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In Rudy Giuliani Affidavit, SDNY Hung Up the Perfect Phone Call

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Consider this: The April 21, 2021 warrant affidavit showing probable cause for the search of Rudy Giuliani’s home, office, and devices did not mention the Perfect Phone Call between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

It could have done so. Earlier warrant affidavits targeting Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, starting with a bunch obtained on October 21, 2019, included it.

On July 25, 2019, President Trump spoke to Ukrainian President [Zelenskyy]. According to a memorandum of the call, which the White House released publicly, President Trump noted that “[t]he former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news.” He also praised a “very good prosecutor,” which appears to be a reference to [Lutsenko,] who was still in place at that time following [Zelenskyy’s] election but subsequently removed from office, or possibly [Shokin,] the former prosecutor.

While SDNY did not release the affidavit for a December 10, 2019 warrant focused exclusively on the Foreign Agent charges, this same reference did appear in an affidavit to obtain the contents of Lev Parnas’ Instagram account the same day.

In context of the potential FARA charges tied exclusively to the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, the paragraph showed that Trump had been persuaded by Rudy Giuliani’s lobbying not just that Yovanovitch “was bad news,” but that the prosecutors behind the effort to oust her, Yuriy Lutsenko and/or Viktor Shokin, were “very good.”

Moreover, the paragraph is particularly relevant evidence in the affidavit targeting Rudy. Far more specifically than the (much earlier) affidavits targeting Lev Parnas, the Rudy affidavit describes that Rudy lobbied Trump to fire Yovanovitch at least three times (the affidavit clearly identifies two instances: once on February 16, 2019, and again on March 22) and lobbied Mike Pompeo at least twice (once on February 8 and again when the White House forwarded his packet of disinformation in March) before he and Parnas turned to a press campaign involving John Solomon to get her ousted.

Yet the only public affidavit targeting Rudy, unlike several targeting Lev Parnas, excluded the paragraph showing the extent of Rudy’s influence.

There may be a perfectly banal explanation, such as an attempt, relatively early in Merrick Garland’s tenure, to minimize the extent to which this was about Trump personally. Or, the Perfect Phone Call might embody some of the uncertainty, noted explicitly in the affidavit, about whether Rudy was targeting Yovanovitch to get contracts with Lutsenko, or whether he was doing it only to get disinformation, to benefit Trump, on Hunter Biden. Given the high likelihood that data seized in this search was also used in other, undisclosed investigations into Rudy — DOJ may not yet have had a January 6 warrant targeting Rudy, but in June 2021, DOJ took overt steps in the investigation into an anti-Hunter Biden film that Rudy plotted — the silence about the Perfect Phone Call may simply reflect the boundary line between investigative prongs. That is, maybe the Perfect Phone Call appears in another affidavit.

The anti-Hunter film was, reportedly, an investigation into possible foreign support. As this table, which compares the scope of investigation in three warrants for substantially the same Foreign Agent investigation, shows, the funding of Rudy’s shenanigans shifted focus over the course of the investigation.

The warrants include:

  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9832, obtained days after Parnas’ arrest, as SDNY obtained warrants to expand the scope of the investigation to incorporate its expanding Foreign Agent focus
  • December 10, 2019, 19 MJ 11500, obtained days after Rudy met with Andrii Derkach, which would have been a natural follow-on investigation to the Parnas investigation, but which Barr moved to EDNY to protect Rudy’s ability to solicit dirt from Russian agents to help Trump’s 2020 campaign
  • April 21, 2021, 21 MJ 4335, obtained on Lisa Monaco’s first day as Deputy Attorney General, when SDNY finally obtained approval for warrants targeting Rudy’s home and devices

In October 2019, DOJ wasn’t looking closely at how the Ukraine caper was funded. In December 2019, it made up two bullets of the warrants, permitting the seizure of:

  • Evidence of any funds sent into any account controlled by or associated with [redacted] or Giuliani, or any instructions to send such funds. (c)
  • Evidence of money, actions, or information requested by, or offered or provided to Parnas, Fruman, Giuliani, or [Toensing] by any Ukrainian national in connection with efforts to remove [Yovanovitch], including but not limited to any Ukrainian investigation of [Burisma Holdings] Ltd., [Hunter Biden], or potential interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (e)

That December 2019 focus on funding may have reflected details about Lev Parnas that SDNY had only just discovered. In an unsuccessful bid to have Parnas detained pretrial submitted the day after DOJ obtained that December 10 warrant targeting Lev Parnas, SDNY laid out what it had learned about the funding of the Ukraine caper.

Parnas poses a significant risk of flight for several reasons, the chief among which are his considerable ties abroad and access to seemingly limitless sources of foreign funding. Parnas has extensive and significant international ties, particularly in Ukraine, the country of his birth. Over the past two years, Parnas traveled repeatedly to Ukraine, and met with numerous Ukrainian government officials, including officials at the very highest level of government. More broadly, Parnas has traveled abroad more than twenty times over the past four years, including on a nearly monthly basis in 2019. Parnas took circuitous travel routes that obscured his final destination, such as by departing the U.S. for one country, but returning from a different country on a different airline. Parnas traveled internationally by private jet as recently as this year; bank account records from Account-1 show that Parnas spent more than $70,000 on private air travel in September 2019 alone.

[snip]

In addition, Parnas’s close ties abroad include connections to Russian and Ukrainian nationals of nearly limitless means, including [Andrey Muraviev] and a Ukrainian oligarch [Dmitry Firtash] living in Vienna who is currently fighting extradition to this country. Parnas has proven adept at gaining access to foreign funding: in the last three years, Parnas received in excess of $1.5 million from Ukrainian and Russian sources. In sum, given Parnas’s significant, high-level connections to powerful and wealthy Ukrainians and at least one Russian national, he could quickly and easily flee the United States for Ukraine or another foreign country, and recoup the security posted to his bond. It is difficult to overstate the extreme flight risk that Parnas poses.

[snip]

  • Between August and October 2019, Parnas received $200,000—not $50,000, as he told Pretrial Services—from the Law Firm into Account-1, which was held in Svetlana Parnas’s name, in what appears to be an attempt to ensure that any assets were held in Svetlana’s, rather than Lev’s, name.5 A portion of this money existed in Account-1 at the time that Parnas submitted his financial affidavit, and, to the Government’s knowledge, does so today, underscoring that Parnas continues to mislead the Government and the Court about his financial condition.
  • Parnas failed to disclose, in describing his income to the Government and Pretrial Services, the fact that in September 2019, he received $1 million from a bank account in Russia into Account-1. While the majority of that money appears to have been used on personal expenses and to purchase a home, as discussed below, some portion of that money existed in Account-1 at the time Parnas submitted his financial affidavit.
  • At the time of his arrest, Parnas had at least $200,000 in an escrow account, in connection with his intended purchase of a property located in Boca Raton, Florida, which was listed for sale at approximately $4.5 million. The escrow account was funded with $200,000 from Account-1 in September 2019. Parnas did not disclose this asset (either the property or the funds in the escrow account) to either Pretrial Services or the Government. It is unclear whether Parnas proceeded with this real estate purchase or received the funds back from the escrow account.

In an appearance on Michael Cohen’s podcast last month, Parnas addressed how various Ukrainian, Russian, and American oligarchs were funding his and Rudy’s efforts; he says it’ll also appear in his forthcoming book.

The warrant targeting Rudy 17 months later doesn’t reveal what SDNY had learned about the funding in the interim, nor does it sustain the focus on how this was all funded. It states with some certainty that in spite of two rounds of discussions of retainer agreements with Lutsenko and others, Rudy never got any money from them.

Based on my involvement in this investigation and my review of text messages, it appears that Giuliani was referring to the execution of [redaction] retainer agreement and the wiring of funds. However, based on my review of bank records, it does not appear that [redacted] wired funds to Giuliani at that time, or any subsequent time.

As NYT emphasized in their report on these warrants, the later warrant does describe that Rudy needed the money.

6 Based on my review of a financial analysis prepared based on bank records and public reports, it appears that around this time, Giuliani had a financial interest in receiving a retainer agreement from [redacted] Specifically, in May 2018, Giuliani left his former law firm and its substantial compensation package. Based on my review of a financial analysis of bank records that have been collected to date (which may not include all of Giuliani’s checking and credit card accounts), on or around January 25, 2018, Giuliani had approximately $1.2 million cash on hand, and approximately $40,000 in credit card debt. By contrast, on or around January 25, 2019, right before he met with [redacted] Giuliani had approximately $400,000 cash on hand in those same accounts and approximately $110,000 in credit card debt. By on or around February 16, 2019, his account balances had dropped to approximately $288,000 and his credit card debt remained over $110,000.

Perhaps because of what SDNY claimed were Parnas’ efforts to obscure his travel, the December 2019 warrant (for which, remember, it did not release the affidavit) added a bullet point, seemingly an afterthought unmarked by a letter, authorizing seizure of evidence that the men were hiding meetings with Ukrainians.

Evidence of efforts or attempts to conceal meetings with individuals acting on behalf of or associated with any Ukrainian national or government official. (no letter)

By contrast, the April 2021 affidavit targeting Rudy was interested in one single trip: His February 2019 trip, with Parnas, to Warsaw.

Evidence relating to a trip by Rudolph Giuliani to Poland in February 2019.(5)

As the affidavit describes, there was good reason to believe Rudy’s public claims about the trip — made in the days after the Perfect Phone Call was released — were lies, because immediately after the meeting, Rudy drafted a retainer shortly after the meeting and started lobbying Trump and Pompeo.

7 Based on my review of public reporting, I have learned that according to an article published on September 29, 2019 in Reuters, Giuliani admitted that he met [Lutsenko] in Warsaw in February 2019 after first meeting him in New York in January, but that the meeting with [redacted] in Warsaw was “really social . . . I think it was either dinner or cigars after dinner. Not opportune for substantive discussion.” However, this does not appear to be accurate, as described herein, Giuliani circulated a draft retainer agreement between [2 words redacted] and [redacted] (a firm owned by [Toensing] and her husband, [Joe DiGenova]) only five days after meeting with [redacted] and communicated with Parnas and [redacted] about lobbying [Pompeo] and Trump to remove [Yovanovitch] on the same day, and in the days following, his meeting with [redacted].

The reference to Lutsenko in that Reuters story is minor; far more of the story focuses on who paid for Rudy’s galivanting — again, a topic dropped in the later known warrant.

One of the key questions is who financed Giuliani’s globe-trotting as he pursued unsubstantiated allegations that Biden had tried to fire Ukraine’s then chief prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to stop him investigating an energy company on which his son Hunter served as a director.

“Nobody pays my expenses,” Giuliani said in an interview with Reuters on Friday. “What does it matter if I’m getting paid for it. Isn’t the real story whether he (Biden) sold out the vice presidency of the United States, not whether I got paid for it?”

The singular focus on that Warsaw meeting — a meeting that took place at an event designed to undermine Obama’s Iran Deal, which Rudy attended in conjunction with MEK (former NJ Senator, Robert Torricelli, with whom John Solomon has a past, also attended with MEK) — is all the more interesting given the temporal scope of the warrant.

The other two warrants I adress here were dictated by dates of collection. Because the October 21 warrant authorized an expanded search of materials obtained months earlier, its temporal scope necessarily ended at the collection date, May 16, 2019. Because the December 10 warrant authorized an expanded search of materials seized from the search of Parnas and Fruman’s residences (primarily Parnas’ — by this point, SDNY seemed to be scrutinizing Parnas far more closely than it did Fruman), its temporal scope necessarily ended on that collection date, October 9, 2019.

But the Rudy warrant extended long past the last overt act, the firing of Yovanovitch, described in the warrant, to December 31, 2019. Here’s how the FBI justified that:

To the extent materials are dated, this warrant is limited to materials created, modified, sent, or received between August 1, 2018, and December 31, 2019. Materials going back to approximately August 2018 are relevant to understand Giuliani’s relationship with Parnas and information he was provided in the fall of 2018 relating to, among other things, Ambassador [Yovanovitch] and Ukraine. Materials created, modified, sent, or received after approximately May 2019, when the Ambassador was removed from her post, through the end of December 2019, during which time Giuliani traveled to Europe to meet [Lutsenko] with are relevant because based on my review of the Prior Search Warrant Returns, it appears that Giuliani continued to make public statements about Ukraine and the Ambassador.

Thus, it rationalized extending the warrant’s temporal scope through December 2019 — a temporal scope that would include the trip for the anti-Hunter Biden documentary, on which Rudy again met Lutsenko, but also met known Russian asset Andrii Derkach and others who would later be deemed Russian assets — based on Rudy’s continued focus, vaguely, on Ukraine (as well as Yovanovitch).

But it’s not clear whether FBI would be able to access details of Rudy’s meeting with Derkach, as opposed to Lutsenko, with this warrant. The long redaction in this bullet point shields who else, in addition to Parnas and Lutsenko, was included in the scope of the known warrant.

In other words, though the temporal scope of the warrant would permit FBI to review information about Rudy’s later meetings with Lutsenko, in association with which trip Rudy also met a series of Russian assets, nothing unredacted in the warrant permitted FBI to seize information about that later meeting (or about the anti-Hunter Biden documentary).

For that matter, nothing unredacted in the April 2021 warrant explicitly permits the FBI to seize information about Rudy’s attempts to dig up disinformation targeting Hunter Biden and his father, even though the warrant affidavit likely mentions such efforts at more than twelve times (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve).

Still, as I’ve noted repeatedly, by the time Judge Oetken approved the Special Master process that Rudy himself had demanded, Special Master Barbara Jones was instructed to review all content post-dating January 1, 2018, a temporal scope significantly broader than the one laid out in the warrant. And according to her reports, while for some devices she focused more nearly on the timeframe of the Ukraine caper, those she reviewed first, she reviewed through the date of seizure.

We still know just a fraction of the story about how Bill Barr obstructed the investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian influence peddling — and the degree to which that let Rudy get rid of phones before the investigation would have otherwise developed (for example, the warrant describes that Rudy replaced a phone used with his main phone number on the date the House started subpoenaing records in advance of impeachment). That is, even though SDNY took aggressive investigative steps on Lisa Monaco’s first day as Deputy Attorney General, it was likely already too late.

Update: Back in real time, I posited that the first time Rudy pitched Mike Pompeo on firing Marie Yovanovitch was done while in Trump’s presence.

Timeline

Below, every bullet is a known warrant. The ones not linked were described in a passage that failed to be fully redacted in a Lev Parnas filing.

  • January 18, 2019, 19 MJ 1729: Yahoo and Google content

May 15, 2019: Marie Yovanovitch firing public

  • May 16, 2019, 19 MJ 4784: iCloud content
  • August 14, 2019, 19 MJ 7593: Yahoo and Google content since January, with expanded focus
  • August 14, 2019, 19 MJ 7594: Unknown warrant
  • August 14, 2019, 19 MJ 7595: Existing Yahoo and Google content, with expanded focus

September 25, 2019: Disclosure of Perfect Phone call

October 9, 2019: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman arrested

  • October 17, 2019, 19 MJ 7595: Actual authorization of the warrant approved in August
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9829: iCloud content since May
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9830: Unknown warrant
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9831: Devices from Dulles
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9832: Existing iCloud content for expanded focus
  • November 4, 2019: Warrant for Rudy’s iCloud
  • November 4, 2019: Warrant for Rudy’s email
  • November 4, 2019: Warrant for Victoria Toensing’s iCloud
  • November 6, 2019: Warrant for Yuriy Lutsenko’s email

December 5, 2019: Rudy meets with known Russian asset, Andrii Derkach

  • December 10, 2019, 19 MJ 11500: Stuff seized from residences for foreign agent focus
  • December 10, 2019, 19 MJ 11501: Instagram
  • December 10, 2019, Warrant for Roman Nasirov’s email
  • December 13, 2019, Warrant for Victoria Toensing’s email

December 14, 2019: Barr aide texts him: “Laptop on way to you”

January 3, 2020: Barr establishes dedicated channel to ingest Rudy’s dirt

January 17, 2020: Jeffrey Rosen makes Richard Donoghue a gatekeeper for all Ukraine-related investigations

  • February 28, 2020: iPhone of Alexander Levin
  • March 3, 2020: iPad of Alexander Levin
  • March 20, 2020, 20 MJ 3074: Fruman iCloud content obtained with October 21, 2019 warrant to cover earlier periods

June 20, 2020: Barr fires Geoffrey Berman

November 2020: SDNY denied authority to seek devices of Rudy Giuliani

January 2021: SDNY denied authority to seek devices of Rudy Giuliani

  • April 13, 2021: Cell site data for Rudy and Toensing

April 21, 2021: Lisa Monaco sworn in

  • April 21, 2021, 21 MJ 4335: Rudy’s office, residence, and devices
  • April 21, 2021: Victoria Toensing iPhone

Rudy Giuliani’s Scott Brady Interview Doesn’t Appear in His Warrant Affidavit

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I’m about to do a larger post on some of the warrants targeting Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas, but first I want to make a point about the April 21, 2021 warrant targeting Rudy.

It doesn’t once mention Rudy’s January 29, 2020 interview with the Pittsburgh US Attorney’s office.

It sources Rudy’s own claims about his activities to a series of articles, interviews, and Tweets.

But the affidavit never once mentions that Rudy Giuliani sat for a 4-hour interview with the Pittsburgh US Attorney and nine other people on January 29, 2020.

NYT first disclosed the interview in this December 2020 article.

Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, asked the Justice Department for a meeting to discuss what he felt was explosive information about Hunter Biden that he had gathered from people in Ukraine and elsewhere, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

In response, Mr. Brady called Mr. Costello and offered to meet. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Costello sent reams of documents to Pittsburgh, then traveled there on Jan. 29. They were picked up by F.B.I. agents and stopped for breakfast before meeting for nearly four hours at the local F.B.I. office with Mr. Brady and his top deputies on the inquiry, Stephen Kaufman and Ira Karoll, the person said.

Rudy described the interview at length in a letter claiming that the government should never have seized his devices (and revealing that SDNY requested, in both November 2020 and January 2021, to do so).

[I]n January 2020, counsel for Giuliani contacted high officials in the Justice Department, to inform them that Giuliani wanted to provide evidence for their consideration about the Ukraine. Within a day, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Scott W. Brady, contacted Giuliani’s counsel and offered to hold a meeting in Pittsburgh with both the United States Attorney’s office personnel and the FBI. Mayor Giuliani immediately accepted, and a meeting was scheduled for January 29, 2020.

On January 29, 2020, Mayor Giuliani and his counsel, flew to Pittsburgh at their own cost, where they were met by agents of the FBI and transported to FBI headquarters in Pittsburgh. Present at that meeting were the United States Attorney, the First Assistant United States Attorney, the Chief of the Criminal Division, and two additional Assistant United States Attorneys (“AUSA’s”) from the Western District of Pennsylvania. The FBI was represented by the Special Agent in Charge (“SAIC”) of the Pittsburgh FBI, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge (“ASAIC”), and three other special agents of the FBI.

Prior to the meeting, Giuliani’s counsel had provided the Pittsburgh United States Attorney’s office with documents and an extensive outline of the subject matter to be discussed, so that the Government could be fully informed and prepared to ask probing questions. Giuliani began the meeting by making a presentation with handouts. During his presentation, and at the end of it, the Mayor and his counsel answered every question they were asked, to the apparent satisfaction of all of the Government officials in the room. In addition to the presentation, Giuliani provided the Government with the names and addresses of individual witnesses, both in the United States and in Ukraine, that could corroborate and amplify the information that the Mayor was providing. Subsequent to that meeting, and covering a period of months, counsel for Giuliani received a number of inquiries, discussions and requests from the First Assistant United States Attorney. All requests were granted and all inquiries were answered. [my emphasis]

At Scott Brady’s deposition before House Judiciary Committee, there was an extensive exchange about that interview — including regarding then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Seth DuCharme’s request that Brady sit in on the interview personally — which I first wrote about here.

And I’ll get copies for everyone. It’s very short. This is an email from Seth DuCharme to you, subject: “Interview.” The date is Wednesday, January 15, 2020. And, for the record, the text of the email is, quote, “Scott I concur with your proposal to interview the person we talked about would feel more comfortable if you participated so we get a sense of what’s coming out of it. We can talk further when convenient for you. Best, Seth.” And tell me if you recall that email.

A Yes, I do recall it.

Q Okay. And the date, again, is January 15, 2020, correct?

A That’s right.

Q So that was 14 days before the interview that you just described at which you were present, correct?

A Correct.

Q Does that help you recall whether this email between you and Seth DuCharme was referring to the witness that you participated in the interview of on January 29, 2020?

A Yes, it definitely did.

Q Okay. Just for clarity, yes, this email is about that witness?

A Yes, that email is about setting up a meeting and interview of Mr. Giuliani.

Q Okay. So the witness was Mr. Giuliani? That’s who you’re talking about?

A Yes.

Q Okay. And it was, in your judgment, important to get Mr. DuCharme’s opinion or, quote, “concurrence” about interviewing Mr. Giuliani. Is that fair to say?

A As I sit here, I don’t know if it was about interviewing Mr. Giuliani or just the logistics of where the interview would take place Pittsburgh, New York, D.C. It might’ve been about that.

Q So you needed Mr. DuCharme’s opinion about where the interview would be taking place?

A No, I didn’t need his opinion.

Q Oh. I’m just trying to

A Yeah.

Q understand, what was the reason, if you can recall, why you consulted with Mr. DuCharme about that particular decision, about whether or not you should interview Mr. Giuliani and any other aspect of that decision?

A Yeah, I I don’t know. I may have just been circling back to him, saying, “Hey, here’s the plan.” And he said, “Yeah, that sounds fine.”

Q Okay. Well, he also said that he would feel more comfortable if you participated, right?

A In that email, he did, yes.

Q Yeah. Was that consistent with what your experience with Mr. DuCharme was when you discussed interviewing Mr. Giuliani, or is there something unusual about the email?

A I don’t remember that there’s anything unusual. I would’ve sat in on that interview anyways, in all likelihood.

Q Okay. And just I don’t want to take this away from you, because I know you and I

A Oh, sure.

Q just have one copy. But just, again, what this email says is, “I concur with your proposal to interview the person we talked about.” And then he says, “Would feel more comfortable if you participated so we get a sense of what’s coming out of it.” Do you see that?

A Uhhuh.

Q Okay.

A Yes.

Q So what did he mean by “we”? Who was he referring to by “we”? Do you know?

A I don’t know.

Q Okay. Is it fair to infer that he is referring to the Attorney General and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General where he was working?

A I don’t know. Yeah, some group of people at Main Justice, but I don’t know specifically if it was DAG Rosen, Attorney General Barr, or the people that were supporting them in ODAG and OAG.

Brady would go on to concede there were a number of things — such as Rudy’s attempts to reach out to Mykola Zlochevsky and his possession of a hard drive of data from Hunter Biden — that Rudy never told the Pittsburgh US Attorney.

Q Okay. Then the other question I think that I have to ask about this is: This is a prior inconsistent statement of Mr. Zlochevsky that your investigation did not uncover, but it’s a statement that Mr. Giuliani was certainly aware of. Would you agree?

A Yes, if based on your representation, yes, absolutely.

[snip]

Okay. And what I am asking you is, have you ever heard that during the course of your investigation that Mr. Giuliani actually learned of the hard drive material on May 30th, 2019?

A No, not during our 2020 vetting process, no.

Q Mr. Giuliani never shared anything about the hard drives or the laptop or any of that in his material with you?

Mr. [Andrew] Lelling. Don’t answer that.

Q Oh, you are not going to answer?

Mr. Lelling. I instruct him not to answer.

Q. He did answer earlier that the hard drive. That Mr. Giuliani did not provide a hard drive.

Mr. Lelling. Okay.

Mr. Brady. He did not provide it. We were unaware of it.

By his own telling, Rudy spent four hours telling a team of ten people about these matters, and yet this affidavit doesn’t mention that interview at all.

To be sure, in his book, Geoffrey Berman — who was likely fired for conducting this investigation — provides one explanation for why Rudy’s 302s wouldn’t be incorporated in any warrant affidavit targeting Rudy: because the FBI refused to share those 302s with the NY Special Agent in Charge, William Sweeney.

So in January 2020 he came up with a plan. He described this plan he had hatched as “an intake process in the field.” That made it sound almost normal. The Department of Justice, in order to deal with the large influx of evidence, was going to employ this tried-and-true method in order to keep it all straight! But in all my years as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I had never heard of “an intake process in the field,” and neither had my executive staff or Sweeney.

His plan was to run all Ukraine-related matters, including information that Giuliani was peddling about the Bidens, through two other districts. His choices were Rich Donoghue, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who sat in Brooklyn; and Scott Brady, the US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. Donoghue would oversee all Ukraine-related investigations, and Brady would handle the intake of information from Rudy and his lawyer.

This scheme, notably, did not include me or SDNY, which, as the office running the Lev and Igor case, was well versed in all things Ukraine. Barr’s implication seemed to be that with such a fire hose of material coming in from Rudy and his lawyer, we needed to spread the work out. And we had to have some kind of traffic cop to keep it all organized and flowing in the right direction—which was to be Brady in Pittsburgh.

All of this, of course, was utter nonsense. If somebody has information about an ongoing case, they typically hire a lawyer and approach the office that’s involved. Regardless of the quality or veracity of the material, I wanted to see it. We were the office with the background to determine its value. And we certainly would have had our own questions for Rudy, because he was a close associate of the two guys we just indicted. What’s more, our office was only a taxi ride away for Rudy and his lawyer—Pittsburgh was a 350-mile trip for them.

We could have handled whatever information Rudy had. With more than two hundred fully capable attorneys, I would have found a couple more to throw into the mix if it came to that. But that’s not what was driving the attorney general’s machinations. I believe it was really an effort by Barr to keep tabs on our continuing Lev and Igor investigation and keep us segregated from potentially helpful leads or admissions being provided by Rudy.

This became immediately clear to me and to Sweeney when we tried to access the information Rudy was providing. Rudy and his lawyer met several times with Main Justice and then with Brady’s team in Pittsburgh. There were FBI reports of those meetings, called 302s, which we wanted to review. So did Sweeney. Sweeney’s team asked the agents in Pittsburgh for a copy and was refused. Sweeney called me up, livid.

“Geoff, in all my years with the FBI I have never been refused a 302,” he said. “This is a total violation of protocol.”

Sweeney asked Jacqueline Maguire, his special agent in charge, to reach out to the acting head of the FBI’s office in Pittsburgh, Eugene Kowel, to request the 302s and related information. A few days later Kowel got back to Maguire and repeated what Brady had told him about the 302s: “It’s not my job to help the Southern District of New York make a case against Rudy.” [my emphasis]

Yet SDNY had to wait until Bill Barr was long gone before they got approval to serve this warrant. How is it possible that in the month and a half since Merrick Garland came in, SDNY had never gotten permission to read the 302s from Rudy’s “cooperation” in Pittsburgh?

Related: In related news, in a request for a delay in responding to Hunter Biden’s lawsuit against Rudy and his former attorney now creditor Robert Costello, it appears they are represented by the same firm.

Jim Jordan Says Trump’s Years of Blowing Off Subpoenas May Merit Impeachment

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In another ploy to get journalists at dick pic-sniffing right wing outlets like JustTheNews and NBC to air false claims, Jim Jordan and James Comer sent the White House a letter demanding any communications the White House had with Hunter Biden or his lawyers about blowing off a subpoena that — the letter itself notes — was issued before the chairmen obtained support of the House to issue impeachment subpoenas.

They base their claim that the President knew his son was going to blow off a subpoena on a misrepresentation of what Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said later that day: that the President was familiar with what his son was going to say.

Look, as you know, Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and so I certainly would refer you to his representatives. Look, the President was certainly familiar with what his son was going to say, and I think what you saw was from the heart from his son. And you’ve heard me say this, you’ve heard the president say this, when it comes to the president and the first lady, they’re proud of him continuing to rebuild his life. They are proud of their son.

Perhaps Jean-Pierre was suggesting Joe Biden knew Hunter would say things like, “James Comer, Jim Jordan, Jason Smith, and their colleagues have distorted the facts,” a true statement similar to comments Joe himself has made. Perhaps Jean-Pierre’s comment meant that Joe Biden knew his son would say that Jordan and Comer, along with Jason Smith, “ridiculed my struggle with addiction [and] belittled my recovery,” something consistent with her own focus on his recovery. Given Jean-Pierre’s observation that “what you saw was from the heart,” perhaps she was referring to Hunter’s tribute to his parents’ love:

During my battle with addiction, my parents were there for me. They literally saved my life. They helped me in ways that I will never be able to repay. And of course they would never expect me to. In the depths of my addiction, I was extremely irresponsible with my finances. But to suggest that is grounds for an impeachment inquiry is beyond the absurd. It’s shameless. There’s no evidence to support the allegations that my father was financially involved in my business because it did not happen.

[snip]

They have taken the light of my Dad’s love — the light of my Dad’s love for me and presented it as darkness.

There is nothing in her statement that confirms foreknowledge that Hunter would blow off the subpoena, something conceded in the letter that her statement only, “suggests that the President had some amount of advanced knowledge that Mr. Biden would choose to defy two congressional subpoenas” [my emphasis].

Nevertheless, serial liar Comer and subpoena scofflaw Jordan use Jean-Pierre’s statement to insinuate that Joe Biden has committed what they themselves call a potentially impeachable offense of dissuading a subpoena recipient from complying with it.

Later on December 13, when asked whether President Biden had watched Mr. Biden’s statement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated that President Biden was “certainly familiar with what his son was going to say.”11 Ms. Jean-Pierre declined, however, to provide any further details about the President’s actions or whether the President approved of his son defying congressional subpoenas.12 Nonetheless, Ms. Jean-Pierre’s statement suggests that the President had some amount of advanced knowledge that Mr. Biden would choose to defy two congressional subpoenas.

Under the relevant section of the criminal code, it is unlawful to “corruptly . . . endeavor[] to influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any investigation or inquiry is being had by . . . any committee of either House or any joint committee of the Congress[.]”13 Likewise, any person who “aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures” the commission of a crime is punishable as a principal of the crime.14

In light of Ms. Jean-Pierre’s statement, we are compelled to examine the involvement of the President in his son’s scheme to defy the Committees’ subpoenas.

[snip]

[T]he fact that the President had advanced awareness that Mr. Biden would defy the Committees’ subpoenas raises a troubling new question that we must examine: whether the President corruptly sought to influence or obstruct the Committees’ proceeding by preventing, discouraging, or dissuading his son from complying with the Committees’ subpoenas. Such conduct could constitute an impeachable offense.

11 Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby. White House Briefing Room (Dec. 13, 2023).

12 Id. 13 18 U.S.C. § 1505 (Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies, and committees).

14 18 U.S.C. § 2(a).

Once you wade through all the bad faith and misrepresentation, this is a breathtaking development: Donald Trump’s most vigorous defender in Congress, Jim Jordan, someone who himself defied a subpoena to cover up Trump’s actions, has accused Donald Trump of committing an impeachable offense.

There are a slew of ways that Donald Trump, “prevent[ed], discourag[ed], or dissuad[ed]” witnesses from complying with subpoenas, during both his impeachments, the January 6 Committee, and elsewhere. Most famously, during the first impeachment, for example, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow got Trump to permit Trump attorney John Dowd to represent Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. In a response to a subpoena that was very similar to the pre-impeachment vote subpoena sent to Hunter Biden, Dowd made a bunch of claims about attorney-client relationships that, with the exception of the tie to Dmitry Firtash, have since been disproven, all in an attempt to deprive Congress of their testimony. While Parnas eventually cooperated with impeachment, neither Fruman nor Rudy did. Indeed, Trump’s entire Administration blew off the inquiry.

Trump did the same with the January 6 inquiry. Trump attempted to pressure Cassidy Hutchinson about her testimony. Even better documented, Robert Costello described that Trump’s lawyer instructed him to withhold materials about a meeting involving a bunch of lawyers but also Mike Flynn based on an attorney-client privilege claim. On Jordan’s logic, Trump should join Bannon in his 4-month contempt sentence for that intervention.

In short, while Comer and Jordan manufactured the claim that President Biden knew Hunter was going to blow off a subpoena, the evidence that Trump has ordered everyone in his orbit to do the same for years is overwhelming.

Once you argue that instructing people to blow off subpoenas merits impeachment, you’ve made the case for a third Trump impeachment.

Comer and Jordan have already surfaced far more evidence supporting an impeachment of Donald Trump than Joe Biden. Three major examples are:

  • Ties between DOJ access and dirt on Hunter Biden: In response to Comer’s allegations about Hunter and Joe Biden, Lev Parnas has renewed allegations he made in the past, much of which are backed by known communications and the recently released warrants from SDNY. Of particular note, he described that Rudy floated access with Trump’s DOJ in exchange for dirt on the Bidens with both Yuriy Lutsenko and Dmitry Firtash. Parnas also claimed that when he attempted to fly to Vienna on October 9, 2019, he believed he would retrieve content stolen from a Hunter Biden laptop.
  • Efforts to funnel Rudy Giuliani’s dirt to the investigation into Hunter Biden: Chuck Grassley revealed that during his first impeachment, when Trump was emphasizing the import of investigating Burisma corruption, his own DOJ shut down a 3.5-year old investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky. Testimony from Scott Brady enhanced what we already know about the dedicated channel Bill Barr set up days later for dirt Rudy had obtained, including from known Russian agents. Of particular import, Brady revealed that he mined the recently closed Zlochevsky investigation to obtain informant testimony about how Zlochevsky changed his story about Joe Biden during the course of impeachment. Brady and Gary Shapley both provided new details of how that information got shared with the Hunter Biden investigative team, with Brady submitting interrogatories about what they were investigative and getting David Weiss’ intervention to brief the information they obtained. Ultimately, after Trump yelled at Bill Barr about the Hunter Biden investigation, Richard Donoghue ordered the Delaware investigators to accept the FD-1023 memorializing Zlochevsky’s changed story about Biden; Bill Barr confessed that he was involved in this process. In short, Jordan and Comer, with an assist from Grassley, have confirmed many of the suspicions that drove the first impeachment.
  • Trump’s involvement in Tony Bobulinski’s inconsistent FBI testimony: The disgruntled IRS agents released Tony Bobulinski’s draft interview report (from the same day as the briefing about Zlochevsky’s changed Biden claims), key claims in which are not backed by previously unreleased communications. The disclosure of testimony that Hunter Biden alleges to be false comes even as Cassidy Hutchinson’s book describes a secret meeting Mark Meadows had weeks after that FBI interview, at which Trump’s chief of staff handed Bobulinski something that could be an envelope.

Thanks to Comer and Jordan — with an important assist from Grassley — Republicans have exposed that Trump has been corruptly involved in the Hunter Biden investigation — the Hunter Biden investigation they’re using to impeach Joe Biden — from the start.

But this letter is different.

Comer and Jordan never admitted that all the rest — all the evidence that Trump corruptly ginned up an investigation into Joe Biden’s kid — merited impeachment. They have claimed the opposite, even in the face of Grassley’s stunning claim that Trump’s DOJ shut down an investigation into Zlochevsky opened when Biden was Vice President.

But here, at long last, they’re admitting that Trump’s years-long efforts to stonewall Congress may merit impeachment.

Mind you, the outlets that believed this letter was newsworthy didn’t mention that fact. Instead, they treated Jordan’s stunning hypocrisy as if it were a good faith intervention. They didn’t even mention that Jordan himself blew off a subpoena to protect Trump!

We know why John Solomon — implicated himself in all these events — pretended this was all good faith. Solomon doesn’t pretend to be anything but a pro-Trump propagandist.

But NBC has no excuse. Either it is too stupid to recognize that this Jordan letter is the height of bad faith … or it is too addicted to dick pic-sniffing clicks to explain all that to their readers.

At some point, Jim Jordan’s confession that Donald Trump really did deserve impeachment becomes the story.

Update: I should have included Luke Broadwater — the NYT scribe who can’t do basic things like test the provenance of documents — in the right wing outlets that simply parroted Jordan’s garbage.

In Lev Parnas Investigation, SDNY Decided that Ivana Trump Is Not Political

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I really should be writing a responsible article describing, in detail, the three phases of the Lev Parnas investigation. But instead, I need to obsess about Ivana Trump.

There were, roughly speaking, three phases of the investigation into Parnas:

January through August 2019: Campaign Finance crimes

The first — which I laid out here — focused primarily on the campaign finance crimes. SDNY obtained two warrants in this period:

  • January 18, 2019, 19 MJ 1729: For Yahoo and Google content
  • May 16, 2019, 19 MJ 4784: For iCloud content

When DOJ did a search of Parnas and Fruman’s residences the day they were arrested, the only crime listed on the warrants were the campaign finance crimes; they did this to hide the scope of the ongoing investigation. SDNY only unsealed the Fruman warrant, not the Parnas one (nor warrants in other districts targeting their co-defendants).

August through December 2019: Foreign Agent suspicions

After the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, SDNY investigated whether all Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman’s influence-peddling served the interests of foreign principals — chiefly Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, but also other Ukrainians and maybe some Russians too.

SDNY obtained at least 8 warrants in this period (there are at least two, 19 MJ 7594 and 19 MJ 9830, which must be related — perhaps targeting their Russian backer, Andrey Muraviev? — but which SDNY withheld). And SDNY also withheld the November 2019 warrants targeting Rudy Giuliani.

  • August 14, 2019, 19 MJ 7593: Yahoo and Google content since January, with expanded focus
  • August 14, 2019, 19 MJ 7595: Existing Yahoo and Google content, with expanded focus
  • October 17, 2019, 19 MJ 7595: Actual authorization of the warrant approved in August
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9829: iCloud content since May
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9831: Devices from Dulles
  • October 21, 2019, 19 MJ 9832: Existing iCloud content for expanded focus
  • November 4, 2019: Warrants targeting Rudy
  • December 10, 2019, 19 MJ 11500: Stuff seized from residences for foreign agent focus
  • December 10, 2019, 19 MJ 11501: Instagram

As I’ll return to, it looks like Bill Barr intervened to halt SDNY’s expanding investigation even earlier than previously disclosed, in December 2019 rather than January 2020.

The only additional warrants SDNY served after December 10, 2019 in the foreign agent investigation was a warrant obtained in March 2020 because Fruman had not synced his iCloud with his phone until after SDNY obtained the May 2019 warrants, meaning some of the texts and chats he had already sent were not in the earlier warrant return.

  • March 20, 2020, 20 MJ 3074: iCloud content obtained with October 21, 2019 to cover earlier periods

Effectively, SDNY discovered that they had obtained content in October 2019 pertaining to events in 2018 and earlier in 2019 that hadn’t been available when they first got Fruman’s iCloud in May 2019, so they asked to use the October 2019 warrant for the earlier periods.

This may mean that Fruman, like Parnas, deleted some of his content on his phones.

December 2019 through March 2020: Fraud Guarantee fraud

Starting on December 12, 2019 — two days after the foreign agent investigation halted — SDNY spent several months trying to figure out what Fraud Guarantee actually was.

  • December 12, 2019, 19 MJ 11651: Google for longer period and expanded focus
  • January 21, 2020, 20 MJ 740: Existing email content for expanded focus
  • February 28, 2020, 20 MJ 2240: Google from creation date for Fraud Guarantee
  • February 28, 2020, 20 MJ 2241: Parnas iCloud for expanded focus

SDNY originally had believed, in 2018, that Fraud Guarantee was a recent creation, one serving as another means to launder political donations. But they had to keep digging further and further back, to 2012, to try to figure out what Fraud Guarantee really was.

The Instagram pivot

I’m still triple checking my own work, but SDNY appears not to have complied with SDNY’s order to release all this backup. In addition to withholding the warrant for the search of Lev Parnas’ residence on October 9, 2019 (though that’s likely to be nearly indistinguishable from the one used to search Fruman’s residence, which was obtained in the same docket), I don’t think they released the affidavit for the December 10, 2019 search of the devices seized at the residences for foreign agent crimes.

That’s the one that should have the most expansive description of the foreign agent investigation (and, I suspect, of the financing behind the effort to fire Marie Yovanovitch and obtain dirt on Hunter Biden, which I’ll return to). I suspect the affidavit is closer in content to the one used to seize Rudy’s email in November 2019 than what was unsealed the other day.

The Instagram warrant obtained that same day necessarily used a different affidavit, partly because it included all the crimes under investigation (broadly, the campaign finance crimes and the suspected foreign agent crimes), but also because it was looking for a different kind of information: mostly, but not entirely, photos that Parnas had posted.

But there’s something really weird about it, which has made me obsess about Ivana Trump.

The warrant suggests SDNY learned about the Instagram account from this WSJ video.

As you’ll note, WSJ describes that the oldest thing on the account was an April 2015 photo of a dog, then this photo, showing Parnas and co-defendant David Correia with Ivana Trump, at what he billed as a “Fraud Guarantee pow wow.”

As WSJ notes, the next things in Parnas’ Instagram account are photos showing him getting access to Trump from very early on in Trump’s campaign, in 2015 (as I’ll return to, Parnas’ 2016 access peddling is something that the warrants focus on more than the coverage of Parnas ever did). Then there’s a break in the Instagram account until summer 2018, when it returns to its focus on political access. The Instagram shows Parnas’ work with Rudy to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden and the 2016 election. It ends (again, per WSJ), with their trip days after the Perfect Phone Call to Madrid, to continue that effort.

SDNY obtained this warrant just two days before the investigation shifted focus to Fraud Guarantee. When they obtained the warrant, they undoubtedly had all the questions they spent the next two months pursuing.

Yet SDNY limited the temporal scope of this warrant to postings starting on October 1, 2015 — effectively excluding only the photo of the dog and some event with Ivana trump six months before Parnas started insinuating himself into Trump’s political orbit, one pertaining to Fraud Guarantee.

To the extent materials are dated, this warrant is limited to materials created between October 1, 2015, which is the month in which it appears Parnas first posted a photo related to a political event, to the present.

Did Ivana have some pre-existing relationship with Lev Parnas, one that dates to months before Lev started serially insinuating himself into Donald Trump’s orbit?

And if she did, why didn’t SDNY want that photo?

SDNY Obtained Warrant(s) for Foreign Agent Charges before John Demers Reviewed the Perfect Transcript

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Had DOJ followed its own rules in 2019, Donald Trump’s “perfect phone call” with Volodymyr Zelenskyy should have been linked to the ongoing criminal investigation into Lev Parnas. Instead, DOJ limited the review of the criminal referral of the whisteblower complaint in such a way that prevented investigators from making that link. The Parnas warrants recently liberated by NYT reveal that failure was even more damning than previously known.

On August 14, 2019, CIA General Counsel Courtney Elwood told National Security Division head John Demers that someone in the CIA had expressed concerns about the July 25 call. The next day, on August 15, 2019, Demers went to the White House to review the transcript of it.

Mr. Eisenberg and Ms. Elwood both spoke on Aug. 14 to John Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, according to three people familiar with the discussion. Ms. Elwood did not pass on the name of the C.I.A. officer, which she did not know because his concerns were submitted anonymously.

The next day, Mr. Demers went to the White House to read the transcript of the call and assess whether to alert other senior law enforcement officials. The deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and Brian A. Benczkowski, the head of the department’s criminal division, were soon looped in, according to two administration officials.

Department officials began to discuss the accusations and whether and how to follow up, and Attorney General William P. Barr learned of the allegations around that time, according to a person familiar with the matter. Although Mr. Barr was briefed, he did not oversee the discussions about how to proceed, the person said.

While DOJ was dawdling over what to do, on August 12, the whistleblower went to Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson and filed a formal complaint. ODNI made a criminal referral at the end of August. And then DOJ declined, almost right away, to investigate.

Ms. Elwood and Mr. Eisenberg learned only later about the complaint, filed on Aug. 12, and did not know it was sent by the same officer who had sent the information anonymously to her.

At the end of August, the office of the director of national intelligence referred the allegations to the Justice Department as a possible criminal matter. Law enforcement officials ultimately declined to open an investigation.

I have always pointed out the problem with this tale. Since 9/11, DOJ’s expectation is that when investigators obtain a tip about anything that might pertain to national security, they run it against FBI holdings to see if there’s a known link to any existing investigation.

Had DOJ’s investigators scrutinized the OCCRP story about Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman cited three times in the complaint, had they done searches on all the identifiers implicated by reference in the complaint, they should have found the ongoing investigation into Parnas and Fruman at SDNY. (On review, even the unclassified part of the complaint mentioned people, like Andriy Telizhenko, who were likely the focus of intelligence scrutiny already, though perhaps not yet at FBI.)

But investigators didn’t get the complaint. According to a public confession Kerri Kupec made in September 2019, they got only the call transcript.

“In August, the Department of Justice was referred a matter relating to a letter the director national intelligence had received from the inspector general for the intelligence community regarding a purported whistleblower complaint. The inspector general’s letter cited a conversation between the president and Ukrainian President Zelensky as a potential violation of federal campaign finance law, while acknowledging that neither the inspector general nor the complainant had firsthand knowledge of the conversation,” Kupec said.

Relying on established procedures set forth in the justice manual, the department’s criminal division reviewed the official record of the call and determined based on the facts and applicable law that there was no campaign finance violence [sic] and that no further action was warranted. All relevant components of the department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the department has concluded this matter,” Kupec concluded. [my emphasis]

They didn’t assess the complaint. They assessed the transcript.

That was always a self-evidently corrupt decision — a decision that, if Bill Barr (who definitely knew of the Parnas and Fruman investigation) and Jeffrey Rosen (who likely did) were involved would be provably an effort to prevent investigators from tying the President to Parnas and Fruman.

But the timeline looks worse given something revealed in the warrants from the investigation liberated by the NYT last week.

The indictment used to arrest Parnas and Fruman on October 9, 2019 only charged them for campaign finance crimes: Conspiracy to violate campaign finance law by donating — including to Trump’s PAC and Pete Sessions — in the name of their front company Global Energy Partners, false statements to the FEC about the donation to Trump’s PAC, filing a materially false document to the FEC about the same, and conspiracy to make cannabis-related political donations using foreign money. The Russian source of those funds, Andrey Muraviev was not yet public. And while the donation to Pete Sessions was intimately connected to the firing of Marie Yovanovitch, that wasn’t mentioned in the first indictment.

What appeared in that indictment was consistent with the first two warrants obtained against Parnas and Fruman. The first, served on Google and Yahoo on January 18, 2019, sought evidence of those foreign and straw donor crimes, along with money laundering and fraud. It cited contacts with Sessions’ office, with Ron DeSantis, and even (regarding what the investigation would ultimately show pertained to Fraud Guarantee), Rudy Giuliani. But even in the discussions of Sessions, there was no mention yet of Yovanovitch.

That began to change in the second warrant, served on Apple for iCloud content on May 16, 2019, the first one after Bill Barr would have started getting briefings. That warrant remained focused on those foreign and straw donor crimes, though added false statements for Parnas and Fruman’s claims to the FEC about what they were up to. It added Muraviev to the inquiry. It took out a request to look for communications with individuals who work at “[redacted].”

That second warrant affidavit included a three page section focused on Parnas and Fruman’s recruitment of Pete Sessions to help get Marie Yovanovitch fired. The most striking thing about that second warrant is that SDNY obtained it the day after public notice of her removal, which development it noted in the warrnt. The warrant affidavit appears to have removed a reference to an email sent to Rudy the day after the Campaign Legal Center first disclosed the Parnas and Fruman grift (perhaps upon discovering that it pertained to Parnas’ effort to recruit Rudy into Fraud Guarantee). Still, there was no mention in that second warrant — the one obtained the day after Yovanovitch’s ouster was confirmed — of any foreign agent ties.

On August 14, presumably blissfully unaware of all the efforts to cover up Trump’s extortion attempt in DC, SDNY attempted to get at least two warrants, one requiring Yahoo and Google to provide new email content, everything generated since the January 18 warrant, and another asking for permission to examine the previously obtained content for new crimes. I phrase it that way for two reasons: First, because those warrants were docket number 19 MJ 7593 and 7595; there’s undoubtedly at least one more, 19 MJ 7594, targeting something or someone else (possibly either Muraviev or Pete Sessions). And while Magistrate Judge Henry Pitman approved the warrant permitting SDNY to examine already collected content for new crimes, they bolloxed it somehow. As SDNY explained in an October 17 letter to Judge Oetken,

[T]he Government is not presently able to locate a copy of the August 14 warrant itself, which may be the result of a clerical error, although it is possible a warrant was not submitted in connection with the August 14 application. As such, the Government respectfully requests that the Court review the attached agent affidavit, which was sworn before Judge Pitman on August 14, and issue the attached warrant which would authorize the Government to seize the materials sought in the August 14 application.

But they did get that warrant, 19 MJ 7593, which required Yahoo and Google to provide new content, content that would be scrutinized under SDNY’s expanded focus.

For the first time, SDNY asked for permission to review Parnas and Fruman’s communications for evidence that they or others were unregistered agents of a foreign power under either FARA or 18 USC 951. Those warrants also asked to look for evidence of bribery (a prong of the investigation that appears to have been dropped after interviewing Sessions in the wake of the Parnas and Fruman arrest).

Normally, by the time a US Attorney’s office contemplates such charges, they involve NSD. According to Geoffrey Berman’s book, before SDNY charged Parnas and Fruman, they got Public Integrity’s approval, at 4AM in the middle of the night! It’s certainly possible the “Sovereign District of New York,” as people jokingly describe SDNY’s notorious independence, did not. But it certainly raised the stakes on the tie between Parnas and Fruman and the President.

By the time John Demers reviewed the transcript of Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the topic of his call had already been made a national security investigation.

Perjury Trapped: Rudy Giuliani’s Sync Sink

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As I noted here, I’m just beginning to go through the warrants from SDNY’s Lev Parnas and Rudy Giuliani investigation the NYT liberated.

I want to start with a very minor point about the apparent inconsistencies between what SDNY found when they conducted searches on Rudy’s cloud and what Rudy claimed — purportedly under penalty of perjury — before Beryl Howell.

In the Ruby Freeman case — the first one, not her renewed suit to enjoin him from continued lies about her — Rudy claimed that he didn’t need to separately search his messaging accounts, because his phones were all synced to his iCloud.

All of my [redacted]@icloud.com iCloud data would have also been included in the TrustPoint data because I synced my iCloud to my devices.

But SDNY, when they searched his iCloud back in 2019, discovered that known messages were not there.

On or about November 4, 2019, the USAO and FBI sought and obtained from the Honorable J. Paul Oetken, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York, a warrant (the “November 4 Warrant”) for records in iCloud accounts belonging to Giuliani and [Victoria Toensing].

[snip]

As discussed above, on November 4, 2019, the FBI and USAO sought and obtained a search warrant for, among other things, Giuliani’s iCloud account. However, the iCloud did not contain many of the text messages outlined above with Parnas and [Fruman] during the December 2018 to April 2019 time frame. Based on my training and experience, as well as my review of records provided by Apple, I believe the iCloud account did not contain text communications from early 2019 because Giuliani did not backup that content, or removed it from the backup, and not because it does not exist. Indeed, for the reasons set forth below, including Giuliani’s public statement that he has retained potentially relevant communications on his cellphones, there is probable cause to believe that, unlike the iCloud account, evidence of the Subject Offenses continue to be maintained on the Subject Devices.

But, according to Robert Costello, in a declaration that — unlike Rudy’s — was actually notarized and so worth something if you ignore the obvious spin in his representations of what SDNY told him — when SDNY reviewed at least seven of those devices, they were corrupted.

Rudy’s messaging wasn’t in his iCloud when SDNY looked in 2019. And it wasn’t in his phones when SDNY looked in 2021. And yet this year, he claimed the content in both places would be the same.

Preliminary Comments on Rudy and Lev Warrants

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In the last few months, NYT asked to and did liberate the warrants in the Lev Parnas investigation and the expansion of the investigation into Rudy Giuliani on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job.

The Rudy warrants are very tidy. They include:

The Parnas warrants are a godawful mess — the digital equivalent of someone throwing 1,000 pages incorporating 30 or so documents on the floor, intermixing them all, thereby confusing where one document begins and the next ends. Here’s what just half look like: SDNY repeatedly split affidavits across multiple documents.

Bad words have been said in the Wheeler home today as a result.

Very bad words. And loudly.

For now, these two affidavits regarding Parnas provide a key introduction:

  • February 28, 2020: This warrant affidavit regarding Fraud Guarantee — the only ongoing investigation after Barr intervened to shut down any investigation into Rudy and after Parnas agreed to cooperate with impeachment — summarizes many if not all of the earlier warrants targeting Parnas.
  • December 10, 2019: This warrant, for Parnas’ Instagram account, is (for the moment) the most intact warrant describing the investigation as it was before Barr shut down any natural development. Temporally, it ends with a description of Trump’s perfect phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

I suspect the Parnas docket may look like it does to obscure what happened to the investigation when Barr intervened. Notably, while both sets of warrants make it clear that the Bidens were part of the project, there is much less focus on it in the Rudy warrants.

All that said, reviewing the Rudy affidavit, I have zero doubt — zero — that this affidavit was intended to obtain content for more than just the Foreign Agent investigation into Rudy. I was always confident that DOJ had set up that possibility (relatedly, former DOJ spox Anthony Coley pointed to this Politico story as proof that Garland nay-sayers have always been wrong), but there are several signs in this affidavit (which I’ll return to) that was the idea.

That said, as I reported, many of the devices seized with the Rudy warrant were corrupted, making them useless for any investigation.

Hunter Biden: Which Came First, the Chick Selling Sex or the Extortion of Campaign Dirt?

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Darren Samuelsohn had a hilarious passage in his version of a story contemplating the prospect of Trump using his second term to seek revenge.

To his credit, unlike the NYT and WaPo versions of this story, he acknowledges that Trump already did this. He even manages to address maybe a quarter of the times when Trump did so, though always missing key details. For example, he describes that Trump fired Jim Comey as revenge, which led to the Mueller investigation.

Consider the firing of James Comey, who the president ousted less than four months into his first term following the FBI director’s public testimony that confirmed an active bureau investigation on potential collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. The president’s move there ignited a chain of events leading to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment, which kept Trump’s White House stuck playing defense for a giant chunk of their four-year term and resulted in a costly series of guilty pleas, legal trials and court convictions for Trump associates that gave way to a series of controversial presidential pardons.

Samuelsohn even mentions “controversial” pardons! — if only in passing. But he doesn’t mention Trump’s concerted demand to prosecute Comey as a result, or the IRS investigation of Comey and Andrew McCabe that the IRS claims was just a wild coincidence.

The funny part is where Samuelsohn describes Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden as something that, like the Comey firing, led to backlash: impeachment.

Another Trump personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sparked the first House impeachment of the president in the aftermath of his mission to conjure up an investigation of the Biden family in Ukraine.

But then two topics — the Durham investigation and Trump’s revenge against Tom Emmer for voting to certify the 2020 election — and two paragraphs later, Samuelsohn introduces Abbe Lowell’s attempt to subpoena Trump as “another front.”

Or on another front, Hunter Biden’s lawyers earlier this month asked for a federal court’s permission to subpoena Trump, Barr and other senior Trump-era DOJ officials as they argue against “a vindictive or selective prosecution arising from an unrelenting pressure campaign beginning in the last administration, in violation of Mr. Biden’s Fifth Amendment rights under the Constitution.”

This is not “another front”! This is confirmation that the effort attributed here to Rudy continues to this day, is a central factor in the 2024 election to return to the White House.

As I noted, the requested subpoenas specifically ask for communications with, “attorney for President Trump (personal or other),” and the request for communications, “discussing any formal or informal investigation or prosecution of Hunter Biden,” should cover any copy of the Perfect Phone Call to Volodymyr Zelensky that Trump might have in his personal possession.

The subpoena is a request for records showing the tie between Rudy’s efforts and the still ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden, which has since morphed into the rationale for Republicans’ own impeachment stunt.

The tie is not imagined. Among other things, Lowell points to records showing then-PADAG Richard Donoghue scheduling a briefing with David Weiss’s team on October 23, 2020. The briefing transferred the FD-1023 created as a result of Bill Barr’s effort to set up an intake process for the dirt Rudy obtained from Russian agents and others.

In fact, all the details of the investigation that Joseph Ziegler has shared raise questions whether there would ever have been a Hunter Biden grand jury investigation were it not for the dirt Ukrainians — possibly downstream of and ultimately directly tied to Rudy’s efforts to obtain dirt on Hunter Biden — shared with DOJ in 2019.

To be sure, Ziegler claims credit.

In his original testimony to House Ways and Means, Zeigler described that he decided to investigate the former Vice President’s son based off a Suspicious Activity Report tied to a social media site involving sex workers. From there, he read about Hunter’s contentious divorce. And from that he decided to launch a criminal investigation.

I started this investigation in November of 2018 after reviewing bank reports related to another case I was working on a social media company. Those bank reports identified Hunter Biden as paying prostitutes related to a potential prostitution ring.

Also included in those bank reports was evidence that Hunter Biden was living lavishly through his corporate bank account. This is a typical thing that we look for in tax cases — criminal tax cases, I should say.

In addition, there was media reporting related to Hunter Biden’s wife, ex-wife, divorce proceedings basically talking about his tax issues. And I wanted to quote some of the things that were said in her divorce filing which was public record.

“Throughout the parties’ separation, Mr. Biden” — referring to Hunter Biden — “has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests, including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, gifts for women with whom he had sexual relationships with, while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills.

“The parties’ outstanding debts are shocking and overwhelming. The parties have maxed-out credit card debt, double mortgages on both real properties they own, and a tax debt of at least $300,000.”

This is all the information that I had in my hand in November when I wanted to open this investigation.

His supervisor, Matt Kutz, treated the investigation of the former Vice President’s son as a sensitive matter and demanded more evidence before letting Ziegler open the investigation.

After discussing the case with my previous supervisor at the time, Matt Kutz, he made a decision to look into the case further before sending it — sending the case up for referral.

[snip]

My manager at the time told me, “No, you cannot do that. That’s a tax disclosure issue.” I didn’t agree with him because there’s been multiple instances where we do that. That’s a normal part of our job. But he was my manager, and I wasn’t going to fight him on it, and he told me that I had to open this up the normal tax administrative way that we would do [for] these cases.

[snip]

[H]e said a political family like this, you have to have more than just an allegation and evidence related to that allegation. In order for this case to move forward, you basically have to show a significant amount of evidence and similar wrongdoing that would basically illustrate a prosecution report.

So he’s basically telling me that I have to show more than just non-[filed] tax returns and the information from the ex-wife in the divorce proceedings.

During Democrats’ questioning, Ziegler described how persistent were his efforts to find some basis to open an investigation into Hunter Biden.

Mr. [Ziegler]. My initiation packet, so sending the case forward to get — we call it subject case. It’s an SCI. It’s elevating the case to actually working the investigation.

My first one showed the unfiled returns and the taxes owed for 2015 and that was it on my first package. So that was the wrongdoing that we were alleging.

And my supervisor goes: You don’t have enough. You need to find more.

So I kept digging for more and more. And even after that point, he goes: You haven’t found enough.

So I ended up searching bank reports that [I] ran on the periphery of what we were looking at.

So I ran bank reports for Burisma, and in those bank reports I had found additional payments that Hunter had received. And then at that point I had found that Hunter did not report the income for 2014 related to Burisma.

So now I had a false return year. So that alone — it was basically so much evidence that I put in there — allowed us to elevate the case.

It took Ziegler three attempts before he was able to show enough evidence of wrong-doing that Kutz would agree to send the referral to DOJ Tax. That’s what led to the decision — at first, Ziegler attributed the decision to Bill Barr personally, though subsequently retracted that claim — to merge his IRS investigation with one Delaware had opened in January 2019.

So after three of these initiation packages, he finally allowed me to push this forward to DOJ Tax for their review.

So the way that our grand jury cases — or the way — I’m sorry. The way that our cases work is when the case is referred from IRS to DOJ Tax, the case has to go through our ASAC and SAC, and then it goes to DOJ Tax where they review and approve it and send it to the appropriate venue or jurisdiction.

So in [or] around March or April of 2019, the case went up to DOJ Tax.

And at that time we were told that William Barr made the decision to join two investigations together. So at that point in time I had found out that Delaware had opened up an investigation related to the bank reports and that that occurred in January of 2019, so 2 months after I started mine.

So when I found out about their case and was told that we had to merge the two, I did a venue analysis. I showed them that, “Hey, the venue’s in D.C. It’s not in Delaware. We need to work this in D.C.” But, ultimately, I was overruled, and it was determined to send the case, join the two case together, and work everything under Delaware. [my emphasis]

Here and elsewhere, Ziegler (working from memory) obscures details of this timeline: about when he came to learn of the Delaware investigation and when he submitted his finalized package for DOJ Tax.

In an email Ziegler sent in April 2019, though, he memorialized that, “Approx. February 2019 — My SSA advised me about the Delaware USAO looking into Robert Doe subsequent to the [Suspicious Activity Report]” on which Ziegler himself had predicated his investigation. That same email described submitting the package to DOJ Tax on April 12, 2019.

Two weeks later, his supervisor relayed the news that the case would end up in Delaware.

Jason Poole telephoned me and advised after inter‐department discussions well above his level, it is highly likely the Robert Doe case will go to the Delaware USAO for investigation.

So while Ziegler may have decided to pursue the former Vice President’s son based on payments to sex workers and divorce records before Delaware opened an investigation, DOJ Tax had not even considered whether this merited a criminal investigation until April 2019, at which point someone high up — possibly even the Attorney General himself — decided Delaware would oversee the case.

By that point, Delaware had been investigating for up to three months, and Ziegler had known that for two months.

That’s important because, if we can believe Johnathan Buma (I raised some cautions about his claims here), the FBI got a tip about Hunter Biden from two Ukrainians with ties to that country’s Prosecutor General’s Office in January 2019.

In January, 2019, DYNAMO, ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST were taken to the US Attorney’s Office in downtown Los Angeles, where they presented severd of these schemes to an Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA), who was interested in pursuing money laundering cases in violation of the FCPA, which implicated US entities or persons. THE ECONOMIST’s presentation included detailed information concerning several multi-million and multi-billion dollar schemes. The information was based on an extrapolation of open-source information from Ukraine, as well as insight from THE  ECONOMIST’s consulting work in the PGO and ROLLIE’s foundation. One of the described scenarios alleged Hunter Biden (Hunter) had been given a lucrative position on the board of directors of the energy company, Burisma Holdings Limited (Burisma), and was likely involved in  unreported lobbying and/or tax evasion.

This approach from people affiliated with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office (my earlier post provides descriptions of those ties) came months after Rudy Giuliani first tasked Lev Parnas with finding this dirt in November 2018 and after Trump had gotten personally involved.

Later that month [on December 6], I attended a Hanukkah celebration at the White House where Giuliani and Trump were both present. Trump approached me briefly to say, “Rudy told me good things. Keep up the good work.” Then he gave me a thumbs-up in approval.

By January 2019, Parnas was in communications with both Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko, both of whom might have had ties to Rollie and the Economist. On January 26, Lutsenko shared a package of information on Burisma that, again, has similarities to what Rollie shared that same month.

According to Buma, sometime after the January 2019 presentation Rollie and The Economist made to the Los Angeles US Attorney’s Office, Buma submitted an FD-1023 about their package and spoke to two FBI case agents located in Baltimore on the already ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden about it.

After receiving the presentation from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST, THE ECONOMIST provided me a thumb drive with some supporting documentation, much of which was in the Ukrainian language, which I do not speak. After I submitted my FD-1023 reports on this information, I was put in touch with two agents working out of the Baltimore office on a case based in Delaware involving Hunter. I spoke on the phone with these agents, who were very interested in the information due to its relation to their ongoing investigation that was mostly involving allegations of Hunter’s involvement with drugs and prostitution. Information derived from ROLLIE and THE ECONOMIST had previously been found to be credible, so this was handled carefully and quickly transferred over to the agents in Baltimore and was serialized in their case file.

As Buma described it, by the time this information showed up in the press, it had become clear that Rollie and the Economist shared the information for influence purposes tied to Joe Biden’s run for the presidency, not law enforcement.

[T]he derogatory information concerning the Bidens and Burisma quickly emerged in domestic US. media, suggesting that it was being provided for political influence rather than law-enforcement purposes.

But that didn’t prevent the Ukrainians from being invited, some time after June 26, 2019, to attend an event associated with the White House at which Rollie gave Mike Pompeo the same package of derogatory information on Hunter Biden. And somewhere along the line, Buma’s primary source who introduced them to the Los Angeles US Attorney’s Office had direct contact with Rudy Giuliani.

The precise relationship between Rollie and The Economist and Rudy’s efforts, started month earlier, remains obscure. But both had begun well before Ziegler’s pitch to DOJ Tax to investigate Hunter Biden criminally, and it’s likely that Delaware had the FD-1023 from the Ukrainians before DOJ Tax approved the investigation.

And by that point, in April 2019, Ziegler’s supervisor — the same guy who insisted he needed more than payments to sex workers to open an investigation into a politically sensitive figure — started documenting the demands for just such an investigation.

Around the same time in 2019, I had emails being sent to me and the Hunter — and the prosecutors on the case, the Hunter Biden prosecutors, from my IRS supervisor. So this was Matt Kutz still.

From what I was told by various people in my agency, my IRS supervisor, Matt Kutz, created memos which he put in the investigative files regarding the investigation potentially violating the subject’s Sixth Amendment rights. He also referred to Donald Trump’s tweets at the time.

[snip]

Q Okay. You’re talking about 2019. You were mentioning the fact that there was a George Murphy that was writing memos or emails and documenting some of his conclusions that were on the other side regarding this case.

Could you tell us more about him? What’s his title and who is he and how does he relate to you in terms of your chain of command?

A So it was actually Matthew Kutz. He was my supervisor at the time and from the articles that he was sending me, I would say he had more of a liberal view than I had and it was pretty obvious from the things he would send me and discuss. And that’s just me making an observation.

So I later found out about these memos that were put in the file regarding the issues that he saw with the investigation, the fact that we even had it opened. So I only learned about those after. And then it came to a point to where he’s sending us so many media articles about different issues that I had to tell him stop, please.

And I had to go around him. And that’s when I went to my ASAC at the time, George Murphy, who was above him.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 2. Off the record.

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. Off the record. [Discussion off the record.]

MAJORITY COUNSEL 1. On the record.

Mr. [Ziegler]. So these articles were a lot about — were a lot of articles regarding Trump and getting a fair investigation and things related to that, Trump’s tweets and stuff like that. So, that’s what drew me to my conclusion.

BY MINORITY COUNSEL 1: Q What was the purpose behind him sending you the Trump tweets? What was he trying to get at, or was he trying to give you more information for your case? Why would he send those, or do you know?

A Yeah, I think he was bringing up concerns with potentially us prosecuting the case down the road, potential issues we’re going to incur. I don’t remember the exact email that he sent that caused me to be — that he had to stop sending me some of the news articles, because it wasn’t even the fact that he was sending me these news articles. It was the opinion he was providing in those emails that I did not agree or that I did not — not agree with but did not think was appropriate.

Gary Shapley replaced Kutz in 2020 — possibly because Kutz insisted on documenting the demands from the President for Ziegler’s thinly-predicated investigation — around the same time Bill Barr set up a means to ingest Rudy’s dirt.

But in 2019, Kutz was documenting in real time the problem with pursuing the son of Donald Trump’s opponent while Donald Trump demanded such investigations via Tweet.

It’s in the case file.

Trump’s demands for an investigation into Hunter Biden were deemed by the IRS SSA to be problematic influence on the case in 2019. Yet that investigation continues, now bolstered by Special Counsel status, and is the basis for the GOP impeachment pitch.

Samuelsohn’s rag has a reporter, Stephen Neukam, covering the GOP impeachment stunt almost half time (though Neukam apparently hasn’t bothered to cover the Scott Brady testimony that lays out even more details of how Barr set up a means to filter Rudy’s dirt into the Hunter Biden investigation, evidence that — contra Ziegler — Barr was “weigh[ing] in, or seek[ing] updates on the investigation after those cases were joined”). Barr has confirmed, on the record, knowledge of how information was shared from Brady to Weiss.

Yet Samuelsohn describes Rudy’s intervention as something past, something unrelated to the future prospect of Trump ordering up investigations into his rivals.

You cannot understand the GOP impeachment pitch — you cannot claim to be doing journalism on the Republican effort to impeach Hunter Biden’s father — unless you understand the ties between Rudy’s efforts and the Hunter Biden investigation.

You can write all you want about how institutional guardrails might stymie Trump’s efforts to politicize DOJ in the future. But if you gloss over evidence that those guardrails failed in Trump’s past Administration, if you ignore how Trump’s success at politicizing DOJ continues to have repercussions to this day — indeed, continues to be a central issue in the election — then you’re not really addressing the threat Trump poses, past and future.

Update: Fixed date of October 23 briefing.

The Two Impeachment Treason Trip: Ukraine Charges Rudy Giuliani’s Sources

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Yesterday, Ukraine’s SBU charged with treason three of the people from whom Rudy Giuliani sought dirt on the Bidens to help Donald Trump get reelected. The announcement names Andrii Derkach and Kostyantyn Kulyk and describes someone that Politico reports to be Oleksandr Dubinsky.

The allegations say the threesome took $10 million from Russia’s GRU to discredit Ukraine.

“The main task of this organization was to take advantage of the tense political situation in Ukraine and discredit our state in the international arena. For this, the group was getting money from Russian military intelligence. Financing amounted to more than $10 million,” SBU said.

According to SBU, Dubinsky, guided by GRU, spread fake news about Ukraine’s military and political leadership, including claims that high-ranking Ukrainian officials were interfering in U.S. presidential elections. SBU said the Ukraine group was run by GRU deputy head Vladimir Alekseyev and his deputy Oleksiy Savin.

The propaganda described in the announcement preceded but is closely linked to Rudy’s December 5, 2019 trip to Kyiv to obtain dirt from Derkach. This Just Security timeline provides a good summary of how the trip to Kyiv — right in the middle of House impeachment proceedings — fit into Rudy’s year-long effort to find campaign dirt.

Why wasn’t Rudy ever charged?

The US Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach for election interference on September 10, 2020. Treasury added Kulyk, Dubinsky, and several other Derkach associates on January 11, 2021.

On September 26, 2022, EDNY charged Derkach with sanctions violations and money laundering. On January 23, 2023, EDNY superseded that indictment to add Derkach’s wife. On December 7, 2022, EDNY moved to seize a condo it claims the couple owns in Beverly Hills.

The Intelligence Community knew of Rudy’s trip to meet Derkach before he went to Kyiv and warned Trump, but Trump did not care.

The warnings to the White House, which have not previously been reported, led national security adviser Robert O’Brien to caution Trump in a private conversation that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia, one of the former officials said.

The message was, “Do what you want to do, but your friend Rudy has been worked by Russian assets in Ukraine,” this person said. Officials wanted “to protect the president from coming out and saying something stupid,” particularly since he was facing impeachment over his own efforts to strong-arm Ukraine’s president into investigating the Bidens.

But O’Brien emerged from the meeting uncertain whether he had gotten through to the president. Trump had “shrugged his shoulders” at O’Brien’s warning, the former official said, and dismissed concern about his lawyer’s activities by saying, “That’s Rudy.”

[snip]

Several senior administration officials “all had a common understanding” that Giuliani was being targeted by the Russians, said the former official who recounted O’Brien’s intervention. That group included Attorney General William P. Barr, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Later reporting made, then retracted a claim, that the FBI had warned Rudy before he made the trip to Kyiv.

At the time Rudy made the trip to Kyiv, he was already under investigation, by SDNY, for serving as an unregistered agent of a different Ukrainian dealing dirt, Yuri Lutsenko, an investigation that grew out of the campaign finance prosecution of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. SDNY obtained warrants for Rudy’s iCloud account on November 4, 2019 and, in April 2021, seized 18 devices from the former President’s attorney. That investigation concluded with no charges in August 2022. Rudy’s lawyer, Robert Costello, subsequently revealed that a number of the devices FBI seized in April 2021 were corrupted and therefore useless to the investigation, which likely is a big part of the reason Rudy was not charged by SDNY.

But Rudy was never charged for his ties to known Russian agent Derkach, either. Indeed, the Derkach indictment was written to focus on his NABULeaks site, attacking Ukrainian efforts to combat corruption; it does not mention Rudy (though it does mention that his sanctions pertained to the 2020 election).

Not only wasn’t Rudy charged, but he was permitted to share the information he obtained while in Ukraine directly with DOJ.

How that happened remains among Bill Barr’s most corrupt and complex machinations, one that deserves far more attention given the ongoing efforts to gin up a Ukraine-related impeachment against Joe Biden.

On January 3, 2020 — less than a month after Rudy met Derkach and while Trump’s first impeachment remained pending — Barr tasked Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady with the “discreet” assignment of ingesting dirt from the public, primarily meaning Rudy, to “vet.”

Brady’s recent deposition before the House Judiciary Committee revealed he did little real vetting. What he did do, though, was to query prosecutors in SDNY about the ongoing investigation into Rudy and obtain “interrogatories” from prosecutors in Delaware about the ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden. He also spoke with prosecutors investigating Dmitry Firtash and Ihor Kolomoyskyi, two of three Ukrainian oligarchs from whom Rudy had also solicited dirt.

Brady also spoke with DC investigators who — according to Chuck Grassley — had just one month earlier, right in the middle of the impeachment effort directly tied to Burisma, shut down an investigation into Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky, the third Ukrainian oligarch from whom Rudy solicited dirt. From the DC investigators, Brady learned of a passing reference to Hunter Biden in a 2017 informant report, which led Brady to reinterview the same informant. The informant revealed that in a late 2019 phone conversation, one that almost certainly took place during impeachment, Zlochevsky claimed to have bribed Joe Biden in such a way that it would take ten years of searching to find the payoff.

In his HJC deposition, Brady admitted that Rudy did not tell him — and his team did not seek out any information — about the President’s lawyer’s efforts to solicit dirt from Zlochevsky.

Q Okay. But you never asked, for example, the House Permanent Select Committee investigators or anyone associated with that investigation to do a similar inquiry for evidence relating to Zlochevsky?

A No, I don’t believe we did.

Q Okay. And, like you said, you were not aware that this interview had taken place in 2019. Is that fair to say?

A I don’t believe I was, no.

Q Okay. And anyone on your team, as far as you know, was not aware that Mr. Zlochevsky had been interviewed at the direction of Giuliani before your assessment began?

A I don’t believe so.

In September 2020, Brady provided Richard Donoghue with a report on the results of his “vetting.” On October 23, 2020, Brady’s investigators briefed David Weiss’ investigators on the FD-1023 describing the late 2019 Zlochevsky claim of bribery. Weiss claims that aspect of his investigation remains ongoing, and Republicans have made the FD-1023 part of their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.

But Barr did more than provide a way for Rudy to share information obtained from a known Russian agent such that it might be used in the investigation into Joe Biden’s son and, now, an impeachment stunt targeting Joe Biden himself. He also ensured that SDNY would not be able to expand their investigation to cover Rudy’s dalliances with Derkach.

On January 17, 2020, Jeffrey Rosen issued a memo making the US Attorney in EDNY — then Richard Donoghue, but Donoghue would swap places in July 2020 with Seth DuCharme, who was at the time overseeing the Brady tasking — a gatekeeper over all Ukraine-related investigations.

Any and all new matters relating to Ukraine shall be directed exclusivelyl to EDNY for investigation and appropriate handling. Unless otherwise directed, existing matters covered by this memorandum shall remain in the Offices and components where they currently are being handled, subject to ongoing consultation with EDNY. Any widening or expansion of existing matters shall require prior consultation with and approval by my office and EDNY.

This memo had the known effect of prohibiting SDNY from following the evidence where their existing investigation into Rudy Giuliani would naturally lead — to Rudy’s relationship with known Russian agent Andrii Derkach.

Geoffrey Berman’s book revealed that Barr also prohibited the New York FBI Field Office — which supports investigations in both SDNY and EDNY — from obtaining the 302s from Brady’s January interviews with Rudy.

There were FBI reports of those meetings, called 302s, which we wanted to review. So did Sweeney. Sweeney’s team asked the agents in Pittsburgh for a copy and was refused. Sweeney called me up, livid.

“Geoff, in all my years with the FBI I have never been refused a 302,” he said. “This is a total violation of protocol.”

This would have prevented SDNY from holding Rudy accountable for any lies he told Brady and prevented EDNY from obtaining Rudy’s first-hand account about where he obtained his dirt and what he had to trade to get it. That may explain why Rudy doesn’t show up in Derkach’s indictment.

But Barr wasn’t done with his efforts to protect Rudy from any consequences for his dalliance with a known Russian agent. In June 2020, Barr fired Geoffrey Berman in an attempt to shut down the ongoing “tentacles” of the investigation into Rudy.

The reason Rudy Giuliani was not charged for soliciting election disinformation from a known Russian agent is that the Attorney General of the United States set up a system that separated the investigation of that Russian agent from the investigation of Rudy, all while channeling whatever disinformation Rudy obtained from Derkach (or Zlochevsky) into the investigation of Joe Biden’s son.

It’s that simple. Bill Barr set up a system that protected Russian disinformation and made sure it could be laundered into the Hunter Biden investigation and also protected the President’s personal lawyer from any consequences for soliciting that Russian disinformation from a known Russian agent.

That’s why Rudy Giuliani wasn’t charged.

How does this relate to the “Hunter Biden” laptop?

The system that Barr set up absolutely has to do with the FD-1023 that remains part of both the Biden impeachment effort and the Hunter Biden criminal investigation.

There’s far less evidence that Rudy’s effort has anything to do with the “Hunter Biden” laptop.

To be sure, Lev Parnas has described that in May 2019 — the month after the laptop ultimately shared with the FBI was dropped off in Wilmington — he first learned that people were shopping a laptop with dirt on Hunter Biden, though he understood it to be one stolen in 2014, not 2019.

At the same time, the BLT Team was exploring many different angles to get information on the Bidens. In June, Giuliani asked me to accompany him to a lunch in New York with Vitaly Pruss, a Russian businessman who claimed to have deep connections to Burisma, including with Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer, and had recommended powerful people to Zlochevsky that he should put on the company’s board. During this meeting, Pruss shared a story with us: He said earlier that year, while doing business related to Burisma, he had taken Hunter Biden to meet Kazakhstan’s minister of foreign affairs, and that Biden had gotten substantially intoxicated with drugs and alcohol on this trip. While he was incapacitated, his laptop was compromised and copied by a representative of FSB (Russia’s secret police) and members of Zlochevsky’s team.

It’s important to note that certain aspects of Pruss’s story are verifiably true. This trip with Hunter Biden did happen, and his computer hard drives were taken and duplicated. But Pruss specified that while the contents of the laptop were personally embarrassing to Hunter Biden – pictures of him doing drugs and surrounded by girls — there was no evidence of financial crimes or any data on his laptop that suggested illegal activities of any other kind, which is the sort of proof that Giuliani desperately needed. Pruss never mentioned anything about the hard drives containing criminal information, only the embarrassing images. It was not until Giuliani began disseminating the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop that the idea of proof of financial and political crimes was introduced.

Parnas also described that he expected to obtain a hard drive from Hunter’s laptop on the trip to Vienna that got preempted by his arrest.

In the early part of October 2019, I got a call telling me to go to Vienna with Giuliani, where the former Chief Financial Officer of Burisma, Alexander Gorbunenko, would meet Giuliani and give us Hunter Biden’s hard drive and answer any questions we had.

The timing of the known laptop parallels Rudy’s efforts in chilling fashion.

The laptop ultimately shared with the FBI was first linked to Hunter Biden’s Apple account in October 2018, at the beginning of Rudy’s efforts to solicit dirt on Biden.

On a November 14, 2018 check, Hunter linked his Fox News pundit shrink to a Russian or Ukrainian-linked escort service he was frequenting at the time — likely the same escort service on which the investigation, now entering its sixth year, was first predicated. But that reference on a check memo line could as easily be explained by addiction or his efforts to cover up or write off such expenses.

Most of the materials on the laptop got packaged up in January and February 2019 while Hunter was again receiving treatment from his Fox News pundit shrink. At the time, Hunter may have had limited access to the Internet, much less the ability to package all that up. The laptop ultimately shared with the FBI was packaged up at a time when Hunter also had a different, older laptop in his possession that was ultimately left at the guest house of the Fox News pundit shrink.

The laptop ultimately shared with the FBI was delivered to the Delaware repair shop — by someone who had access to Hunter Biden’s phone and credit card — in April 2019.

Depending on whether you believe John Paul Mac Isaac or the FBI, JPMI’s father first reached out to the FBI about the laptop hours before or seven days after Parnas was arrested, either October 9 or October 16, 2019. The FBI ultimately obtained the laptop on December 9, 2019, days before the House voted to impeach Donald Trump, and the same month when (per Chuck Grassley) Barr’s DOJ shut down an investigation into Zlochevsky, the guy whose former CFO had been offering Rudy such a hard drive two months earlier. If you can believe JPMI (and you probably can’t), the FBI tried to boot up the laptop before obtaining any known warrant for it.

The day after the IRS obtained a warrant for the laptop on December 13, 2019, one of Barr’s aides texted him on his private phone to let him know they were sending him a laptop.

And then months after Barr jerry-rigged a system to ingest dirt from Russian spies into the investigation of Hunter Biden while protecting Rudy, in August 2020, JPMI shared a hard drive of the materials from that very same laptop with Rudy Giuliani, the same guy who had solicited dirt from Burisma in October 2019 and from a Russian agent back in December 2019.

After the NYPost first revealed the laptop, Rudy dismissed concerns that it may have come from Russian spies and even called obtaining it an “extension” of his earlier efforts to obtain such dirt, including (if you can believe Parnas) a laptop from Zlochevsky’s former CFO.

But that’s some Deep State talk, he added. “The chance that Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50.”

[snip]

Asked, for instance, whether he was concerned if the materials he obtained might in some way be linked to the hacking of Burisma late last year—an act attributed to Russian intelligence—Giuliani said: “Wouldn’t matter. What’s the difference?”

[snip]

Giuliani said he viewed his latest leak to the New York Post as an extension of his years-long efforts to work with Ukrainians to dig up dirt on the Bidens.

According to Scott Brady, Rudy never told him he had obtained the laptop, even though Rudy got it before Brady submitted his report to Donoghue in September 2020.

There are a great deal of remarkable coincidences in the parallel timelines of Barr’s complex system to obtain dirt on Hunter Biden while protecting Rudy and the timeline of the laptop first shared with the FBI and then shared with Rudy. But thus far that’s all they are: coincidences.

There’s not even proof — at least not publicly — that anyone besides Hunter Biden packaged up the laptop that ultimately got shared with the FBI. To the extent someone did, there’s more evidence implicating American rat-fuckers than Russian ones.

There are a great deal of questions about how the laptop got packaged up and the legality of JPMI’s sharing of it with anyone but the FBI. But for now, those are different questions than the questions about Rudy’s efforts to solicit dirt from a Russian agent.

Did John Durham meet these same Russian agents on behalf of Barr?

There’s one more question these charges in Ukraine raise, however: Whether John Durham met with one or several of these men Ukraine now accuses of working for Russian spies.

On the day that Treasury sanctioned Kulyk and Dubinsky, January 11, 2021, Durham sent an aide some group chats he had participated in with Barr’s top aides in September 2019, just as the impeachment panic started.

Those group chats, which Durham referred back to on the day Derkach’s associates were sanctioned, seem to have arisen out of a panic Barr had on the morning of September 24, 2019, the day the White House would release the Volodymyr Zelenskyy transcript showing that Trump asked the Ukrainian President to deal dirt on the Bidens to both his Attorney General and personal lawyer.

“Call me ASAP,” the Attorney General texted Durham that morning, followed almost twelve hours later by Durham asking to speak, possibly for a second time.

The next day, September 25, DOJ issued a statement revealing that Durham had received information from several Ukrainians who weren’t part of government.

A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election,” DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Wednesday. “While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating.”

That’s what led up to the group chats Durham would share months later.

At 3:44 PM on September 26, the day the White House released the whistleblower complaint, someone from Durham’s team — probably Durham himself — participated in a chat with 8 people.

Less than an hour later, a bunch of people — including Will Levi, Seth DuCharme (who would be in charge of Scott Brady’s “vetting” project and then take over any investigation in EDNY), and “John” — convened in a lobby bar together, waiting for Barr to arrive.

The following day, when Kurt Volker resigned, there was another group chat, the second one Durham would share months later.

Barr was still focused on CYA regarding his own involvement. In advance of Lindsey Graham going on the Sunday shows that weekend, Barr made sure to get Lindsey his statement claiming not to have spoken to the Ukrainians personally.

 

Later on October 2, Kerri Kupec apologized to Barr that “Sadie” hadn’t gotten editors to change a particular story, probably a reference to this WSJ story, which discusses Barr’s request that Trump give introductions to some foreign leaders.

On October 30, the day after the Democrats released the impeachment resolution, Kupec sent Barr the statement he had made about Ukraine back in September.

A minute later Barr sent that statement to Will Levi, with no further comment.

There’s far more about Barr’s panic as impeachment unrolled in 2019, as I laid out here.

The panic likely includes Eric Herschmann, who was then in private practice but who would join Trump’s impeachment defense and then ultimately serve as a babysitter for Trump in the White House. While at the White House, Hershmann pitched the “laptop” to the WSJ before Rudy discredited it.

But one thing is clear: In the wake of the disclosure that Trump asked Zelenskyy to work with Barr in addition to Rudy, Barr attempted to pawn off any contacts with Ukraine onto Durham — an effort that appears to have been discussed in both group chats and a face-to-face meeting in a hotel bar.

And then, over three months later, on the day that Rudy’s sources were sanctioned, two of whom were just charged with treason along with Derkach, Durham revisited those group chats.

That may explain why Barr worked so hard to ensure that Rudy never faced consequences for soliciting disinformation from a known Russian agent.

Update: Fixed timing of Parnas arrest per zscore.

Scott Brady Checked In on Investigations into All of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian Oligarchs

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In Lev Parnas’ letter to James Comer laying out how Rudy Giuliani was shopping for Hunter Biden dirt just like the laptop he eventually got, he described reaching out to three different Ukrainian Oligarchs for help getting dirt on Joe Biden.

First, Ihor Kolomoyskyi:

I was tasked in April 2019 to go to Ukraine and get in contact with Zelenskyy. Yet my attempts to contact him were consistently blocked by Ihor Kolomoyskyi, a Ukrainian oligarch who was backing Zelenskyy financially. Eventually I flew to Israel, where Kolomoyskyi was living in exile, and explained Giuliani and Trump’s stance on the matter and why we needed Zelenskyy to commence an investigation into the Bidens. Giuliani had also instructed me to tell Kolomoyskyi that he would help with his legal problems in the U.S. if he would help us with Zelenskyy.

[snip]

On May 13th, Ukrainian officials got confirmation from the U.S. that Mike Pence would not attend Zelenskyy’s inauguration, which caused turmoil inside the Ukrainian government. They didn’t want their people to realize that the U.S. were essentially pulling out of its promise to provide aid. When Kolomoyskyi found out, he returned to Ukraine, and was furious about the situation. He went to the media, calling Fruman and me grifters, stating that we were trying to force Zelenskyy to do unethical things, and threatening our lives. On his end, Giuliani then began sending bullying and threatening messages to Zelenskyy on Twitter and disparaging him on FOX News. He would question Zelenskyy’s power as president, he would insist that Zelenskyy arrest Kolomoyskyi immediately, and repeat that Zelenskyy’s inner circle was comprised of Trump’s enemies, among other such statements. [my emphasis]

Then, Dmitry Firtash:

The problem was that Firtash would prove nearly impossible to contact. He was also facing a serious extradition case to the U.S. for a number of bribery, racketeering and other charges since 2014. Solomon and Giuliani put together a package of documents regarding confidential information in Firtash’s case, and had me travel to Vienna in June 2019 to meet with Firtash, letting him know that Giuliani and our whole team were serious and that we could help him if he helped us. From June until the time of my arrest in October 2019, we had ongoing communications with Firtash.

In a meeting with the BLT Team, Solomon relayed to Giuliani that he had information that Robert Mueller’s lead prosecutor Andrew Weissman offered Firtash a deal to cancel his extradition if he would testify against Trump and Putin. Firtash didn’t want to get involved with the Biden versus Trump situation, but was open to helping us with Mueller’s investigations into Trump. Thereafter, as I became an interpreter between Firtash’s new legal team and Firtash, most of the conversations in which I participated were potentially privileged; however, I believe this information may be made available to the House Oversight Committee through a Congressional subpoena.

But the true purpose of dangling this carrot in front of Firtash was to get him to use his contacts to pressure Zlochevsky to cooperate with the BLT Team. Eventually, Giuliani proposed a $1 million contract to represent Firtash. Later, similar to the Lutsenko situation, he took it back and had Firtash sign a contract with Victoria Toensing. Giuliani, however, would continue to oversee everything and remain in charge of matters related to Firtash. Then later Giuliani and Toensing had several phone calls that I was privy to with Bill Barr, leading to an unofficial meeting in the lobby at the Trump International Hotel, and then an official meeting at the Department of Justice.  [my emphasis]

Finally, Mykola Zlochevsky:

Giuliani continued the simultaneous efforts to reach Zlochevsky through Firtash and Pruss. I specifically recall that Giuliani told me to tell Pruss to pressure Zlochevsky by saying that he could be “an enemy or a friend of Trump.” At a meeting of the BLT Team, Giuliani and Solomon came up with a series of 12-14 questions about the Bidens that we would propose to Zlochevsky. Eventually, we managed to get Zlochevsky’s answers back. But his answers gave us nothing – because there was nothing. On reading Zlochevsky’s reply, Giuliani turned red and yelled, “What is this shit? This is bullshit. Make sure nobody sees this. Bury this.”

I will remind you that Zlochevsky’s answers are in the report that the House Oversight Committee published.

Parnas described that Rudy explicitly traded legal relief for Kolomoyskyi and Firtash in the letter. He told Politico in 2020 that Zlochevsky had offered up dirt if Rudy could curry favor at DOJ for him.

[T]he Burisma founder had the allegedly derogatory information and was willing to give it to Giuliani if he could help the oligarch curry favor with the Justice Department.

Three Oligarchs, three discussions about intervening with DOJ.

That’s important background to Scott Brady’s discussion of his interactions with other US Attorneys in his role purportedly “vetting” information he didn’t (at least as he described with the FD-1023 involving Zlochevsky) vet all that thoroughly.

Brady described checking in with the Chicago US Attorney, where the Dmitry Firtash investigation is. He described discussing the PrivatBank investigation into Kolomoyskyi with the US Attorney for Cleveland; the PrivatBank investigation out of Cleveland has gone on to seize a number of properties around the US, starting in August 2020 (though the US Attorney’s Office for MDFL filed those 2020 seizures).

Q What other U.S. attorney’s offices did you have contact with?

A Northern District of Illinois, and Northern District of Ohio.

Q And did you give briefings to the Northern District of Illinois and the Northern District of Ohio?

A No. As part of our initial tasking and Mr. Donoghue’s role as kind of quarterback or air traffic controller for all Ukraine investigations, there was an investigation in the Northern District of Illinois. So I spoke with the U.S. District Attorney, talked with him about what we were tasked with doing, what I believed the scope of that to be, asked him if that intersected at all with his case and investigation. He said: No. And so we had no further interaction. The Northern District of Ohio had a — it’s public an investigation into PrivatBank and Mr. Kolomoisky for a series of activities that were occurring in the Northern District of Ohio and elsewhere. There was some interaction with PrivatBank in this case. And so I wanted to, again, do the same thing, talk with the U.S. attorney, say: Here’s what we’re looking at. Here’s where PrivatBank plays a role in this. And does this intersect with yours? And we determined that it did not. And so, didn’t have any followup communications with them

Q And did you provide any sort of report or product to the PADAG regarding this information?

A This information, meaning ND Illinois and ND Ohio?

Q Correct. Correct.

A I don’t know that it would have been written, but I certainly would have apprised him, that yes, I talked with ND Illinois, you know, no intersection. Talked with, you know, Justin in the Northern District of Ohio. We talked about PrivatBank. Theirs is separate from what we’re looking at. As I mentioned, all of our work with SDNY, EDNY and the District of Delaware was summarized in our final report and recommendations to Mr. Donoghue. I think we sent that in September.

Q And did you have an understanding whether the Northern District of Illinois or the Northern District of Ohio had grand jury investigations regarding the information you were passing along?

A They did. That’s why I spoke with them.

Q And, for the FBI, I know we’ve spoken about the FBI Pittsburgh Field Office, the Baltimore Field Office, the Washington Field Office. Were there any other field offices that your office communicated with regarding your task?

A New York. The New York Field Office, which supported both EDNY and SDNY.

As a reminder, Brady effectively quizzed both SDNY and Delaware about where their investigations into Rudy and Hunter Biden. He told Geoffrey Berman he was wrong in the former and obtained interrogatories about the Hunter Biden investigation from David Weiss’ prosecutors.

These other conversations would have given him visibility into the investigations into the Oligarch who refused to help Rudy, Kolomoyskyi, and the one, Firtash, who was offering dirt when Parnas was arrested.

Unlike the vetting he purported to do — which he reported to Richard Donoghue in September 2020 — the results of Brady’s discussions with those US Attorneys did not get committed to a written report.

As to his interaction with DC, where — if we’re to believe Chuck Grassley — a kleptocracy investigation into Zlochevksy opened in 2016 had just been shut down in December 2019, even as Republicans defended Trump by raising the grave risk of Hunter Biden’s association with Zlochevsky, Brady described interacting just with the FBI Field Office, not the US Attorney’s Office. And even there, just to obtain the 2017 FD-1023 that made one reference to Hunter Biden.

And did you have any communications with the Washington Field Office of the FBI?

A Yes.

Q And how many communications did you have with the Washington Field Office?

A They were limited. So headquarters versus Washington Field Office, our interaction with the Washington Field Office related to the underlying 1023 that predated this one that we looked at and then gave rise to our request to reinterview the CHS in the June 2020 1023.

Q And so did the underlying 1023, did that come from the Washington Field Office? Was that why there was interaction?

A Yes.

Q Who did you interact with at the WFO?

A I don’t remember. It would have been my AUSAs, I think, that were interacting with AUSAs and Pittsburgh special agents that were interacting with special agents from WFO.

Q Were there any other interactions that occurred between your office and the WFO?

A Not that I recall.

You can be an enemy or a friend of Donald Trump, Parnas claims Rudy told Zlochevsky.

And less than a month after Rudy obtained dirt from an alleged Russian agent, Andrii Derkach, the guy representing the President seemed to be able to deliver on such promises.

Update: This may be an entirely minor point, or maybe not. In John Paul Mac Isaac’s book, he describes a moment where he prints out a bunch of documents while waiting for the FBI to arrive the first time. Among the things he claims to print out are emails mention Kolomoyskyi. There are only two, at least transliterated that way. One, a polling report. And the other a discussion about how to answer questions from James Risen. Here’s how Vadym responded:

Do I get it right that they are asking wether Igor Kolomoyskyi ever started and then sold a company to NZ?
This is a well spread absurdity! that keep being repeated.
We may use this opportunity to stay firmly that that person does not have and never had any relationship to Buri[s]ma.
Similarly, he suggests Hunter was in email threads with Zlochevsky — who doesn’t show up on these.