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45 Days Plus 45 Days: Is Trump Violating His Own Election Tampering Executive Order?

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As I noted last week, along with all the issues on which Trump’s top spooks clearly disagreed with him at last week’s Worldwide Threat Assessment hearing, there was also a remarkable exchange regarding a report mandated by a Trump Executive Order on election interference last year. Effectively, it became clear that Director of National Intelligence doesn’t want to brief the Intelligence Committee on whether Russia interfered with last year’s election.

Martin Heinrich: Director Coats, I want to come back to you for a moment. Your office issued a statement recently announcing that you had submitted the intelligence community’s report assessing the threats to the 2018 mid-term elections to the President and to appropriate Executive Agencies. Our committee has not seen this report. And despite committee requests following the election that the ODNI brief the committee on any identified threats, it took ODNI two months to get a simple oral briefing and no written assessment has yet been provided. Can you explain to me why we haven’t been kept more fully and currently informed about those Russian activities in the 2018–

Richard Burr: Before you respond, let me just acknowledge to the members that the Vice Chairman and I have both been briefed on the report and it’s my understanding that the report at some point will be available.

Dan Coats: The process that we’re going through are two 45 day periods, one for the IC to assess whether there was anything that resulted in a change of the vote or anything with machines, uh, what the influence efforts were and so forth. So we collected all of that, and the second 45 days — which we then provided to the Chairman and Vice Chairman. And the second 45 days is with DHS looking, and DOJ, looking at whether there’s information enough there to take — to determine what kind of response they might take. We’re waiting for that final information to come in.

Heinrich: So the rest of us can look forward — so the rest of us can then look forward to reading the report?

Coats: I think we will be informing the Chairman and the Vice Chairman of that, of their decisions.

Heinrich: That’s not what I asked. Will the rest of the Committee have access to that report, Mr. Chairman?

[pause]

Heinrich: Chairman Burr?

Burr; Well, let me say to members we’re sort of in unchartered ground. But I make the same commitment I always do, that anything that the Vice Chairman and myself are exposed to, we’ll make every request to open the aperture so that all members will be able to read I think it’s vitally important, especially on this one, we’re not to a point where we’ve been denied or we’re not to a point that negotiations need to start. So it’s my hope that, once the final 45-day window is up that is a report that will be made available, probably to members only.

The reporting requirements come from this language:

Section 1. (a) Not later than 45 days after the conclusion of a United States election, the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate executive departments and agencies (agencies), shall conduct an assessment of any information indicating that a foreign government, or any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government, has acted with the intent or purpose of interfering in that election. The assessment shall identify, to the maximum extent ascertainable, the nature of any foreign interference and any methods employed to execute it, the persons involved, and the foreign government or governments that authorized, directed, sponsored, or supported it. The Director of National Intelligence shall deliver this assessment and appropriate supporting information to the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security.

(b) Within 45 days of receiving the assessment and information described in section 1(a) of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate agencies and, as appropriate, State and local officials, shall deliver to the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of Defense a report evaluating, with respect to the United States election that is the subject of the assessment described in section 1(a):

(i) the extent to which any foreign interference that targeted election infrastructure materially affected the security or integrity of that infrastructure, the tabulation of votes, or the timely transmission of election results; and

(ii) if any foreign interference involved activities targeting the infrastructure of, or pertaining to, a political organization, campaign, or candidate, the extent to which such activities materially affected the security or integrity of that infrastructure, including by unauthorized access to, disclosure or threatened disclosure of, or alteration or falsification of, information or data.

The report shall identify any material issues of fact with respect to these matters that the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security are unable to evaluate or reach agreement on at the time the report is submitted. The report shall also include updates and recommendations, when appropriate, regarding remedial actions to be taken by the United States Government, other than the sanctions described in sections 2 and 3 of this order.

And if DOJ and Homeland Security do find someone tampered with the country, Trump’s own Executive Order requires harsh sanctions on the perpetrators.

Sec. 2. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any foreign person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security:

(i) to have directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in a United States election;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any activity described in subsection (a)(i) of this section or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property or interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

The Executive Order was a transparent attempt to stave off similar language in the Intelligence Authorization last year.

Today is — by my count — the end of that second 45 day period (or 90 days total from the end of the election). So Trump’s Administration should be deciding today whether — just as one example — the Russian attempt to hack Claire McCaskill was more successful than she apparently knew and whether, according to his own Executive Order, Trump now has to impose sanctions on Russia for trying.

Last week’s report actually envisioned Russia attempting to manipulate data, which might explain the sensitivity around this report.

Russia’s social media efforts will continue to focus on aggravating social and racial tensions, undermining trust in authorities, and criticizing perceived anti-Russia politicians. Moscow may employ additional influence toolkits—such as spreading disinformation, conducting hack-and-leak operations, or manipulating data—in a more targeted fashion to influence US policy, actions, and elections.

Alternately, Trump’s Administration knows the Russians tried to help him again in the mid-term elections but doesn’t want to do what they’ve promised to do in response.

Update: Big Dick Toilet Salesman Matt Whitaker and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen say that Trump doesn’t have to sanction Russia for hacking Claire McCaskill and others last year because the report they won’t even share with the Senate Intelligence Committee says Russia’s tampering had no impact on the election.

Although the specific conclusions within the joint report must remain classified, the Departments have concluded there is no evidence to date that any identified activities of a foreign government or foreign agent had a material impact on the integrity or security of election infrastructure or political/campaign infrastructure used in the 2018 midterm elections for the United States Congress. This finding was informed by a report prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) pursuant to the same Executive Order and is consistent with what was indicated by the U.S. government after the 2018 elections.

While the report remains classified, its findings will help drive future efforts to protect election and political/campaign infrastructure from foreign interference.

The Disinformation Campaign Targeting Mueller and the Delayed Briefing to SSCI on Russian Election Interference

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A lot of people are reporting and misreporting details from this Mueller filing revealing that it had been the target of disinformation efforts starting in October.

1000 non-sensitive files leaked along with the file structure Mueller provided it with

To substantiate an argument that Concord Management should not be able to share with Yevgeniy Prigozhin the sensitive discovery that the government has shared with their trollish lawyers, Mueller revealed that on October 22, someone posted 1000 files turned over in discovery along with a bunch of other crap, partially nested within the file structure of the files turned over in discovery.

On October 22, 2018, the newly created Twitter account @HackingRedstone published the following tweet: “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!”1 The tweet also included a link to a webpage located on an online file-sharing portal. This webpage contained file folders with names and folder structures that are unique to the names and structures of materials (including tracking numbers assigned by the Special Counsel’s Office) produced by the government in discovery.2 The FBI’s initial review of the over 300,000 files from the website has found that the unique “hashtag” values of over 1,000 files on the website matched the hashtag values of files produced in discovery.3 Furthermore, the FBI’s ongoing review has found no evidence that U.S. government servers, including servers used by the Special Counsel’s Office, fell victim to any computer intrusion involving the discovery files.

1 On that same date, a reporter contacted the Special Counsel’s Office to advise that the reporter had received a direct message on Twitter from an individual who stated that they had received discovery material by hacking into a Russian legal company that had obtained discovery material from Reed Smith. The individual further stated that he or she was able to view and download the files from the Russian legal company’s database through a remote server.

2 For example, the file-sharing website contains a folder labeled “001-W773.” Within that folder was a folder labeled “Yahoo.” Within that folder was a folder labeled “return.” Within the “return” folder were several folders with the names of email addresses. In discovery in this case, the government produced a zip file named “Yahoo 773.” Within that zip file were search warrant returns for Yahoo email accounts. The names of the email accounts contained in that zip file were identical to the names of the email address folders within the “return” subfolder on the webpage. The webpage contained numerous other examples of similarities between the structure of the discovery and the names and structures of the file folders on the webpage. The file names and structure of the material produced by the government in discovery are not a matter of public record. At the same time, some folders contained within the Redstone Hacking release have naming conventions that do not appear in the government’s discovery production but appear to have been applied in the course of uploading the government’s production. For example, the “001- W773” folder appears within a folder labeled “REL001,” which is not a folder found within the government’s production. The naming convention of folder “REL001” suggests that the contents of the folder came from a production managed on Relativity, a software platform for managing document review. Neither the Special Counsel’s Office nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office used Relativity to produce discovery in this case. [my emphasis]

It sounds like Mueller’s office found out about it when being contacted by the journalist who had been alerted to the content on Twitter.

But before Mueller asked Concord’s trollish lawyers about it, the defense attorneys — citing media contacts they themselves had received — contacted prosecutors to offer a bullshit excuse about where the files came from.

On October 23, 2018, the day after the tweet quoted above, defense counsel contacted the government to advise that defense counsel had received media inquiries from journalists claiming they had been offered “hacked discovery materials from our case.” Defense counsel advised that the vendor hired by the defense reported no unauthorized access to the non-sensitive discovery. Defense counsel concluded, “I think it is a scam peddling the stuff that was hacked and dumped many years ago by Shaltai Boltai,” referencing a purported hack of Concord’s computer systems that occurred in approximately 2014. That hypothesis is not consistent with the fact that actual discovery materials from this case existed on the site, and that many of the file names and file structures on the webpage reflected file names and file structures from the discovery production in this case.

Without any hint of accusation against the defense attorneys (though this motion is accompanied by an ex parte one, so who knows if they offered further explanation there), Mueller notes any sharing of this information for disinformation purposes would violate the protective order in the case.

As stated previously, these facts establish a use of the non-sensitive discovery in this case in a manner inconsistent with the terms of the protective order. The order states that discovery may be used by defense counsel “solely in connection with the defense of this criminal case, and for no other purpose, and in connection with no other proceeding, without further order of this Court,” Dkt. No. 42-1, ¶ 1, and that “authorized persons shall not copy or reproduce the materials except in order to provide copies of the materials for use in connection with this case by defense counsel and authorized persons,” id. ¶ 3. The use of the file names and file structure of the discovery to create a webpage intended to discredit the investigation in this case described above shows that the discovery was reproduced for a purpose other than the defense of the case.

Update: Thursday evening, Mueller submitted another version of this clarifying that the @HackingRedstone tweets alerting journalists to the document dump were DMs, and so not public (or visible to the defense). The first public tweet publicizing the dump came on October 30, so even closer to the election.

Shortly after the government filed, defense counsel drew the government’s attention to the following sentence, which appears on page nine of the filing: “On October 22, 2018, the newly created Twitter account @HackingRedstone published the following tweet: ‘We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!’” Defense counsel pointed out that this sentence could be read to suggest that the Twitter account broadcast a publicly-available “tweet” on October 22. In fact, the Twitter account @HackingRedstone began sending multiple private direct messages to members of the media promoting a link to the online file-sharing webpage using Twitter on October 22. The content of those direct messages was consistent with, but more expansive than, the quoted tweet to the general public, which was issued on October 30. By separate filing, the government will move to file under seal the text of the direct messages. The online file sharing webpage was publicly accessible at least starting on October 22.

I’m not sure it makes the defense response any more or less suspect. But it does tie the disinformation even more closely with the election.

The Mueller disinformation was part of a month-long election season campaign

This thread, from one of the journalists who was offered the information, put it all in context back on November 7, the day after the election.

The thread shows how the release of the Mueller-related files was part of a month-long effort to seed a claim that the Internet Research Agency had succeeded in affecting the election.

Update: This story provides more background.

Other signs of the ongoing investigation into Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s trolls

Given how the Mueller disinformation functioned as part of that month-long, election oriented campaign, I’m more interested in this passage from the Mueller investigation than that the investigation had been targeted. Mueller argues that they shouldn’t have to share the sensitive discovery with Yevgeniy Prigozhin because the sensitive discovery mentions uncharged individuals who are still trying to fuck with our elections.

First, the sensitive discovery identifies uncharged individuals and entities that the government believes are continuing to engage in operations that interfere with lawful U.S. government functions like those activities charged in the indictment.

To be sure, we knew the investigation into Prigozhin’s trolls was ongoing. On October 19, just days before these files got dropped, DOJ unsealed an EDVA complaint, which had been filed under seal on September 28, against Prigozhin’s accountant, Alekseevna Khusyaynova. Along with showing Prigozhin’s trolls responding to the original Internet Research Agency indictment last February, it showed IRA’s ongoing troll efforts through at least June of last year.

Then, in December, Concord insinuated that Mueller prosecutor Rush Atkinson had obtained information via the firewall counsel and taken an investigative step on that information back on August 30.

On August 23, 2018, in connection with a request (“Concord’s Request”) made pursuant to the Protective Order entered by the Court, Dkt. No. 42-1, Concord provided confidential information to Firewall Counsel. The Court was made aware of the nature of this information in the sealed portion of Concord’s Motion for Leave to Respond to the Government’s Supplemental Briefing Relating to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss the Indictment, filed on October 22, 2018. Dkt. No. 70-4 (Concord’s “Motion for Leave”). Seven days after Concord’s Request, on August 30, 2018, Assistant Special Counsel L. Rush Atkinson took investigative action on the exact same information Concord provided to Firewall Counsel. Undersigned counsel learned about this on October 4, 2018, based on discovery provided by the Special Counsel’s Office. Immediately upon identifying this remarkable coincidence, on October 5, 2018, undersigned counsel requested an explanation from the Special Counsel’s Office, copying Firewall Counsel on the e-mail.

[snip]

Having received no further explanation or information from the government, undersigned counsel raised this issue with the Court in a filing made on October 22, 2018 in connection with the then-pending Motion to Dismiss. In response to questions from the Court, Firewall Counsel denied having any communication with the Special Counsel’s Office.

This was a bid to obtain live grand jury investigative information, one that failed earlier this month after Mueller explained under seal how his prosecutors had obtained this information and Dabney Friedrich denied the request.

What this filing, in conjunction with Josh Russell’s explanatory Twitter thread, reveals is that the Mueller disinformation effort was part of a disinformation campaign targeted at the election.

Dan Coats doesn’t want to share the report on Russian election tampering with SSCI

And I find that interesting because of a disturbing exchange in a very disturbing Global Threats hearing the other day. After getting both Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and FBI Director Christopher Wray to offer excuses for White House decisions to given security risks like Jared Kushner security clearance, Martin Heinrich then asked Coats why ODNI had not shared the report on election tampering even with the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Heinrich: Director Coats, I want to come back to you for a moment. Your office issued a statement recently announcing that you had submitted the intelligence community’s report assessing the threats to the 2018 mid-term elections to the President and to appropriate Executive Agencies. Our committee has not seen this report. And despite committee requests following the election that the ODNI brief the committee on any identified threats, it took ODNI two months to get a simple oral briefing and no written assessment has yet been provided. Can you explain to me why we haven’t been kept more fully and currently informed about those Russian activities in the 2018–

Chairman Richard Burr interrupts to say that, in fact, he and Vice Chair Mark Warner have seen the report.

Burr: Before you respond, let me just acknowledge to the members that the Vice Chairman and I have both been briefed on the report and it’s my understanding that the report at some point will be available.

Coats then gives a lame excuse about the deadlines, 45 days, then 45 days.

Coats: The process that we’re going through are two 45 day periods, one for the IC to assess whether there was anything that resulted in a change of the vote or anything with machines, uh, what the influence efforts were and so forth. So we collected all of that, and the second 45 days — which we then provided to the Chairman and Vice Chairman. And the second 45 days is with DHS looking, and DOJ, looking at whether there’s information enough there to take — to determine what kind of response they might take. We’re waiting for that final information to come in.

After Coats dodges his question about sharing the report with the Committee, Heinrich then turns to Burr to figure out when they’re going to get the information. Burr at least hints that the Executive might try to withhold this report, but it hasn’t gotten to that yet.

Heinrich: So the rest of us can look forward — so the rest of us can then look forward to reading the report?

Coats: I think we will be informing the Chairman and the Vice Chairman of that, of their decisions.

Heinrich: That’s not what I asked. Will the rest of the Committee have access to that report, Mr. Chairman?

[pause]

Heinrich: Chairman Burr?

Burr; Well, let me say to members we’re sort of in unchartered ground. But I make the same commitment I always do, that anything that the Vice Chairman and myself are exposed to, we’ll make every request to open the aperture so that all members will be able to read I think it’s vitally important, especially on this one, we’re not to a point where we’ve been denied or we’re not to a point that negotiations need to start. So it’s my hope that, once the final 45-day window is up that is a report that will be made available, probably to members only.

Coming as it did in a hearing where it became clear that Trump’s spooks are helpless in keeping Trump from pursuing policies that damage the country, this exchange got very little attention. But it should!

The Executive Branch by law has to report certain things to the Intelligence Committees. This report was mandated by Executive Order under threat of legislation mandating it.

And while Coats’ comment about DOJ, “looking at whether there’s information enough there to take — to determine what kind of response they might take,” suggests part of the sensitivity about this report stems from a delay to provide DOJ time to decide whether they’ll take prosecutorial action against what they saw in the election, the suggestion that only members of the committee (not staffers and not other members of Congress) will ever get the final report, as well as the suggestion that Coats might even fight that, put this report on a level of sensitivity that matches covert actions, the most sensitive information that get shared with Congress.

Maybe the Russians did have an effect on the election?

In any case, going back to the Mueller disinformation effort, that feels like very familiar dick-wagging, an effort to make key entities in the US feel vulnerable to Russian compromise. Mueller sounds pretty sure it was not a successful compromise (that is, the data came from Concord’s lawyers, not Mueller).

But if the disinformation was part an effort to boast that Putin’s allies had successfully tampered with the vote — particularly if Russia really succeeded in doing so — it might explain why this report is being treated with the sensitivity of the torture or illegal spying program.

Update: I’ve corrected this to note that in the end the Intelligence Authorization did not mandate this report, as was originally intended; Trump staved that requirement off with an Executive Order. Still, that still makes this look like an attempt to avoid admitting to Congress that your buddy Putin continues to tamper in US elections.

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

If SSCI Was Referring All This Perjury to Mueller about GRU Funding Trump, Why Did Richard Burr Claim It Had Found No “Collusion”?

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In the wake of the Michael Cohen plea, Richard Burr made some comments about his committee’s relationship with the Special Counsel. He referred to multiple referrals to Mueller, even using the phrase “a lot.”

“It’s a loud message to everybody that’s interviewed by our committee. … If you lie to us, we’re going to go after you,” Mr. Burr said during a candid question-and-answer session at the annual Texas National Security Forum.

[snip]

[T]he committee has on more than one occasion recommended prosecutions based on their interviews.

“We continually go back and look at the testimony we’ve been given, and we weigh it against any new information that might be out there that either a reporter has been able to [get] in a comment from an individual,” he said. “We have shared, when permission has been given by those we interview, interview notes with the Department of Justice and specifically with the special prosecutor.”

“We have made referrals to the special prosecutor for prosecution,” he continued. “In a lot of cases, those might be tied to lying to us.”

While it’s not clear how much SSCI confirmed about Cohen’s lies (Cohen testified on October 25, 2017, and Felix Sater testified on April 4, 2018), given Sater’s public comments up to and including BuzzFeed’s big story, At a minimum (per Sater’s description of his testimony to BuzzFeed, SSCI knew that Cohen had lied about how many times he spoke to Trump about the deal.

The Moscow Project was discussed multiple times within the Company and did not end in January 2016. Instead, as late as approximately June 2016 , COHEN and Individual 2 discussed efforts to obtain Russian governmental approval for the Moscow Project. COHEN discussed the status and progress of the Moscow Project with Individual 1 on more than the three occasions COHEN claimed to the Committee, and he briefed family members of Individual 1 within the Company about the project .

And SSCI almost certainly learned that Cohen was working on a trip to Russia up to the time when news broke that the Russians had hacked the DNC.

COHEN agreed to travel to Russia in connection with the Moscow Project and took steps in contemplation of Individual l ‘ s possible travel to Russia. COHEN and Individual 2 discussed on multiple occasions traveling to Russia to pursue the Moscow Project. COHEN asked Individual 1 about the possibility of Individual 1 traveling to Russia in connection with the Moscow Project, and asked a senior campaign official about potential business travel to Russia.

On or about May 4 , 2016 , Individual 2 wrote to COHEN, “I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen the question is before or after iii. the convention. Obviously the pre – meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but the 2 big guys where [sic] the question. I said I would confirm and revert.” COHEN responded, “My trip before Cleveland. [Individual l] once he becomes the nominee after the convention. ”

On or about May 5, 2016, Individual 2 followed up with COHEN and wrote, “[Russian Official l] would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia’s Davos it’s June 16- 19. He wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either [the President of Russia] or [the Prime Minister of Russia], as they are not sure if 1 or both will be there. He said anything you want to discuss including dates and subjects are on the table to discuss. ”

On or about May 6, 2016, Individual 2 asked COHEN to confirm those dates would work for him to travel. COHEN wrote back, “Works for me.”

From on or about June 9 to June 14, 2016, Individual 2 sent numerous messages to COHEN about the travel, including forms for COHEN to complete. However, on or about June 14, 2016, COHEN met Individual 2 in the lobby of the Company’s headquarters to inform Individual 2 he would not be traveling at that timeT.

SSCI would have known this in April (perhaps not coincidentally, five days before the raid on Cohen by SDNY; remember that Paul Manafort was raided the night after testifying to SSCI).

In addition to Cohen, we also know SSCI referred Sam Patten to Mueller (though SSCI seems to have referred Patten for something other than the lies laid out in his criminal information). Patten lied about funneling oligarch money into Trump’s inauguration.

PATTEN misled the SSCI in that he intentionally did not provide SSCI certain documents that could lead to revelation of him causing and concealing the foreign purchase of the PIC tickets, described about, and gave false and misleading testimony to avoid disclosing that he had caused and concealed foreign money to be paid to the PIC. In addition, PATTEN provided misleading testimony about his representation of foreign principals in the United States, so as to conceal his violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Finally, after the interview, PATTEN deleted documents pertinent to his relationships with the above-described foreign principals.

So in other words, by April, SSCI knew, as part of their investigation into whether Trump conspired with the GRU officers who hacked and leaked Hillary’s email, that Trump was in bed with GRU money on both the front end of the election — in attempting to set up this Trump Tower deal — and the back end — in accepting laundered money from GRU-connected individuals.

And yet two times during election season, first in August and then again in September, Richard Burr claimed that his committee had found “no hard evidence of collusion.” In response to both, I suggested that it looked like the committee wasn’t pursuing what evidence it had learned of. Now Burr is openly talking about referring “a lot” of people to Mueller’s office — and the two we know he referred, together, may not be a smoking gun but certainly would set off my itchy smoke alarm.

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

Who Told Carter Page that James Wolfe Was the Source of the FISA Leak?

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There’s a detail in the Statement of the Offense filed in conjunction with the guilty plea former Senate Intelligence Committee Director of Security James Wolfe worth further attention.

As I had noted when Wolfe was indicted, while the indictment catches Wolfe red-handed in lies about unclassified leaks Wolfe gave to Ali Watkins and some NBC reporters, it seems more interested in, and therefore probably arose out of, Wolfe’s ties with the reporters on the WaPo story first reporting that Carter Page had been targeted with a FISA order. Rather than having to prove that Wolfe leaked classified FISA information to a journalist with better operational security than the others, the government chose instead to charge him for the more easily proved case that he lied to the FBI.

The statement of offense confirms that the investigation arose in response to the FISA story.

On April 11, 2017, classified national security information concerning the existence and predication of FBI surveillance of an individual (“MALE-1”) pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was published in an article authored by three reporters, including REPORTER #1.

In April 2017, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of this classified information to the news media.

And whereas the indictment had mostly discussed Wolfe’s conversations with the WaPo reporter obliquely, the statement of the offense describes how Wolfe followed up by email after meeting the reporter on December 9, 2015, and how the reporter then checked in the day before the election.

What’s more interesting, however, are the details about the aftermath of the story, when Carter Page wrote to the journalist in question and BCCed Wolfe.

On May 8, 2017, MALE-1 emailed REPORTER #1 complaining about REPORTER #1’s reporting of him (MALE-1). According to the metadata recovered during the search of Wolfe’s email, Wolfe was blind-copied on that email by MALE-1.

The day before Page sent that email, he had written a letter to Richard Burr and Mark Warner, complaining about the WaPo story and Ali Watkins’ reporting that Page was the anonymous person named in the  case. It seems that Page either learned or discovered that Wolfe might be the person who leaked the FISA news.

And as the Statement lays out, it seems that Wolfe and the journalist in question exchanged an encrypted file.

On May 11, 2017, at 11:13 a.m., REPORTER #1 emailed Wolfe, “What’s your cell?” The signature block of REPORTER #1’s email contained the reporter’s name, affiliation with a national news outlet, and telephone numbers.

On May 11, 2017, at 5:16 p.m., REPORTER #1 sent a second email to Wolfe, writing “Hi! When can we get coffee?” This time, the signature block of the second email included a 44-character long code made up of letters and numbers that appears to be a “PGP” fingerprint. If used, this fingerprint would have permitted Wolfe to send REPORTER #1 an email using an application that would encrypt the contents of the message, but not the subject line or the name of the sender.

Between the December 9, 2015, November 7, 2016, and two May 11, 2017 emails, the Statement lays out four email exchanges between Wolfe and this journalist. But the indictment says there was a fifth, possibly in June 2017.

For example, between in or around December 2015 and in or around June 2017, WOLFE and REPORTER #1 communicated at least five times using his SSCI email account.

In any case, that Page BCCed Wolfe suggests that he suspected Wolfe was the source, and perhaps said as much in his email to the reporter (thus explaining the follow-up between them).

As it is this Statement (and the indictment of Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards for sharing FinCen data with Jason Leopold yesterday, but I’ll return to that) may suggest that the government obtained the reporter’s emails, but then parallel constructed doing so by collecting Wolfe’s. But it also suggests that Page knew precisely who leaked the FISA information.

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

Manafort Turns State’s Evidence: “It’s Time for Some Game Theory”

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It took a day for the President to complain after his former campaign manager, having spent the week proffering up testimony, flipped on Friday. When he did, Trump tied the Mueller investigation to polls (and upcoming midterm elections) for the first time in a Tweet.

Of course, his freebie legal PR hack, Rudy Giuliani has been tying midterms to the investigation for some time in his insistence that no indictments can come between now and then. Rudy should be happy, then, that Paul Manfort’s plea avoids a four week trial for Trump’s campaign manager right in the middle of election season.

But he’s not.

I mean, at first, Rudy put a brave face on things Friday, claiming,

Once again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign. The reason: the President did nothing wrong and Paul Manafort will tell the truth.

But almost immediately after making that statement, Rudy took out the part about Manafort telling the truth.

Roger Stone, who’s shrewder than Rudy, immediately suggested anything Manafort may be saying (or may already have said) implicating him would be a lie.

I am uncertain of the details of Paul’s plea deal but certain it has no bearing on me since neither Paul Manafort or anyone else can testify truthfully that I am involved in Russian collusion, WikiLeaks collaboration or any other illegal act pertaining to the 2016 election.

Though of course, Stone’s seeming awareness that Mueller might pursue Manafort testimony about Stone reveals his brave comment for the lie it is.

I’m more interested, however, in Rudy’s (and John Dowd’s) apparent desperation to stave off a mass prisoner’s dilemma.

Manafort first proffered testimony Monday, September 10. Rudy was still boasting about how much he knew about Manafort’s thinking for a Thursday Politico story — though he based that off conversations before and after the EDVA trial, which had ended three weeks earlier.

Giuliani also confirmed that Trump’s lawyers and Manafort’s have been in regular contact and that they are part of a joint defense agreement that allows confidential information sharing.

“All during the investigation we have an open communication with them,” he said. “Defense lawyers talk to each other all the time, where, as long as our clients authorize it, therefore we have a better idea of what’s going to happen. That’s very common.”

Giuliani confirmed he spoke with Manafort’s lead defense lawyer Kevin Downing shortly before and after the verdicts were returned in the Virginia trial, but the former mayor wouldn’t say what he discusses with the Manafort team. “It’d all be attorney-client privilege, not just from our point of view but from theirs,” he said.

Immediately after Manafort’s cooperation was announced, both NPR and the same Politico team that had been quoting Rudy’s bravura reported that someone close to Manafort said there would be no cooperation against the President. In later stories, both quote Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Rudy claiming Manafort’s cooperation has nothing to do with the President.

Despite Manafort’s having led the campaign, the White House has sought to distance itself from him and his case.

“This had absolutely nothing to do with the president or his victorious 2016 presidential campaign,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday. “It is totally unrelated.”

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani echoed that idea, adding that “the president did nothing wrong.”

But the NPR version includes this correction.

Editor’s note: An early version of this story published before all the court documents in the case were available contained a characterization from a person familiar with the case that said Manafort’s cooperation would be limited. When charging documents and other materials appeared, they did not support that and the characterization was removed.

And the Politico noted how quickly Rudy backed off his claim that Manafort would testify truthfully.

Of course, anyone who has read the plea agreement closely — up to and including the government’s ability to declare Manafort in breach of the agreement with only a good faith rather than preponderance of the evidence standard —

— and it’s clear that if Mueller’s team wants Manafort to testify about Trump, he will.

Meanwhile, Rudy is yelling on Twitter that the morning shows aren’t taking his word about what Manafort is testifying about over what the clear text of the plea agreement suggests.

I’m more interested still that John Dowd emailed the lawyers for the (reportedly 37, though the number is likely smaller now) other witnesses in the Joint Defense Agreement, claiming outlandishly that Manafort has no evidence on Trump.

The President’s lawyers — the one who currently “works” for him for “free” and the one who allegedly doesn’t work for him anymore but recently got lionized in Woodward’s book as his main source about the Mueller investigation, and in that role was shown to be either an idiot or a fantasist, that the “free” one cites to claim that Woodward exonerates the President — are working very hard to convince others that Manafort’s plea deal doesn’t mean the calculation both other witnesses and the Republican party have been making has to change.

They’re trying to stave off an awful game of prisoner’s dilemma.

Consider if you’re one of the other 37 (which might be down to 34 given known cooperators, or maybe even fewer given how uncertain Rudy seems to be about Don McGahn’s third session of testimony) members of the Joint Defense Agreement, especially if you’re one who has already testified before the grand jury about matters that Manafort (and Gates) might be able to refute. So long as there’s no chance Trump will be touched, you’re probably still safe, as you can count on Trump rewarding those who maintain the omertà or at the very least working to kill the Mueller inquiry shortly after the election.

But if you have doubts about that — or concerns that other witnesses might have doubts about that — you still have an opportunity to recall the things you claimed you could not recall a year ago. Depending on how central your testimony is, you might even be able to slip in and fix your testimony unnoticed.

So each of 37 (or maybe just 30) people are considering whether they have to recalculate their decisions about whether to remain loyal to the President or take care of themselves.

Meanwhile, there’s the Republican party. Admittedly, the Republicans are unlikely to do anything until they rush through Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, even if doing so without first inquiring about the allegation that he assaulted a girl when he was in high school will damage their electoral prospects with women in November.

But once they’ve got Kavanaugh confirmed (assuming no big news breaks in the Mueller investigation before that), then the calculation may change. Right now, a lot of Republicans believe they have to stick with Trump through the election, if only to ensure the GOP base turns out. But if Trump’s poll numbers continue to sink — and as the numbers of those who strongly disapprove of Trump continue to grow — Republicans in certain kinds of districts (especially suburbs) will have an incentive to distance themselves from the President.

All that’s a straight calculation based on whether Trump will help or hurt more, come November. But the Republican party, from Trump’s endless repetition of “no collusion;” to Devin Nunes’ naked attempt to obstruct the Mueller investigation; to Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham’s referral of Christopher Steele rather than Don Jr for perjury charges; to Mark Meadows’ latest attempts to turn Lisa Page and Peter Strzok’s attempts to chase down someone leaking about Carter Page into a suggestion they themselves leaked; to Richard Burr’s cynical boasts that his committee hasn’t found stuff they wouldn’t chase down if they had been told of it, has invested everything on a gamble that Trump was telling the truth (or, more cynically, that he could stave off discovery of any conspiracy he entered into with Russia).

Republicans have invested a whole lot into attempting to give the President a clean bill of health.

Meanwhile, his campaign manager — a guy many of them have worked with — is presumably now doing the opposite, telling Mueller precisely what the Republicans have been working so hard to suppress for 18 months.

At some point, the ones who have been playing along even while admitting that the President probably did conspire with Russia (I know of some who believe that’s likely), will make their move.

If the GOP were less dysfunctional, they’d do it sooner rather than later, cut their losses with Trump to try to salvage the Pence presidency (whom they like far more anyway). But for now, that calculation of whether or not to do so is likely happening in private.

I’m in no way promising Manafort’s plea deal will set off two parallel floods of rats fleeing the Trump JDA or his presidency generally. These are Republicans, after all, and I’m sure they still would prefer obstructing the whole thing away.

I don’t think a mass abandonment of Trump is going to happen anytime soon.

But Trump’s lawyers do seem worried that could happen.

Trump needs his fellow Republicans to believe that Paul Manafort isn’t providing evidence that incriminates him. Because if they start to believe that, their calculations behind support for him may change, and change quickly.

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

Richard Burr Pretends He Has a Basis to Claim SSCI Has [Searched for and] Not Found Any Evidence of “Collusion”

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Richard Burr is teeing up Tweet-bait again by going on Fox News and suggesting his committee has not found “hard evidence of collusion.”

In the interview, Burr uses some of the same squishy language he used last month with the AP, which the Fox dude raised to explain why he was asking him about the investigation when Burr’s Fox appearance was designed to boast about how well prepared the Trump Administration was for Hurricane Florence.

Fox: Sir, can you say today that there has been no evidence — no factual evidence — of collusion between the Trump campaign and any elements of the Russian government during the election of 2016?

Burr: I can say, as it relates to the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, that we have no hard evidence of collusion. Now, we’re not over, and that leaves the opportunity that we might find something that we don’t have today. But the fact is if this is all about collusion — and our investigation encompasses more than collusion — that issue has not been finalized at all.

Fox: If that is your answer today, what is next, or how does this end, perhaps that’s the better way to ask that question.

Burr: Well, Bill, if you’d have asked me when we started this 19 months ago, if it would be over today, I would have said yes, but we found a lot of things that we didn’t anticipate that we would find, we’ve had to chase a lot of threads that needed to be chased. I hope to complete this at some point before the end of the year. It will take probably three to six months to write the final report. But we’ve got, we’ve been charged with making a determination as to what happened, and conveying that with facts to the American people, to let them make their mind up.

Fox: Okay, can you give us an idea of what the conclusion could be then Sir, if it’s not collusion? What is it?

Burr: I can’t really tell you, and maybe we find something in the next several interviews that are evidence of collusion, I don’t think so, with what we’ve seen, but clearly we were asked to look at Russian meddling. Today, once again, this Administration said we’re not going to let Russia meddle in our elections, we’re going to sanction people, they gave 45 days until after the election to report to DHS any interference, and DHS would seek sanctions against them. So the United States government, the whole of government’s taking a very tough stand on Russia. [my emphasis]

As I noted regarding the AP story last month, this statement also stops well short of claiming the Senate Intelligence Committee has looked for and not found evidence of Trump’s campaign conspiring with Russia.

It’s a squishy statement that seems designed — particularly given Burr’s newfound lassitude about ending the inquiry and his stated worries of being accused of missing something in the future — to permit him to sustain a claim he hasn’t seen any conspiracy, at least through the election, without aggressively investigating for one.

Burr is careful to make clear that he is speaking only about his committee, and the question, which seems coached, asked only about Trump’s campaign “colluding” with “elements of the Russian government.” Heck, Don Jr and Aras Agalarov employee Ike Kaveladze could have signed a pact in blood on June 10, 2016, the day after their Trump Tower meeting, and Burr’s statement would still be true, because Agalarov and his employees are not Russian officials. And both last month and today, Burr specifies that he’s talking about “factual” or “hard” evidence.

As it is, the public record of what SSCI has been focused on (and the witnesses whose dodgy comments it hasn’t tried to nail down) makes it clear it’s not looking all that aggressively for evidence of a conspiracy with Russia.

But Burr might feel comfortable making this repeated claim even if his investigators had, in the privacy of their SCIF, been told that a witness had provided Mueller evidence of a conspiracy, so long as those investigators made no effort to actually obtain the evidence. They could even have been told by a witness that she was specifically withholding inflammatory pieces of hard evidence potentially implicating Trump’s campaign, on the basis that she was waiting to see if FBI corroborated the most likely explanation for that evidence. If they never asked for that evidence, then Burr would be perfectly able to go on Fox News and claim his committee hadn’t received any evidence. No one is asking Burr whether he has sought out all the evidence of “collusion” his investigators have been informed about.

Such a scenario might also explain why, in both appearances, Burr laid the ground work to “discover” evidence in two months or so that did corroborate a conspiracy. He’s just going to make sure he doesn’t actually ask for such evidence before then.

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

Bill Clinton Did Not Win an Election By Getting a Blowjob: The Danger of Lindsey Graham’s Willful Ignorance about Russian Interference

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In his statement in Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing yesterday, Lindsey Graham embodied the problem with Republicans’ deliberate ignorance about Russian interference in the 2016 election.

As part of his statement, he raised the time Joe Biden pointed out what a hypocrite Brett Kavanaugh was for believing presidents should not be investigated during their term but nevertheless thought it necessary to ask Bill Clinton the following questions:

If Monica Lewinsky says that you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?

[snip]

If Monica Lewinsky says that she gave you oral sex in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?

If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated in her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office, would she be lying?

Lindsey did so to suggest Biden’s comments about the Clinton investigation refute the claim that Trump picked Kavanaugh to protect himself from investigation, as if the investigation of Clinton for a blowjob was as legitimate as Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump cheated to win the election.

To justify such an absurd claim, Lindsey suggests that the Mueller investigation is only about whether Trump acted improperly when he fired Comey.

When it comes to the pillar of political virtue, Comey. Harry Reid: “That he’s been a supporter of Comey, and led the fight to get him confirmed, as he believed Comey was a principled public servant. With the deepest regret, I now see that I was wrong.” Mr. Nadler, from NY. “The President can fire him for cause and ought to. He violated the guidelines and put his thumb on the scale of an election.” Mr. Cohen, from Tennessee, a Democrat. “Call on Comey to resign his position, effective immediately, I’m sureupon reflection of this action he will submit his letter of resignation for the nation’s good.” To my Democratic friends,  you were all for getting rid of this guy. Now all of a sudden the country is turning upside down cause Trump did it.

The same guy who recently endorsed the idea of Trump firing Jeff Sessions once Kavanaugh gets confirmed then claimed he would do everything to protect the Mueller investigation. He says that even while suggesting he agrees with Kavanaugh that the president shouldn’t be investigated.

There’s a process to find out what happened in the 2016 election. It’s called Mr. Mueller. And I will do everything I can to make sure he finishes his job without political interference. And I’m here to tell anybody in the country that listens, that this is so hypocritical of my friends on the other side. When it was their President, Kavanaugh was right. When you’re talking about Roe v. Wade, it’s okay to promise the nation it will never be overturned. It’s okay to pick a Democratic staff member of this committee, but it’s not okay to pick somebody who’s been a lifelong Republican.

Which brings us to the stunning bit. Having just misrepresented the scope of the Mueller investigation — completely ignoring that the primary investigation is about whether Trump conspired with a hostile foreign power to win the election — Lindsey then suggests that Democrats should have no influence over judges because they lost the election the legitimacy of which Mueller continues to investigate (and about which Mueller has already provided evidence that the scope of Russia’s help for Trump went further than initially known).

People see through this. You had a chance, and you lost. If you want to pick judges from your way of thinking, then you better win an election.

After discussing his support for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Lindsey then suggests that stripping the last limits on presidential power is just a game (even while admitting he likes Trump best of all for getting two SCOTUS picks).

I hope people in the country understand this game. It’s a game that I’m sad to be part of. It’s gotten really bad. The antidote to our problems in this country when it comes to judges and politics is not to deny you a place on the Supreme Court. This is exactly where you need to be, this is exactly the time you need to be there, and I’m telling President Trump, “You do some things that drive me crazy, you do some great things. You have never done anything better, in my view, than to pick Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.  Cause you had an opportunity to put well-qualified conservatives on the court — men steeped in the rule of law — who will apply analysis not politics to their decision-making, and you knocked it out of the park, and I say to my friends on the other side: you can’t lose the election and pick judges.

Lindsey ends, again, by taunting Democrats that they can’t have any input on Supreme Court justices if they lose an election.

An election the investigation of which Lindsey claims to, but is not, protecting. An election the investigation of which may be stymied by the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.

Of course, this is only possible because of the way four different efforts in Congress — including Lindsey’s own — have served to obscure the matters under investigation. You’ve got Lindsey’s investigation and Bob Goodlatte’s — both more worried about a single FISA order that even a conservative Republican has told me was based on overwhelming evidence — than whether the guy making lifetime appointments cheated to get that authority. You’ve got Devin Nunes’ investigation, better described as an information gathering effort to help Trump get away with any cheating he engaged in than an investigation of whether he did cheat. Finally, there is Richard Burr’s investigation which, while on its face is more credible, nevertheless is not pursuing leads that support a case that Trump conspired with Russia to win the election.

Lindsey Graham is concerned about lies Christopher Steele may have told under oath in the UK, but not lies Don Jr clearly told his own committee. His big rush to stack SCOTUS suggests the reason for that has everything to do with a need to sustain a fiction that those SCOTUS choices are the result of a legitimate election win rather than willfully conspiring with a foreign adversary to get those choices.

The Problems with Richard Burr’s Claim that SSCI Has No Evidence of Collusion

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Fresh off a really testy statement suggesting that he is one of just two acceptable gatekeepers on the question of whether Trump conspired with Russia, Richard Burr made some comments to the AP over the weekend suggesting his committee had not received any evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and Russia.

Burr said there is “no factual evidence today that we’ve received” on collusion or conspiracy between Russia and President Donald Trump’s campaign.

It’s a squishy statement that seems designed — particularly given Burr’s newfound lassitude about ending the inquiry and his stated worries of being accused of missing something in the future — to permit him to sustain a claim he hasn’t seen any conspiracy, at least through the election, without aggressively investigating for one.

“Nothing in this town stays classified or secret forever,” Burr said. “And at some point somebody’s going to go back and do a review. And I’d love not to be the one that chaired the committee when somebody says, ‘well, boy, you missed this.’ So we’ve tried to be pretty thorough in how we’ve done it.”

[snip]

Still, he says he doesn’t think the committee should rush to wrap up the work, saying “the worst thing we can do is to prematurely try to end” the probe.

Indeed, the rest of this article lays out plenty of evidence that Burr is not looking for evidence of a conspiracy. First, there’s the description of what his committee has been working on most recently:

For now, Burr says, the committee is preparing to put out two reports by the end of September: one on the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s election interference, and a second on Russia’s election meddling on social media. The committee is also expected to hold a hearing with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in the first week of September.

Along with prior work and that laid out in that prior work, then, the Burr interview reveals that SSCI has been focused on:

  • A review of the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment
  • A report on election security vulnerability that barely mentions election vendor security
  • The planned report on Obama’s response to the Russian attack
  • The planned (and laudable) report on disinformation on social media
  • Per a bullet in the ICA report, “the contents of the [Steele dossier and its] handling by the United States Government “

These are all worthwhile topics (if you ignore the absence of a focus on vendors in the election security report). They’re just tangential to any question of conspiracy between Trump and Russia.

And on the one area where Burr does mention that conspiracy, he makes it clear he’s not going to work too hard to find out the truth.

“If the intent is to have a show trial, I’m not a participant,” Burr says on public hearings. He says “I don’t see a reason today” to bring back Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, who participated in a meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the election.

At least at the House Intelligence Committee interview Don Jr had in December, the President’s son professed to not recall whether a call to a blocked number looped in his father on discussions about the June 9 meeting. And Mark Warner has made it clear that the committee did not ask Don Jr about a later meeting where  he proved willing to accept election assistance from foreign entities. Don Jr’s SJC testimony on that point is, by all appearances, a false statement to Congress. So the public record, at least, suggests that no committee has worked through the holes in Don Jr’s story — even ignoring some of the other questions remaining in the public record. Yet Burr likens chasing down those details to “a show trial.”

So, even with what’s in the public record, there’s significant reason to question whether Burr’s claim that “no factual evidence today that we’ve received” shows a conspiracy between Trump and Russia reflects any real effort to find out if there was one.

Plus, the article makes it clear that Burr doesn’t just demand that witnesses to the committee, but even other Senators, remain utterly silent about what the committee has been doing.

Sen. Jim Lankford of Oklahoma, who sits on the intelligence panel and is close to Burr, says Burr started every meeting at the beginning of the probe by asking senators not to talk to the media “until we get additional facts and we put things out together.”

While I greatly appreciate the need to keep the substance of some things the committee is doing a secret (indeed, I find that the committee doesn’t leak like a sieve refreshing), Burr’s public refusal to chase down the Don Jr story and his unwillingness to allow any public comment about what the committee is doing raise real questions about whether the committee would chase down evidence that would support a conspiracy case — even formerly public information still accessible to Congress, much less records requiring more of an effort to obtain — that might prove the same. Burr might worry just as much about someone, in the future, pointing to proof the committee chose not to chase down leads about a Trump-Russian conspiracy as his stated concern about someone pointing to something the committee missed.

“I know that from a committee’s integrity standpoint we’ve got to prove what we find. And if you can’t prove it then we can’t make the claim,” Burr said in the interview. But if his committee is not trying to prove that a conspiracy with Russia exists, then he should stop claiming that the committee has received no factual evidence that such a conspiracy exists. He would simply be unqualified to make the claim one way or another, and so should stop suggesting he would know if there were a conspiracy.

This is why I complained — before Burr made these comments — about his problematic epistemology, his insistence that he is one of just two gate-keepers on a claim about whether or not there has been collusion. Even the public record suggests no one in the committee can make such a claim.

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

The Epistemology of Security Clearance Dick-Waving

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

I really couldn’t be bothered to get hot and bothered about President Trump stripping John Brennan of his security clearance. Brennan himself has been involved in the politicization of security clearances (perhaps most directly in Jeffrey Sterling’s case), and to have David Petraeus, of all people, complain about politicized security clearances, discredits the pushback. I’m far more concerned about the loyalty policing at EPA, Interior, Department of Education, and on the DOJ team attacking ObamaCare than I am about Brennan, because the bullying of those more obscure people will have a tangible effect on Americans’ lives. Indeed, the fact that Trump issued a declaration stripping Brennan of his clearance on July 26 but we only learned about it on August 15 is a testament to how little impact this has, other than the posturing around it.

But it has led to dangerous politicization elsewhere.

After being stripped of his clearance, Brennan wrote this op-ed.

In it, Brennan spends six paragraphs setting up how deceitful are Russians generally and his former counterpart Alexander Bortnikov specifically, and how successfully they recruit targets, including Americans, leading from a description of Russian “perfidy” directly to deeming election tampering denials “hogwash.”

Brennan then turns to Trump. He leads his accusation that Trump “colluded” with Russia by describing how asking for Russian to find Hillary’s missing emails “openly authorized his followers to work” with Russians.

The already challenging work of the American intelligence and law enforcement communities was made more difficult in late July 2016, however, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, publicly called upon Russia to find the missing emails of Mrs. Clinton. By issuing such a statement, Mr. Trump was not only encouraging a foreign nation to collect intelligence against a United States citizen, but also openly authorizing his followers to work with our primary global adversary against his political opponent.

Brennan then points to what he has read in “the reporting of an open and free press” to declare Trump’s claims of no collusion — as he had just claimed Russia’s denials of election interference — to be “hogwash.”

Such a public clarion call certainly makes one wonder what Mr. Trump privately encouraged his advisers to do — and what they actually did — to win the election. While I had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election, I now am aware — thanks to the reporting of an open and free press — of many more of the highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services.

Mr. Trump’s claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash.

The only questions that remain are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of “Trump Incorporated” attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the movement of money into their pockets.

In response, Richard Burr issued this testy statement, defending Trump’s action of stripping the clearance of a former CIA Director with whom Burr got along splendidly when he was spying on Burr’s own separate branch of government oversight committee.

Director Brennan’s recent statements purport to know as fact that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power. If Director Brennan’s statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA, why didn’t he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not The New York Times.

If, however, Director Brennan’s statement is purely political and based on conjecture, the president has full authority to revoke his security clearance as head of the Executive Branch.

I’m offended by Burr’s statement not just because it ignores the plain language of Brennan’s op-ed, which it links, but for the epistemology of the Russian investigation suggested by the Senate Intelligence Committee Chair. Here’s the logic of the statement:

1. Brennan “purports” to know Trump colluded with a foreign power

Here, Burr ignores how Brennan defines it — first “authorizing his followers to work” with Russia by calling on them to find Hillary’s missing emails, and then “highly suspicious dalliances of some American citizens with people affiliated with the Russian intelligence services” — stuff that’s public. He also ignores that Brennan himself says he doesn’t know whether the “collusion” involved constitutes a criminally liable conspiracy. That is, Brennan is defining collusion as something less than a criminal conspiracy to cooperate to cheat on the election, but Burr doesn’t care.

2. Why doesn’t Brennan’s claim show up in the Brennan-led Intelligence Community Assessment?

Again, Burr ignores Brennan’s description of becoming aware of this in the time period after he “had deep insight into Russian activities during the 2016 election” — so after he left the CIA — and taunts him that the ICA Brennan oversaw showed no evidence of collusion. The implication is Brennan’s ability to know if there were collusion ended on January 20, 2017. (Burr is also ignoring that there were two different investigations even while Brennan was in government — the intelligence investigation led by Brennan, which by law should not be targeting Americans, and the several parallel counterintelligence investigations at FBI, which could investigate Americans.)

Burr then presents three and only three possibilities for how Brennan might have knowledge of collusion, once again ignoring the free press that Brennan clearly attributes it to. First, either intelligence, or personal knowledge:

3. If Brennan has something called “intelligence” proving Trump’s collusion, then it must have come from an intelligence breach.

4. If he has something called “personal knowledge” of collusion, then it must only be shared with Mueller’s team, not with the NYT.

That’s it, according to the Senate Intelligence Chair, for real information about collusion. Either it’s intelligence to which Brennan is no longer entitled (assuming, of course, that Gina Haspel would have no reason to share intelligence about Russia with Brennan in some kind of consultation, which — if Brennan did then pass that on publicly, would be the only proper reason to strip his clearance). Or it’s “personal information,” usually called “evidence,” which may only be shared with Mueller and not with the press. “Intelligence,” which is the purview of the Intelligence Committee and the agencies it oversees. Or “evidence,” which is the purview of a DOJ investigation. Either/or.

That’s, of course, illogical, and not just because Burr’s own committee is investigating some of the same “evidence” that the FBI is, notably what happened on social media and what some witnesses have testified about, in secret, to the committee, and witnesses to both (like Rob Goldstone) have also commented publicly.

It’s illogical, too, because there are other ways to get real evidence of collusion. I believe I have evidence of collusion. I shared it with the FBI, sure. But after I revealed that I had provided information to the FBI in July, I also shared limited parts of it with some Republican Congressmen, in hopes of explaining to them how serious the investigation is and showing that entire parts of it don’t derive from Peter Strzok’s decisions. I’ve also discussed, prospectively, sharing it with some former top intelligence officials (unsurprisingly, not Brennan), in the interests of elucidating parts of the Russian attack they missed.

Yet even though his either/or proposition is false, Burr then uses it to proclaim Trump’s treatment of Brennan proper based on this remarkable statement:

5. “If, however, Director Brennan’s statement is purely political and based on conjecture, the president has full authority to revoke his security clearance as head of the Executive Branch.”

Having set up this false either/or proposition, Burr then suggests anything else must be “purely political” and “based on conjecture,” and — without showing the logical relation between the two clauses in this sentence — states that the President has the authority to revoke Brennan’s security clearance.

(If NOT (intelligence or evidence,) THEN political conjecture) THEN strip the damn clearance.

It is true that thus far the case law suggests that a President does have the authority to strip Brennan’s clearance (though a Brennan challenge, or even more easily, a Bruce Ohr challenge, might establish new limits to that authority). But that authority has no relationship to the claimed political or conjectural nature of Brennan’s comments. Not only does Burr suggest it does — suggest that stripping security clearances because of speech perceived to be political is not just proper but justified — but by yoking these two clauses together in one sentence, Burr suggests punishing political speech is in some way intimately tied to the authority therein.

Plus, as Brad Heath noted, Burr’s statement argues that Trump was right to strip Brennan’s clearance on July 26 because of statements Brennan made on August 16.

The Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, mind you, made this statement.

But here’s the reason why I really care about this.

Back when he was CIA Director, I openly criticized Brennan for the way he worked the press to get the most hawkish read of the Russian attack into the press. But I didn’t think his efforts arose from partisanship. Rather, it was an effort to raise alarm bells about the attack in the last weeks of the Administration. Such use of the press happens all the time when Administration officials are trying to advance their favored policy decisions.

Burr, however, is using his position of authority to affirmatively tie security clearances to speech he (or the President) deems excessively political. He’s doing it even as he argues there are just two appropriate categories of weighing whether collusion happened or not, intelligence (his purview) or evidence (Mueller’s). And he’s doing it as his committee is leading what has, up to this point, been the only Congressional investigation not utterly discredited by partisan bickering.

That pisses me off for several reasons. First, Burr is in the same breath being a raging partisan and asserting that his committee is one of the only entities that can appropriately weigh whether Trump conspired with Russia to win the election. He’s putting a thumb on the scale at precisely the moment that he claims only he (and Mueller) get to decide whether collusion happened. This raises real questions in my mind about what would happen if and when SSCI came upon information that shows Trump conspired with Russia. It raises real doubts in my mind about whether SSCI is able to conduct their investigation.

More importantly, he’s wrong. He’s wrong for the obvious reason that journalists are discovering important threads of the Russia investigation. Indeed, the part of SSCI’s work they’re most proud about — Russia’s use of social media — came out of a lot of really good reporting on the topic.

He’s wrong because we’re a democracy and whether Trump conspired with Russia will one day be most critically decided in a political sphere. As we get closer to that day, the American public has every right to read these two data points together and consider whether they show Trump and the Russians conspiring.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.

And he’s wrong because none of the certified experts are getting the Russia story entirely right. As I said, I’ve had conversations in the last several months with Republican congressmen, former top intelligence officials, and a whole lot of experts on the Russian attack, including (but not limited to) top InfoSec people, other journalists, and some key witnesses. Even aside from the stuff I went to the FBI about (which might give me special insight to what happened, but also has made me admittedly blindered about other issues) all of those people, including me, have missed key things or gotten key details wrong. Just as one example, in conversations I’ve had with that ilk of people, every single person save one has either misread key parts of the GRU indictment or read in their prior assumptions (the one exception had the advantage of being a key witness behind at least two paragraphs of the indictment). That’s just one example, but it’s an example that suggests we need more honest discussion and less of Burr and Trump’s attempt to decertify democratic speech about what the President did.

The Chair of the Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, effectively asserted that he is one of the few authorities with the right to say, based off what his committee does in private, whether Trump conspired with Russia or not, and that any citizen deigning to weigh in based off the public evidence may be properly disciplined by the President. The statement goes a long way to discredit the investigation his committee is doing, a real blow to his staffers’ success at bridging any partisan divide. Most importantly, because it so badly gets the epistemology of an attack that targeted all Americans wrong, it raises real questions about Burr’s understanding of the Russian attack at issue.

James Wolfe: The Distinction Between FBI’s Investigation of Leaking Classified versus Non-Public Information

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There’s something about the James Wolfe case that has stuck with me. For an article published after Wolfe’s indictment was released, Ali Watkins’ lawyer, Mark MacDougall, tempered his concern about Watkins’ call records being seized by suggesting that the scope of charges might somehow legitimate it.

Watkins’ attorney, Mark MacDougall, had described the seizure as “disconcerting.”

“Whether it was really necessary here will depend on the nature of the investigation and the scope of any charges,” MacDougall said in a statement.

While MacDougall has gone silent since then, this comment suggested there might be a reasonable premise for DOJ to seize all of Watkins call records for her entire journalistic career, which is fairly shocking. FBI gets all the call records of someone, these days, to identify all the devices she uses to check that activity as much as they do so to identify specific calls made. There’s nothing revealed by the indictment that would justify that, and a lot (notably, the evidence they had ready access to Wolfe’s phone content) that suggests it wasn’t justified.

With that in mind, I want to look at some details about the known timeline of the investigation:

March 2017: Exec Branch provides SSCI “the Classified Document,” which includes both Secret and Top Secret information, with details pertaining to Page classified as Secret.

March 2, 2017: James Comey briefs HPSCI on counterintelligence investigations, with a briefing to SSCI at almost the same time.

March 17, 2017: 82 text messages between Wolfe and Watkins.

April 3, 2017: Watkins confirms that Carter Page is Male-1.

April 11, 2017: WaPo reports FBI obtained FISA order on Carter Page.

June 2017: End date of five communications with Reporter #1 via Wolfe’s SSCI email.

June 2017: Using pretext of serving as a source, CBP agent Jeffrey Rambo grills Watkins about her travel with Wolfe.

October 2017: Wolfe offers up to be anonymous source for Reporter #4 on Signal.

October 16, 2017: Wolfe Signals Reporter #3 about Page’s subepoena.

October 17, 2017: NBC reports Carter Page subpoena.

October 24, 2017: Wolfe informs Reporter #3 of timing of Page’s testimony.

October 30, 2017: FBI informs James Wolfe of investigation.

November 15, 2017: 90 days before DOJ informs Ali Watkins they’ve seized her call records.

December 14, 2017: FBI approaches Watkins about Wolfe.

Prior to December 15, 2017 interview: Wolfe writes text message to Watkins about his support for her career.

December 15, 2017: FBI interviews Wolfe.

February 13, 2018: DOJ informs Watkins they’ve seized her call records.

June 6, 2018: Senate votes to make official records available to DOJ.

That the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, acting jointly, are authorized to provide to the United States Department of Justice copies of Committee records sought in connection with a pending investigation arising out of allegations of the unauthorized disclosure of information, except concerning matters for which a privilege should be asserted.

June 7, 2018: Grand jury indicts Wolfe.

June 7, 2018: Richard Burr and Mark Warner release a statement:

We are troubled to hear of the charges filed against a former member of the Committee staff. While the charges do not appear to include anything related to the mishandling of classified information, the Committee takes this matter extremely seriously. We were made aware of the investigation late last year, and have fully cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice since then. Working through Senate Legal Counsel, and as noted in a Senate Resolution, the Committee has made certain official records available to the Justice Department.

June 13, 2018: Wolfe arraigned in DC. His lawyers move to prohibit claims he leaked classified information.

The indictment is quite clear: the investigation leading to Wolfe’s indictment started as an investigation into “multiple unauthorized disclosures of classified information” to the press. It’s clear from Burr and Warner’s statement that they were a bit surprised that the “charges do not appear to include anything related to the mishandling of classified information.” The indictment doesn’t charge Wolfe with leaking classified information.

And the timeline laid out in the indictment suggests that the document provided SSCI in March 2017 led to Watkins confirming that Page was Male-1 in the Victor Podobnyy complaint, the complaint itself is probably not classified. Nor would it, with its reference to Page as Male-1 (also used in this indictment!), be enough to ID Page as the guy Podobnyy was trying to recruit.

As I suggested in this post, for all the focus on Watkins, the indictment actually seemed to prioritize Reporter #1, including on the questionnaire the FBI gave Wolfe when they interviewed him in December. It first asked if Wolfe knew any of the reporters behind that still unidentified story, then asked a question that his relationship with Watkins would clearly refute, which agents contextualized even further by asking specific questions about details they had already confirmed about their relationship, including the international travel Rambo had identified as early as June. Then, after asking a question that would clearly pertain to Wolfe’s undeniable relationship with Watkins, the questionnaire asked whether he had given classified or unclassified documents to any of the journalists he might have admitted to contacting in Question 10, covering the basis for that Podobnyy story.

c. During the interview, FBI agents showed WOLFE a copy of a news article authored by three reporters, including REPORTER #1, about an individual (referred to herein as “MALE-l)”, that contained classified information that had been provided to the SSCI by the Executive Branch for official purposes.

d. Question 9 of the lnvestigative Questionnaire asked “Have you had any contact with” any of those three reporters. As to each reporter, WOLFE stated and checked “No.”

e. Question 10 of the Investigative Questionnaire asked, “Besides [the three named reporters], do you currently have or had any contact with any other reporters (professional, official, personal)?” Before answering this question, WOLFE stated orally to the FBI agents that although he had no official or professional contact with reporters, he saw reporters every day, and so to “feel comfortable” he would check “Yes.” He did so, and initialed this answer.

f. Question 10 of the Investigative Questionnaire further asked, “If yes, who and describe the relationship (professional, official, personal).” In the space provided, WOLFE hand wrote “Official – No” and “Professional – No.” WOLFE then orally volunteered that he certainly did not talk to reporters about anything SSCl-related. FBI agents orally asked WOLFE if he had traveled internationally with any reporter, gone to a baseball game or to the movies with a reporter, or had weekly or regular electronic communication with a reporter. To each question WOLFE verbally responded ‘No.” WOLFE then wrote “Personal – No” on the Investigative Questionnaire.

g. Question 11 of the lnvestigative Questionnaire asked, “If yes to question ten, did you discuss or disclose any official U.S. government information or documents whether classified or unclassified which is the property of the U.S. government without express authorization from the owner of the information?” WOLFE stated and checked “No” and initialed this answer.

Now consider the vote to release official SSCI documents to DOJ, which DOJ appears to have needed before they presented the indictment to the grand jury the next day, but which DOJ knew enough about to already be prepped to indict. That is, DOJ surely already knew what those records showed; what the vote did was permit DOJ to use the records in a prosecution. There are surely records pertaining to the SSCI SCIF that DOJ wanted, including the specific treatment of the Classified Document delivered to SSCI in March 2017.

On or about March 17,2017,the Classified Document was transported to the SSCI. As Director of Security, WOLFE received, maintained, and managed the Classified Document on behalf of the SSCI.

It’s also possible (though unlikely) that SSCI, and not the Executive Branch, counts as custodian of Wolfe’s Non-Disclosure Agreements.

But the only actual SSCI record described in the indictment is the email account he used to communicate with Reporter #1, as well as emails that Page sent to the committee to complain about leaks.

For example, between in or around December 2015 and in or around June 2017, WOLFE and REPORTER #1 communicated at least five times using his SSCI email account.

[snip]

26. On or about October 18, 2011, MALE-1 sent an email to the SSCI, complaining that the news organization had published REPORTER #3’s news article of the previous day, reporting that he had been subpoenaed.

27. On or about October 24,2017, at 7:00 a.m., WOLFE informed REPORTER #3, using Signal, that MALE-1 would testify in closed hearing before the SSCI “this week.” At 9:58 a.m., REPORTER #3 sent an email to MALE-I, asking him to confirm that he would be ‘paying a visit to Senate Intelligence staffers this week.” At 9:23 p.m., MALE-I sent an email to the SSCI, forwarding the email he had received from REPORTER #3, and complaining that the details of his appearance had been leaked to the press.

So it’s possible that, having had SSCI’s cooperation since the time FBI was interviewing Wolfe, DOJ only needed to ensure it could access these email records. It’s possible that DOJ believes convicting Wolfe of false statements charges, and avoiding the hassle of exposing classified information at a trial charging that he leaked classified information, is sufficient punishment.

Or it’s possible that this indictment is just the next step in an investigative process that aims to get confirmation — public or tacit, the latter obtained via a guilty plea with cooperation — regarding the source for that other, still unidentified story that incorporated classified information. I also think FBI may be particularly interested that Wolfe was approaching journalists offering to be a source, as he did in October with Reporter #4, and not vice-versa.