protect the integrity of the investigation.    You know, I’d want those steps to be taken.

[Dem staffer to Dem staffer] do you have any other questions before we stop?

[Dem staffer] So the question my colleague was asking you is there’s ‐‐ there’s an ongoing investigation. There’s a concern that there is a leak coming from someone on the investigative team, but ‐‐

Mr. Zink.    You mean generally or ‐‐

[Dem staffer] Generally.

Mr. Zink. Okay.

[Dem staffer] and ‐‐ but there is no clear answer as to who on the investigative team it is.    Would it be reasonable for management to consider removing the entire investigative team in order to protect the integrity of the investigation?

Ultimately the agent, who claimed he would have told his supervisor if there were a leak as there had been on this case which he didn’t acknowledge had been riddled by leaks, conceded that you might ultimately remove people from the team.

The discussion then turned to details about the investigation when someone — possibly the agent himself — asked to go off the record.

And that was it.

Mandolfo came back and ended the interview.

Mr. Zink. Just want to confirm with counsel for majority and minority that the terms “target,” “subject,” and “witness” as they were used in today’s questioning modify and relate to the FBI and Department’s investigation, not the grand jury’s investigation. Just confirming that.

Mr. Mandolfo. Yes. And just based upon the narrow scope and agreement that was formed amongst counsel and the parties that this would be limited to a very limited set of facts, we are now going to conclude with speaking with [Retired FBI Agent] at this time.

It’s not clear whether Mandolfo ended the interview because the retired agent realized he had violated grand jury rules (thus the clarification from his lawyer), whether he realized answering the question about other agencies would do so, or whether the discussion of leaks had been so unhelpful that Mandolfo had to stop.

But the tactic was a fairly telling indicator of what would happen if there were a substantive review of the investigation into Hunter Biden.

Perhaps we’ll now see some of that in discovery.

Chuck Grassley Must Think the FD-1023 Informant Is Worth Killing Off

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In their panic to do something to stave off the Hunter Biden guilty plea next week — and perhaps to bail Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler (who are represented by lawyers tied to Chuck Grassley) out of wild and in some cases inconsistent claims they made in their House Oversight debut — Grassley and James Comer have released the FD-1023 form on which they’ve hung their latest conspiracy theories about an attempt to bribe Joe Biden.

They’ve released it with almost no redactions, so it will be very easy for anyone who came in contact with the FBI informant whose interview it recorded — an international businessman — to reverse engineer who he is.

Virtually anyone bound by the principles of physics, by time and space, who has looked at the FD-1023 closely has recognized that the allegation in the report does not match known reality.

Lev Parnas swears it didn’t happen. In this Twitter thread, Thomas Fine calls the report, the Science Fiction Double Feature Bribery Scheme. ABC provided multiple ways the allegations conflict with reality and even notes that Chuck Grassley waged war on the exploitation of such unvetted intelligence with Christopher Steele. Phil Bump last month described how James Comer was spinning his wheels (and the press) but couldn’t find any substance to it; he even noted Ron Johnson’s admission that he couldn’t substantiate a key claim in it.

The most interesting thing, to me, is that FBI agents working with then-Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady, the partisan Republican whom Barr put in charge of ingesting Rudy’s Russian disinformation, didn’t ask, or record, on what date in 2019, a meeting in London addressing an entirely different topic took place at which Oleksandr Ostapenko placed a call to Mykola Zlochevsky so Zlochevsky could provide to the informant very specific numbers of recordings he had involving Hunter Biden and his father.

Brady’s team didn’t get (or record) this date even after a follow-up conversation three days after the original meeting with the informant, even though it would have been the freshest memory for the informant and fairly easy to pinpoint given travel records. They identified with some specificity at which coffee house the meeting with Ostapenko happened (possibly this place), but not the date.

That’s not how the FBI works.

But given the informant’s reference to “recent news reports about the investigations into the Bidens and Burisma,” it is likely the meeting happened during the impeachment investigation, possibly even after Rudy Giuliani met with soon-to-be-sanctioned Russian agent Andrii Derkach in December 2019.

If the meeting came after mid-February, “Hunter Biden’s” “laptop” was already being packaged up for a later political hit job. If the meeting came after October 9, 2019, which is when Parnas’ visibility onto these matters ended because he was arrested but Rudy was not, then it might reflect what happened to the plan to meet Burisma’s CFO and Dmitry Firtash in Vienna to obtain a copy of “Hunter Biden’s” “laptop” after his arrest. It could be possible, after all, that Zlochevsky had said one thing to Parnas earlier in 2019 and another thing after Victoria Toensing had met with Bill Barr.

There’s something else that debunks the story: that Chuck Grassley apparently cares so little about substantiating it he’s willing to risk the life of the informant.

Both ABC and this weaker CNN report describe that the FBI warned releasing this could get the informant killed. The Messenger provides more detail on the various warnings the FBI gave Congress about protecting this information (contrary to its claim, this is not an exclusive; WaPo’s Jacqueline Alemany and Politico’s Jordain Carney both posted one of these letters on Twitter, but don’t appear to have written it up).

FBI officials cautioned lawmakers on several occasions about the dangers that releasing the document could pose to confidential informants and others, according to materials obtained by The Messenger.

“We have repeatedly explained to you, in correspondence and in briefings, how critical it is to keep this information confidential,” the FBI said in a June 9 letter, obtained by The Messenger, to the Democratic ranking member and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who has been scrutinizing the Biden family.

“We are concerned that Members disregarded the Committee’s agreement that information from the document should not be further disclosed,” the FBI said in the letter, which came one day after lawmakers on the Oversight Committee were permitted to view the document in a secured room.

Other documents obtained by The Messenger show that the FBI’s warnings not to release the confidential information extended back to May — before Comer and others were allowed to view the FBI form.

The FBI told lawmakers that protecting the secrecy of the FBI form is “critical” to the “physical safety” of the source and others, according to a May 30 letter sent to Comer.

[snip]

Members of Congress were also provided with a warning that the information contained in the document “should be treated confidentially,” before they viewed the form on June 8, saying the agency “expressly does not consent” to the release of the material.

The FBI also raised concerns that lawmakers were taking notes in the meeting, which was prohibited, according to the letter.

Grassley and Comer released this FD-1023 — in almost unredacted form — after FBI warned, multiple times, of the danger of doing so.

This, to my mind, is the biggest tell of this stunt.

If you want to fuel a controversy, you release the FD-1023, even at the risk of getting the informant killed or, at the very least, burning his value as an informant permanently. If you want to pursue the allegation, you do everything you can to protect the FD-1023 and the informant.

Especially given David Weiss’ notice to Lindsey Graham that there is an ongoing investigation into matters pertaining to the FD-1023.

Your questions about allegations contained in an FBI FD-1023 Form relate to an ongoing investigation. As such, I cannot comment on them at this time.

Unless, of course, the GOP is so desperate to kill that investigation that they’d be willing to get the informant behind it killed as well.

Update: Federalist Faceplant Margot, who occasionally gets fed disinformation from Bill Barr, says a source has told her the FBI verified that the human source traveled where he had claimed he had traveled at the times he said he had.

Following the late June 2020 interview with the CHS, the Pittsburgh FBI office obtained travel records for the CHS, and those records confirmed the CHS had traveled to the locales detailed in the FD-1023 during the relevant time period. The trips included a late 2015 or early 2016 visit to Kiev, Ukraine; a trip a couple of months later to Vienna, Austria; and travel to London in 2019.

She’s really one of the few people stupid enough to report this as news. After all, the FBI corroborated that Igor Danchenko traveled to Moscow when he said he had, too. All that meant was that he was in Moscow being fed disinformation when he said he was.

The same is especially likely here because, if the FBI had actual dates for the 2019 trip to London — as Faceplant Margot says they did — then it raises still more questions why they didn’t include the date.

Unless the date would have given up the game by making it clear it happened after Rudy’s made further deals for disinformation.

The Funny Leak Denials of the So-Called IRS Whistleblowers

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In the hearing platforming the complaints of two IRS agents who are angry their case against Hunter Biden wasn’t charged as a felony, Joseph Ziegler — who had previously made a big deal of hiding his identity — was given an opportunity to deny being a source for public reporting on the Hunter Biden investigation.

In the exchange, Ziegler only denied being the source for Garrett Ziegler’s site — he was not asked, and he never denied, being a source for other media outlets.

Tim Burchett: It’s also come to my attention that today, after this hearing was already under way, apparently oppo research is circulating from, quote, Hunter Biden’s legal team, unquote, suggestions that you had leaked SARs and other investigative information to someone that had released that information online. Is there a statement that you’d like to make about whether you’ve leaked any investigative information to someone to reveal on the Internet? And I’m sure Hunter Biden’s legal team, who’s obviously watching right now, and these dirt bags are trying to smear you through the press. And it’s disgusting. And I’d appreciate hearing a direct answer from you, Brother.

Ziegler: So there’s two parts to this. There was that release of that bank report, my name was listed in there. So my name was out in the public as one of the IRS agents working this case. And that was maybe two or three years ago. So that came out. And then on top of that, me and my husband were in a report that’s out on social media, on Twitter, by a person with the same last name that I have who I’ve never met, I’ve never turned over information to, we just happen to have the same last name. Okay? I was, for my sexuality, my sexual orientation, my husband was put out there, like information related to me, so it was in an effort to discredit me that I’m this person working for the liberal side and I must, must be a plant. And it was awful the things that they were saying about me. But I can tell you that I’ve never turned over any information regarding this case to anyone related to that Marco Polo report or, someone with the same last name that I have.

It was not, at all, a denial that he was the source for other leaks to the press. It was a very limited denial, limited only to Garrett Ziegler, not generally.

He has made at least one other denial of leaking, which I’ll return to.

For now, I’m interested in the way that his claim, given under cloak of anonymity, that he and his spouse were harassed because his name showed up in the SARs and other legal process at Garrett Ziegler’s site is one reason he gave in his Ways and Means testimony for harping on his sexual orientation — about which of course, no Democrat would give a shit.

I’m an American, and my allegiances are to my country and my government. I’m also a gay man. I have a husband, two dogs, a home, and a life full of family and friends. But above all else, I’m a human being. My sexuality doesn’t define me as a person. It’s just who I love.

I’d like to say one more thing regarding this topic of sexuality, especially since it’s the start of Pride Month. But people have said that I’m gay and people have said, because I’m gay and that I am working as the case agent on this investigation, that I must be a far-left liberal, perfectly placed to fit some agenda. This was stuff that was on social media regarding me.

I can tell you that I am none of those things. I’m a career government employee, and I have always strived to not let politics enter my frame of mind when working cases.

I’ve tried to stay so nonpolitical that in the last Presidential election I voted but had decided to not vote for the Presidential candidate because I didn’t want to be asked that question in a court proceeding in the future and I didn’t want to show any potential bias. [my emphasis]

His sexual orientation is relevant to his testimony to the extent that right wingers harassed him after his name was made public by Garrett Ziegler.

In his opening statement this week, he used his sexual orientation again:

I had recently heard an elected official say that I must be more credible because I am a gay Democrat married to a man.

He can’t be accused of lying because he’s a gay man, he parroted others — who again, must be right wingers — as saying. He couldn’t have an association with efforts to leak the contents of a laptop that started getting packaged up the very same month he himself opened an investigation into a relatively small international tax cheat based off payments to Russian sex workers, his very first investigation in the group, because he would be harassed by associates of someone like Garrett Ziegler for who he is. In both cases, he used his sexual orientation as some measure of credibility, one that would never be convincing for actual Democrats, because Democrats just don’t give a shit (and know well that prominent gay men like Ric Grenell are truly epic right wing trolls). But Ziegler wielded his harassment by presumed frothers as if it ensures he’d never associate with people whose readers would harass a gay man.

Meanwhile, at Wednesday’s hearing, Gary Shapley was asked about leaks several times. In one exchange, Ro Khanna attempted, with limited success, to ask him a series of questions. In Shapley’s first answer, he claimed that he was the one who reported the October 6 to “our Inspector General,” so presumably Treasury’s Inspector General, TIGTA.

Ro Khanna: Let me just ask you on the media. You’ve given testimony under oath that you have never spoken to the Washington Post — any reporter on this matter, correct?

Gary Shapley: That’s correct.

Khanna: Do you know — have you spoken to any media outlet on this matter?

Shapley: Uh, I have spoken, after the House Ways and Means Committee,

Khanna: Before that, have you spoken to any media — journalists on this matter?

Shapley: Absolutely not.

Khanna: Do you know if any colleague of yours at the IRS has spoken to any journalist on this matter?

Shapley: Absolutely not.

Khanna: Do you know of any investigation into the leaks on this matter?

Shapley: Uh, … so the October 6 leak, I was the person who referred it to our Inspector General.

It’s an interesting claim because his own exhibit shows the FBI agent, Darrell Waldon, responding to Shapley’s email, which Shapley sent after 6PM on Friday October 7, before 8AM on the Tuesday after a Federal holiday, saying that he, Waldon, would take care of that referral.

It may be that Shapley did make a referral, either via email over the weekend or after receiving an email saying someone else was taking care of it. It may also be that Shapley made his own referral even after Waldon did, which sure might raise questions at TIGTA. But Shapley’s own document raises questions about this claim.

As Khanna attempted to question Shapley further, Shapley kept talking over him, reciting an obviously rehearsed response.  James Comer even tried to force Khanna to relinquish his time so Shapley could answer the question Shapley wanted to answer before Comer realized that’s not how it works.

Khanna: Do you know if any of your colleagues are under investigation —

Shapley: There was a leak on December 9, 2020, around the day of action. And I know the IRS Inspector General and DOJ IG are looking into…

Khanna: Do you know if any of your colleagues are under investigation? Sorry, if I could just finish. Do you know if any of your colleagues are under investigation for that leak?

Shapley: I know of no colleague under investigation for that leak [glances towards the Chair].

Khanna: And just for the record, it is your testimony under oath that you have never spoken to any media person before the House testimony about this matter?

Shapley: It’s not only my testimony under oath today, I’ve provided an affidavit to the House Ways and Means Committee saying the same. I’ve said it to our Inspector General’s office as well. [Crosstalk]

Khanna: I appreciate that. I just want to make a final point on this. One, I think that —

Shapley: Mr. Chairmain, you mind if I — [Shapley’s lawyers consulting behind him]

Comer: Can the Gentleman answer the question you asked, Mr. Khanna?

Khanna: I just don’t want my time to be–

Jamie Raskin: If you’re granting him the time, Mr. Chairman.

Khanna: I just want a minute to wrap up if you’ll give me time.

Comer: Okay, you have a minute.

Shapley was asked about leaks twice more, both times by Dan Goldman. In the first instance, Goldman asked how the October 6 leak came up in the October 7 meeting.

Goldman: You’re familiar with an October 6 Washington Post story entitled Federal agents see chargeable tax gun purchase case against Hunter Biden, is that right?

Shapley: Yes I’m familiar yes.

Goldman: And this was, this meeting occurred October 7, the day after this, right?

Shapley: That’s correct.

Goldman: Was this article discussed at that meeting?

Shapley: It was.

Goldman: And what was the nature of the discussion?

Shapley: Uh, it’s in that document, that email, that basically says we’ve got to keep the sphere small–

Goldman: So it’s pretty clear, you would agree, that this was a leak to the Washington Post by law enforcement agents since it describes what Federal agents believe, right?

Shapley: So it wasn’t actually clear to me that it was because usually they’ll say that it’s a law enforcement source that provided it, and if you see at the bottom it says they corroborated independently and they did not mention law enforcement. [Shapley’s attorney leans over to whisper to him]

Goldman: You don’t think it’s a Federal agent, agents, who leaked this when the headline says, Federal agents see chargeable tax gun purchase case against Hunter Biden?

Comer: Gentleman’s time is expired but feel free to answer the question.

Shapley was being questioned. But Ziegler piped in and offers up a December 9, 2020 leak.

Ziegler: So there, prior to that if you go back to December of 2020, there was another leak to the Washington Post that got, we had to get Department of Justice OIG involved, TIGTA involved so there was other leaks that happened prior to this to the Washington Post that I think, are important for us to understand as well.

Shapley: It has similar information as the October 6 leak.

It’s interesting that Ziegler piped in here, because answering a question about October 6 by raising the December 9, 2020 leak is what he did in his House Ways and Means testimony, too. Ziegler described that he told TIGTA that he believed a December 9, 2020 leak came from DOJ or (!!) the defense. He also described that “we would constantly be talking about” this subject.

Prior to this, there were other leaks. After our day of action in December of 2020, we got word that a couple of the news sources were going to release an article on the investigation. This was a couple days prior to us going public — going overt.

So that leak happened, and nothing changed after that one. And everything indicated, even in communication in meetings from what I recall — we thought that the leak was potentially from someone in [the] Department of Justice. So we would constantly be talking about, yeah, it’s not an IRS person. It’s not anyone on the team. It’s always — it appeared like it was someone from Department of Justice. So that’s what kind of shocked me with this moving forward.

I was interviewed by an investigator — I think they were with TIGTA. I told them, I didn’t leak anything. I thought that the leak might have come from either defense counsel, or from DOJ like the other ones came.

But back to Wednesday’s hearing. Goldman asked Shapley again about leaks in a later round.

Goldman: Gentlemen, I want to return to the Washington Post October 6 article and I’d ask unanimous consent to enter it into the record. In your testimony, Mr. Shapley, before the Ways and Means Committee, you stated, quote, there was a leak, it appeared to come from the agents level, who was critical of the prosecutors for not charging the case. What you testified earlier was a little different. Which one do you stand by today?

[pause]

Shapley: I’m sorry, could you repeat that?

Goldman, quoting: “There was a leak, it appeared to come from the agents level, who was critical of the prosecutors for not charging the case.”

Shapley: Yeah, I said it appeared, because I said it came from the agents’ level, but the source was a source familiar with the topic and it didn’t say it was a law enforcement source.

Goldman: Okay, that seems to be a distinction without a difference. And then, you understand that, obviously leaks of grand jury information is a felony, right?

Shapley: Leaking investigative information including 6103 would be a felony, yes.

Goldman: Well that’s true as well. So would you agree that there would be some skepticism from prosecutors about which of the agents may be the source of a leak?

Comer: Gentleman’s time is expired but feel free to answer the question.

Shapley: Since there have been multiple leaks in this investigation, and the one on December 8 or December 9, 2020, it appears to come from someone, as Lesley Wolf stated —

Goldman: I was just asking about October 6, 2022.

Shapley: So I

Goldman: It would cause anyone suspicion, right?

Shapley: If it says it comes from an agent level. [His attorney leans over, whispers something.]

Goldman: That’s what you said.

Comer: Gentleman’s time has expired.

Now, Goldman didn’t actually quote Shapley exactly. Here’s the full quote from Shapley’s Ways and Means testimony.

Q In No. 1 on this email you prepared, says: “Discussion about the agent leak — requested the sphere stay as small as possible…DOJ IG will be notified. FBI — HQ is notified.”

What was the specific leak?

A So there was a leak, I’m not sure what outlet, on October 6th of 2022 — it appeared to come from the agent’s level, who was critical of the prosecutors for not charging the case.

Q Okay. Talking about the Hunter Biden case?

A Yes, not charging the Hunter Biden case.

So, obviously that was part of the discussion at the beginning. And there have been multiple leaks in this case going back, and this one was handled a lot differently because I guess it was purportedly from the agent’s level.

So this drastic — you know, they used that as an excuse to kind of — to do what they were doing to us after this meeting on the 7th, they kind of used that leak as an excuse to exclude us.

In context, the view from others was that this was an agent level leak. Given his later use of the word, “purportedly,” I’m not sure it was Shapley’s espoused view.

I’m more interested in other aspects of this exchange.

In May, when Shapley answered a friendly question from the Majority Counsel, he feigned uncertainty what outlet this was from. In July, in public, Shapely kept answering questions about the October 2022 leak by responding about the December 2020 leak — and Ziegler explained they were doing so because “there was another leak to the Washington Post,” which by his telling they talked about all the time.

More interesting, though, is Shapley’s claim that, “this [leak] was handled a lot differently because I guess it was purportedly from the agent’s level.”

Both he and Ziegler described that this leak was the excuse to start excluding the IRS agents from the case.

But Shapley’s claim that the October 2022 leak was treated differently is likely false.

As I noted in this post, there was another leak, to the NYT in March 2022 (right after the IRS agents submitted their prosecution memo and asked DC to partner on it). That same month, for what Shapley presents as discovery purposes, everyone was asked for their email. But even though he had attempted to interview Hunter Biden himself in December 2020, he didn’t comply with that request.

It is common practice for DOJ to ask for the case agents’ communications in discovery, as they might have to testify in court. However, it’s much more unusual to ask for management communications, because it is simply not discoverable.

In March of 2022, DOJ requested of the IRS and FBI all management-level emails and documents on this case. I didn’t produce my emails, but I provided them with my sensitive case reports and memorandums that included contemporaneous documentation of DOJ’s continued unethical conduct. [my emphasis]

After the October meeting, prosecutors came back to Shapley, and asked again, which he got really touchy about.

[T]his was the culmination of an October 24th communication from Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office and — well, it was really Lesley Wolf and Mark Daly who called the case agent, [redacted], on the telephone and said, hey, we need — we need Shapley’s emails and his — these sensitive case reports that he’s authored back to May.

And they didn’t ask for discovery for anybody else. They didn’t ask for, from the — mind you, the agents had provided discovery March-April timeframe, so there was 6 months or so of additional discovery, and they’re not asking for that, right? They’re only asking for mine.

So [redacted] sends me an email with Wolf and Daly on it that says, hey, you know, they asked for this, you got to talk to Shapley. I respond, hey, yeah, I’m available 9:15, let’s chat. And she sends that, she forwards my email to Shawn Weede, number [two] — a senior level at Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office.

And then he contacts me about this discovery, and he’s kind of putting a lot of pressure on me. So even Weiss called up, the deputy chief, to complain about timing of the emails that got turned over from me at that request. [my emphasis]

It appears that it’s not that DOJ treated the leak differently, it’s that they noticed that the first time they asked for emails, he had blown off the request.

Again, as I noted here, as Darrell Waldon, the same agent who said he’d take care of the TIGTA referral, started reviewing his emails, Shapley asked for advance notice of anything suspicious — precisely the thing he said Hunter Biden should not get.

If you have questions about any emails I would ask you share it in advance so I can look at them and be prepared to put them into context. The USAO was so eager to got my emails (which they already had 95% of) … then surprise … they “might” have a problem with a few of them that memorialized their conduct. If the content of what I documented, in report or email is the cause of their consternation I would direct them to consider their actions instead of who documented them.

I have done nothing wrong. Instead of constant battles with the USAO/DOJ Tax, I chose to be politically savvy. I documented issues, that I would have normally addressed as they occurred, because of the USAO and DOJ Tax’s continued visceral reactions to any dissenting opinions or ideas. Every single day was a battle to do our job. I continually reported these issues up to IRS-CI leadership beginning in the summer of 2020. Now, because they realized I documented their conduct they separate me out, cease all communication and are not attempting to salvage their own conduct by attacking mind. This is an attempt by the USAO to tarnish my good standing and position within IRS-CI … and I expect IRS-CI leadership to understand that. As recent as the October 7 meeting, the Delaware USAO had nothing but good things to say about me/us. Then they finally read “discovery” items (provided 6 months previous — that are not discoverable) and they are beginning to defend their own unethical actions.

Consider the below:

  1. I am not a witness — therefor Jencks/impeachment is not an issue.
  2. I am not the receiver of original evidence nor engaged i any negative exculpatory language against the subject … My documentation only shows the USAO/DOJ Tax’s preferential treatment of this subject. [bold underline original, italics mine]

Shapley’s boss, Michael Batdorf, was, at that point, quite supportive of the possibility that Shapley would have concerns about prosecutorial misconduct. Two months later he began to put a hold on what Shapley and others were doing.

I don’t think any of this shows that these IRS agents were leakers one way or another, and I also think it likely that whoever did some of these leaks used a cut-out.

Shapley may not be the leaker. But he sure seems to be hiding stuff in his emails. And only after his emails got turned over did he start claiming to be a whistleblower.

WaPo Is Suppressing Information that Might Debunk Devlin Barrett’s Latest Spin

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Last week, I asked the WaPo if they would release the two reports — one from Johns Hopkins professor Matt Green and the other from InfoSec expert Jake Williams — that were the basis of this report on the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

I had asked once before, in May 2022.

But since I had originally asked, a bunch of things had happened to make those reports more newsworthy. Hunter Biden had countersued John Paul Mac Isaac (here’s the WaPo’s report). James Comer has stumbled over and over in his unabashed effort to manufacture a scandal (in which the WaPo has played along, still treating it as a credible investigation). Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office released a plea deal to which Hunter Biden is expected to plead guilty next week (here’s the WaPo report). IRS agents claiming to be whistleblowers, Gary Shapley and Whistleblower X, shared notes that raised questions about the FBI treatment of the device (but WaPo didn’t mention that in their report). Abbe Lowell claimed that Shapley misidentified Hunter Biden’s interlocutors in some key WhatsApp messages (something else WaPo didn’t mention even while repeating the substance of the contested WhatsApp texts). Denver Riggleman, who has been working as part of a Hunter Biden team to examine what has been released, has alleged some of the data has been manipulated (something WaPo hasn’t bothered to cover at all).

That all led me to start looking at the publicly released (but unreliable) emails at BidenLaptopEmails dot com, where I’ve discovered that during a period when Hunter Biden was getting Ketamine treatment and bookended by two communications from him that indicated he was not getting outside comms, someone:

  • Split Hunter’s Uber account, on which his two iCloud accounts had previously been joined
  • Accessed Hunter’s rhb iCloud account from a browser
  • Changed the password and related phone numbers to his rhb iCloud account
  • Installed and gave full access to his droidhunter gmail account a real app, called Hunter, that can send email on someone else’s behalf
  • Signed into that droidhunter account using a new device
  • Again changed emails and phone numbers associated with his rhb account
  • Asked for a full copy of his rhbdc iCloud account
  • Reset the password of that rhbdc iCloud account
  • Made droidhunter account the notification email for the rhbdc account
  • Downloaded all Hunter’s Apple Store purchases
  • Made changes to the Uber (and Waze) account associated with an XS phone that would be included in the “laptop”
  • Restored rhb as an alternate address to the account
  • Restored contacts from an unidentified prior change
  • Obtained — including at the droidhunter email account — a download link of the entire rhbdc iCloud account
  • Backed up the XS phone to the laptop
  • Gotten a trial app of a photo editor
  • Backed up an iPad to the laptop
  • Changed the iTunes password
  • Added the Dr. Fone account, allowing you to adopt a chosen second phone number for a phone, to a second of Hunter’s accounts
  • Signed into the droidhunter account from a burner phone
  • Restored the prior trusted phone number
  • Added software that could record calls
  • Started erasing and then locked a laptop — probably the one that would eventually end up in Mac Isaac’s store
  • Got a new Mac phone for the droidhunter account

That series of changes are not the only emails in the MarcoPolo set that should raise questions about whether Hunter Biden’s digital identity may have been compromised.

Two that are important to the topic of this post are, first, that a great many devices logged into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts in 2018 and 2019, yet many of them don’t appear to be tied to him getting his own new iPhone or computer, and only rarely are the existing devices shut down or passwords changed afterwards. The sheer number should have raised alarms that people had broken into Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts when the IRS asked Apple for Hunter Biden’s subscriber information in November 2019, in advance of writing a subpoena for the laptop in custody of John Paul Mac Isaac. Additionally, there were a bunch of attempts to get into Hunter Biden’s Venmo account, and the account added two new Remembered Devices within 12 minutes of each other in August 2018, one in the LA foothills and the other in Las Vegas. That and other details (including texts and emails) might have raised questions about whether sex workers from the very same escort service on which the IRS had predicated this entire investigation took steps to compromise Hunter Biden’s devices.

But the timeline above provides some reason to believe that at the time the “laptop” was packaged up for delivery to John Paul Mac Isaac, Hunter Biden did not have complete — if any — control of his own communications.

I wouldn’t be able to prove whether Hunter Biden was hacked during this key period in 2019. It would require subpoena power and access to reliable data. But as it happens, Whistleblower X had subpoena power — and was already watching Hunter Biden closely — in precisely the period this happened.

For those of us who don’t have subpoena power, though, we have to rely on publicly available evidence, filtered through partisan gatekeepers alleged to have tampered with the device.

The two reports done for the WaPo are the only known assessments of the drive containing the “laptop” primarily using forensic — as opposed to a correlative — methodology. The correlative methodology, which shows all the communications on the drive confirm the others, unsurprisingly concludes that the “laptop” came from one of Hunter Biden’s several iCloud accounts.

The forensic methodology looked for digital verification — not just of email signatures, but also of the drive itself. Both Green and Williams raised questions about the treatment of and missing digital signatures on the drive, questions that seem to match what Riggleman’s team is seeing.

Indeed, the concerns that Green and Williams raised may explain something the FBI itself found. Shapley’s notes recorded that on March 31, 2020, someone wrote an email “about quality and completeness of imaged/recovered information from the hard drive” — an email that was being intentionally withheld from the agents (especially Whistleblower X) who might one day testify at trial.

This sounds like it might reflect the same concerns raised by anyone external examining the drive forensically. If it does, it would suggest that some of the irregularities everyone can see in drives released via Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon always existed, including in the one shared with the FBI and in any separate drive shared with Republicans in Congress.

Because of all the new questions raised about the “laptop,” and because of the centrality that the Republicans want it to have on the upcoming election, I thought it reasonable to ask the WaPo to do what even the Washington Examiner was willing to do: show their work. While the Examiner’s report from Gus Dimitrelos tellingly excludes many of the details I’ve laid out above and hides both some key later device accesses and types of apps — especially spyware — loaded onto Hunter Biden’s iCloud accounts, while the way the Examiner released it exacerbated the privacy violations on Hunter Biden himself, it nevertheless was useful for explaining how two iCloud accounts were loaded up onto one laptop and how the government was able to obtain WhatsApp texts that don’t show up on the unencrypted parts of the laptop.

After I made several requests, WaPo PR manager Savannah Stephens declined to release the reports, calling the two reports, “foundational reporting documents.”

Marcy, thank you for reaching out. We do not release foundational reporting documents. Our coverage at the time was transparent about how the study was conducted, including this report.

Even though it has two reports that could significantly impact fairly pressing debates — debates the WaPo itself treats as important — the WaPo refuses to release more on these expert reports on the laptop.

Instead of doing that, the WaPo is instead paying Devlin Barrett to do what he does best — write down as true what right wingers tell him to write, not what the public evidence actually shows.

In a story with Matt Viser (the same guy who repeated the content of contested WhatsApp texts without revealing that Abbe Lowell had contested them), Barrett wrote that the testimony of the men he calls “whistleblowers” “show Hunter Biden’s laptop had little role in the investigation into Hunter Biden.”

Barrett and Viser utterly misrepresent the debate over the laptop — dodging the question, in the lede, at least, of whether the laptop can help get to the truth — something once considered the purview of journalism and something WaPo’s own report on this drive had previously done.

For more than two years, Democrats and Republicans have hotly debated the importance of the “Hunter Biden laptop” — insisting that it was either key evidence of corruption or fool’s gold meant to con 2020 voters into abandoning then-candidate Joe Biden.

Both theories were largely wrong, according to two of the agents closest to the investigation of tax crimes allegedly committed by President Biden’s son.

[snip]

But the agents’ accounts also indicate that the laptop played at best a small role in the criminal investigation into potential tax and gun-purchasing violations. Far from a smoking gun, the laptop appears to have been mostly an afterthought to the reams of text messages, emails and other evidence that agents gathered from Hunter Biden’s cloud data. A lawyer for one of those agents said he nevertheless was frustrated by the Justice Department’s refusal to let them review the laptop’s contents.

I’m very interested in the project of this column, because not only is this not what Shapley and Whistleblower X’s testimony said, but it misrepresented and misunderstands how evidence works.

This is a tax investigation. It came from, per Whistleblower X, his examination of what is probably a Russian escort service. But it’s a tax investigation: it relies on financial data that comes directly from banks and other financial institutions, institutions that are — to the extent they aren’t tainted by identity theft or hacking, like people seem to have tried to do to Hunter Biden’s Venmo — inherently reliable.

As for emails and texts, the IRS agents’ testimony (taken in conjunction with the report that the Washington Examiner was ethical enough to release), shows that the IRS didn’t obtain what is probably Hunter Biden’s rhb iCloud account — from which the cited, contested WhatsApp messages were probably obtained a second time — until August 2020, after it got some of the same material on the laptop. That potential taint may be why someone told Barrett to downplay the import of the laptop.

While the laptop may not have played a key role in substantiating a tax case against Hunter Biden, it may well have tainted the evidence in the case. It may well be part of the reason why Hunter Biden is getting to plead to misdemeanor rather than felony tax charges — because as even Whistleblower X explained that he had been told, there are emails that raised concerns about whether this could be charged at all, suggesting this case couldn’t withstand discovery.

Plus, WaPo is being coy here: The laptop may have played little part in a tax investigation reliant on bank records. But it did play a central part in allegations, including WaPo’s own reporting, of foreign influence peddling involving (among others), Burisma, the hack of which became public between the time the IRS started using this laptop as evidence and the time they learned Rudy Giuliani had a role in it.

That part is all pitch, though — yet another instance where Devlin Barrett writes down what right wingers tell him to say and WaPo reports it as if it were true. It’s what WaPo pays him to do.

It’s the claims about the laptop — from an outlet sitting on two reports that raise questions about its reliability — that I find especially curious. Start with this paragraph, which conflates the steps FBI took in November 2019 to authenticate that the laptop was Hunter Biden’s — subscriber information from Apple, a purchase record in Delaware, two but maybe only two phone calls with Mac Isaac, and “other intelligence” — with what the AUSA on the case said about it almost a year later.

After being handed the device by a Wilmington, Del., computer shop owner in 2019, the FBI quickly concluded by examining computer data as well as Hunter Biden’s phone records that the laptop was genuinely his and did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated.

That last bit — “did not seem to have been tampered with or manipulated” — published by an outlet sitting on two reports that show the laptop was tampered with? It is a paraphrase from a meeting in October 2020, not a description of legal process served in November 2019. And therein lies a big part of the scandal.

In the actual quote, Wolf — painted as the bad guy here by the IRS agents — was saying that it “is not a priority” for the investigative team to see “if anything was added to the computer by a third party” even after learning that the lawyer for the President, whose demands for this investigation had raised influence problems from the start of the investigation, had some kind of tie to it.

This is as if Peter Strzok, rather than just failing to make sure people writing FISA applications had adverse information about the Steele dossier (which is what frothers think the IG Report showed), had instead said, “fuck it, I don’t care if it is tainted.” These notes show the Hunter Biden investigative team did what right wingers accuse the Crossfire Hurricane team of doing, blowing off the import of the involvement of a campaign in a key piece of evidence.

When the WaPo conflates those two items again later in the piece, they date the quote to May 2020.

Democrats suggested the data might have been doctored or possibly a Russian-backed disinformation campaign. The information provided by IRS agents to Congress seems to put both the accusations and counter-accusations to rest.

FBI agents were able to determine in early November 2019 that the device they had was registered to Hunter Biden, and phone records showed he had been in contact with the computer shop owner.

“We have no reason to believe there is anything fabricated nefariously on the computer and or hard drive. There are emails and other items that corroborate the items on the laptop,” Shapley wrote in notes that dated that determination to around May 2020.

Dating Lesley Wolf’s comment saying they had no reason to believe anything on the laptop was fabricated to May 2020 is either a deliberate error or a confession that two journalists proclaiming the laptop to lack any taint have no fucking clue what they’re reading.

Wolf said this, at a meeting the investigative team had on October 22, 2020, in the wake of the discovery that Rudy Giuliani had some tie to the laptop, as the team scrambled to memorialize how they had treated a key piece of evidence about which a bunch of questions would now be raised.

A Yes. So there are a couple significant parts of this. One was that, at this time, the laptop was a very big story, so we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.

So we wanted to go through the timeline of what happened with the laptop and devices.

Because the laptop had become a huge story, “we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately,” Devlin Barrett’s star “whistleblower” explained.

And Shapley shows Wolf saying that they had no knowledge, in October 2020, of any fabrications on the laptop. But he records her saying that after “computer guy” said “they could do a csv list that shows when everything was created.”

That is, Wolf said this after “computer guy” described something they had not yet done ten months after obtaining the laptop, had not yet done two months after getting warrants relying on the laptop, that they would need to do to make sure the laptop had not been altered by third parties. Wolf said this after “computer guy” described that the FBI had not done very basic things to verify the integrity of the laptop they should have done ten months earlier, before relying on it.

Again, I’m not sure whether WaPo’s journalists are dishonest or just stupid. But this exchange is critical for another reason. Lesley Wolf’s assertion about the integrity of the laptop relied on correlation: by matching emails on the laptop with emails that could be obtained directly from the provider.

There are emails and other items hat corroborate the items on the laptop and hard dive.

This is the method that Washington Examiner’s expert used to proclaim the laptop authentic. It’s the method that a bunch of other right wing journalists have gotten experts to use to validate the laptop.

If you steal someone’s iCloud account, the way to prove that it is authentic is by proving that it is their iCloud account, which is what correlation does.

But “computer guy” was suggesting using a forensic method, ten months after the fact, to test the integrity of the laptop itself. DDOSecrets has done this test on the publicly released emails — and half of them have a last modified date of February 11, 2019, right towards the end of the timeline I show above.

Lesley Wolf made her comment on October 22, 2020. No one in Gary Shapley’s interview asked him what happened after that. Nor does Devlin Barrett seem curious to ask.

If “computer guy” subsequently did this test, there’s good reason to believe he would have found what DDOSecrets did: that while these emails match the ones in Hunter Biden’s accounts, they were all packaged up on February 11, 2019, at a time it’s not clear Hunter Biden had control of his own digital accounts.

If you use a forensic method to validate these files, you’re not going to get the same results as a correlative method. That’s why it would be very useful for the debate about the laptop for WaPo to share the two known expert reports done using forensic methods on the drive itself, rather than correlation.

There’s one more hilarious thing about this Devlin Barrett creation. He, predictably, repeats his “whistleblower’s” complaints about not getting stuff pertaining to the laptop.

Shapley said a federal prosecutor on the case, Lesley Wolf, told him that the IRS agents couldn’t see the laptop. “At some point, they were going to give a redacted version, but we don’t even think we got a full — even a redacted version. We only got piecemeal items,” Shapley told the committee, voicing his frustration that he would have liked to see all the data.

Devlin Barrett — dishonest or stupid? — quotes Shapley’s testimony out of context. The full quotation makes it clear Shapley is referring, again, to a discussion that took place on October 22, 2020. More importantly, Shapley is not referring to the laptop!!

And when it came down to item number 33 on page 2, Special Agent [Whistleblower X] is saying like, well, I haven’t seen this information. And AUSA Lesley Wolf says, well, you haven’t seen it because, for a variety of reasons, they kept it from the agents. And she said that at some point they were going to give a redacted version, but we don’t even think we got a full — even a redacted version. We only got piecemeal items [my emphasis]

That particular quotation, identified clearly as item number 33, is the report about the laptop — which I’ll copy again here to make it so easy even Devlin Barrett might understand it:

To help a right winger allege corruption, Devlin Barrett quotes his complaint that his team was not given the actual forensic report about the laptop. Corruption, in this story, is withholding a forensic report that might tell people what they need to know about the laptop.

And yet that is precisely what WaPo itself refuses to do: release two reports that raise questions about the quality and completeness of the drive.

According to Devlin Barrett’s own standard — at least the standard he applies when he’s parroting right wingers — withholding such a report is a sign of corruption.

Even the plain language of Gary Shapley’s contemporaneous notes show that Devlin’s claim that, “information provided by IRS agents to Congress” “put[s] … the accusations” that “the data might have been doctored or possibly a Russian-backed disinformation campaign” … “to rest” is wildly false (dishonest or stupid?). It does the opposite: It shows that ten months after beginning to rely on the laptop, the FBI still had not done basic forensic checks of the data on it and the AUSA leading the investigation didn’t think doing so was a priority.

That should be the story. That’s the scandal.

And true to form, Devlin Barrett spins the exactly opposite tale.

The WaPo has in its possession some of the only available information that can help to explain what the FBI saw by March 2020, two independent equivalent reports to the one that Shapley implies it is corrupt to withhold.

And unlike the Washington Examiner, they won’t release it.

“I can get any source on the planet.” The Pre-History of Gal Luft’s Pre-“Whistleblower” Indictment

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In this post I noted that Gal Luft — the guy who got James Comer all hot and bothered about having a “whistleblower” confirming his conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden — was indicted on November 1, 2022, before the Republicans even won back the House. The timing alone debunks Luft’s and GOP claims that he was charged as retaliation for coming forward to Republicans.

But he might have been charged even before that.

That’s because the statutes of limitation for many of the substantive charges against him — save the alleged conspiracy to violate FARA — would have expired before he was indicted if he hadn’t fled the country when the person referred in his indictment as co-conspirator-1, Chi Ping Patrick Ho, was arrested in November 2017.

Here’s what the charges, duration, and five year Statute of Limitation looks like for the indictment against Luft.

It seems exceedingly likely that SDNY charged Luft on November 1, 2022 because that’s the day the Statute of Limitations would otherwise have expired on the headline charge: the conspiracy to get James Woolsey to act on behalf of CEFC by using Luft’s NGO as a cut-out.

But the five year Statutes of Limitations would have started expiring on the other substantive charges starting in November 2020.

DOJ could still indict Luft on those charges because — as they allude to in the indictment — once his alleged co-conspirator Patrick Ho was charged in November 2017, he fled the US and never returned.

Since the arrest of an associate (“CC-1”) on different U.S. charges in mid-November 2017, LUFT has remained outside the United States.

The known Luft docket doesn’t show any complaint prior to the indictment. But SDNY doesn’t always include prior charges in the prosecution docket (note, for example, that the Oleg Deripaska docket starts with a superseding indictment as document number 1, thereby hiding the timing and content of the prior indictment).

But if DOJ wanted to preserve those other charges until such time as they indicted on the last-expiring one, they might have obtained one or several serial complaints charging them, in case Luft ever happened to fly into the US unexpectedly, which would otherwise have cause those Statutes of Limitation to expire. If that’s right, then SDNY may have started charging Luft as early as November 2020, with more controversial charges involving Iran and Libya the following year.

With that in mind, I want to look at what the Patrick Ho prosecution — Luft’s alleged co-conspirator in counts 1 and 2, as well as Hunter Biden’s associate and legal client through the beginning of Ho’s own prosecution in 2018 — says about the investigation into Luft.

Based on search warrant return dates, DOJ appears to have obtained probable cause against Ho by June 20, 2016 — possibly based off a FISA warrant noticed during the prosecution. Before his arrest, DOJ continued to obtain Ho’s cloud communications at least through March 6, 2017 — meaning they were collecting communications Ho had with Luft during the period he was cultivating the Woolsey deal, and would have been collecting emails with Hunter Biden, except — unless I fucked up the search — none of the noticed email accounts show up in the MarcoPolo set.

While it’s clear CEFC did use charity to try to cultivate Hunter Biden, it’s not entirely clear what role Ho’s NGO played in that process (or whether Hunter had direct involvement with it). It’s worth noting on this point, charges against the Chadian whom Ho was convicted of trying to bribe were dropped. And Woolsey is not known to have been charged, in part because the Chinese payments to him were too well laundered through (allegedly) entities like Luft’s own NGO — likely the same reason why Tony Podesta wasn’t charged for involvement in Paul Manafort’s Ukrainian influence peddling.

Ho was first charged by complaint on November 16, 2017, then arrested as he landed in JFK two days later. On his arrest, the FBI took possession of six USB drives, at least two phones, and an iPad, all of which they presumably searched.

In the wake of Ho’s arrest, DOJ took other overt steps, which they cited in a detention filing to describe how much more they learned after Ho’s arrest. Those steps including interviewing witnesses, executing search warrants — including for Ho’s Virginia NGO, and subpoenaing documents from third parties.

The government first publicly mentioned the arms and Iran conduct subsequently charged against Luft in an October 2018 motion in limine. Because Ho seemed to be preparing to claim his involvement in Chad and Uganda — the two countries he was charged with attempting to bribe — involved charity, a defense that would have skirted aspects of the charged crime, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the government argued they should be able to introduce evidence that Ho was pushing CEFC business, not just charity.

On October 2014, the defendant sent his assistant an email stating, “I am going to BJ [i.e., Beijing] this Friday to see [the Chairman of CEFC NGO and CEFC China] on Sat afternoon. The documents I want to send him before hand in separate items are: . . . 7. Iranian connection (brief).”4 On the same date, the defendant sent his assistant another email, attaching a document, which stated, in pertinent part:

7) Iranian Connection . . . Iran has money in a Bank in china which is under sanction. Iran wishes to purchase precious metal with this money. The precious metal is available through a Bank in HK which cannot accept money from the Bank in China which holds the money but is under sanction. The Iranian agent is looking for a Chinese company acting as a middle man in such transactions and will pay commission. (details to be presented orally) The Iranian connection has strong urge to establish trading relationship with us in oil and products . . . .

The following year, in June 2015, the defendant received an email that stated, in pertinent part: “The Iranian team will arrive in BJ . . . . See the attached.” The attachment referenced in the email was a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Presentation to Potential Partners Iran Petroleum Investments.” The next day, the defendant forwarded the email to his assistant, stating, “For writing report to [the Chairman of CEFC NGO and CEFC China].”

The following year, in June 2016, the defendant emailed another individual, blindcopying his assistant, and stated, in pertinent part, “Will get [two executives of CEFC China] to meet with [oil executive at company with operations in Iran] in BJ, and [another individual] also on another occasion if he comes. You can start organizing these. . . . Other matters ftf [i.e., face to face].” [paragraph 78]

[snip]

The defendant also sought to and did broker arms transactions unrelated to the Chad and Uganda schemes charged in this case. For example:

In March 2015, an individual sent the defendant an email, stating, “I have the list and end user agreement. Pls advise next step.” On the same day, the defendant replied, in pertinent part, “Find a way to pass them onto me and we can execute that right away[].” The individual replied, “Attached. [W]e have the funding and processing mechanisms in place. If it works nice there will be much more. Also for S. Sudan.” The attachment to this email was a document entitled “End User Certificate,” certifying that the user of the goods in question would be the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Libya. The goods listed on the document included numerous arms. [paragraph 48]

The following month, the defendant sent an email that stated in pertinent part: “It so turns out Qatar also needs urgently a list of toys from us. But for the same reason we had for Libya, we cannot sell directly to them. Is there a way you could act as an intermediary in both cases?” The person whom the defendant emailed replied: “Qatar good chance bc there is no embargo. Libya is another case bc going against an embargo is tricky.” The defendant responded: “Qatar needs new toys quite urgently. Their chief is coming to China and we hope to give them a piece of good news. Please confirm soonest.” [paragraph 48]

As linked above, several of the documents described in this motion describing “other uncharged conduct” are documents listed in Luft’s own indictment. Given that he fled upon Ho’s arrest, he seems to have recognized the threat to himself at that point, in 2017. If not, the public docketing of these documents should have made that clear.

The government repeated these references to communications with Luft — among other places — in their sentencing memorandum for Ho, submitted on March 18, 2019, just days before the meeting with Luft in Belgium.

So Luft was on notice about this part of the criminal investigation into him when he arranged that meeting and pitched dirt on Hunter Biden. The meeting was literally days after Ho was sentenced on March 25, 2019.

SDNY didn’t charge Ho with either of the conspiracies in which he is named as Luft’s co-conspirator, even though their understanding of the arms control conspiracy was well-advanced by the time of his trial in November 2018. He remained imprisoned in the US until June 8, 2020, well over a year after the interview with Luft, after which Ho was deported to Hong Kong. Admittedly, that was the height of the pandemic and Ho was already 70, and so would have been difficult to keep jailed.

But the timing of Luft’s meeting with the SDNY and FBI — literally days after Ho’s sentencing — suggests that SDNY took that opportunity to advance the several overt prongs of the investigations against him, regardless of what dangle — true or not — about Hunter Biden Luft offered. They had already, publicly, made clear they believed it was criminal conduct.

Luft was on notice about that before the Brussels meeting and, as alleged in the indictment, he lied about the arms control scheme and discussions with Iran.

It probably would have been easier to extradite him from the US Embassy in Brussels than it would from Cyprus, so clearly SDNY wasn’t ready to arrest him yet.

There’s no False Statements charge in the indictment pertaining to Woolsey, however, so it’s unclear whether the FBI asked Luft about that.

Trump’s Criminal Division head, Brian Benczkowski, took credit for the Ho sentencing (and may have had to approve the meeting with Luft). So it seems likely even Bill Barr’s DOJ were fine with those two prongs of the Luft prosecution.

The Woolsey allegation, of course is a different matter.

So, too, might another one be.

Count 7 of his indictment charges Luft with violating sanctions against Iran. It starts, as such charges do, with an explanation of the IEEPA authorizing such sanctions, generally. It spends six paragraphs describing the sanctions regime against Iran. It spends eight paragraphs describing the charged conduct involving Iran. Then, before the two paragraphs charging Luft for evading Iran sections, his indictment includes this paragraph:

80. Several months later, on or about October 10, 2016, CC-2 emailed GAL LUFT, the defendant, that CC-2 had a Chinese client who needed Russian oil, which LUFT confirmed he could help provide: “I just got off the phone with Russia. They have this.” Forwarding this email to CC-1, LUFT wrote: “If [CC-2] really has this client we need to grab it. This is exactly what we need. . . . I can get any source on the planet.”

That’s not related to the current charges (though if Luft continued to pursue business with Russia, particularly after 2017 and 2022 sanctions, those might amount to IEEPA sanctions violations as well). But it suggests DOJ’s interest into Luft may extend beyond China.

Andrew DeFilippis Had a Role in the Prosecution of Gal Luft’s Co-Conspirator-1

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James Comer plans to rely on Gal Luft’s testimony in his efforts to gin up conspiracy theories against Joe Biden, even in spite of the indictment against Luft DOJ obtained before James Comer started pursuing his conspiracy theories.

Andrew DeFilippis handled the classified evidence in the Patrick Ho case

Because of that, I want to flag a detail about the Patrick Ho case, the case out of which this one arose.

Ho is the person described as Co-Conspirator-1 in the Luft indictment.

Ho was sentenced on March 25, 2019 for bribing Chadian and Ugandan officials; the former scheme started in a suite in Trump Tower in 2014.

Through a connection, HO was introduced to Cheikh Gadio, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Senegal, who had a personal relationship with President Déby. HO and Gadio met at CEFC China’s suite at Trump World Tower in midtown Manhattan, where HO enlisted Gadio to assist CEFC China in obtaining access to President Déby.

Days after Ho was sentenced, the two lead prosecutors on that case, Catherine Ghosh and Daniel Richenthal, flew to Brussels to meet with Luft. As alleged in the indictment, Luft lied to those prosecutors and four FBI agents about both the arms deals and Chinese influence peddling for which he has since been charged.

64. On or about March 28, 2019, in the Southern District of New York, Belgium, and elsewhere outside of the jurisdiction of any particular State or district of the United States, GAL LUFT, the defendant, who is expected to be first brought to and arrested in the Southern District of New York, a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully made a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation, to wit, LUFT falsely stated during an interview at the United States Embassy in Brussels, Belgium with federal law enforcement officers and prosecutors, in connection with an investigation being conducted in the Southern District of New York, that LUFT had not sought to engage in or profit from arms deals, and instead merely had been asked by an Israeli friend who dealt in arms to check arms prices so that the friend could use this information in bidding on deals, a request that LUFT said he fulfilled by having CC-1 check prices with CC-2 and then relay this information to LUFT–when in fact LUFT had actively worked to broker numerous illegal arms deals for profit involving multiple different countries, both in concert with CC-1 and directly himself, including as described in paragraphs Forty-Four through Fifty-Three above.

[snip]

84. On or about March 29, 2019, in the Southern District of New York, Belgium, and elsewhere outside of the jurisdiction of any particular State or district of the United States, GAL LUFT, defendant, who is expected to be first brought to and arrested in the Southern District of New York, in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully made a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation, to wit, LUFT falsely stated during an interview at the United States Embassy in Brussels, Belgium with federal law enforcement officers and prosecutors, in connection with an investigation being conducted in the Southern District of New York, that LUFT had tried to prevent CEFC China from doing an oil deal with Iran, that LUFT had been excluded from CEFC China meetings with Iranians, and that LUFT did not know of any CEFC China dealings with Iran while he was affiliated with the company–when in fact, including as described above in paragraphs Sixty-Six through Eighty, LUFT personally attended at least one meeting between CEFC China and Iranians and assisted in setting up additional such meetings for the purpose of arranging deals for Iranian oil, and also worked to find a buyer of Iranian oil while concealing its origin.

Starting in early 2018, DeFilippis handled the classified evidence on the Ho case — both CIPA and a FISA order. He would have spent a great deal of time reviewing what the spooks had obtained on Ho and his associates, undoubtedly including Luft.

Andrew DeFilippis investigated John Kerry for a year

DeFilippis’ efforts on the Ho case took place in parallel with his efforts to gin up a criminal investigation against John Kerry. Here’s how Geoffrey Berman described being ordered to do that by Main Justice.

On May 9, the day after the second Trump tweet, the co-chiefs of SDNY’s national security unit, Ferrara and Graff, had a meeting at Main Justice with the head of the unit that oversees counterintelligence cases at DOJ, which is under the National Security Division.

He said that Main Justice was referring an investigation to us that concerned Kerry’s Iran-related conduct. The conduct that had annoyed the president was now a priority of the Department of Justice. The focus was to be on potential violations of the Logan Act.

[snip]

From the outset, I was skeptical that there was a case to be made. I knew enough about the Logan Act to have strong doubts. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have talked about it from time to time, suggesting that some opponent is in violation of it. It never goes anywhere.

But I figured if they bring us a possible case, we’ll do our best. We’ll look into it. We brought a prosecutor from the national security unit, Andrew DeFilippis, into the investigation.

Trump, meanwhile, kept on tweeting. “John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people,” he wrote that September. “He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!”

DeFilippis’ efforts extended into 2019, overlapping with the trial of Ho and the interview with Luft. National Security prosecutors at Main Justice kept pressuring SDNY to advance the investigation into Kerry, but first, Berman had DeFilippis research whether the Logan Act would be chargeable even if Kerry had committed it.

The next step would have been to conduct an inquiry into Kerry’s electronic communications, what’s known as a 2703(d) order. That would have produced the header information—the to, from, date, and subject fields—but not the contents. I decided that before moving forward, it made sense to evaluate whether we would ever have a viable, appropriate charge that matched up with Kerry’s alleged conduct.

At the risk of stating the obvious, under our system of law, pissing off the president is not a chargeable offense. I asked DeFilippis to conduct additional legal research into the Logan Act and other potentially applicable theories. “Look, we’re talking about going to the next step here,” I said.

“But before we do any further investigation, I want to know what the law is on the Logan Act. Let’s say we gather additional documents—I want to know, how is that helping us?”

I wanted to answer the question, even if these things happened, was it a crime? Let’s cut to the chase and find that out, because we’ve got plenty of other work to do and I don’t want us to just be spinning our wheels on this.

For the next several months, DeFilippis conducted extensive research into the Logan Act as well as statutes relating to possible criminal ethics violations by former senior government employees.

On April 22, 2019, Trump tweeted, “Iran is being given VERY BAD advice by @JohnKerry and people who helped him lead the U.S. into the very bad Iran Nuclear Deal. Big violation of Logan Act?”

The tweet was in the morning. That afternoon, Ferrara got a call from Main Justice. He was told that David Burns, the principal deputy assistant attorney general for national security, wanted to know why we were delaying. Why had we not proceeded with a 2703(d) order—the look into Kerry’s electronic communications?

The next day, Burns spoke to Ferrara, Graff, and DeFilippis and repeatedly pressed them about why they had not submitted the 2703(d) order. The team responded that additional analysis needed to be done before pursuing the order.

SDNY decided not to pursue the case against Kerry in fall of 2019.

We spent roughly a year exploring whether there was any basis to further investigate Kerry. Memos were written, revised, and thoroughly discussed.

Our deep dive into the Logan Act confirmed why no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under it in the more than 220 years it has been on the books: the law is not useful. It definitely does not prohibit a former US secretary of state from talking to a foreign official. We did not find that Kerry violated any ethics statutes or any laws having to do with the improper handling of classified material.

In September 2019, DeFilippis advised the National Security Division at Main Justice that we would not be pursuing the case further. He had earlier attempted to tell the specific NSD attorney assigned to the case of our decision, but he couldn’t connect because that attorney was engaged in another matter: the Craig trial.

Sometime after that, DeFilippis became the lead prosecutor on the Durham team, leading the prosecution of Michael Sussmann.

Andrew DeFilippis oversaw the most abusive parts of the John Durham prosecution

Over the course of the Michael Sussmann prosecution, DeFilippis and his prosecution team:

As noted above, Geoffrey Berman boasted that the investigation into Kerry didn’t leak. Even ignoring the inexplicably perfect concert between Alfa Bank’s efforts and Durham’s, it’s not clear the same can be said about the Durham investigation.

And it’s not just that DeFilippis routinely tried to introduce evidence that served his narrative rather than matched the facts. It’s that DeFilippis repeatedly — most notably in the alleged complaint that researchers working on a DARPA project would attempt to identify which Russians were interfering in the US election — proved more sympathetic of Russian efforts to help get Trump elected than to conduct an ethical prosecution.

Last August, shortly before Durham confessed the utter humiliation of his team at the hand of Sergei Millian, DeFilippis withdrew from the Durham team with almost no notice, left DOJ, and returned — in a Special Counsel role, not as Partner — to Sullivan & Cromwell.

These are just data points. There is no reason, yet, to believe that DeFilippis continues to unethically gin up conspiracy theories against Democrats.

But they are data points I thought worth collecting in one place.

James Comer’s Imaginary Whistleblower Friend, Gal Luft, Was Charged Last November for Lying in that March 2019 Meeting

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I wrote last week that James Comer and Jim Jordan and Jason Smith have been immunizing misconduct and crime in an effort to gin up a conspiracy theory against Joe Biden and his family.

Last night, that effort was demonstrated in spectacular fashion. For months, Comer has been squealing about a secret informant he had who had proof that Joe Biden engaged in graft with CEFC. But then his imaginary whistleblower friend disappeared.

In recent weeks, Comer’s imaginary whistleblower friend was identified as Gal Luft. He disappeared because he skipped bail in Cyprus on an arrest warrant from the US.

Here’s how NYPost’s Hunter propagandist described it:

Gal Luft, the “missing” witness in the House Oversight Committee’s Biden family corruption investigation, has told The Post he is alive and living as a fugitive in an undisclosed location.

The former Israeli Defense Force colonel vanished from Cyprus last month while on bail awaiting extradition to the US on seven charges.

He denies the allegations, which include five charges relating to the Arms Export Control Act of conspiring to sell Chinese products to the United Arab Emirates, Kenya and Libya, as well as a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and of making a false statement.

Luft claims he was forced to skip bail because he is the victim of a political persecution by the US to protect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and brother Jim.

A few days ago, Luft did a video, naming the prosecutors he met with at that meeting and daring DOJ to unseal his indictment. So they did. The November 1, 2022 indictment, by the same two prosecutors, charges Luft with a range of sanctions violations and serving as a Foreign Agent of China. The FARA violation alleges he insinuated someone who looks a lot like James Woolsey into the Trump Administration on the payroll of CEFC.

The date is important: He was charged before he started regaling dim-witted Chairmen about dirt on Hunter Biden. This prosecution can’t be about retaliation for the conspiracy theories he told Comer — the indictment precedes it all by months.

In any case, the indictment also lays out the false charges count against him.

He was charged with lying at that March 2019 meeting about his own ties to CEFC.

84. On or about March 29, 2019, in the Southern District of New York, Belgium, and elsewhere outside of the jurisdiction of any particular State or district of the United States, GAL LUFT, defendant, who is expected to be first brought to and arrested in the Southern District of New York, in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully made a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation, to wit, LUFT falsely stated during an interview at the United States Embassy in Brussels, Belgium with federal law enforcement officers and prosecutors, in connection with an investigation being conducted in the Southern District of New York, that LUFT had tried to prevent CEFC China from doing an oil deal with Iran, that LUFT had been excluded from CEFC China meetings with Iranians, and that LUFT did not know of any CEFC China dealings with Iran while he was affiliated with the company–when in fact, including as described above in paragraphs Sixty-Six through Eighty, LUFT personally attended at least one meeting between CEFC China and Iranians and assisted in setting up additional such meetings for the purpose of arranging deals for Iranian oil, and also worked to find a buyer of Iranian oil while concealing its origin.

In other words, well before Luft told Comer anything, he had been charged for lying at the very meeting he’s now claiming he was retaliated for. Comer was duped.

Again.

Given the precedent of Eric Swalwell, who was removed from the House Intelligence Committee after having been cultivated by a Chinese agent, Comer should be stripped of his gavel and referred to the ethics committee.

Instead, Speaker McCarthy is going to let him continue to make a mockery of himself offering to immunize all range of grifters in hopes of finding dirt.

The Blind Squirrel’s Nut: Chuck Grassley Unwittingly Debunks Bill Barr

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Last month, Bill Barr got Federalist Faceplant Margot Cleveland to claim that Jamie Raskin was lying when he said that the lead from an informant claiming that Joe Biden had been bribed was assessed by Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady and then shut down.

It’s not true. It wasn’t closed down,” William Barr told The Federalist on Tuesday in response to Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s claim that the former attorney general and his “handpicked prosecutor” had ended an investigation into a confidential human source’s allegation that Joe Biden had agreed to a $5 million bribe. “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”

Then James Comer relied on that to claim that Raskin was wrong when he said that it was shut down as an assessment.

Bill Barr to Margot Cleveland to James Comer: At each new level, this Matryoshka doll of disinformation gets less and less credible.

So incredible, in fact, that even Chuck Grassley debunked them.

Unwittingly.

Like the proverbial blind squirrel finding a nut.

You see, Chuck is outraged that the IRS agents conducting the investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes were not included in a meeting at which Pittsburgh FBI agents briefed the Delaware US Attorney’s office about the informant report. He has written Delaware US Attorney David Weiss a letter demanding an explanation of why.

The answer is clear from the timing of the briefing, which Senator Grassley reveals in his letter: October 23, 2020.

Based on information provided to my office from individuals aware of the meeting, on October 23, 2020, Justice Department and FBI Special Agents from the Pittsburgh Field Office briefed Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf, one of your top prosecutors, and FBI Special Agents from the Baltimore Field Office with respect to the contents of the FBI-generated FD1023 alleging a criminal bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and Hunter Biden; however, the meeting did not include any IRS agents. In addition, based on information provided to my office, potentially hundreds of Justice Department and FBI officials have had access to the FD-1023 at issue, which begs the question that I’ve been asking since the start of my oversight in this matter: what steps have the Justice Department and FBI taken to investigate the allegations?

This briefing was nine days after a NYPost story would have made clear that Rudy Giuliani had ties to the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” that the IRS agents had been relying on for investigative materials for the better part of a year.

It was one day after an October 22, 2020 meeting that the IRS agents did attend. As Gary Shapley confessed to the House Ways and Means Committee, the meeting was largely an effort to make sure that the government had used proper legal process before acquiring two devices that — it had only recently became clear — had become and may always have been part of a political hit job.

A Yes. So there are a couple significant parts of this. One was that, at this time, the laptop was a very big story, so we were just making sure that everything was being handled appropriately.

So we wanted to go through the timeline of what happened with the laptop and devices. I thought one of the most important first parts was that on November 6 of 2019, the FBI case agent, Josh Wilson, called up the computer shop owner, John Paul, and basically got the device numbers from him.

If Shapley’s notes are at all reliable, prosecutors at the meeting instead discovered that the FBI broke the most basic rules of forensics when exploiting the laptop purportedly owned by the former Vice President’s dissolute son, and in the process may have destroyed evidence about who was really behind it. I’m still not convinced his notes are reliable, but if they are, then the meeting should have raised all sorts of alarms within DOJ.

As I laid out here, Shapley has instead pitched the meeting as one that served the primary purpose of giving Whistleblower X opportunity to complain that the US Attorney’s office had prevented the IRS agents from being tainted by dodgy materials on the laptop. Whistleblower X did complain, mind you, but those complaints mostly raise questions about the extent to which he had already been accessing materials from the laptop that Rudy Giuliani had been tampering with, thereby tainting the investigation.

Shapley’s propaganda has worked, because that’s what our blind squirrel from Iowa focuses his letter on.

But as Shapley described in his prepared statement, even before that meeting he had written to AUSA Lesley Wolf complaining about how the laptop was being referred to in the news.

On October 19th, 2020, I emailed Assistant United States Attorney Wolf: “We
need to talk about the computer. It appears the FBI is making certain representations
about the device, and the only reason we know what is on the device is because of the
IRS CI affiant search warrant that allowed access to the documents. If Durham also
executed a search warrant on a device, we need to know so that my leadership is
informed. My management has to be looped into whatever the FBI is doing with the
laptop. It is IRS CI’s responsibility to know what is happening. Let me know when I can
be briefed on this issue.”

Shapley appears to have been concerned, in the weeks before the Presidential election, that people believed the laptop was being investigated by the FBI as an information operation targeting Joe Biden, when in his view, it remained the cornerstone of his investigation into Hunter Biden.

But if DOJ was not already investigating both topics by October 23, 2020 — both Hunter Biden’s tax crimes and a potential information operation targeting Joe Biden — if it has not spent years doing so, then the FBI has become even more captured than I already suspected.

Indeed, if the FBI hasn’t already significantly substantiated that Hunter Biden was hacked in early 2019, then I may renounce my citizenship. I know FBI’s cyber agents can be incompetent, but they can’t be that incompetent, can they?

Can they?

Chuck Grassley may not realize it because he is very old and he is staffed by a bunch of partisan cranks. But he’s basically complaining that DOJ might have learned their lesson after the Steele dossier — the lesson that Chuck Grassley spent years demanding they learn! — and decided, upon the revelation that a key piece of evidence they had been relying on for months had ties to a political hit job, they should figure out precisely what tie that key piece of evidence had to the political hit job.

Chuck Grassley may also not realize that the political cranks who staff him got him to sign a letter effectively complaining that the FBI thought it worthwhile to figure out if the information operation Russian spies had been bragging about for over a year at that point had actually succeeded. Chuck is bitching that the FBI decided to protect a presidential candidate.

Chuck Grassley also likely doesn’t realize his staffers got him to sign a letter bitching that David Weiss attempted to maintain the integrity of the tax investigation even while DOJ assessed whether they had been caught in another information operation. That’s why you don’t include the IRS agents in a meeting where Pittsburgh FBI agents explain to Delaware lawyers how sketchy was the information Rudy Giuliani was collecting from known Russian agents in Ukraine. If you include them, you risk blowing the otherwise meritorious tax investigation.

And Chuck Grassley definitely doesn’t realize that he has debunked Bill Barr.

You see, Bill Barr, who is a very adept liar, was sort of telling the truth to Faceplant Margot that the FD-1023 was referred to DE USAO for further investigation. It surely was. But Pittsburgh FBI agents shared it on October 23, 2020, because the US Attorney’s office was frantically trying to figure out whether the entire tax investigation had been blown, or only parts of it. The US Attorney’s office was undoubtedly trying to understand what kind of other garbage Rudy had produced that got shared with the FBI, in addition to any role he had with the “laptop” that had been used in the tax investigation.

Even Gary Shapley admitted that in the wake of the NYPost story, the Delaware US Attorney’s office did some quick CYA to figure out whether they had been using a tainted information operation for the better part of a year (they had!). The October 23 briefing would have had substantially the same purpose as the October 22 one: to figure out how tainted the investigation was.

And Bill Barr instead got even stupider people to believe that that an attempt to triage the damage done by Rudy’s political hit job amounts to an investigation for bribery.