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What Glenn Simpson Said about the Relationship with the FBI

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I keep promising a big post or series of posts on the Glenn Simpson transcript. And I keep doing quick posts to summarize what the transcript says about controversial topics. In this one, I’ll look at what it says about whether FBI paid Christopher Steele and how the relationship went south. All told, these passages support some points I made in this post and this one — that because of the way Fusion pushed to publicize an ongoing counterintelligence investigation, the FBI got as pissed with Steele and Fusion as vice versa.

First, as I suggested, Simpson suggests (though does not confirm) FBI did reimburse Steele for his September 2016 trip to Rome to report on his findings thus far.

Q. Do you know who paid for Mr. Steele’s trip to Rome to meet with the FBI?

A. I have read recently that — I think in a letter from Senator Grassley that the FBI reimbursed the expense, but to be clear, I mean, that’s it. He was, to my knowledge, not been compensated for that work or any other work during this time.

MR. FOSTER: I’m sorry. You’re saying that Fusion did not pay for the trip?

MR. LEVY: Go ahead and answer the question.

MR. SIMPSON: I don’t think we did.

But later, when asked specifically if Steele obtained payment for the work he did, rather than the travel to share his work, Simpson emphasizes that he only knows what Steele has claimed, which is that FBI didn’t pay for the work.

Q. And I think you’ve already answered this question, but to the best of your knowledge, did Mr. Steele ever obtain payment from the FBI for actual research that he was doing on Russian interference or on possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia?

A. He told me he did not, and I have no independent information other than what he told me. I don’t believe he ever received compensation for working on anything related to Trump and Russia.

Simpson is unable to say whether Steele was providing the FBI rolling production of his memos.

Q. Do you know if he provided any other memoranda to the FBI on a rolling basis at all at any point?

MR. LEVY: He’s answered that question too.

BY THE WITNESS:

A. I don’t know.

In spite of Simpson saying, elsewhere, that Fusion clients get to decide what happens with their end product, Simpson claims that just he and Steele decided to go to the FBI. But his memory on this point is less than perfect.

Q. So after Mr. Steele had found out the information that he put in the very first of these memos, the one dated June 20, 2016, he approached you about taking this information to specifically the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

A. That’s my recollection.

Q. So to the best of your recollection, that request or idea came directly from Mr. Steele, not anyone else?

A. That’s right.

Q. And who was involved in discussions about whether it was appropriate to take either the memo or the information in the memo to the FBI?

A. It was Chris and me. I mean, that’s the only ones I remember, the two of us. The only ones I know of.

Later, Simpson’s lawyer claims privilege over the question of whether Perkins Coie played a part in this decision.

Once the decision was made, did you share that decision with anyone, that he was going to go to the FBI with this information?

A. I think we’re not able to answer that.

MR. LEVY: He’s going to decline to answer that question.

Simpson twice describes how Steele “broke off” his relationship with the FBI (which sure makes it sound like an ongoing relationship) in terms of the frustration with the reopening of the Hillary email investigation and the NYT report that the FBI had not confirmed any ties with Russia.

A. There was some sort of interaction, I think it was probably telephonic that occurred after Director Comey sent his letter to Congress reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. That episode, you know, obviously created some concern that the FBI was intervening in a political campaign in contravention of long-standing Justice Department regulation. So it made a lot of people, including us, concerned about what the heck was going on at the FBI. So, you know, we began getting questions from the press about, you know, whether they were also investigating Trump and, you know, we encouraged them to ask the FBI that question. You know, I think — I’m not sure we’ve covered this fully, but, you know, we just encouraged them to ask the FBI that question. On October 31st the New York Times posed a story saying that the FBI is investigating Trump and found no connections to Russia and, you know, it was a real Halloween special.

Sometime thereafter the FBI — I understand Chris severed his relationship with the FBI out of concern that he didn’t know what was happening inside the FBI and there was a concern that the FBI was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people and that we didn’t really understand what was going on. So he stopped dealing with them.

[snip]

A. I think I was just recounting that he vaguely said that he had broken off with them over this concern that we didn’t really know what was going on. I’m sorry to be vague, but we just didn’t understand what was going on and he said he had broken off with them.

Q. When you say “we” did not understand what 3 was going on, who are you referring to as the “we”?

A. Chris and I, mostly just the two of us. There was a lot of public controversy over the conduct of the FBI. I remember discussing it with many people, but this conversation was between the two of us.

Q. And what was the time frame of when Steele said he had broken off with the FBI?

A. I can — I don’t know exactly, but it would have been between October 31st and election day.

MS. QUINT: October 31st was when you said there was an article —

MR. SIMPSON: In the New York Times. There was an article in the New York Times on October 31st that created concern about what was going on at the FBI.

MS. QUINT: Because it wasn’t consistent with your understanding of the investigation?

MR. SIMPSON: Exactly.

BY MS. SAWYER:

Q. And I think, just to be clear, this was an article you had talked about that both revealed that Director Comey had alerted Congress to something about the Clinton e-mail investigation?

A. No. That happened a few days previous. I don’t know the exact date that he sent the letter to Congress, but this was an article specifically about — it was disclosing the existence of an FBI investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia, which, to my recollection, was the first time that anyone reported that the FBI was looking at whether the Trump campaign had ties to the Kremlin but at the same time saying that they had investigated this and not found anything, which threw cold water on the whole question through the election.

But Simpson also admits that the FBI was pissed about seeing Steele’s public reporting in the press, something I had surmised but none of Fusion’s media outlets had reported.

A. I remember Chris saying at some point that they were upset with media coverage of some of the 6 issues that he had discussed with him.

Which is interesting because Simpson gets forgetful about whether the September briefings with the press — it’s not clear whether they happened before or after Simpson met for the second time with the FBI — mentioned that Simpson had gone to the FBI.

MR. DAVIS: So in your meetings with journalists in September you didn’t reference Mr. Steele’s interactions with the FBI or passing on of information to them?

BY THE WITNESS:

A. I don’t recall.

But as the citations above show, Simpson makes it clear the discussions with the press after Jim Comey’s email letter did raise the investigation.

A. I’m not going to get into specific news organizations or reporters or stories, but I would restate that this was during the period when we were encouraging the media to ask questions about whether the FBI was, in fact, investigating these 24 matters.

Finally, Simpson readily admits they reshared the dossier with John McCain’s associate David Kramer to make sure Jim Comey himself would get it (this would have happened at the moment President Obama asked for the intelligence report on the Russian tampering).

That was essentially — all we sort of wanted was for the government to do its job and we were concerned about whether the information that we provided previously had ever, you know, risen to the leadership level of the FBI. We simply just didn’t know. It was our belief that Director Comey if he was aware — if he was made aware of this information would treat it seriously.

 

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The Simpson Transcript: The Dossier as Predicate

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I’m working towards a big post (or a series of small ones) on the Glenn Simpson transcript. I address some of my impressions in this Real News Network video with Aaron Maté from the other day.

Before I do that larger post, however, I want to address something Maté asked me about: whether the Simpson transcript — in which he says that Christopher Steele learned from the FBI about (what independent reporting confirms) the Papadopoulos tip from the Australians — supports or refutes the sharply contested arguments about whether the Steele dossier started the counterintelligence investigation or served as a key source for a FISA warrant against either Carter Page or Paul Manafort. Skeptics of the report that the investigation actually arose from the George Papadopoulos tip have argued that the latest PR effort around the dossier is an attempt to paper over the dossier as the true source of either the investigation or the FISA orders.

As I noted on RNN, the dossier doesn’t actually help the anti-Trump narrative as much as people have made out. Simpson testified that Steele decided to reach out to the FBI towards the end of June or beginning of July (after only the first dossier report had been done), and the conversation actually happened the first week of July (a questioner later refers to it as occurring July 5).

Q. And do you recall when you — when you and Mr. Steele decided kind of that he could or should take this to the FBI, approximately the time frame of that?

A. I believe it was sometime around the turn of the month. It would have been in late June or at latest early July. That’s my recollection.

[snip]

Q. Do you have any knowledge of when that first conversation actually then took place?

A. Over the last several months that this has become a public controversy I’ve learned the general date and I believe it was if first week of July, but I don’t believe he told me — if he told me the time, I don’t remember when he told me.

Simpson later admits his certainty about these dates comes from Fusion’s response to speculation and other reporting.

Q. And that information about that time, that first week of July, where does that come from?

A. It comes from news accounts of these events and conversations between Chris and I and some of my — presumably my business partners too. Generally speaking, we have, as you know, not been eager to discuss any of this in public and there’s been a lot of speculation and guessing and stories, many of which are wrong. So when an incorrect story comes out we would, you know, talk about it. So, you know, in the course of those kinds of things I generally obtained a sense of when things occurred that I might otherwise not be able to provide you.

Regardless of how accurate or not this report, it means that Steele spoke with the FBI weeks before the Australian tip is supposed to have come in, which was after Wikileaks started dumping the emails on July 22 (though as I noted with Maté, there are aspects of that story that are sketchy as well). The reference to Steele learning about what he now believes was the Papadopoulos tip reflects feedback from mid to late September, when the FBI told him his story had been corroborated by a human source, not from that first FBI meeting.

Essentially what he told me was they had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and that — that they — my understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.

Later in the transcript Simpson responds in a way that suggests Steele was reading the FBI response rather than learning actual details of the tip; certainly he might have been able to corroborate it back in London.

Q. And did Mr. Steele tell you that the FBI had relayed this information to him?

A. He didn’t specifically say that.

Q. I’m going to have you take a look at one of the filings —

MR. FOSTER: I thought you said earlier that he did say the FBI told him.

MR. SIMPSON: I think I was saying we did not have the detailed conversations where he would debrief me on his discussions with the FBI. He would say very generic things like I saw them, they asked me a lot of questions, sounds like they have another source or they have another source. He wouldn’t put words in their mouth.

In other words, the record shows that (unless the public story about the Australian tip is really inaccurate) the pee tape report came in first, and then the Oz tip did.

That said, both of these tips came in before late July, which is when Jim Comey testified the CI investigation started.

Which is where this predicate debate has always gone wrong. It imagines that the FBI opened an investigation into one and only one thing. In addition to those two things, there were the actual hack and the Guccifer 2.0 persona — already perceived to be a Russian operation before the first Steele report came in — along with clear indications Wikileaks was involved with it. There was Carter Page’s publicly reported trip and speech in Russia, and the beginnings of the reawakening Paul Manafort scandal. And there were the concerns raised about the change in the GOP platform (though I think that got more press than the evidence justified).

So there were a whole bunch of things leading up to the opening of the investigation. And there’s no reason to believe just one predicated the investigation.

Similarly, the case on the FISA orders is mixed (though this is an area, in particular, where the FBI would have an incentive to release partial stories). One of the first reports on Carter Page’s FISA order dates it to late summer, when the Trump campaign was distancing itself from him. But later reporting said he had been tapped even before he joined the campaign, in conjunction with his earlier recruitment by Russian spies.

Manafort, too, was reportedly targeted under FISA because of his earlier dalliances with Russia. In his case, the wiretap had lapsed, but was restarted after new details of his corruption forced him off the campaign in August.

As I’ll write in my larger post on the Simpson transcript, I don’t think all this means the tie between the dossier and the FBI investigation is above reproach. But it does seem clear that, even if the dossier is one thing that justified the investigation, it was neither the earliest thing nor the only thing.

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Stephen Miller Claims that Trump’s Russian Investigation Line Was a Disclaimer

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In this post, I noted that Trump (in his interview with the WSJ) appears to believe asking for and getting a letter from Rod Rosenstein justifying Jim Comey’s firing is proof that his firing of Comey wasn’t obstruction of justice. I suggested that that argument may have been planned from the start — and noted the proximity of that argument to the claim, which we know Jared Kushner provided, that Democrats would be thrilled by Comey’s firing.

Having suggested that there was more of a plan behind the orchestrated firing of Comey than we might imagine, I want to return to the Jake Tapper interview with Stephen Miller on Sunday.

Tapper asked Miller about his role in writing the initial draft of the letter that fired Comey, which NYT reported on this way:

Mr. McGahn successfully blocked the president from sending the letter — which Mr. Trump had composed with Stephen Miller, one of the president’s top political advisers — to Mr. Comey. But a copy was given to the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who then drafted his own letter. Mr. Rosenstein’s letter was ultimately used as the Trump administration’s public rationale for Mr. Comey’s firing, which was that Mr. Comey had mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Mr. Rosenstein is overseeing Mr. Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to disrupt last year’s presidential election, as well as whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice.

Mr. McGahn’s concerns about Mr. Trump’s letter show how much he realized that the president’s rationale for firing Mr. Comey might not hold up to scrutiny, and how he and other administration officials sought to build a more defensible public case for his ouster.

[snip]

Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Miller to draft a letter, and dictated his unfettered thoughts. Several people who saw Mr. Miller’s multi-page draft described it as a “screed.”

Mr. Trump was back in Washington on Monday, May 8, when copies of the letter were handed out in the Oval Office to senior officials, including Mr. McGahn and Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Trump announced that he had decided to fire Mr. Comey, and read aloud from Mr. Miller’s memo.

Some present at the meeting, including Mr. McGahn, were alarmed that the president had decided to fire the F.B.I. director after consulting only Ms. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Miller. Mr. McGahn began an effort to stop the letter or at least pare it back.

[snip]

Rosenstein was given a copy of the original letter and agreed to write a separate memo for Mr. Trump about why Mr. Comey should be fired.

In the interview with Tapper, Miller claimed that the key claim the NYT said got removed — about Comey thrice telling Trump he wasn’t personally under investigation — was actually in the final letter.

Tapper: According to the New York Times, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, in his possession, an early draft of a letter that you helped write, in May 2017, detailing reasons to fire FBI Director James Comey. According to the newspaper, the first line of the letter mentions the Russia investigation. Did you write a letter outlining the reasons to fire Comey and list the Russia investigation. Is that true?

Miller: Here’s the problem with what you’re saying: the final draft of the letter the one that was made —

Tapper: I’m not talking about that one, I’m talking about the one that Comey [sic] has that mentions Russia —

Miller: If you want to have an answer to your question and not to get hysterical, then I’ll answer it. The final draft of the letter has the same line about the fact that there is a Trump-Russia investigation that this has nothing to do with.

Tapper: So it was just moved from the top to the bottom.

Miller: No. No! Look at the letter. It’s at the beginning. The investigation is referenced at the beginning of the final letter that was released to point out about the fact that notwithstanding, having been informed that there’s no investigation, that the um, the move that is happening is completely unrelated to that. So it was a disclaimer. It appeared in the final version of the letter that was made public.

Here’s the letter Trump sent to fire Comey. The passage Miller must be talking about reads,

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.

That’s the passage that was so confounding when we all read that in real time.

And while I’m not prepared to believe Miller that that is the totality of the reference to Russia in the original letter — after all, this doesn’t even mention Russia — what I do think Miller provided proof for on national TV is that the connotation of that sentence changed from first to second draft, and in a way that he, Kushner, and Don McGahn all surely recognize.

In the first letter, according to McGahn and others, the “screed” listed the Russia investigation as a reason to fire Comey. Here, according to the guy who drafted it, it is meant to serve as a disclaimer, a denial that this firing was about the Russia investigation.

And that’s what Miller surely told Mueller’s investigators.

No wonder he kept ranting and had to be escorted off Tapper’s set. He just revealed, for everyone, how this second letter was designed to be misleading.

In the last week, Miller and Trump have told CNN and WSJ, respectively, about their cover-up.

Update: I forgot to reference this language from the NYT’s latest. The line originally said that the investigation was“fabricated and politically motivated.” If that reporting is correct then they also changed the wording of the reference to the investigation.

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Trump’s Obstruction Defense: Rod Rosenstein Wrote a Letter

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The WSJ has posted a transcript of their interview with Trump.

I think it shows how he plans (and may have planned, from the start) to defend against obstruction charges: by noting that Rod Rosenstein, in his letter supporting Comey’s firing, said stronger things against Comey than Trump did.

He returned to this idea three times in the interview. First, after WSJ first noted that Mueller may be looking at obstruction charges.

TRUMP: There has never been, in the history — in the history of an administration anybody that was more open than we were. You understand that?

WSJ: Yes.

TRUMP: We gave them everything. We didn’t go to court and say, “You can’t have this document, you can’t have” — and what we gave them showed — I never got a phone call from Russia. I didn’t have a tweet. I didn’t have a — I had nothing. I didn’t have an email. I didn’t have a meeting. I didn’t have — did I have one meeting with — about Russia? And…

WSJ: Well, Mueller’s also looking at some other areas, right? Like obstruction of justice…

TRUMP: Well allow — let me — (inaudible). So, they make up a crime, and the crime doesn’t exist. And then they say obstruction. And how could there be obstruction on firing Comey? When the man who’s in charge of it wrote a letter that was far stronger than anything I would have written. He was in charge — Deputy Rosenstein. He wrote a letter that’s far stronger than even what I say.

Again, after ranting a bit about how badly the Democrats once wanted Comey fired.

All you have to do is take a look, seriously – take a look at all these people, they all wanted him fired. And the FBI was a mess. When he announced the Hillary Clinton fiasco where she was guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty and then where they did the interview with no tape recorder, with no swearing in, with no this, with no that – you know the story.

But take a look at all of these people that became critics of my firing (ph), they all wanted him fired. And they wanted him fired until I said, “he’s fired.” But the deputy, Rosenstein, who is in charge, he wrote a letter that was possibly or probably stronger than anything I would have written or did write.

Then he returns to it just as WSJ tries to get him to shift to talking about infrastructure.

WSJ: (Inaudible) infrastructure (inaudible).

TRUMP: But just so you understand…

WSJ: Oh, sorry.

TRUMP: …The Deputy Attorney General, who’s in charge of the case, wanted – all you have to do is read his letter. So that’s – there’s no obstruction there.

But Rosenstein!!! He seems to be saying.

I’m interested in this, in general. But I’m also interested in how closely tied the notion that Democrats would celebrate a Comey firing is with the claim that because Rosenstein said meaner things about Comey, there couldn’t be obstruction.

I wonder whether this was the plan all along. And I wonder whether these two whackjob ideas came from the same person: Jared.

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Did The Most Senior White House Official Lie to the NYT about the Content of the Comey Firing Letter?

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One week after conducting a “surprise” interview set up by Trump ally Christopher Ruddy (for which he was widely criticized), Mike Schmidt has a widely hailed story describing the evidence supporting an obstruction charges against Donald Trump.

Or maybe against Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Most interestingly, it suggests that several days after Trump attacked Jeff Sessions while watching Jim Comey’s May 3 testimony to Congress, Sessions sent an aide to Congress to try to gin up a series of damning stories about Comey.

White House aides gave updates to Mr. Trump throughout, informing him of Mr. Comey’s refusal to publicly clear him. Mr. Trump unloaded on Mr. Sessions, who was at the White House that day. He criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, questioned his loyalty, and said he wanted to get rid of Mr. Comey.

[snip]

Two days after Mr. Comey’s testimony, an aide to Mr. Sessions approached a Capitol Hill staff member asking whether the staffer had any derogatory information about the F.B.I. director. The attorney general wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said the incident did not occur. “This did not happen and would not happen,” said the spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores. “Plain and simple.”

Hmmm. I don’t think Sessions has honored his recusal.

He may have also ordered up Rod Rosenstein to suggest Comey needed firing.

Earlier that day, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, had pulled one of Mr. McGahn’s deputies aside after a meeting at the Justice Department. Mr. Rosenstein told the aide that top White House and Justice Department lawyers needed to discuss Mr. Comey’s future. It is unclear whether this conversation was related to the effort to dig up dirt on Mr. Comey.

The following weekend, Trump went to Bedminster to have Stephen Miller write up a letter firing Comey. It’s this detail I’m most interested in.

In interviews with The Times, White House officials have said the letter contained no references to Russia or the F.B.I.’s investigation. According to two people who have read it, however, the letter’s first sentence said the Russia investigation had been “fabricated and politically motivated.” [my emphasis]

Remember, Schmidt has just had a rather celebrated interview with one particular White House official. Er, The White House Official. Half of the off-the-record comments omitted from the NYT transcript of the interview clearly pertain to the Russian investigation.

TRUMP: Everybody knows the answer already. There was no collusion. None whatsoever.

_________

TRUMP: Maybe I’ll just say a little bit of a [inaudible]. I’ve always found Paul Manafort to be a very nice man. And I found him to be an honorable person. Paul only worked for me for a few months. Paul worked for Ronald Reagan. His firm worked for John McCain, worked for Bob Dole, worked for many Republicans for far longer than he worked for me. And you’re talking about what Paul was many years ago before I ever heard of him. He worked for me for — what was it, three and a half months?

[snip]

TRUMP: What I’ve done is, I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department. But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.

_________

TRUMP: For purposes of the Justice Department, I watched Alan Dershowitz the other day, who by the way, says I, says this is a ridiculous —

SCHMIDT: He’s been very good to you.

TRUMP: He’s been amazing. And he’s a liberal Democrat. I don’t know him. He’s a liberal Democrat. I watched Alan Dershowitz the other day, he said, No. 1, there is no collusion, No. 2, collusion is not a crime, but even if it was a crime, there was no collusion. And he said that very strongly. He said there was no collusion. And he has studied this thing very closely. I’ve seen him a number of times. There is no collusion, and even if there was, it’s not a crime. But there’s no collusion. I don’t even say [inaudible]. I don’t even go that far.

_________

TRUMP: So for the purposes of what’s going on with this phony Russian deal, which, by the way, you’ve heard me say it, is only an excuse for losing an election that they should have won, because it’s very hard for a Republican to win the Electoral College. O.K.?

This last break in the transcript picks up right where the information these White House officials lying to the NYT leave off: with the claim that this is a “fabricated and politically motivated” investigation.

Particularly given that Schmidt has been working this aspect of the story for months, what are the chances that the most senior White House official lied to Schmidt about what he had written to justify firing Jim Comey?

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How Does the Strzok Text Dump Differ from Jim Comey’s July 5, 2016 Speech?

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I’m a bit bemused by the response to DOJ’s release of the texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. As Rod Rosenstein testified before HJC yesterday, the release came after notice to Strzok and Page through their lawyers. The release of the texts came with the approval of DOJ IG Michael Horowitz — who says the investigation into the underlying conduct may last through spring. And Rosenstein strongly implied he wanted them released, taking responsibility for it (while claiming not to know whether Jeff Sessions had a role in their release).

As he explained to Trey Gowdy — who, like a number of Republicans, claimed to be at a loss of what to say to constituents who asked “what in the hell is going on with DOJ and the FBI” — the release of the texts proves that any wrongdoing will be met with consequences.

Gowdy: What happens when people who are supposed to cure the conflict of interest have even greater conflicts of interests than those they replace? That’s not a rhetorical question. Neither you nor I nor anyone else would ever sit Peter Strzok on a jury, we wouldn’t have him objectively dispassionately investigate anything, knowing what we now know. Why didn’t we know it ahead of time, and my last question, my final question — and I appreciate the Chairman’s patience — how would you help me answer that question when I go back to South Carolina this weekend?

Rosenstein: Congressman, first of all, with regard to the Special Counsel, Mr. Strzok was already working on the investigation when the Special Counsel was appointed. The appointment I made was of Robert Mueller. So what I’d recommend you tell your constituents is that Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray are accountable and that we will ensure that no bias is reflected in any actions taken by the Special Counsel or any matter within the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. When we have evidence of any inappropriate conduct, we’re going to take action on it. And that’s what Mr. Mueller did here as soon as he learned about this issue — he took action — and that’s what I anticipate the rest of our prosecutors, the new group of US Attorneys, our Justice Department appointees. They understand the rules and they understand the responsibility to defend the integrity of the Department. If they find evidence of improper conduct, they’re going to take action.

So Congressman, that’s the best assurance I can give you. But actually, there’s one other point, which is you should tell your constituents that we exposed this issue because we’re ensuring that the Inspector General conducts a thorough and effective investigation, and if there is any evidence of impropriety, he’s going to surface it and report about it publicly.

I actually think Rosenstein did a much better job than others apparently do, yesterday, at distinguishing between the Strzok texts (which apparently were on DOJ issued cell phones and, in spite of having Hillary investigation subject lines may not have been logged into Sentinel) and the political views of Andrew Weissmann or the past representation of Jeannie Rhee. Furthermore, he repeatedly said he would only fire Mueller for cause, and made it clear there had been no cause. Several times he talked about how closely he has worked with Mueller, such as on the scope of what gets included in his investigation (even while defending the charges against Manafort as appropriately included).

That said, I wonder how Rosenstein distinguishes, in his own mind, what he did in approving the release of the texts from an ongoing investigation and what Jim Comey did on July 5, 2016, when he gave a press conference about why Hillary Clinton had not been charged. While Rosenstein’s biggest complaint in his letter supporting the firing of Comey was that he substituted his decision for that of prosecutors, he also argued that the Department shouldn’t release derogatory information gratuitously.

Compounding the error, the Director ignored another longstanding principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation. Derogatory information sometimes is disclosed in the course of criminal investigations and prosecutions, but we never release it gratuitously. The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.

In response to skeptical question at a congressional hearing, the Director defended his remarks by saying that his “goal was to say what is true. What did we do, what did we find, what do we think about it.” But the goal of a federal criminal investigation is not to announce our thoughts at a press conference. The goal is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to justify a federal criminal prosecution, then allow a federal prosecutor who exercises authority delegated by the Attorney General to make a prosecutorial decision, and then – if prosecution is warranted – let the judge and jury determine the facts. We sometimes release information about closed investigations in appropriate ways, but the FBI does not do it sua sponte.

In some ways this is worse because of the off chance that Inspector General Michael Horowitz finds that these texts don’t merit some kind of response; the investigation is not finished yet.

That said, I actually do think there’s a difference: Strzok and Page are department employees, rather than subjects of an external investigation. DOJ exercises awesome power, and usually DOJ is releasing the texts of private citizens in this kind of embarrassing way.

Even former clearance holders seem surprised that these texts were discovered. It is unbelievable to me how few people understand the great liberty that counterintelligence investigators like Strzok can have in obtaining the communications of investigative targets like he has now become, particularly during leak or insider threat investigations. That may not be a good thing, but it is what other targets have been subjected to. So I think it reasonable to have FBI’s own subject to the same scrutiny, for better and worse.

I do think it worthwhile for DOJ to show that it will hold people accountable for improper actions.

Plus, aside from one August comment — which we may obtain more context on when Horowitz does finish this investigation — about an “insurance” policy against Trump, the texts simply aren’t that damning (though they do raise questions about Strzok’s role in the investigation). Strzok agrees with Rex Tillerson, after all, that Trump is an idiot.

So as far as that goes, I’m actually okay with Rosenstein’s release of these texts.

Except I worry about something else.

I actually worry less about Mueller getting fired than just about every other Trump opponent on the planet. Rosenstein seems intent to let him do his work, and (notably at several times during the hearing) seems to agree with the gravity of the investigation. Trump can’t get to Mueller without taking out Rosenstein (and Rachel Brand). And I actually think Rosenstein has thus far balanced the position of a Republican protecting a Republican from Republican ire fairly well. I expect the next shoes Mueller drops — whenever that happens — will change the tone dramatically.

What bothers me most about the release of these texts, however, is that they are a response to the same pressure that Comey was responding to (and which he thought he was smart enough to manage, just as Rosenstein surely thinks he can handle it here).

They are a response — from the same people who ran the Benghazi investigation then ignored DOJ’s prosecution of the Benghazi mastermind — to a willingness to challenge the very core of DOJ functionality, all in a bid to politicize it.

Perhaps Rosenstein is right to bide his time — to create space for Mueller to drop the next few shoes — with the release of the Strzok texts.

But at some point, Republicans need to start calling out Republicans for the damage they’re doing to rule of law with this constant playing of the refs, this demand for proof that Democrats aren’t getting some advantage through the rule of law. If those next shoes don’t have the effect I imagine, it may be too late.

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Christopher Wray Departs from Jim Comey’s “Balance” on Encryption

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In his statement before the House Judiciary Committee last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray raised encryption, as FBI Directors do when they go before Congress.

His comments on encryption have a really bizarre line, complaining that, “The more we as a society rely on electronic devices to communicate and store information, the more likely it is that information that was once found in filing cabinets, letters, and photo albums will now be stored only in electronic form.” The reverse is really the issue: our electronic devices now make it really easy to get and search through what previously might be hidden in a (locked!) filing cabinet. They also encourage us to write in texts what we used to say in phone or direct conversations. So the reality is all this digitalization just makes it easier to engage in one stop evidence shopping with someone’s phone.

The more interesting thing, to me, is the way in which Wray’s rhetoric deviates sharply from that of Jim Comey.

Comey, you’ll remember, always liked to talk about the “balance” between security and privacy. He used that formulation most times he discussed back doors in encryption.

And he gave an entire speech on it last year in the wake of the San Bernardino phone challenge.

In America we’ve always balanced privacy and security. It can be messy, it can be painful, but we’ve always worked through the three branches of government to achieve that balance in a sensible way.

[snip]

We have to find thoughtful, productive ways to talk about issues of privacy and security, and here’s the thing, by thoughtful I don’t mean that I’m right, and you’re wrong. I could be wrong about the way I assess, the way I perceive, the way I balance, the way I reason, but I think all productive conversations start from a place of humility. I could be wrong.

[snip]

[L]itigation is a terrible place to have any discussion about a complicated policy issue, especially one that touches on our values, on the things we care about most, on technology, on trade-offs, and balance.

[snip]

We are all people trying to do the right thing as we see the right. It is not for the FBI to decide how this country should govern itself.

It’s not for the FBI to decide what the right approach is here. Our job is to investigate. Our job is to tell you, the people who pay for us, when the tools you count on us to use aren’t working so much anymore, so you can figure out what to do about that. It’s also not the job of the technology companies to tell us—to tell you—what to do about this. Their job is to innovate and come up with the next great thing, and they’re spectacular at that, which is to be treasured. How we move forward needs to be resolved by the American people, and especially the young who know technology so well, and who care so deeply about getting the hard things right.

In his statement, Wray seems to be invoking this Comey formulation when he rejects the entire notion.

Some observers have conceived of this challenge as a trade-off between privacy and security. In our view, the demanding requirements to obtain legal authority to access data—such as by applying to a court for a warrant or a wiretap—necessarily already account for both privacy and security. The FBI is actively engaged with relevant stakeholders, including companies providing technological services, to educate them on the corrosive effects of the Going Dark challenge on both public safety and the rule of law, and with the academic community and technologists to work on technical solutions to this problem.

Wray appears to be rejecting Comey’s (usually false) show of seeking the right balanced between access and encryption, and instead saying a warrant is all it needs. That, in spite of the fact that Congress has specifically stopped short of requiring technical access for some of the applications that Wray and Comey were complaining about. Not to mention the fact that FBI doesn’t ever get a warrant to get to US person content via back door searches or the 2014 exception.

Ultimately, of course, the effect is the same: FBI is going to continue demanding back doors into encryption.

But Wray, apparently, doesn’t even feel the need to feign an interest in the debate.

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Christopher Wray Was Doing Great Until He Accused Chad of Spewing Jihadist Propaganda

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In his first House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing today, FBI Director Christopher Wray responded to questions about FBI Agent Peter Strzok by explaining there was an ongoing Inspector General investigation into Strzok’s role in the investigation into Hillary’s treatment of classified information more times (at least 16) than he dodged answers in his confirmation hearing (11).

At that level, it was a typical HJC hearing, as each side spent more time pitching their partisan spin (with Democrats asking a string of questions Wray was unable to answer about Russia) rather than — with a few exceptions — conducting much oversight.

That said, I really appreciated two aspects of Wray’s testimony today. First, with the very notable exception of FISA matters (specifically, any FISA applications tied to Trump’s associates, and whether they derived in any way from the Steele dossier), Wray seemed genuinely willing to accept HJC’s mandate to conduct oversight.

As I’ve already noted, I get that HJC can be full of partisan hacks. But it is also the case that the Executive branch, particularly something as powerful as the FBI, must be subject to the oversight requests of Congress. And under both the Bush and Obama Administrations, FBI and DOJ largely treated their oversight committees with (sometimes deserved, but often undeserved) contempt. Even where Wray was bullshitting members of Congress, such as when he pretended that moving Strzok to human resources wasn’t a demotion, he at least appeared to treat their inquiries with respect.

Perhaps, if it is treated with respect it sometimes doesn’t deserve, HJC will come to become the committee FBI and DOJ need as an oversight body.

The other thing I appreciated — particularly in the wake of Jim Comey’s treatment of everything as a fight between “good guys” and “bad guys” — was Wray’s repeated invocation of the humanness of FBI and its officials. For example, in what must have been a rehearsed response to a question about the reputation of the FBI, Wray said, “Do we make mistakes? You bet we make mistakes. Just like everyone who is human makes mistakes,” before describing how the IG (which is currently investigating Strzok) provides the opportunity to “hold our folks accountable, if that’s appropriate.” Somewhat less convincingly, in response to a question from Cedric Richmond, who cleverly noted that the FBI Headquarters is still named after the architect of COINTELPRO, J Edgar Hoover, Wray again stressed the humanity of FBI. “It’s something we’re not proud of but it is also something we’ve learned from … We’re human, we make mistakes. We have things that we’ve done well. We’ve had things we done badly, and when we’ve done badly we try to learn from them.”

Given FBI’s intransigence on back door searches and Wray’s own evolving understanding of the problems caused by the designation Black Identity Extremist (not to mention what appears to be undeserved self-congratulation about how many — or rather few — open investigation into white supremacist terrorists the FBI has) I’m not convinced the FBI really has learned those lessons. It is still too white and too male of an organization to understand how much it polices some of the same things COINTELPRO did, and with even more intrusive tools.

But I am heartened that the FBI Director, perhaps largely because of the focus on Strzok, publicly recognized that FBI is not always the good guy, contrary to what Comey internalized and evangelized over and over. In discussions with Karen Bass about the BIE designation, too, it sounded like he was at least able to listen, even if he refused to withdraw the intelligence report that created the designation.

That said, Wray made several outright errors that need to be corrected.

The first two, both about Section 702, came in response to questions by Ted Poe (who was one of just a few people to raise Section 702, in spite of the fact that I’ve heard from numerous staffers they can’t get answers about key aspects of how 702 works). First, addressing Poe’s claim that back door searches are abusive, Wray claimed that courts that had considered the querying had found it to be consistent with the Fourth Amendment.

Every court, every  court, to have looked at the way in which Section 702 is handled, including the querying, has concluded that it’s being done consistent with the Fourth Amendment.

As the EFF laid out, that’s not actually true. The Ninth Circuit punted on precisely the issue of back door searches.

When Wray mentions the Ninth Circuit, he is likely referencing a 2016 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In the opinion for USA v. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the appeals court ruled that, based on the very specific evidence of the lawsuit, data collected under Section 702 did not violate a U.S. person’s Fourth Amendment rights. But the judge explicitly wrote that this lawsuit did not involve some of the more “complex statutory and constitutional issues” potentially raised by Section 702.

Notably, the judge wrote that the Mohamud case did not involve “the retention and querying of incidentally collected communications.” That’s exactly what we mean when we talk about “backdoor searches.”

Wray is mischaracterizing the court’s opinion. He is wrong.

In addition, Wray claimed that,

The individuals that are incidentally collected — the US person information that is incidentally collected — are people that are in communication with foreigners who are the subject of foreign intelligence investigations, so like an ISIS recruiter, there’s a US person picked up, that person would have been in email contact, for example, with an ISIS recruiter.

While I’m not certain precisely what gets dumped into the FBI database that is queried, it is false to claim that every US person who has information collected would necessarily have been in communication with the target. That’s because PRISM providers are cloud storage providers and NSA gets anything a target stores and then some, and because people email very interesting stuff to each other all the time. That means there’s a whole bunch of other things that might implicate US persons swept up in the PRISM collection that gets shared, in raw form, with the FBI.

I wanted to point to an assumption virtually everyone has been making about PRISM collection and its suitability for back door searches that may not be valid. If you think about the hack-and-leak dumps in recent years, for example, often the most damaging, as well as the most ridiculous infringements on privacy, involve email attachments, such as the list of most Democratic members of Congress’ email many passwords for which were easily obtainable online, or phone conversations about routine housekeeping or illness. And that’s just attachments; most of the PRISM providers are actually cloud storage providers, in addition to being electronic communication providers, and from the very first requests to Yahoo there was mission creep of all the types of things the government might demand.

And while NSA and FBI aren’t supposed to keep stuff that doesn’t count as foreign intelligence or criminal information, it’s clear (from the WaPo report) that NSA, at least, does.

So as we talk about how inappropriate the upstream back door searches were and are because they can search on stuff that’s not foreign intelligence information, we should remember that the very same thing is likely true of back door searches of  the fruits of searches on a person’s cloud storage account.

Plus, while the example of an ISIS recruiter makes for good show, the targets will also include people like Chinese scientists and Russian businessmen, among other things. There are completely innocent reasons — like science!!! — to speak to such targets. And yet if FBI does a back door search on Americans who’ve engaged in such innocent discussions it can and almost certainly has led to innocent people being targeted unfairly.

It bothers me that me — a dirty fucking hippie blogger, though admittedly one who has become (as a Congressional staffer introduced me as earlier this year) as expert on FISA as anyone outside of government — knows these details better than the FBI Director (who, after all, was involved in not providing defendants adequate notice of this stuff during its illegal go-around under Stellar Wind).

But Wray’s biggest error, on a different topic, came later. After first dodging Pramila Jayapal’s questions about whether Trump’s tweets have contributed to the spike of hate crimes this year by suggesting the data was untrustworthy (!!!), Director Wray than answered her question about the Muslim ban this way.

An awful lot of our terror investigations do also involve immigration violations, so there is a close nexus between immigration violations and counterterrorism investigations, and an awful lot of the terrorist investigations we have involve global jihadist rhetoric, which is disproportionately concentrated in certain countries.

One reason terror investigations involve immigration violations is because that’s an easy way to punish someone who hasn’t actually committed any crime (and given that most terrorist attacks are not recent immigrants, sort of beside the point).

But the notion that immigration from Muslim majority countries — like the six included in the current Muslim ban: Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Chad — is dangerous because global jihadist rhetoric arises from those countries is the height of nonsense. That’s because the most effective recruiter of Americans for almost a decade was a man, Anwar al-Awlaki, who wrote much of his propaganda here or in the UK; while his rhetoric subsequently did get published from Yemen, he’s been dead for 6 years, with far less jihadist rhetoric in English from there. And while Syria, Somalia, and Libya do export hateful rhetoric, so did Iraq and does Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two countries we haven’t banned. Iran certainly exports a great deal of anti-American rhetoric, but it is not recruiting terrorists here and most of its anti-American actions are legitimate state-based opposition derived from power relations, not religion. And Awlaki is by no means the only producer of anti-American rhetoric in majority Christian countries, including but not limited to the US and UK.

Ultimately, of course, Jayapal was talking about Trump’s Muslim ban, the one that bans elite Venezuelans and North Koreans along with weaker Muslim ones. And while he didn’t go as far as to say that Kim Jong-Un was spewing jihadist rhetoric, that’s the logic here.

But by implication, he was talking about Chad, which in spite of its cooperation on terrorism, got added to the list because Trump is incompetent. To suggest Chad is a propaganda threat and the US and UK are not is the height of folly.

But that’s what the FBI Director claimed today to avoid criticizing Trump’s bigotry.

Update: For some reason I was writing Cedric Richmond’s last name wrong all day today. I’ve corrected my use of “Johnson” instead of “Richmond” here. My apologies to him for my still uncorrected tweets.

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Abbe Lowell’s “No Apparent Evidence” of Jared Kushner Involvement Defense

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The other day I examined how Abbe Lowell’s non-responsive answer to Senate Judiciary Committee concerns about the disclosure of his client Jared Kushner revealed that the Intelligence Committees are conducting thoroughly inadequate investigations. He claimed the disclosures to SJC matched those to the ICs, yet he totally blew off the request for documents “about” people and topics of interest. That means the ICs didn’t get Jared’s documents pertaining to people and topics of interest — which is a pretty good way of hiding what Jared knew about Russian tampering.

[C]heck out Lowell’s more general excuse for not turning over such documents:

With respect to the substance of your letter, let me start with the so-called “Missing Documents.” They are not missing at all. As you will note, after I spoke to your staff, I wrote a cover letter with our production. In that letter, I wrote: “We believe that our prior production [to the intelligence committees] contains the most pertinent documents to your inquiry into the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, and related matters, and undercut any notion that there was collusion (or even any extensive interaction) between Mr. Kushner and Russia concerning the 2016 election.” The documents provided to those committees fully responded to their requests. That was why we said we would provide those documents to you first to see if anything else was relevant or new, and try to determine whether those documents satisfy your inquiry as well.

This production, which doesn’t include any documents about designated topics (including the June 9 meeting), satisfied the intelligence committees. That means the intelligence committees could not have asked for “about” documents (which is particularly ironic given that they’re both trying to find a way to help NSA turn “about” 702 collection back on). Which in turn means the intelligence committees likely have huge gaps in their understanding of Jared’s awareness of the Russian discussions.

And in addition to all his other contemptuous non-answers to Feinstein’s letter, Lowell says Jared shouldn’t have to sit for an interview with SJC because he already sat for 6 hours with the other committees, the committees that didn’t ask for “about” documents and therefore don’t have a complete picture of Jared’s involvement.

It turns out Adam Schiff now agrees that they didn’t have the documents necessary to provide adequate preparation to question Jared.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview that Mr. Kushner had been interviewed “prematurely,” when the committee was “not ready.”

“We didn’t have the advantage of documents that we would have wanted to ask [him] about,” he said.

A failure to obtain and review the documents necessary to understand Jared’s action seems to be a trend.

Which is why I’m so interested in this comment, from Lowell, about whether Jared — widely reported to have been a key player in convincing Trump to fire Comey —

At the Oval Office meeting on Monday, May 8, Trump described his draft termination letter to top aides who wandered in and out of the room, including then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, White House Counsel Donald McGahn and senior adviser Hope Hicks. Pence arrived late, after the meeting had begun. They were also joined by Miller and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both of whom had been with Trump over the weekend in Bedminster. Kushner supported the president’s decision.

— Seems to have not heard of such thing. (See also this post.)

Mr. Lowell said in an interview, “When the president made the decision to fire FBI Director Comey, Mr. Kushner supported it.” A White House attorney added that Mr. Kushner had “no meaningful role” in the decision: “There’s no apparent evidence of Jared’s involvement in any decision-making process having to do with Mr. Comey’s firing.”

“No apparent evidence” sounds like the line of a lawyer that’s not budging beyond what he has seen in document review. But if he has designed all his document review — even to the point of ignoring the instructions from Congress — to avoid turning over any communications that reflect Kushner’s thinking about events he wasn’t personally involved in, then he’s not going to have stumbled across the most pertinent documents.

Which is to say, there may well be a good deal of evidence. But it does’t seem like Lowell’s working very hard to find out if there is.

In any case, while you’re reading this, about Mueller’s interest in Jared’s contacts, even beyond those with Russian bankers, this post on Jared’s so-called peace plan is on point.

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Today in the Ben Wittes (And Friends) Utter Lack of Self-Awareness File: Family and Friends Edition

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This morning, Ben Wittes called Ashley Feinberg’s discovery of the Twitter account that Jim Comey had himself disclosed the existence of publicly, “a creepy stalking effort.”

Shortly thereafter he went on to backtrack a bit, calling Feinberg’s work “very impressive,” but then pitching his privacy concern as pertaining to Comey’s adult-aged son.

Later in the day he defended against claims he was “being mean” to her by pointing to the time she used his name to get Comey to click on a test phish.

Then Matt Tait weighed in, reaffirming that tracking Comey down through his adult-aged son was very stalkery.

Ultimately, though, they (and Susan Hennessey) end up asking what the news value of Feinberg identifying Comey’s Twitter account was.

Let’s review, shall we? We’re talking about whether it is acceptable for a journalist to use public means (facilitated by a loophole in Instagram), hopping through a public figure’s 22-year old son, to find the public figure’s Twitter account, which he revealed in a televised appearance.

And not just any public figure. This is Jim Comey, the man who, in 2004, declined to reauthorize a bulk Internet metadata dragnet (Comey showed no such compunction about reauthorizing a phone metadata dragnet), only to run to the FISA Court and tell Colleen Collar-Kotelly that she had no discretion but to approve it.

And thus was born the legal codification of the definition of “relevant to” that holds that the metadata of all Americans can be considered “relevant to” FBI’s standing terrorism investigations, the definition that, two years later, would be used to justify collection aspiring to obtain the metadata of all phone calls placed in this country. Not just those who talk to terrorists, but those who talk to the people who talk to them and the people who talk to those who talk to those who talk to them. Including their children.

The Internet dragnet (and the upstream collection that replaced it) collects things like what people get tagged or favorited in Instagram and Twitter accounts — precisely the kind of metadata that led Feinberg to identify Comey’s account.

But that’s not all that’s “relevant to” whether there is any news value to using publicly available metadata to identify a Twitter account that Comey himself revealed.

In 2014, when Jim Comey headed the FBI, DOJ’s Inspector General argued for at least the second time (with the first including practices that occurred while Comey was DAG) that FBI should not be obtaining all records associated with the Friends and Family account of a target.

[T]he significance of the FBI’s request for “associated” records is that the FBI has sought and in some cases received not only the toll billing records and subscriber information of the specific telephone number identified in the NSL, but also the toll billing numbers that belong to the same account — such as numbers in a group or family plan account — without a separate determination and certification by the FBI that the additional records are relevant to an authorized international terrorism investigation. Yet before the FBI may specifically request in an NSL the records of a subject’s family member or partner, Section 2709 would require an authorized official to certify that such records are relevant to a national security investigation. (158)

That is, DOJ’s IG had to tell the FBI for the second time, when Comey was running it, that they shouldn’t be collecting the phone records of a target’s mom or (dependent aged) child or girlfriend because they were associated with accounts relevant to an investigation.

The FBI accepted DOJ IG’s recommendation to ensure that records “associated to” those “relevant to” investigations not be collected, but had only implemented it thus far on the non-automated side of NSL submissions by the time of the report.

Now that we’ve reviewed Jim Comey’s great tolerance for using three hop metadata records as an investigative technique (if not the more targeted collection of records “associated to” those “relevant to” investigations) as well as the mind-numbing definition of what constitutes “relevant to,” let’s return to the context of his discussions about social media. While the Twitter revelation served as evidence for a story that he’s non-partisan, the Instagram one he likes to tell serves to support his claim to care about privacy. Here’s the quote Feinberg included in her piece, but Comey has made this speechlet numerous times over the years.

I care deeply about privacy, treasure it. I have an Instagram account with nine followers. Nobody is getting in. They’re all immediate relatives and one daughter’s serious boyfriend. I let them in because they’re serious enough. I don’t want anybody looking at my photos. I treasure my privacy and security on the internet.

Nobody is getting into his Instagram account (with its loophole permitting people like Feinberg or FBI agents to get to his metadata), Comey said. With respect to content, that seems to be true.

Presumably, he also believed nobody was getting into his Twitter account that at that point just one person — the weak link, Ben Wittes — had followed.

He was wrong.

Jim Comey’s understanding of his own well guarded privacy was overblown, in part because of the inherent insecurity of the platforms he uses and in part because of the OpSec practices of his friend and his son’s friend. I don’t think Comey much cares — in his business, the likelihood that a dumb associate might thwart otherwise admirable operational security (especially on the part of a 22-year old) of a target is a blessing, not a curse.

But it is an awesome illustration of the power and danger of this metadata soup that, under Comey, the government got far more access to.

Now, in threads where I’ve made this argument, people have rightly pointed out that the power of the FBI (which gets far more metadata) and a reporter is somewhat different, as might be the necessity for avoiding any chains involving children. Though the frequency with which Trump and his associates’ own (admittedly older) spawn get included in stories of his corruption demonstrates how important such connections are, even for journalists.

But the contention that FBI’s contact chaining and a journalist’s contact chaining are that different is belied by Comey’s own reaction, his first tweet ever.

Not only did he say he wasn’t mad and compliment her work, but he posted the link to FBI jobs.

I’d say Jim Comey sees a similarity in what Feinberg did.

I’m all in favor of protecting the accounts of children from such contact chaining — and am really not a big fan of contact chaining, generally. But those who, like Comey and Wittes and Hennessey and Tait, have championed a system that endorses at least two hop chaining irrespective of who gets hopped, not to mention those who’ve tolerated the collection on family members in even more targeted surveillance, I’m not all that interested in complaints about the privacy of a 22-year old son.

Or rather, I point to it as yet another example of surveillance boosters not understanding what the policies they embrace actually look like in practice.

Which is precisely why this “doxing” was so newsworthy.

Update: For the benefit of Al, I’m including this link to Comey introducing his children (Brian was 19 at the time, his youngest was 13) at his FBI Director confirmation hearing in 2013; a screencap is above. It sounds like he did the same at his DAG hearing 10 years earlier.

So if you’ve got a concern about their safety you might want to talk to the Senate about the practice of featuring families during confirmation hearings.

Update: Here we are Monday and Gates and Manafort still haven’t found anything liquid to put up as bail. Not only that, but in a filing raising a potential conflict with one of Gates’ money laundering expert lawyers, prosecutors reveal Gates is trying to have his partner from a movie-related firm’s brother serve as surety while also doing so for the partner.

Marc Brown, the brother of defendant Steven Brown, was proposed by Gates as a potential surety despite the facts that they seemingly do not have a significant relationship, they have not had regular contact over the past ten years, and Marc Brown currently serves as a surety for his brother Steven in his ongoing criminal prosecution in New York. In an interview with the Special Counsel’s Office on November 16, Marc Brown listed as a reason for seeking to support Gates that they belonged to the same fraternity (although they did not attend the same college) and that, as such, he felt duty bound to help Gates. Of note, Marc Brown’s financial assets were significantly lower, almost by half, than previously represented by Gates.

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