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Trump’s National Security Adviser Responded to an Attack on the Capitol by Sending Personal Tweets

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As former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien tells it — or told it, in his August 2022 interview with the January 6 Committee — he responded to an attack on the Capitol by sending personal tweets.

CNN reported last week that O’Brien will soon have the opportunity to tell a more credible story to both of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s grand juries, which is why I decided to read the transcript of O’Brien’s interview with the January 6 Committee.

Presumably, Smith wants to ask O’Brien about Trump’s firing of people who questioned his authority to invoke the Insurrection Act, a topic that like recent witness Johnny McEntee, O’Brien addressed in his January 6 interview. Perhaps Smith wants him to explain the plot to seize voting machines and other details surrounding the December 18 meeting, which recent witness Ken Cuccinelli addressed. O’Brien may be asked about his challenge to Cassidy Hutchinson’s credibility in his own January 6 testimony, perhaps the only person who has questioned her testimony who hasn’t since been discredited.

Given the CNN report that he would testify before both the January 6 and the stolen document grand juries, he may be asked about his knowledge of plans to take documents pertaining to topics Trump obsessed about, not just the Russian investigation (which O’Brien calls, “Russiagate hoax documents”), but also specific intelligence about Venezuela; O’Brien claims not to remember anything about the efforts to declassify documents to take.

But the most striking aspect of O’Brien’s transcript was his admitted failure to do much of anything as the Capitol was attacked.

To be fair, the appearance of O’Brien’s almost complete inaction as the Capitol was attacked stems, in part, from his own forgetfulness. He claims to remember only one interagency planning meeting in advance of January 6, even though other witnesses testified to several. He only recalls a concern about threats to the White House in advance, not the Capitol. He doesn’t recall briefing the President, the Chief of Staff, or the White House Counsel of intelligence in advance of the attack. He doesn’t recall any talk of Trump marching to the Capitol.

He recalls speaking to Mike Pence during the attack, but can’t recall most details about the conversation.

He recalls speaking to Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who would not assume power for another two weeks. But he can’t recall whether he spoke to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the attack.

He recalls that his Deputy Matthew Pottinger called him and told him he had to resign, but can’t recall that he did so specifically in response to Trump’s text targeting Mike Pence.

He’s certain he made no effort to speak to the President as a mob of his supporters attacked a co-equal branch of government. He did not do so, he explained, because he was in Miami and wanted to speak to the President in person.

The story O’Brien told of his actions leading up to and on January 6 was of breath-taking dereliction of duty.

When asked specifically how he responded to learning that the President’s supporters were attacking the Capitol, he explained he sent some personal Tweets.

Q Okay. All right. So let’s talk about then what you did after receiving that information. What steps did you take now that you’re aware of this violence at the Capitol and had this conversation with the [Vice, sic] President? What did you do next?

A So I did a couple of things. I’m not sure the exact order in which I did them.

Q Okay.

A One is I put out a series of tweets on my personal Twitter account.

[snip]

Q Okay. All right. So, again, you didn’t take any action in particular response to this [Trump’s tweet].

Your tweets don’t start until a bit later, your personal tweets that you sent out.

A Yeah, I’m not sure what time my tweets came out, but I wouldn’t say it’s in direct response to this, but I did tweet that I thought the Vice President was courageous.

Q Yeah, you did.

[snip]

All right. The next one up says, “My first experience in government was serving as an intern for Senator Hayakawa of California. What the mob did to our Senate chamber today was an utter disgrace.”

Again, what motivated you to put that out? And do you remember roughly when that was?

A So, again, I don’t recall — and I don’t have a time or a date stamp on this. I think that was the first tweet that I put out on my personal account.

Q I think this is — you’re right — from your personal account, not the official NSA account.

A Correct. And I wanted to get some tweets out on my personal account because I didn’t have to go through a White House clearance process or get others involved. I wanted to try and act, you know, somewhat quickly and make sure the people that — to the extent anyone followed it or was interested, that was my view.

There were some other calls — to Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, for example. But seemingly no coordination of any response. Just tweets about the internship he had when he was 14.

There are certainly reasons to doubt his forgetfulness. At other times, he uses other tactics to avoid discussing whether he had direct contacts with Trump or anyone else of substance, like invoke Executive Privilege over his own feelings.

Q Were you frustrated, Ambassador O’Brien, with the President’s conduct on January 6th?

Mr. Larson. I think this starts to get into — invariably gets into communications with the President and impressions of the President and all that. So I’m going to assert executive privilege here.

And there’s good question of how diligently O’Brien searched for communications relevant to his testimony.

For example, there was a damning document: a draft concession speech that O’Brien wrote for Trump on December 21. O’Brien sent it from his home email account to his White House email account — because maybe his printer was out of paper, he mused.

Q 9 o’clock at night on the 21st.

A Yeah. So I was obviously at home. I probably sent it because I didn’t have a printer. I probably didn’t want to print it or didn’t have a printer at home or it may have been out of paper or something.

And this is something I did on what I considered was my own time. I thought it was — I think by this time the electoral college had already voted, and I think that the primary lawsuits that the President’s legal team had brought had been decided. You know, I can’t be certain, but I’d probably seen that on the news.

And I thought it would be — I thought I’d draft up what was in essence a concession speech, but put it in language that might appeal to the President and I thought might be something that the President could — the type of speech that the President would feel comfortable giving, but at the same time would convey the message that he conceded the election. And I thought it would be good for him and for the country.

O’Brien claims the only one he shared it with at the White House was his own Chief of Staff, not Trump’s or not Trump himself.

Q Did you share this with anyone after you sent it to your own official White House account?

A Yes.

Q With whom?

A I believe I shared it with Alex Gray, my chief of staff.

Q Your chief of staff. I see.

A Right.

Q How about Mark Meadows or the President himself?

A No. I don’t believe I did.

What’s interesting is not just that O’Brien sent it, but that he didn’t turn over an email sent from his own account in his production to the committee. The document should have been turned over to the committee by both O’Brien himself and the Archives. The committee only got the Archives copy

Q Okay. Let me show you another exhibit, this is No. 9, that is an email from your personal account to your official account. I don’t recall if this came from your production or from the Archives.

A I think this came from your production.

Q Yeah. I think that’s right. This is a record produced by the National Archives.

O’Brien wasn’t giving anything up.

And that’s why I find this exchange showing the National Security Adviser — the National Security Adviser!!! — explaining how he was doing business on Signal and WhatsApp and no, he’s not entirely sure whether all his texts got archived properly so suspect.

Q Ambassador O’Brien, how about any other messaging applications, like Signal or Telegram or WhatsApp? Did you use any of those platforms to conduct any official business when you were National Security Advisor?

A I did.

Q Okay. Which of those platforms did you use?

A I think I received some messages from people on WhatsApp and on Signal.

Q All right. And again, tell us what the circumstances would be that would trigger the use of those platforms versus the White House email account or your official device.

A So on the official devices, there was no ability, I don’t think, to put on Signal or any of the other applications.

There were some foreign ambassadors or foreign ministers that would want to get in touch with you and they tended to us Signal or WhatsApp.

[snip]

Q  I’m just wondering sort of the general circumstances that would cause you to go to WhatsApp or Signal. Was it just, hey, it’s a foreign leader, so that’s the platform that he or she uses? Or would you, beyond that, use it for other reasons as well?

A Yeah. So I’m not a consumer of social media or those sorts of applications for the most part. There were some foreign leaders that asked for my cell phone number so that they could connect via Signal, because I think some foreign leaders from time to time would reach out and they were concerned about intercept and they felt there was some safety — that was their opinion — there was some safety. My opinion was different. But they wanted to communicate by Signal or WhatsApp, but it was on rare occasions.

Q I see. Okay. And beyond that, Ambassador O’Brien, would you use WhatsApp or Signal to talk to someone on a personal matter or campaign related or things that you wanted to ensure were kept off of the official government channel?

A Yeah, not that I recall. That was not my practice.

Given how little else he recalls about his job, suffice it to say this “do not recall” whether he used Signal or WhatsApp for other purposes deserves some skepticism, particularly given that everywhere he relies on the committee to pull up call records. Especially given his lackadaisical attitude about preserving whatever Signal texts he sent, at least with foreign ambassadors.

Q Got it. All right. Now, on the subject of these personal devices or accounts, did you provide all [inaudible] with the official communications from these personal accounts to the National Archives when you completed your tenure as National Security Advisor?

A So I don’t know if I had any information on those devices. I do know that when I left the job at the State Department there were some conversations I took screenshots of and I left those behind for the State Department for my files. So that was my practice there.

When it comes to the leaving as NSA, I may have had — you know, I don’t recall, I don’t recall if I screenshotted. I know I screenshotted a few things. I don’t know if they were left behind for the Archives. That would have been my practice. But again, I can’t recall.

It is undeniably true that Robert O’Brien responded to an attack on the Capitol by Tweeting, on his personal account, that Mike Pence was courageous.

But it is also the case that there’s a whole lot of forgetting going on here that looks more like a gap in communications records than anything else.

Which may be on of the biggest things for which Jack Smith would like to get O’Brien on the record.

Alex Saab: The Businessman Inside the DEA Informant Inside the Claimed Venezuelan Diplomat Inside the Alleged Putin “Laundry Man”

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When DOJ first announced the extradition of Alex Saab from Cabo Verde to the US in October 2021, they described him as a Colombian businessman accused of laundering money through Venezuela.

Alex Nain Saab Moran (Saab), 49, a Colombian citizen, will make his initial appearance in federal court in Miami, Florida, today after being extradited from the Republic of Cabo Verde. Saab is charged in an indictment with laundering the proceeds of violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in connection with a scheme to pay bribes to take advantage of Venezuela’s government-controlled exchange rate. He is expected to make his initial court appearance today at 1:00 p.m. before U.S. Magistrate Judge John J. O’Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Specifically, on July 25, 2019, Saab was charged along with Alvaro Pulido Vargas, aka German Enrique Rubio Salas, 55, also a Colombian citizen, in an eight-count indictment with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and seven counts of money laundering. The indictment alleges that beginning in or around November 2011 and continuing until at least September 2015, Saab and Pulido conspired with others to launder the proceeds of an illegal bribery scheme from bank accounts located in Venezuela to and through bank accounts located in the United States. According to the indictment, Saab and Pulido obtained a contract with the Venezuelan government in November 2011 to build low-income housing units. The defendants and their co-conspirators then took advantage of Venezuela’s government-controlled exchange rate, under which U.S. dollars could be obtained at a favorable rate, by submitting false and fraudulent import documents for goods and materials that were never imported into Venezuela and bribing Venezuelan government officials to approve those documents. The indictment alleges that the unlawful activity was a bribery scheme that violated the FCPA and involved bribery offenses against Venezuela. It also alleges that meetings in furtherance of the bribe payments occurred in Miami and that Saab and Pulido wired money related to the scheme to bank accounts in the Southern District of Florida. As a result of the scheme, Saab and Pulido transferred approximately $350 million out of Venezuela, through the United States, to overseas accounts they owned or controlled.

But four months after that, in February 2022, the judge in his case in Miami, Robert Scola, ordered a document submitted before the extradition be unsealed. That revealed he had been a DEA informant, largely confirming the details behind his indictment.

[O]ver the course of nearly twelve (12) months, SAAB MORAN cooperated with agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”), provided DEA with information about his criminal activity, engaged in proactive cooperation as a confidential source for the DEA, and forfeited money to the United States and DEA as part of an agreement to self-surrender in the United States in order to face charges for his criminal conduct. In light of SAAB MORAN’s cooperation, which included providing law enforcement with information about the bribes that he paid and the crimes that he committed, the United States has concerns regarding the safety and security of SAAB MORAN and/or his family were this information to be disclosed to the Maduro Regime in Venezuela. See “Venezuelan charged in Miami money laundering case gunned down by motorcycle assassin,” Sept. 2, 2020, available at https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article245436795.html.

[snip]

On August 8 and August 10, 2016, SAAB MORAN, represented by criminal counsel in the United States and his Colombian lawyer, 1 met with special agents from the DEA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) in Bogota, Colombia. During these meetings, SAAB MORAN was debriefed and provided information relating to certain of his companies that contracted with the Government of Venezuela to build low-income housing, including how those companies were paid in connection with the contracts and how the money flowed after his companies received the funds. On November 28, 2017, SAAB MORAN, joined by his Colombian counsel, met with special agents from the DEA and an Assistant United States Attorney for another debriefing.

[snip]

On June 27, 2018, SAAB MORAN signed a cooperating source (“CS”) agreement with the DEA and became an active law enforcement source shortly thereafter, communicating with special agents from the DEA via telephone, text, and voice messaging. As part of his cooperation, SAAB MORAN also engaged in proactive cooperation.

[snip]

On April 4, 2019, SAAB MORAN, represented by his U.S. counsel, met with special agents from the DEA and prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Department of Justice in Europe. At that meeting, SAAB MORAN was provided a deadline by which to surrender to U.S. authorities in the Southern District of Florida in connection with his criminal conduct. SAAB MORAN was further advised that, if he failed to surrender by May 30, 2019, he would no longer remain a cooperating source and would be charged criminally in the Southern District of Florida.

Then, last October, Saab made an unsuccessful bid to claim that on top of being a businessman and sometime DEA informant, he was also a Venezuelan diplomat, the country’s Special Envoy to Iran.

For the two years following his appointment in April 2018, Mr. Saab fulfilled his role as a Venezuelan Special Envoy. To that end, he was issued a diplomatic passport that specifically identified him as a Special Envoy (“Enviado Especial”). See Exhibit 1.3 This activity culminated in spring 2020, in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic that shattered Venezuela’s already fragile social and economic condition when there was a need for Mr. Saab to negotiate for gasoline, food, and medical supplies.4 Even before the pandemic, Venezuela was facing an emergency shortage of gasoline and medicine due to crippling external economic sanctions.

The Venezuelan government tasked Mr. Saab with three official diplomatic missions to Iran, in March, April, and June 2020, to procure equipment to maintain and repair Venezuela’s oil refineries, as well as to obtain gasoline, goods, foodstuffs, and medicine that the country desperately needed. Mr. Saab also met with an Iranian diplomatic delegation in Venezuela. He was Head of Mission on each trip. Two missions were successfully completed, but the third was interrupted by Mr. Saab’s interception and detention while he was in transit through Cape Verde.

Judge Scola was unpersuaded. He noted, among other things, that Saab was unable to present a diplomatic passport in Cabo Verde. Saab will appeal that decision.

But in December, the January 6 Committee revealed Saab may be something else.

In August 23, 2022 testimony to the January 6 Committee, former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien listed a bunch of reasons he didn’t think Mark Esper was a helpful Secretary of Defense. By far the most interesting of those is that, after Saab was arrested in Cabo Verde, Esper was unwilling to provide DOD resources to stave off a rescue attempt.

We had another situation where we had Alex Saab, who was Vladimir Putin’s finance laundry man and the financial go-between between Venezuela and the Kremlin and Iran. And he was arrested in Caba Verde, a small island off of Africa.

We were concerned that there may be a rescue attempt mounted, and we wanted to put — and the Caba Verdeans are good people, but they lack capability to defend against a — especially if there was a great power intervention to either kill or rescue Saab.

We needed a naval ship to get on post off the island to send a message of deterrence. Secretary Esper resisted that effort. And we ended up having to get a Coast Guard cutter, some poor guys who had just gotten back in off deployment, to cross the Atlantic to get there in time.

And Gina Haspel and Chris Wray and I and others had to do a few things to deter a  rescue operation there because we didn’t have help from the DOD.

The efforts to thwart any rescue attempts — presumably including the “few things” that O’Brien and CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray had to do to deter a rescue mission — were publicly reported in December 2020, as background to Esper’s firing.

The mission was set in motion in early June, when Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman who is widely believed to be the architect of the economic deals that are keeping the Maduro government afloat, was arrested in Cape Verde when his private plane stopped to refuel en route to Iran from Venezuela. The United States sought his extradition under American money laundering charges, and judicial proceedings began.

“Saab is critically important to Maduro because he has been the Maduro family’s frontman for years,” said Moises Rendon, a Venezuela specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Saab has access to privileged information to Maduro’s corruption schemes in and outside Venezuela.”

The subsequent stealthy arrival of the American warship coincided with President Trump’s firing of Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper in early November. For months, Mr. Esper had fended off pleas from the State and Justice Departments to deploy a Navy vessel to Cape Verde to deter Venezuela and Iran from plotting to spirit Mr. Saab away from the island. Mr. Esper scoffed at concerns over a cloak-and-dagger jailbreak, and said sending in the Navy was a misuse of American military might. A Coast Guard cutter was dispatched in August instead.

With Mr. Esper out of the way, however, his replacement, Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller, a former White House counterterrorism aide, quickly approved the San Jacinto’s deployment from Norfolk, Va. The ship sailed across the Atlantic to keep a close eye on the lone captive.

But not the claim that he was, “Vladimir Putin’s finance laundry man.” Saab’s alleged tie to Putin gets more interesting when you consider allegations that Oleg Deripaska was laundering funds through Venezuela. I’ve asked both SDFL and Saab’s attorneys at Baker Hostettler for comment on the allegation, but have not yet gotten a response.

The longer Alex Saab sits in one or another jail cell, the more interesting he becomes, it seems.

“Classified Evening Briefing:” Mishandled and Stolen Documents Update

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There has been a bunch of news in the various investigations into various constitutional officers who took documents home. Here’s my updated handy table.

Biden

On February 1, the FBI did a consensual search of President Biden’s Rehoboth home. No additional documents with classified marks were found, though the FBI did take some notes from Biden’s time as Vice President. Those kinds of notes are what I include among potential “trophy” documents, because they may reflect mementos.

NARA released information relating to Biden’s initial turnover of documents under FOIA. I assume they would have had to get DOJ’s permission to do so.

Pence

Mike Pence’s team announced that, after a consensual search of his Carmel, IN home, the FBI found one additional document with classification markings and six additional pages.

The FBI discovered an additional classified document at former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home Friday during a voluntary five-hour search of the house, a Pence adviser said in a statement.

The adviser, Devin O’Malley, said “the Department of Justice completed a thorough and unrestricted search of five hours and removed one document with classified markings and six additional pages without such markings that were not discovered in the initial review by the vice president’s counsel.”

“The vice president has directed his legal team to continue its cooperation with appropriate authorities and to be fully transparent through the conclusion of this matter,” O’Malley said. He also noted that Pence and his legal team had “agreed to a consensual search of his residence that took place today.”

A source familiar with the search said DOJ was given unrestricted access to Pence’s home, and a member of his legal team was present through its duration.

The scope of the search included looking for documents that DOJ believed might be considered original documents that should have been sent to the National Archives, the source said, which could explain the six pages of additional material that were taken.

Given those six pages, I’ve changed the table to reflect possible “trophy” documents, things taken as keepsakes.

Pence has another weekend home in IN that has not been searched.

Trump

Trump may have used the news of Pence’s classified document as an opportunity to dump more news of his own. Multiple outlets reported that he had turned over:

  • An empty folder marked “Classified Evening Briefing”
  • Some additional classified files
  • The laptop and thumb drive onto which digital versions of those files were copied

Here’s how ABC described the new materials:

The folder with classification markings was discovered in a box with additional papers, the sources said. A copy of the box’s contents was made electronically, raising the question about the existence of any additional electronic records that may be relevant to the special counsel’s investigation.

ABC News has also learned that after the information was recovered, federal agents retrieved the laptop from the aide. The laptop was not retrieved on the Mar-a-Lago grounds, the sources said.

Given the position of the person reportedly involved — who works for Trump’s PAC — it is possible that this person is the one who did a “compilation” of messages from a pollster, a faith leader, a book author, with two classified documents, one Secret and one Confidential.

Separately, there have been reports of at least three witnesses who have testified in the stolen document case:

  • In the second week of January, Evan Corcoran appeared before the grand jury. He’s the one who did the search that happened not to find the 100 documents Trump had hidden.
  • Late last year DOJ reached out to Alina Habba (she is represented by the same lawyer who had represented Christina Bobb). Habba filed a declaration in a NYS case claiming to have done a diligent search of Trump’s property for subpoenaed documents.
  • On February 2, Tom Fitton appeared before the grand jury. Fitton, who is not a lawyer, gave Trump catastrophically stupid advice saying that a suit he filed against Bill Clinton that was unrelated meant Trump could just determine what documents he could keep.
  • Robert O’Brien was subpoenaed in both the stolen documents and the attempted stolen election case and is asserting Executive Privilege over some matters. O’Brien would know the circumstances by which Trump was briefed, so this could be a follow-up to items more recently turned over to DOJ.

The Men Disputing Cassidy Hutchinson’s Retelling of Trump’s SUV Lunge Got Warnings about Plans to Flood the Capitol

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Since Cassidy Hutchinson’s startling testimony on Tuesday, credulous journalists have reported anonymous sources pushing back against one of her most dramatic stories: that when told he was not going to the Capitol on January 6, Donald Trump lunged towards the steering wheel of the SUV taking him back to the White House and then went after the clavicle of the head of his detail, Bobby Engel.

On top of being anonymous, the pushback never disputed Hutchinson’s claim: that she was told this story by Tony Ornato, the Secret Service Officer that Trump elevated into an important political position at the White House, Deputy Chief of Staff, in front of Engel, who did not dispute the story. Plus, Alyssa Farrah has described that Ornato, in the past, has disputed things she said under oath (about Trump’s stunt in Lafayette Square), without himself going under oath.

Nevertheless, that anonymous pushback has distracted from a far more alarming detail in Tuesday’s testimony that Ornato and Engel have not disputed, neither on or off the record: that they got warnings about plans to occupy buildings in DC and, implicitly, warnings about Proud Boy involvement.

That revelation came just before Hutchinson affirmed a detail I’ve been almost alone in reporting for over a year: Not just Roger Stone, but also Rudy Giuliani, had links to the Proud Boys.

Cheney: US Secret Service was looking at similar information and watching the planned demonstrations. In fact, their Intelligence Division sent several emails to White House personnel, like Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato and the head of the President’s protective detail Robert Engel, including certain materials listing events like those on the screen.

Cheney: The White House continued to receive updates about planned demonstrations, including information regarding the Proud Boys organizing and planning to attend events on January 6. Although Ms. Hutchinson has no detailed knowledge of any planning involving the Proud Boys for January 6, she did note this:

{video}

Hutchinson: I recall hearing the word[s], “Oath Keeper,” hearing the word[s], “Proud Boys,” closer to the planning of the January 6 rally when Mr. Giuliani would be around.

The reference to Ornato and Engel is among the first in Tuesday’s hearing: while Cheney had previewed Hutchinson’s interactions with Ornato and the Secret Service in her introduction, this reference was the first substantive description of Ornato’s activities. That description, as well as Hutchinson’s explanation of how she told Trump’s National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien that Ornato had had a conversation with Mark Meadows about the warnings of violence, came even before Cheney cued Hutchinson to explain what an important role the Deputy Chief of Staff played.

Some time later, the hearing revealed texts between Hutchinson and Ornato reflecting the latter’s awareness that Trump’s supporters were trying to avoid the metal detectors.

Importantly, Cheney mentioned something about this text exchange that doesn’t appear in the texts shown on the screen: a discussion between the two of them — Hutchinson and Ornato — about an “OTR,” an “off the record” movement to get Trump to the Capitol. The Committee appears to be withholding precisely what those texts say — involving Trump personally, and so colorably covered under Executive Privilege.

That may not be the only thing the Committee withheld from its presentation: note in my transcription above that Cheney doesn’t say Ornato and Engel received the warnings that were flashed on the screen. She says they received, “certain materials listing events like those on the screen.” [my emphasis] Particularly given the reports that the Committee met in a secure facility in advance of this hearing, that phrasing could allow for other records, records too sensitive to show publicly, tying the Proud Boys to plans to occupy buildings on January 6.

The story of Trump lunging in the SUV is a distraction, and Ornato, a loyal Trumpster, is likely using his pushback to distract from far more damning details of Hutchinson’s testimony:

  • Both Engel and Ornato had warnings of plans to occupy buildings
  • Hutchinson linked Rudy Giuliani in advance of the attack to both militias that attacked the Capitol
  • Ornato discussed these warnings in advance with Mark Meadows, who pushed Hutchinson away twice during the early moments of the attack
  • In spite of foreknowledge of a plan to occupy buildings and the involvement of militias, Ornato nevertheless continued to plan to take Trump to the Capitol

Secret Service loyalists, for all their anonymous pushback, are denying none of these far more damning details, details that put them — and Meadows and Trump — in far more complicit position with respect to the attack.

Rudy Giuliani’s Alleged “Cooperation” Is a Threat to Lay out How Bill Barr and Jeffrey Rosen Protected Russian Disinformation

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Now that I’ve waded through Rudy Giulilani’s response to learning that SDNY had conducted a covert search on him in November 2019 before it conducted an overt search in April 2021, I’m certain Rudy engaged in just the kind of bad lawyering SDNY hoped he would — more on that in a week or so.

But a big part of his letter was not an attempt to engage in good lawyering, but instead to send messages to a variety of people. He provided co-conspirators a map they can use to understand which of their communications are in SDNY’s hands, and which are not. But he also laid out what he called his “cooperation,” which aside from minimal claims (which SDNY disputed) to have cooperated with SDNY against Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, really amounts to the corrupt stuff he believed he was protected for because he did it on behalf of Donald Trump. Indeed, he claims that if Judge Paul Oetken only knew he had permission to do all this stuff, then he wouldn’t have approved the warrants against him.

It is unknown if the Government informed the Court of Giuliani’s cooperation with the State Department or his offers to cooperate with the SDNY or his actual cooperation with the Western District of Pennsylvania.

His first claim of “cooperation” revisits claims he made in the wake of the whistleblower complaint in 2019, claiming that he was working closely with State when he was lobbying to fire Marie Yovanovitch.

It was premature and unwarranted for the Government to seize Giuliani’s ESI because Giuliani had already cooperated with the US State Department (“State”) through Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, in March 2019 concerning Ukraine. He also cooperated again in July and August of 2019 at the request of the State Department in assisting them with regard to Ukraine.

This is almost certainly the meat of the SDNY investigation, and whatever else Rudy has done by invoking it, he has put Mike Pompeo on the hotseat.

It may not be a coincidence that in the wake of this letter, Gordon Sondland sued Mike Pompeo for covering up what really happened in State in 2019 and provided several excuses — most importantly, that Pompeo refused to let him access his own backup materials before testifying — for why his two existing sessions of sworn testimony might conflict with what SDNY seized from Rudy.

In his other claim of cooperation, Rudy detailed how he shared disinformation from Russian agent Andrii Derkach with DOJ, which he described as “cooperation” with Main Justice in the guise of its delegate, Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady.

Before I repeat Rudy’s description of how he shared disinformation from Andrii Derkach with a hand-picked and very pro-Trump US Attorney, consider several details: first, immediately in the wake of the raid on Rudy in April, there were leaked explanations for how Rudy managed to meet with a known Russian agent — right in the middle of impeachment!! — even though both National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and FBI’s Counterintelligence folks knew that Russia was feeding Derkach disinformation to feed to Rudy.

The WaPo originally reported that the FBI had warned Rudy, but had to retract that. Rudy never got warned.

Correction: An earlier version of this story, published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation. That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings.

The FBI became aware in late 2019 that Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence operation aimed at circulating falsehoods intended to damage President Biden politically ahead of last year’s election, according to people familiar with the matter.

Officials planned to warn Giuliani as part of an extensive effort by the bureau to alert members of Congress and at least one conservative media outlet, One America News, that they faced a risk of being used to further Russia’s attempt to influence the election’s outcome, said several current and former U.S. officials. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains highly sensitive.

The FBI became aware of the Russian information operation at a time when Giuliani was deeply involved with former president Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and related activities in Ukraine to surface unflattering or incriminating information about the Biden family.

[snip]

In late 2019, before Giuliani’s trip to Kyiv, U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Trump White House that Giuliani was the target of a Russian influence operation, as The Post reported last year. Officials became concerned after obtaining evidence, including communications intercepts, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence. The warnings led then-national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien to caution Trump that any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia.

Then, after matching the WaPo’s original story and similarly having to retract it, NBC offered an explanation why Rudy wasn’t given that briefing: because it would “complicate” what NBC called “the criminal investigation” into Rudy.

The FBI prepared a so-called “defensive” briefing for Rudy Giuliani in 2019 in which agents were poised to warn him he was being targeted by a Russian intelligence influence operation as he sought to gather opposition research on the Biden family, according to a source familiar with the matter.

But that briefing was not given, according to a second source familiar with the matter, because of concerns that the briefing could complicate the criminal investigation into the former New York City mayor.

Yet, at the time Rudy would have gotten this warning, SDNY had already shown probable cause Rudy was an agent of one or another pro-corruption Ukrainians, almost certainly Yuri Lutsenko in his efforts to fire Marie Yovanovitch. Without a Derkach angle to the SDNY investigation — an angle Jeffrey Rosen went to great lengths to prevent them from pursuing — it’s not clear how it would have complicated that investigation.

Rudy didn’t get his warning and instead of warning him, Trump said that was Rudy being Rudy. So Rudy first met with Lutsenko, the subject of the first investigation, and headed from that meeting directly to meet with Derkach.

A month later, Rosen issued a memo prohibiting any prosecutors from expanding the scope of their already opened investigations, which would have had the effect of preventing SDNY from investigating Rudy’s ongoing influence peddling for known Russian agent Andrii Derkach, about whom FBI decided not to warn Rudy even though everyone briefed on it knew it was a Russian intelligence operation.

But that wasn’t the only thing that Billy Barr and Rosen’s efforts to divvy up Ukrainian investigations did. After Rosen wrote that memo (ensuring no one could start an investigation into Rudy’s dalliances with Derkach), but still a week before Trump was acquitted for coercing dirt from Ukraine to use against Joe Biden, per Rudy’s timeline, Barr assigned Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady to oversee intake of all Ukrainian dirt and, within a day, Rudy was in the business of sharing Derkach’s dirt directly with Pittsburgh’s US Attorney’s office.

In his letter, Rudy clearly identifies four of the nine people who rushed to accept Rudy’s dirt, which the government had identified as Russia disinformation before he went to collect it in December.

[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]

And, as Rudy tells it, that First AUSA kept coming back for more, a claim (like his other claims about the personnel involved) that matches a story published in the NYT after those involved knew that Trump had lost. That story also described that Brady kept pushing for inappropriate investigative steps until, ultimately, Seth DuCharme had to get involved.

Officials said that Mr. Brady almost immediately started pushing to take aggressive steps. He had a list of people he wanted F.B.I. agents to question. It was not clear whether they were the same witnesses that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Costello had submitted, but a former law enforcement official said that Mr. Brady had wanted the F.B.I. to question people mentioned in Mr. Giuliani’s materials.

The steps were outside “normal investigative procedures,” one former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the events said, particularly in an election year; Justice Department policy typically forbids investigators from making aggressive moves before elections that could affect the outcome of the vote if they become public.
The Pittsburgh F.B.I. office refused to comply without the approval of David L. Bowdich, the F.B.I.’s deputy director, the former official said.

Mr. Brady’s demands soon prompted a tense confrontation with F.B.I. officials at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. The meeting was mediated by Seth D. DuCharme, now the acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and at the time a trusted aide and ally of Mr. Barr’s at the Justice Department in Washington.

Then, after Barr failed to replace Geoffrey Berman with a hand-picked flunky when he fired him on June 20 of last year, Barr instead installed DuCharme in Brooklyn on July 10, thereby making DuCharme (who had already been personally involved in Pittsburgh) the gatekeeper on any investigations pertaining to Ukraine. And sometime months after that — as Rudy continued to share known Russian disinformation during the election — DuCharme approved not an expansion of the investigation in SDNY that Barr tried to shut down by firing Berman, which would have been the logical thing to do if you were concerned about Russians interfering in our elections, but instead a parallel investigation in EDNY that, per the more recent NYT report, by design would not treat Rudy as a subject. Meanwhile, Rosen created repeated roadblocks — higher and higher levels of approvals for a search of Rudy — in an attempt to prevent SDNY from advancing their investigation into Rudy any further.

There are some involved in this story, like the FBI Agents who got promoted into the jobs formerly held by Andrew McCabe and Bill Priestap and Peter Strzok, who probably let all this happen because they knew the best way to advance their careers was to not make the mistake that their predecessors had made by trying to keep the country safe from Russian interference during an election. Others may rationalize what they did as a means to placate the President, perhaps imagining that it wouldn’t do that much damage to the country — that was the excuse cited by the NYT article on the Pittsburgh investigation. But those people, in recognizing Trump would lash out if they tried to investigate Russian interference in the 2020 election, would have therefore understood that Trump wanted Russian spies to interfere in the election and would be furious if they prevented it. They would have had to have understood that the way to keep Trump happy was to let Russia have its way. They would have been operating on the recognition that all the claims about what Trump did in 2016 were true, at least as far as 2020.

Plus, no one who pushed as hard as Scott Brady did can claim to be trying to placate the President.

Finally, worst of all, there are those who took a vow to “protect and defend against enemies foreign and domestic” who made affirmative attempts to protect not just the disinformation that Rudy was feeding to DOJ and FBI, but also protect Rudy for serving as the willful handmaiden of someone they knew was a Russian spy.

The Russian scandal of 2020 is, in many ways, even more scandalous than the Russian scandal of 2016. At least Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were in a position to claim plausible deniability. Bill Barr and Jeffrey Rosen are not.

Update: This email obtained via American Oversight shows that the decision to use Scott Brady to protect the Russian disinformation intake started earlier, by January 3.

The DOD Flunkies’ Convenient Lapse of Executive Privilege

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The first thing you should take away from this long Vanity Fair profile of the Trump loyalists who led DOD during the Transition period is that Kash Patel has a very selective approach to Executive Privilege. Deep in the story, when caught in a lie about a plot to have him replace CIA Director Gina Haspel, Patel invokes Executive Privilege to refuse to answer.

I asked Patel about an Axios story that broke just before we sat down to talk. It asserted that CIA director Gina Haspel threatened to resign after learning that Trump planned to install Patel as her deputy. “I’m not going to comment on what the president wanted to do or didn’t want to do, but there’s no conversations of that now or this week or this year,” he replied. But he seemed to be playing coy. The CIA gambit took place last year. In fact, when I had spoken with Cohen about the matter, he had told me, “The idea was to put Kash in as the deputy, which doesn’t require Senate approval, and then to fire Gina the next day, leaving Kash in charge…. Robert O’Brien, [Trump’s national security adviser], is the one who deep-sixed it.” When I pressed Patel further about these machinations, which had occurred in December, I saw him turn lawyerly: “That stuff is between me and the boss. That’s the only thing I don’t comment on. Ever. It’s executive privilege.”

But in the first lines of the profile, both he and former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller happily offer up a tale of how Trump not only claimed to know what an appropriate deployment of National Guard troops would be in preparation for January 6, but ordered DOD to have them deployed.

On the evening of January 5—the night before a white supremacist mob stormed Capitol Hill in a siege that would leave five dead—the acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller, was at the White House with his chief of staff, Kash Patel. They were meeting with President Trump on “an Iran issue,” Miller told me. But then the conversation switched gears. The president, Miller recalled, asked how many troops the Pentagon planned to turn out the following day. “We’re like, ‘We’re going to provide any National Guard support that the District requests,’” Miller responded. “And [Trump] goes, ‘You’re going to need 10,000 people.’ No, I’m not talking bullshit. He said that. And we’re like, ‘Maybe. But you know, someone’s going to have to ask for it.’” At that point Miller remembered the president telling him, “‘You do what you need to do. You do what you need to do.’ He said, ‘You’re going to need 10,000.’ That’s what he said. Swear to God.”

I could not recall the last time a contingent that large had been called up to supplement law enforcement at all, much less at a demonstration—the Women’s March and the Million Man March sprang to mind—and so I asked the acting SECDEF why Trump threw out such a big number. “The president’s sometimes hyperbolic, as you’ve noticed. There were gonna be a million people in the street, I think was his expectation.” Miller maintained that initial reports on the anticipated crowd size were all over the map—anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000. “Park Police—everybody’s so hesitant to give numbers. So I think that was what was driving the president.”

There’s a lot of reason to believe this is bullshit. Trump wouldn’t ask for the Guard if he wanted a show of force, he’d ask for a helicopter flyover or something else inappropriate.  Trump isn’t a detail guy. Miller and Patel offered up a key (and dubious) excuse used elsewhere — that they hadn’t been told the Park Service had expanded the Trump rally to 30,000 attendees.

Most importantly, Patel demonstrated that he believes his actual conversations with Trump should be protected by Executive Privilege. Certainly, he would refuse to say anything bad about Trump.

Ezra Cohen[-Watnick], by contrast, isn’t prompted to. While he is permitted to claim that Trump threw everyone — the entire country — under the bus, he’s not asked about his mentor Mike Flynn’s role in the conspiracy.

Ezra Cohen, another of Miller’s top confidants, believes that his colleagues’ words and deeds may be well and good, but are beside the point: “The president threw us under the bus. And when I say ‘us,’ I don’t mean only us political appointees or only us Republicans. He threw America under the bus. He caused a lot of damage to the fabric of this country. Did he go and storm the Capitol himself? No. But he, I believe, had an opportunity to tamp things down and he chose not to. And that’s really the fatal flaw. I mean, he’s in charge. And when you’re in charge, you’re responsible for what goes wrong.”

[snip]

His promotion was fodder for trolls of every stripe. “To the left I became this horrible person that enabled the president, attacking [Obama officials] and all this other stuff like that,” Cohen contended as we sat in his kitchen and later drove through a Chick-fil-A before tooling around northern Virginia. “And then to the crazy people on the right—that are dangerous people that did the horrible, antidemocratic behavior with the Capitol—these nutjobs are saying that I am QAnon.”

The silence about Flynn’s call for martial law is all the more telling given Cohen’s nod to the way QAnon has worked him into their conspiracies. Flynn played a key role in mobilizing QAnon to serve as Trump’s army.

Also missing from this profile? Any mention of Flynn’s brother, Charles, who participated in a call with local DC officials calling for more help but whose role DOD hid until after Biden was inaugurated.

There are other silences as well, perhaps most notably Miller’s stubborn effort to burrow in a fourth ally, Mike Ellis, at NSA in the last hours of the Trump Administration.

So even before you get into the details, this profile should be regarded as an effort by three very slick dudes to recast their role as Trump flunkies in the wake of an inexcusable event.

With all that said, it appears to differ in key ways from the timeline DOD released days after the coup attempt. The Vanity Fair narrative makes several claims that are probably true: That Miller came to work expecting he might not get home that night (though didn’t stay in DC even as the National Guard did in advance of the inauguratoin), and that DOD was chastened given the gross abuse in response to June protests.

But it also suggests Muriel Bowser called for help 48 minutes after DOD’s timeline shows she did.

On the morning of January 6, as Miller recounted, he was hopeful that the day would prove uneventful. But decades in special operations and intelligence had honed his senses. “It was the first day I brought an overnight bag to work. My wife was like, ‘What are you doing there?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know when I’m going to be home.’” To hear Patel tell it, they were on autopilot for most of the day: “We had talked to [the president] in person the day before, on the phone the day before, and two days before that. We were given clear instructions. We had all our authorizations. We didn’t need to talk to the president. I was talking to [Trump’s chief of staff, Mark] Meadows, nonstop that day.”

The security posture and response on January 6 did not occur in a vacuum. June 1, 2020, had been a perilous precedent. On that day federal police had expelled peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square to facilitate the president’s saunter over to St. John’s Church for a publicity stunt. But the brute force displayed to clear out the area proved a national embarrassment and allegedly influenced Washington mayor Muriel Bowser’s view, come January, about how the capital should be policed—and by whom. On the day before all hell broke loose on the Hill, she made it clear the D.C. police (MPD) would be running the show on the 6th, though 340 unarmed National Guard troops had been requested to help with traffic: “The District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD.”

Miller told me that when Trump made him head of the Pentagon, in November, “the bar was pretty low.” He had three goals. “No military coup, no major war, and no troops in the street,” before observing dryly, “The ‘no troops in the street’ thing changed dramatically about 14:30…. So that one’s off [the list].”

The day began with a lull. “We had meetings upon meetings. We were monitoring it. And we’re just like, Please, God, please, God. Then the damn TV pops up and everybody converges on my office: [Joint Chiefs of Staff] chairman [Mark Milley], Secretary of the Army [Ryan] McCarthy, the crew just converges.” And as intelligence started cycling in, things went from watch and see to “a current op.” Miller recalled, “We had already decided we’re going to need to activate the National Guard, and that’s where the fog and friction comes in.”

“The D.C. mayor finally said, ‘Okay, I need more,’” Kash Patel would tell me. “Then the Capitol police—a federal agency and the Secret Service made the request. We can support them under Title 10, Title 32 authorities for [the] National Guard. So [they] collectively started making requests, and we did it. And then we just went to work.”

With his use of the word “finally,” Patel insinuates there was a delay before Bowser called and asked for help. Meanwhile, Miller suggests that DOD’s response took place at 2:30PM.

The timeline, however, shows that Bowser requested help 29 minutes after DOD says they got “open source reports” of demonstrators moving on the Capitol.

1305: A/SD receives open source reports of demonstrator movements to U.S. Capitol.

1326: USCP orders evacuation of Capitol complex.

1334: SECARMY phone call with Mayor Bowser in which Mayor Bowser communicates request for unspecified number of additional forces.

1349: Commanding General, DCNG, Walker phone call with USCP Chief Sund. Chief Sund communicates request for immediate assistance.

1422: SECARMY phone call with D.C. Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Dr. Rodriguez, and MPD leadership to discuss the current situation and to request additional DCNG support.

1430: A/SD, CJCS, and SECARMY meet to discuss USCP and Mayor Bowser’s requests. 1500: A/SD determines all available forces of the DCNG are required to reinforce MPD and USCP positions to support efforts to reestablish security of the Capitol complex.

1500: SECARMY directs DCNG to prepare available Guardsmen to move from the armory to the Capitol complex, while seeking formal approval from A/SD for deployment. DCNG prepares to move 150 personnel to support USCP, pending A/SD’s approval.

1504: A/SD, with advice from CJCS, DoD GC, the Chief of the National Guard Bureau (CNGB), SECARMY, and the Chief of Staff of the Army, provides verbal approval of the full activation of DCNG (1100 total) in support of the MPD. Immediately upon A/SD approval, Secretary McCarthy directs DCNG to initiate movement and full mobilization. In response, DCNG redeployed all soldiers from positions at Metro stations and all available non-support and non-C2 personnel to support MPD. DCNG begins full mobilization.

The Vanity Fair profile suggests DOD made the decision based off watching TV — presumably those open source reports — that reinforcements would be needed. But they didn’t even begin to “discuss” doing so until 2:30, and didn’t move to make that deployment until 3:04 (so 34 minutes after Miller describes).

Plus, Patel makes no mention of the call from Capitol Police at 1:49.

Ezra Cohen would like you to believe that he got thrown under the bus along with all the people supporting rule of law. Patel would like you to believe the failures of DOD under his watch were not attributable to the Chief of Staff. And Miller would like you to know his family doesn’t much like Donald Trump.

But the whole story reads like a fairy tale.

“That’s Rudy.” Trump Proves, Yet Again, That He Would Just Ignore a Defensive Briefing

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For years, the frothy right has wailed that candidate Donald Trump should have been given a defensive briefing back in July 2016, rather than have the FBI open an investigation to figure out which member(s) of his campaign had gotten advance notice that the Russians were planning on dropping emails to help Trump win. Never mind that his top advisor in the briefing where that would have occurred was secretly working for the Turkish government at the time.

The complaint has always rung hollow given that, after President Obama warned Trump against hiring Mike Flynn (the aforementioned secret agent for Turkey), Trump went ahead and hired him anyway.

Today, however, we have further proof that Trump would have done nothing if he had gotten a defensive briefing rather than have the FBI investigate whether — as turned out to be true, in every single case — Flynn and Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos and Carter Page were trying to cash in on their ties to Trump with foreign governments.

Yesterday, the WaPo reported that Trump’s national security advisor warned Trump that Russia was feeding Trump bullshit though Rudy.

U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence, according to four former officials familiar with the matter.

The warnings were based on multiple sources, including intercepted communications, that showed Giuliani was interacting with people tied to Russian intelligence during a December 2019 trip to Ukraine, where he was gathering information that he thought would expose corrupt acts by former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The intelligence raised concerns that Giuliani was being used to feed Russian misinformation to the president, the former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information and conversations.

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.”

The WaPo goes on to reveal that Bill Barr and Pat Cipollone — who helped Trump survive impeachment for asking for this help — along with Chris Wray all understood that Rudy was being targeted by Russia.

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 Counsel Pat Cipollone.

Today, the NYT matched the WaPo story, albeit with one of their fewer than WaPo’s sources pushing back somewhat.

The agencies imparted the warning months before disclosing publicly in August that Moscow was trying to interfere in the election by taking aim at Mr. Biden’s campaign, the officials said. Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani have promoted unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Biden that have aligned with Russian disinformation efforts, and Mr. Giuliani has met with a Ukrainian lawmaker whom American officials believe is a Russian agent.

Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, presented the warning about Mr. Giuliani to Mr. Trump in December. Two former officials gave conflicting accounts about its nature. One said the report was presented to Mr. Trump as unverified and vague, but another said the intelligence agencies had developed solid and credible information that Mr. Giuliani was being “worked over” by Russian operatives.

Mr. Trump shrugged it off, officials said, but the first former official cautioned that his reaction could have been colored in part by other information given to him not long before that appeared to back some of Mr. Giuliani’s claims about Ukraine.

Both stories, however, agree that Trump blew off this warning.

So in 2016, the FBI investigated and Trump wailed and cried and said he wished he had gotten a defensive briefing.

Last December, he got a defensive briefing, and he just let his attorney continue to mainline him Russian disinformation.

And along the way, Billy Barr seems to have sidelined a tip (and possibly tried to squelch others) — in the form of the whistleblower complaint that launched impeachment — that might get Rudy investigated for serving as such a willing agent of Russian intelligence.

The Kinds and Significance of Russian Interference — 2016 and 2020

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Trump’s meltdown last week — in which he purged top staffers at the Director of National Intelligence after a briefing on Russian interference in the 2020 election, followed by National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien making shit up on Meet the Press — has created a firestorm about Russian interference in the 2020 election. That firestorm, however, has spun free of what ways Russia interfered in 2016 and what effect it had.

Five ways Russia interfered in 2016

First, remember that there were at least five ways Russia interfered in 2016:

  • Stealing information then releasing it in a way that treats it as dirt
  • Creating on-going security challenges for Hillary
  • Using trolls to magnify divisions and feed disinformation
  • Tampering with the voting infrastructure
  • Influence peddling and/or attempting to recruit Trump aides for policy benefits

Stealing information then releasing it in a way that treats it as dirt

The most obvious way Russia interfered in 2016 was by hacking the DNC, DCCC, and John Podesta (it also hacked some Republicans it did not like). It released both the DNC and Podesta data in such a way as to exaggerate any derogatory information in the releases, successfully distracting the press for much of the campaign and focusing attention on Hillary rather than Trump. It released DCCC information that was of some use for Republican candidates.

Roger Stone took steps — not all of which are public yet — to optimize this effort. In the wake of Stone’s efforts, he moved to pay off one participant in this effort by trying to get a pardon for Julian Assange.

Creating on-going security challenges for Hillary

In addition to creating a messaging problem, the hack-and-leak campaign created ongoing security challenges for Hillary. Someone who played a key role in InfoSec on the campaign has described the Russian effort as a series of waves of attacks. The GRU indictment describes one of those waves — the efforts to hack Hillary’s personal server — which came in seeming response to Trump’s “Russia are you listening” comment. An attack that is often forgotten, and from a data perspective was likely one of the most dangerous, involved a month-long effort to obtain Hillary’s analytics from the campaign’s AWS server.

Whatever happened with this data, the persistence of these attacks created additional problems for Hillary, as her staff had to spend time playing whack-a-mole with Russian hackers rather than optimizing their campaign efforts.

Using trolls to magnify divisions and feed disinformation

Putin’s “chef,” Yevgeniy Prigozhin, also had staffers from his troll factory in St. Petersburg shift an ongoing campaign that attempted to sow division in the US to adopt a specific campaign focus, pushing Trump and attacking Hillary. Importantly, Prigozhin’s US-based troll effort was part of a larger multinational effort. And it was in no way the only disinformation and trolling entity involved in the election. Both parties did some of this, other countries did some, and mercenaries trying to exploit social media algorithms for profit did some as well.

Tampering with the voting infrastructure

Russia also tampered with US voting infrastructure. In 2016, this consisted of probing most states and accessing voter rolls in at least two, though there’s no evidence that Russian hackers made any changes. In addition, Russian hackers targeted a vendor that provided polling books, with uncertain results. The most substantive evidence of possible success affecting the vote in 2016 involved failures of polling books in Durham County, NC, which created a real slowdown in voting in one of the state’s most Democratic areas.

In recent days, there have been reports of a ransomware attack hitting Palm Beach County in September 2016, but it is unclear whether this was part of the Russian effort.

Because there’s no certainty whether the Russian hack of VR Systems was behind the Durham County problems, there’s no proof that any of these efforts affected the outcome. But they point to the easiest way to use hacking to do so: by making it harder for voters in particular areas to vote and harder for specific localities to count the vote.

Some of what Russia did in 2016 — such as probes of a particularly conservative county in FL — may have been part of Russia’s effort to discredit the outcome. They didn’t fully deploy this effort because Trump won.

Influence peddling and/or attempting to recruit Trump aides for policy benefits

Finally, Russia accompanied its other efforts with various kinds of influence peddling targeting Trump’s aides. It was not the only country that did so: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, UAE, and Israel were some of the others. Foreign countries were similarly trying to target Hillary’s campaign — and the UAE effort, at least, targeted both campaigns at once, through George Nader.

Importantly, however, these efforts intersected with Russia’s other efforts to interfere in the election in ways that tied specific policy outcomes to Russia’s interference:

  • An unrealistically lucrative Trump Tower deal involved a former GRU officer and sanctioned banks
  • At a meeting convened to offer Trump dirt about Hillary, Don Jr agreed in principle to revisit ending Magnitsky sanctions if Trump won
  • George Papadopoulos pitched ending sanctions to Joseph Mifsud, who had alerted him that Russia had emails they intended to drop to help Trump
  • Paul Manafort had a meeting that tied winning the Rust Belt, carving up Ukraine, and getting paid personally together; the meeting took place against the background of sharing internal polling data throughout the campaign

As I’ll note in a follow-up, information coming out in FOIAed 302s makes it clear that Mike Flynn’s effort to undercut Obama’s December 2016 sanctions was more systematic than the Mueller Report concludes. So not only did Russia make it clear it wanted sanctions relief, Trump moved to give it to them even before he got elected (and his Administration found a way to exempt Oleg Deripaska from some of these sanctions).

Manafort continued to pursue efforts to carve up Ukraine until he went to jail. In addition, Trump continues to take actions that undercut Ukraine’s efforts to fight Russia and corruption. Neither of these have been tied to a specific quid pro quo (though the investigation into Manafort’s actions, especially, remained inconclusive at the time of the Mueller Report).

So while none of these was charged as a quid pro quo or a conspiracy (and the reasons why they weren’t vary; Manafort lied about what he was doing, and why, whereas Mueller couldn’t prove Don Jr had the mens rea of entering into a quid pro quo), Russia tied certain policy outcomes to its interference.

Trump’s narcissism and legal exposure exacerbated the effects

The Russian attack was more effective than it otherwise would have been for two reasons. First, because he’s a narcissist and because Russia built in plausible deniability, Trump refused to admit that Russia did try to help him. Indeed, he clings more and more to Russian disinformation about what happened, leading the IC to refuse to brief him on the threat, leading to last week’s meltdown.

In addition, rather than let FBI investigate the people who had entered into discussions of a quid pro quo, Trump obstructed the investigation. Trump has spent years now attacking the rule of law and institutions of government rather than admit what DOJ IG found — there was reason to open the investigation, or admit what DOJ found — there was reason to prosecute six of his aides for lying about what happened.

The Russian effort was just one of the reasons Hillary lost

It’s also important to remember that Russia’s interference was just one of the many things that contributed to Hillary’s loss.

Other aspects were probably more important. For example, Republican voter suppression, particularly in Wisconsin and North Carolina, was far more important than any effect the VR Systems hack may have had in Durham County. Jim Comey’s public statements about the email investigation had at least as much effect as the Russian hack-and-leak campaign did on press focus. Hillary made some boneheaded choices — like barely campaigning in WI and MI; while I had worried that she made those choices because Russia tampered with her analytics (with the AWS hack), that doesn’t seem to have happened. Disinformation sent by the Trump campaign and associates was more significant than Russian disinformation. It didn’t help that the Obama Administration announced a sharp spike in ObamaCare prices right before the election.

The response matters

As noted, Trump’s narcissism dramatically increased the effect of the Russian efforts in 2016, because he has always refused to admit it happened.

Compare that to Bernie’s response to learning that Russia was trying to help his campaign, which accepted that it is happening and rejected the help.

“I don’t care, frankly, who [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to be president,” Sanders said in a statement. “My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.

“In 2016, Russia used Internet propaganda to sow division in our country, and my understanding is that they are doing it again in 2020. Some of the ugly stuff on the Internet attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters.”

This was not perfect — Bernie could have revealed this briefing himself weeks ago, Bernie blamed the WaPo for reporting it when it seems like the story was seeded by O’Brien. But it was very good, in that it highlighted the point of Russian interference — sowing divisions — and it reaffirmed the import of Americans selecting who wins. Plus, contrary to Trump, there’s no reason to believe Bernie would pursue policies that specifically advantaged Russia.

Other factors remain more important than Russian interference

There’s very serious reason to be concerned that Russia will hack the outcome of 2020. After all, it would need only to affect the outcome in a small number of precincts to tip the result, and the prospect of power outages or ransomware doing so in urgent fashion have grown since 2016.

That said, as with 2016, there are far more urgent concerns, and those concerns are entirely American.

Republicans continue to seek out new ways to suppress the vote, including by throwing large swaths of voters off the rolls without adequate vetting. There are real concerns about voting machines, particularly in Georgia (and there are credible concerns about the reliability of GA’s tally in past elections). Republicans have continued to make polling locations less accessible in Democratic precincts than in Republican ones.

Facebook refuses to police the accuracy of political ads, and Trump has flooded Facebook with disinformation.

And Bloomberg’s efforts this year — which include a good deal of trolling and disinformation — are unprecedented in recent memory. His ad spending has undercut the ability to weigh candidates. And his personnel spending is increasing the costs for other candidates.

Russian efforts to sway the vote are real. Denying them — as some of Bernie’s supporters are doing in ways that hurt the candidate — does not help. But, assuming DHS continues to work with localities to ensure the integrity of voting infrastructure, neither does overplaying them. Between now and November there’s far more reason to be concerned about American-funded disinformation and American money distorting our democratic process.