The reason I have so little patience for NYT’s decision to dedicate the resources of three senior reporters to warn about the dangers of a second Trump term is not that I disagree about the second term. They’re right that it would be far worse.
It’s that the same reporters continue to downplay Trump’s past corruption — some of which Maggie Haberman specifically enabled — and outright ignore the ongoing effects of it.
Imagine how much healthier American democracy would be if the NYT dedicated just half of the time and space that went into the eight, often repetitive stories on this topic to instead lay out how the ongoing effort to impeach Biden is a continuation of Trump’s efforts, made with the assistance of men now deemed to be Russian spies by both the US and Ukraine, to frame Joe Biden?
NYT appears not to have assigned a single reporter to chase down the following allegations that have come out of the GOP impeachment effort:
Bill Barr’s DOJ shut down a corruption investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky — which had been opened in January 2016, while Biden was VP and Hunter was on the board of Burisma — in December 2019, right in the middle of an impeachment defense claiming to prioritize the investigation of Burisma’s corruption.
Days later, Barr set up a rickety effort to ingest the dirt Rudy Giuliani had obtained, including from known Russian agent Andrii Derkach and possibly from Burisma itself, without being forced to prosecute Rudy for soliciting dirt from known Russian agents. One of several details we’ve learned since NYT’s superb past reporting on this effort (besides that Scott Brady’s testimony completely conflicts with that past NYT report), is that Brady mined information from the newly closed Zlochevsky investigation to obtain an FD-1023 recording Zlochevksy making new claims about Joe Biden around the same time in 2019 as Barr shut down the investigation into Zlochevsky, claims that were utterly inconsistent with what he had said months earlier.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer claims, backed by newly disclosed communications, that Tony Bobulinski falsely told the FBI on October 23, 2020 that he had personally attended a February 2017 meeting at which he saw CEFC’s Chair hand Hunter Biden an enormous diamond. That meeting with the FBI took place one day after attending the October 22, 2020 debate with Donald Trump. Weeks later, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, Bobulinski and Mark Meadows had a covert meeting at a campaign stop; she claims she saw Trump’s chief of staff hand Bobulinski, “what appeared to be a folded sheet of paper or a small envelope.”
Separately, Hunter Biden partner Rob Walker described the concerns he and Hunter had about Bobulinski’s business ties to Russians, possibly including Viktor Vekselberg.
In addition to the informant report on Zlochevsky’s changed claims about Biden, there were three other dodgy informant reports shared with the Hunter Biden team: from two Ukrainians that seem tied to the Rudy effort, from Gal Luft at meetings where — he has since been accused — he lied about his ties to CEFC, and from Bannon associate Peter Schweizer (the latter of which this important NYT story on Tim Thibault did address).
Throughout this period, the IRS supervisor on the investigation documented repeated examples of improper influence on the investigation. In a recent subpoena request, Hunter’s attorney noted that Trump’s improper effort to influence the investigation continues to this day.
In short, basic reporting on Republican efforts to impeach Biden show that it, along with key parts (though not necessarily all) of the investigation into Hunter Biden, are simply a continuation of an effort Trump started in 2018 to frame Joe Biden. That is an effort that involved people that both the US and Ukraine have labeled as Russian spies.
Aside from some key articles (linked above), NYT has covered none of this.
Instead, NYT claims the exact opposite. It claims that the effort to gin up a criminal investigation into Joe Biden didn’t succeed.
And neither effort for which he was impeached succeeded. Mr. Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into opening a criminal investigation into Mr. Biden by withholding military aid, but it did not cooperate.
It’s right there, the full-time pursuit of three different House committees, ongoing, with an FD-1023 about Zlochevsky’s changed claims about Biden and Bobulinksi’s FBI report that seems to have close ties to Trump (in which Bobulinski was represented by a known Maggie Haberman source).
NYT tells you the first term wasn’t that bad, because Trump’s efforts failed. Yet what failed was NYT’s reporting on ongoing events.
NYT tells this fairy tale even as they continue to whitewash Bill Barr’s efforts. In a recent 4,000-word story, in which they claimed that the commutation of Jonathan Braun’s sentence “stood out” more than the pre-trial pardon of Steve Bannon issued the same day, NYT gives Barr two paragraphs to claim he tried to clean up pardons.
William P. Barr, a Trump attorney general who had left by the time of the Braun commutation, said when he took over the Justice Department he discovered that “there were pardons being given without any vetting by the department.”
Mr. Barr added that he told Trump aides they should at least send over names of those being considered so the department could thoroughly examine their records. While the White House Counsel’s Office tried to do so, the effort fell apart under the crush of pardon requests that poured in during the final weeks before Mr. Trump left office, according to people with direct knowledge of the process.
It is true that of the eight pardons given before he arrived, there were some doozies, including Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D’Souza, Scooter Libby, and the ranchers whose arson cases sparked the Malheur occupation.
But Barr was utterly complicit in the most abusive pardons Trump gave. Less than two months after he was confirmed based off repeated assurances that giving a pardon in exchange for false testimony was obstruction, Bill Barr wrote a memo declining to prosecute a crime in process, the effort to use pardons to ensure that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and others continued to lie to cover up Trump’s ties to Russia in the 2016 campaign. The Barr memo did not once mention pardons, even though that was a key thrust of the second volume of the Mueller Report (something Charlie Savage has also noted).
Of course, NYT joins Barr in that complicity. This story finally mentions one of those pardons in its discussion of Trump’s abuse.
His lawyers floated a pardon at his campaign chairman, whom Mr. Trump praised for not “flipping” as prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to get him to cooperate as a witness in the Russia inquiry; Mr. Trump later did pardon him.
But it does not mention that Manafort specifically lied about why he briefed Konstantin Kilimnik campaign information, an act that the Intelligence Community later stated as fact resulted in the sharing of campaign information with Russian intelligence. This is a topic about which NYT has a still uncorrected story, hiding the tie to Oleg Deripaska.
It’s not that Trump pardoned Manafort for “not flipping.” It’s that he pardoned Manafort after he lied about why the campaign manager shared information that Russian spies could use in their attack on US democracy.
And the very link NYT relies on here mentions the Stone pardon, a commutation and then pardon that halted a still ongoing CFAA conspiracy investigation between Trump’s rat-fucker and the Russians (another detail NYT has never reported).
Yes, I absolutely agree. A second Trump term would be worse.
But repeating that, over and over, even while misinforming readers about the ongoing five year effort to frame Joe Biden is not the best way to prevent a second term.
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As we wait for Trump to be arraigned in Prettyman Courthouse, I thought it worthwhile to list the 16 men who were prosecuted in Prettyman Courthouse that Trump pardoned, and their crimes:
Scooter Libby: Obstruction of justice and perjury
David Safavian: Obstruction of justice and false statements
Mike Flynn: False statements
Alex Van Der Zwaan: False statements
George Papadopoulos: False statements
Paul Slough, Manslaughter (Blackwater Nisour Square)
Nicholas Slatten: Murder (Blackwater Nisour Square)
Roger Stone: Obstruction of a proceeding, false statements, witness tampering
Paul Manafort: Conspiracy to defraud the US (money laundering and FARA), conspiracy to obstruct (witness tampering)
Robert Coughlin: Conflict of interest
Todd Boulanger: Wire fraud
Elliot Broidy: Conspiracy to violate FARA
Douglas Jemal, Wire fraud
Aviem Sella, Espionage
Four of these men lied to cover up Trump’s own Russian ties; a fifth, the son-in-law of Alfa Bank oligarch German Khan, Alex Van Der Zwaan, lied to cover up Manafort’s past Ukraine graft. A sixth, Elliot Broidy, did fundraising for Trump.
These are Trump’s people.
A lot of Republicans are wailing that Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted in DC. Marsha Blackburn is arguing that Trump should be treated differently than her constituents Lisa Eisenhart and Eric Munchel, who were prosecuted for conspiracy to obstruct the vote count, just like Trump is facing. Tim Scott is arguing that Trump should be treated differently than his constituent George Tenney, who was prosecuted for obstructing the vote count, just like Trump is facing.
But if anything, it is more appropriate to prosecute Trump in DC than Munchel (Zip Tie Guy) and Tenney (who opened the East Door of the Capitol). After all, he was a resident of DC when his alleged crimes were committed.
More importantly, even just the list of those he pardoned make it clear that Prettyman felons are his kind of people. Donald Trump is precisely where he belongs today.
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This piece, from November 2021, explains why 241 is such a good fit to Trump’s efforts to discount the votes of 81 million Biden voters.
The Supreme Court has stressed that Section 241 contains “sweeping general words” and directed courts to give the provision “a sweep as broad as its language.” In United States v. Classic it established that the statute protects not only the right to vote but the right to have one’s vote properly counted. Classic upheld an indictment of officials who sought to aid one candidate by refusing to count votes cast for his opponent.
The broad language of Section 241 clearly encompasses the actions of those involved in Trump’s coup attempt, and the Court’s precedents support that conclusion. Evidence currently available shows that the conspirators agreed to a common scheme to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, took innumerable acts designed to accomplish that goal, and intended thereby to effectively deprive millions of voters in half a dozen states—and the rest of the 81 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden—of their right to vote and have their votes properly counted.
In Anderson v. U.S. the Court explicitly held that Section 241 reaches conspiracies designed “to dilute the value of votes of qualified voters.” It requires only an intent to prevent votes from being “given full value and effect,” an intent that includes an intent “to have false votes cast.” Evidence suggests that Trump and his supporters attempted exactly that in Georgia. They pressured local officials to somehow, some way magically “find” 11,780 additional votes to give Trump victory there and negate the votes of nearly two and a half million Georgia voters.
And it’s not just the concerted effort to eliminate the votes of 81 million Biden voters on January 6.
The recent news that Jack Smith has subpoenaed the security footage from the State Farm arena vote count location in Georgia, taken in conjunction with Trump’s efforts in places like Michigan — where his efforts focused on preventing a fair count of Detroit, where he had actually performed better than in 2016, rather than Kent County, the still predominantly white county where he lost the state — is a reminder that Trump and his mobs, many associated with overt white supremacists like Nick Fuentes, aggressively tried to thwart the counting of Black and Latino people’s votes. It was the same play Roger Stone used when he sent “election observers” to Black precincts in 2016, just on a far grander scale, and backed by the incitement of the sitting President.
As I said in the other post, we’ll see how Jack Smith charges this soon enough.
For now, I want to talk about how the press cognitively missed this — myself included. I want to talk about how the press — myself included — didn’t treat an overt effort to make it harder to count the votes of Black and Latino voters as a crime.
In its piece (including Maggie, but also a lot of people who aren’t as conflicted as she is), NYT points to both Norm Eisen (who didn’t see this, either, and whose recent prosecution memo on the charges we did expect didn’t even cite the pending decisions in the DC Circuit) and the January 6 Committee as if they are where this investigation came from.
Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.
[snip]
The prospect of charging Mr. Trump under the other two statutes cited in the target letter is less novel, if not without hurdles. Among other things, in its final report last year, the House committee that investigated the events that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol had recommended that the Justice Department charge the former president under both of them.
Alan Feuer (who is bylined along with Maggie) knows as well as I do, neither ConfraudUS (18 USC 371) nor obstruction (18 USC 1512(c)(2)) came from the January 6 Committee. J6C — and people like Eisen — were still looking at insurrection long after I was screaming that DOJ would use obstruction. They — and people like Eisen — still hadn’t figured out how DOJ was using obstruction even after Carl Nichols specifically raised the prospect of using it with Trump.
NYT’s discussion of the pending appeal from Thomas Robertson in the DC Circuit (in the last paragraphs of the article) is as good as you’ll see in the mainstream press. They know well the obstruction charges builds on years of work by DOJ’s prosecutors, but nevertheless point to J6C’s fairly thin referral of it, as if that, and not the charges in 300 January 6 cases already, is where it comes from.
The reason we knew DOJ would use obstruction is because DOJ has been, overtly, setting that up for years.
In its description of the unexpected mention of 241, though, NYT describes that “prosecutors have introduced a new twist.”
Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Again, it was a surprise to me, too. I’m not faulting the NYT for being surprised. But that doesn’t mean prosecutors “introduced a new twist,” as if this is some fucking reality show. It means journalists, myself included, either don’t know of, misinterpreted the investigative steps that DOJ has already taken, or simply didn’t see them — and I fear it’s the latter.
To be sure, in retrospect there are signs that DOJ was investigating this. In December, WaPo reported that DOJ had subpoenaed election officials in predominantly minority counties in swing states (notably, the journalists on the story were local reporters, neither Trump whisperers nor the WaPo journalists who’ve given scant coverage to the crime scene investigation).
Special counsel Jack Smith has sent grand jury subpoenas to local officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin — three states that were central to President Donald Trump’s failed plan to stay in power following the 2020 election — seeking any and all communications with Trump, his campaign, and a long list of aides and allies.
The requests for records arrived in Dane County, Wis.; Maricopa County, Ariz.; and Wayne County, Mich., late last week, and in Milwaukee on Monday, officials said. They are among the first known subpoenas issued since Smith was named last month by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee Trump-related aspects of the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, as well as the criminal probe of Trump’s possible mishandling of classified documents at his Florida home and private club.
The subpoenas, at least three of which are dated Nov. 22, indicate that the Justice Department is extending its examination of the circumstances leading up to the Capitol attack to include local election officials and their potential interactions with the former president and his representatives related to the 2020 election.
The virtually identical requests to Arizona and Wisconsin seek communications with Trump, in addition to employees, agents and attorneys for his campaign. Details of the Michigan subpoena, confirmed by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, were not immediately available.
[snip]
Previous subpoenas, in Arizona and other battleground states targeted by Trump, have been issued to key Republican players seen as allies in his pressure campaign to reverse the results of the 2020 election. Maricopa County, the sprawling Arizona jurisdiction that is home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters, was among several localities on the receiving end of that pressure.
The Post could not confirm Tuesday whether the latest round of subpoenas went to local officials in any other states. The office of the secretary of state in Pennsylvania, another 2020 contested state, declined to comment. State and local election officials in another contested state, Georgia, said they knew of no subpoenas arriving in the past week. Officials in Clark County, Nev., the sixth contested state, declined to comment.
The Arizona subpoena was addressed to Maricopa County’s elections department, while the Wisconsin versions were addressed to the Milwaukee and Dane clerks. All seek communications from June 1, 2020, through Jan. 20, 2021. [snip]
These subpoenas asked for Trump’s contacts with local election officials, in the predominantly minority counties that Democrats need to win swing states, going back to June 2020, well before the election itself. By December 2022, DOJ was taking overt steps in an investigation that even before the election Trump had plans targeting minority cities.
And there may have been a still earlier sign of this prong of the investigation, from the NYT itself. Alan Feuer (with Mike Schmidt) reported in November that prosecutors were investigating Stone’s rent-a-mob tactics, going back to 2018 but really going back to the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000, the same fucking MO Stone has adopted for decades, using threats of violence to make it harder to count brown people’s votes.
The time was 2018, the setting was southern Florida, and the election in question was for governor and a hotly contested race that would help determine who controlled the United States Senate.
Now, four years later, the Justice Department is examining whether the tactics used then served as a model for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In recent months, prosecutors overseeing the seditious conspiracy case of five members of the Proud Boys have expanded their investigation to examine the role that Jacob Engels — a Florida Proud Boy who accompanied Mr. Stone to Washington for Jan. 6 — played in the 2018 protests, according to a person briefed on the matter.
The prosecutors want to know whether Mr. Engels received any payments or drew up any plans for the Florida demonstration, and whether he has ties to other people connected to the Proud Boys’ activities in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol.
Different prosecutors connected to the Jan. 6 investigation have also been asking questions about efforts by Mr. Stone — a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump — to stave off a recount in the 2018 Senate race in Florida, according to other people familiar with the matter.
[snip]
The 2018 demonstrations in Florida did not come close to the scale or intensity of the assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, but the overlap in tactics and in those involved was striking enough to have attracted the attention of federal investigators.
Information obtained by investigators shows that some of those on the ground in 2018 called the protests “Brooks Brothers 2.0,” a reference to the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot” during a recount of the presidential vote in Florida in 2000. During that event, supporters of George W. Bush — apparently working with Mr. Stone — stormed a local government building, stopping the vote count at a crucial moment.
As I noted at the time, the NYT story ignored Stone’s 2016 efforts, but his efforts to intimidate Black voters at the polls in that year was the origin of the Stop the Steal effort that Ali Alexander was entrusted to implement in 2020 while Stone awaited his pardon.
And we know from evidence submitted at the Proud Boys trial that their role in mobs was not limited to January 6, but was instead mobilized on a moment’s notice immediately after the election.
Tarrio even indicated that he had gotten instructions from “the campaign.”
Finally, for all my complaints about the treatment of Brandon Straka, this prong may have — should have — gone back still earlier, to the belated discovery of Straka’s grift.
This investigation has been happening. It’s just that reporters — myself included — didn’t report it as such.
It’s not just the epic mob Trump mobilized on January 6, an attempt to use violence to prevent the votes of 81 million Biden voters to be counted. It was an effort that went back before that, to use threats of violence to make it harder for election workers like Ruby Freeman to count the vote in big cities populated by minorities.
One reason TV lawyers didn’t see this is they have always treated Trump’s suspected crimes as a white collar affair, plotting in the Willard, but not tasing Michael Fanone at the Capitol.
But it is also about race and visibility.
January 6 was spectacular, there for the whole world to see.
But those earlier mobs — at the TCF center in Detroit, the State Farm arena in Atlanta, Phoenix, Milwauke — those earlier mobs were also efforts to make sure certain votes weren’t counted, or if they were, were only counted after poorly paid election workers risked threats of violence to count them, after people like Ruby Freeman were targeted by Trump’s team to have their lives ruined.
And we, the press collectively, didn’t treat those efforts to disqualify votes as the same kind of crime, as part of the same conspiracy, as Trump’s more spectacular efforts on January 6.
Update: Added the campaign texts. Thanks to Brandi, who knew exactly where to find them.
Update: Ironically, Bill Barr’s testimony may be pivotal to prove that Trump targeted Detroit because of race. That’s because Barr specifically told Trump he had done better in Detroit than he did in 2016.
Trump raised “the big vote dump, as he called it, in Detroit,” Barr said. “He said ‘people saw boxes coming into the counting station at all hours of the morning’ and so forth.”
Barr said he explained to Trump that Detroit centralized its counting process at the TCF Center downtown convention hall rather than in each precinct. For the November 2020 general election, Michigan’s largest city counted its absentee ballots at the convention center under the supervision of state Bureau of Election Director Chris Thomas. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, most ballots cast were absentee.
“They’re moved to counting stations,” Barr said. “And so the normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours.”
“I said, ‘Did anyone point out to you … that you did better in Detroit than you did last time? There’s no indication of fraud in Detroit,” Barr said he told Trump.
Everyone in MI knows — and I’m sure Trump knows — he lost MI because he lost Kent County, which as more young people move into Grand Rapids has been getting more Democratic in recent years. That Trump targeted Detroit and not Kent (or Oakland, which has also been trending increasingly Democratic) is a testament that this was about race.
Update, 7/30: Both NAACP and ACLU recognized this in real time. Here’s ACLU’s suit.
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The WaPo has a story that many Merrick Garland attackers claim confirms their fears about the DOJ investigation. Except the story has really important gaps, most importantly in its portrayal of the fake electors investigation, which is the damning part of the story about Garland or Lisa Monaco’s direct decisions (as opposed to those of FBI).
Moreover, the one thing it proves definitively is that former FBI Washington Field Office head Steve D’Antuono repeatedly shot down investigative prongs of this investigation, just like he did the stolen documents investigation. That the head of the WFO was running interference for Trump raises key questions about FBI missteps with people like Brandon Straka, someone arrested early who had direct ties to the scheme in the Willard, to say nothing about WFO’s ineptitude in advance of the attack.
Here are the main disclosures.
Steve D’Antuono shot down an effort by JP Cooney early
The story describes that — after such time as Brandon Straka was being treated as a cooperative witness — JP Cooney pitched an idea to get to Stone through the Oath Keepers, not the Proud Boys.
But a group of prosecutors led by J.P. Cooney, the head of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, argued that the existing structure of the probe overlooked a key investigative angle. They sought to open a new front, based partly on publicly available evidence, including from social media, that linked some extremists involved in the riot to people in Trump’s orbit — including Roger Stone, Trump’s longest-serving political adviser; Ali Alexander, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot; and Alex Jones, the Infowars host.
[snip]
According to three people who either viewed or were briefed on Cooney’s plan, it called for a task force to embark on a wide-ranging effort, including seeking phone records for Stone as well as Alexander. Cooney wanted investigators to follow the money — to trace who had financed the false claims of a stolen election and paid for the travel of rallygoers-turned-rioters. He was urging investigators to probe the connection between Stone and members of the Oath Keepers, who were photographed together outside the Willard hotel in downtown Washington on the morning of Jan. 6.
[snip]
D’Antuono called Sherwin. The two agreed Cooney did not provide evidence that Stone had likely committed a crime — the standard they considered appropriate for looking at a political figure. Investigating Stone simply because he spent time with Oath Keepers could expose the department to accusations that it had politicized the probe, they told colleagues.
D’Antuono took the matter to Abbate, Wray’s newly named deputy director. Abbate agreed the plan was premature.
It’s genuinely hard to believe this was the plan. To be sure, FBI did investigate Stone’s ties to the Oath Keepers, starting no later than March 2021. But that wasn’t the obvious route to get to Trump.
The route to get there, importantly, was via a route that Bill Barr had affirmatively dismissed in advance of the attack: through the Proud Boys, not the Oath Keepers. Stone’s ties to the Oath Keepers was not obviously criminal; it still may not be. His ties to the Proud Boys are central.
In any case, Steve D’Antuono — who stalled the stolen documents case investigation last summer — shot down this angle of the investigation early on.
The initial decision to exclude Trump came from a guy who had presided over a politicized DOJ
Michael Sherwin — who as US Attorney played a role in killing investigations into Trump’s people in summer 2020 — did not include Trump in his summary of the investigation in March 2021.
[A]ccording to a copy of the briefing document, absent from Sherwin’s 11-page presentation to Garland on March 11, 2021, was any reference to Trump or his advisers — those who did not go to the Capitol riot but orchestrated events that led to it.
[snip]
Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature, according to five individuals familiar with the decision. Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.
The strategy was embraced by Garland, Monaco and Wray.
This may or may not have been the right decision — but WaPo only mentions Sherwin’s role in Barr’s sabotage of ongoing Trump cases in passing.
Whether certain FBI decisions came from Steve D’Antuono or Chris Wray is unclear
Chris Wray absolutely comes off as gun-shy in this story, which is perfectly consistent with the way he threw his own agents under the bus in the wake of the DOJ IG Report on Carter Page.
Wray and his team sought to avoid even an appearance of top-down influence by having local field offices run investigations and make day-to-day decisions. In fact, when it came to the Jan. 6 investigation, agents noticed that Wray did not travel the five blocks from FBI headquarters to the bureau’s Washington field office running the investigation for more than 21 months after the attack. In that time, people familiar with the investigation said, he had never received a detailed briefing on the topic directly from the assistant director in charge of the office, Steven D’Antuono.
[snip]
D’Antuono, who was interacting with lawmakers and reporters, told colleagues: “Everybody keeps asking, ‘Where the hell is the FBI?’”
The answer they heard did not instill confidence. Top FBI aides told D’Antuono and Sherwin that Wray wanted to stay on as Biden’s FBI director. They said they would not put the top boss “out there” — in the public eye — because they feared any public comments might spur Trump to unceremoniously fire him.
I’m more concerned about Wray’s later actions — but the later timidity is described to have come from Steve D’Antuono, not Wray (and on the stolen documents investigation, Wray pushed for a more aggressive investigation, whereas D’Antuono pushed the slow it).
D’Antuono shot down an effort to pursue the Willard
In November 2021, when Thomas Windom asked to pursue the plotting in the Willard in November 2021, D’Antuono refused, and tried to get Windom to pursue militia ties instead.
At a meeting in November 2021, Windom asked D’Antuono to assist in a grand jury investigation, which would include subpoenaing the Willard hotel for billing information from the time when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was working with Stephen K. Bannon, Boris Epshteyn and other Trump associates in their “war room.” Stone was staying there around Jan. 6 as well, in a different suite.
D’Antuono was skeptical. The investigative track sounded eerily similar to the Cooney proposal that had been shot down in February, he later confided to colleagues.
“I’m not serving subpoenas on the friggin’ Willard,” D’Antuono told Windom, according to a person familiar with their discussions. “You don’t have enough to issue subpoenas.”
This was absolutely the wrong decision, but it is yet another case where D’Antuono was thwarting the investigation. His refusal to investigate the Williard also should focus more attention on the treatment of Brandon Straka and others, because if the FBI hadn’t been so credulous months earlier, they would have had more evidence on the Willard.
800 words of this story pertain to Michael Sherwin’s firing
Sherwin’s firing for trying to force sedition charges is a distraction. Yet 800 words of this story focus on it.
While the story does show that under Chandler Phillips, there was uncertainty about direction of the investigation (Lisa Monaco’s office was micro-managing at that point, partly in an attempt to enforce consistency across hundreds of defendants, partly to ensure that more deliberate rioters were charged with felonies). But it does seem that the delay in getting Matthew Graves in place did delay a renewed focus on Trump. That’s Joe Biden’s fault.
The focus on Stewart Rhodes is a distraction
Similarly, the focus on Stewart Rhodes, as opposed to Enrique Tarrio, is a distraction.
The outstanding issue of whether to charge Rhodes and other militia leaders with seditious conspiracy quickly rose to the top of to-do lists for the two new appointees. It had been eight months since Sherwin directed his deputies to raise the idea in a memo to the office of the deputy attorney general.
A long story in which the Proud Boys investigation is treated as “other militia leaders” is a long story that doesn’t understand the most basic things about January 6.
Details about the decision not to pursue the fake electors are vague and at times inaccurate
The WaPo described that the original decision not to pursue the fake electors plot happened “about the same time,” as D’Antuono’s decision to shoot down Cooney’s Stone investigation without presenting a date.
About the same time, attorneys at Main Justice declined another proposal that would have squarely focused prosecutors on documents that Trump used to pressure Pence not to certify the election for Biden, The Post found.
Officials at the National Archives had discovered similarities in fraudulent slates of electors for Trump that his Republican allies had submitted to Congress and the Archives. The National Archives inspector general’s office asked the Justice Department’s election crimes branch to consider investigating the seemingly coordinated effort in swing states. Citing its prosecutors’ discretion, the department told the Archives it would not pursue the topic, according to two people with knowledge of the decision.
If that decision happened before Garland came in (as it appears to have), then the story is about how Garland chose to revisit and reopen the fake electors decision, not why he chose not to pursue it.
The story describes that when Lisa Monaco did publicly confirm DOJ was pursuing fake electors in January 2022, people were surprised to hear that.
Law enforcement officers, including some who would be called upon to join the investigation in ensuing months, were taken aback by Monaco’s comments because they had not been told work was beginning, and it was extremely rare for Justice Department officials to comment on ongoing investigations.
Behind the scenes, federal prosecutors in Michigan who received Nessel’s referral were waiting to hear from Monaco’s office about how Main Justice wanted to proceed. National Archives officials were dumbstruck; the Justice Department was suddenly interested in the fake electors evidence it had declined to pursue a year earlier.
One person directly familiar with the department’s new interest in the case said it felt as though the department was reacting to the House committee’s work as well as heightened media coverage and commentary. “Only after they were embarrassed did they start looking,” the person said.
In the weeks and days before Monaco’s announcement, DOJ had finalized exploiting Rudy’s phone (as I note below, the WaPo story doesn’t focus on Rudy). The DOJ pursuit of the fake electors plot included aspects and subjects the January 6 Committee never pursued. So it is virtually certain that Rudy’s phone, not just J6C, drove at least part of the renewed focus on this.
It took two months after this for the FBI — for D’Antuono and Wray — to open the investigation, and they did not open the investigation against Trump at first.
In April 2022, more than 15 months after the attack, Wray signed off on the authorization opening a criminal investigation into the fake electors plot.
Still, the FBI was tentative: Internally, some of the ex-president’s advisers and his reelection campaign were identified as the focus of the bureau’s probe, but not Trump.
Note, this is still two months before Cassidy Hutchinson’s public testimony, which had publicly been viewed as the first focus on Trump.
WaPo suggests that the first subpoenas in the fake elector plot went out on June 21, 2022 (which in any case would still be proof DOJ acted before the public hearing).
On June 21, 2022, the House select committee held a nationally televised hearing on fake electors — a topic the committee had, in contrast to the Justice Department, identified early on as a major target for investigation. Testimony revealed what the committee had learned in nine months: The Trump campaign had requested that fake elector documents be flown to D.C. in time to help pressure Pence.
[snip]
That day, FBI agents delivered subpoenas about electors for Trump to state lawmakers in Arizona. The next day, agents served subpoenas to people who signed documents claiming to be Trump electors in Georgia and Michigan.
But as I note below, the first fake electors subpoenas went out a month earlier, by May 25. This part of the narrative is misleading at best.
WaPo suggests there was an inordinate delay in interviewing fake electors.
In several cases, before the special counsel’s office got in touch, witnesses in the fake electors scheme hadn’t heard from the FBI in almost a year and thought the case was dead. Similarly, firsthand witnesses to Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — in which Trump asked him to “find” enough votes to win that state — were not interviewed by the Justice Department until this year, after Smith’s team contacted them.
It’s not clear whether this is true at all. It has persistently taken 6 months or more to exploit cell phones. The Boris Epshteyn interviews in April took place on that schedule, even with complications of claiming work product with Rudy.
This is, rather, consistent with much of the January 6 investigation, or any investigation. All the more so given increasing signs that the January 6 and stolen documents case is intersecting at Trump’s PAC, which is not discussed in the article.
The most damning part of this story for DOJ leaves out the Rudy phones and the May subpoena. Including those two things, though, really undermines the narrative about that prong of the investigation.
The gaps in the WaPo story
There are many things not mentioned in this story, which betray real blind spots in the sourcing. Those include:
The failure by WFO under Steve D’Antuono to prevent January 6. D’Antuono is good at playing the press, and some quotes in here suggest that he was pushing for more aggressive investigation and Wray was resisting. Tellingly, then, this story doesn’t even mention — much less attempt to explain — why the FBI under D’Antuono failed to act on intelligence predicting January 6 (and indeed, kept Proud Boys on as informants targeting “Antifa” even as they were planning to come to DC for January 6). That’s where this story begins, yet it’s not included here.
Brandon Straka and similarly other well-connected VIPs. Brandon Straka got credit for cooperating in February and March 2021 interviews; he was in a position (and did) provide evidence about ties to the Stop the Steel investigation and the Willard. But the FBI — led by Steve D’Antuono, who also obstructed the investigation into the stolen documents — proved remarkably credulous with Straka and similar witnesses. A different treatment of Straka may well have led to far different results. Yet Straka is not mentioned here.
The Proud Boys’ history of teaming with Roger Stone to sow violence. According to the story, Michael Sherwin set his sights on the Oath Keepers and that initiative led to the sedition conviction of Stewart Rhodes and others. At sentencing, the sedition conviction proved important only for Rhodes and Kelly Meggs; everyone else was treated similarly as obstruction defendants, even with terrorist enhancements. But the more obvious starting point to understand Trump’s ties to January 6 — and an absolutely critical one given how bodies led by Alex Jones made the attack successful — is the Proud Boys. Given DC USAO’s treatment of the threats Stone made with Enrique Tarrio against Amy Berman Jackson in 2019, the focus on the Oath Keepers as distinct from the Proud Boys is inexcusable.
Rudy Giuliani’s phone. In September 2021, DOJ made a decision to do a privilege review on Rudy Giuliani’s phone that would access all information on his phones, not just the Ukraine-related topics the warrants to obtain the phones targeted in April 2021. Rudy has since confirmed that this included all the January 6 related material he admits to have had in his possession when the phones were seized in Lisa Monaco’s first week. It is absolutely certain that this should have produced information on the fake elector plot, starting in November 2021, yet WaPo doesn’t mention it.
The May 2022 Fake Electors subpoenas. The story implies DOJ first sent out subpoenas in the fake elector plot in June 2022. That’s false: the first subpoenas went out in May 2022. Importantly, there were names on those subpoenas that weren’t the focus of J6C’s public investigation (and in any case, preceded the public hearings). [Update: As Kyle Cheney noted, DOJ also obtained the email accounts of John Eastman and others, three of four lawyers.] That suggests that some of this investigation came from DOJ’s own work, not J6C’s.
Sidney Powell. The investigation into Sidney Powell, started no later than September 2021, is not mentioned in this piece. It’s unclear what became of that investigation, but DOJ did pursue it as a prong of the investigation at a time when, the story suggests, DOJ was not pursuing any Public Integrity prong of the investigation.
January 6 Committee’s delayed sharing. Some of this story is told from the perspective of the January 6 Committee. Yet it doesn’t mention that the committee’s decision to delay sharing of its transcripts did real and predictable damage to the Proud Boys case, and withheld tools from DOJ they could have used to flip witnesses six months earlier than they did.
Ultimately, this is a story first and foremost about Steve D’Antuono, who left the FBI in November. And I suspect it is just scratching the surface on the story about him.
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[Wayne] BEYER: My question to you is: will you pardon the January 6th rioters who were convicted of federal offenses?
TRUMP: I am inclined to pardon many of them. I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.
But, you know, when you look at Antifa, what they’ve done to Portland, and if you look at Antifa, look at what they’ve done to Minneapolis and so many other – so many other places, look at what they did to Seattle. And BLM – BLM, many people were killed.
These people – I’m not trying to justify anything, but you have two standards of justice in this country, and what they’ve done – and I love that question because what they’ve done to see many people is nothing – nothing. And then what they’ve done to these people, they’ve persecuted these people.
And yeah, my answer is I am most likely – if I get in, I will most likely – I would say it will be a large portion of them. You know, they did a very –
And it’ll be very early on. And they’re living in hell right now.
Given his legal focus on police misconduct and sometime membership in a GOP lawyers association, Beyer may have been teeing Trump up to promise to pardon the men and women who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and might have assassinated Mike Pence. Given his background, this feels like a scripted question, designed to provide Trump an opportunity to promise those facing prosecution (including some lawyers!) to remain loyal to Trump.
In response, Kaitlin Collins attempted to point out Trump’s hypocrisy by raising one of the several cops and former cops who rioted on January 6, to say nothing of the former and active duty service men and women who participated in the attack (she was probably alluding to Thomas Webster, the most celebrated of the former cops charged with assaults, but he is not the only one). That only teed up another opportunity for Trump to undermine the rule of law in the US.
COLLINS: So when it comes to pardons –
TRUMP: They’re living in hell, and they’re policemen, and they’re firemen, and they’re soldiers, and they’re carpenters and electricians and they’re great people. Many of them are just great people.
COLLINS: Mr. President, one of the people who was convicted was a former policeman but he was convicted of attacking a police officer, I should note.
But when you said you are considering pardoning a large portion of those charged with crimes on January 6th, does that include the four Proud Boys members who were charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy?
TRUMP: I don’t know. I’ll have to look at their case, but I will say in Washington, D.C., you cannot get a fair trial, you cannot. Just like in New York City, you can’t get a fair trial either.
Collins made no mention — none — about Trump’s past pardons. She let one of the most unprecedented abuses committed during Trump’s first term, his pardons for those who lied to protect him, go unmentioned even when discussing a topic directly on point.
She’s not alone in her silence. Six months after Trump announced he was running, I’m aware of no deep dive on Trump’s abuse of the pardon power in his first term, not even the pardons that were — as a mass pardon of January 6 convicts would be — pardons of criminals whose crimes served his own power.
Take Paul Manafort. Whatever you imagine the Mueller Report says, whether or not you’ve read the far more damning Senate Intelligence Committee Report, it is a fact that Trump pardoned his way out of legal trouble with Manafort.
After entering into a plea deal in September 2018 that averted a damaging trial during the 2018 pre-election period, Manafort immediately changed his testimony on several key subjects. Judge Amy Berman Jackson ultimately ruled that his changed testimony amounted to lies that breached his plea agreement. She ruled that Manafort lied about three topics, one of which was what happened during an August 2, 2016 meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik at which:
Manafort explained how the campaign planned to win the swing states where Trump would eventually win the election
Kilimnik discussed how Manafort could get millions in payments from his Ukrainian paymasters and $19 million in disputed funds forgiven with Oleg Deripaska
Kilimnik recruited Manafort’s involvement in a plan to carve up Ukraine very similar to the plan Russia pursued until they invaded last February
Had Manafort not entered the plea deal he abrogated within hours, weeks of pre-election coverage would have focused on Manafort’s FARA trial, the proof that Manafort had worked for pro-Russian Ukrainians and then lied to cover it up. Such a trial might have led to even greater Republicans losses in the November 2018 elections.
On the other hand, had Manafort cooperated in good faith, Mueller would have had three witnesses to the meeting, days after the conventions, where Manafort took steps — either wittingly or unwittingly — that provided someone who played a key role in the Russian interference operation with inside information about the Trump campaign.
Instead, Manafort forestalled the trial and undermined any value that his damning testimony (including that Roger Stone had pre-knowledge that WikiLeaks would release John Podesta emails) would have.
And after Manafort lied to cover up what really happened at that meeting and thereby faced a stiffer sentence, Trump pardoned his former campaign manager. In the process, Trump — who has bitched about the cost of the Mueller investigation — reversed the forfeitures that would have contributed to the expense of investigating Manafort’s crimes.
Intelligence judgments since make the meeting even more damning. In June 2020, the FBI offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to Kilimnik’s arrest. The Senate Intelligence Committee Report included two redacted sections (one, two) describing evidence that Kilimnik may have been more closely tied the hack-and-leak activities.
An April 2021 sanctions report stated as fact that Kilimnik had shared campaign information with Russian intelligence.
Konstantin Kilimnik (Kilimnik) is a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant and known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy. Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2018, Kilimnik was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice regarding unregistered lobbying work. Kilimnik has also sought to assist designated former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. At Yanukovych’s direction, Kilimnik sought to institute a plan that would return Yanukovych to power in Ukraine.
Kilimnik was designated pursuant to E.O. 13848 for having engaged in foreign interference in the U.S. 2020 presidential election. [my emphasis]
The declassified intelligence report on the 2020 election (which was declassified in March 2021 but completed in classified form on January 7, 2021, before Trump left office) described that Kilimnik continued to interfere in US elections in 2020.
A network of Ukraine-linked individuals— including Russian influence agent Konstantin Kilimnik—who were also connected to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) took steps throughout the election cycle to damage US ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump’s prospects for reelection. We assess this network also sought to discredit the Obama administration by emphasizing accusations of corruption by US officials, and to falsely blame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.
Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences. These Russian proxies met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons to advocate for formal investigations; hired a US firm to petition US officials; and attempted to make contact with several senior US officials. They also made contact with established US media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020.
In other words, the tie to Kilimnik ended up being far more damaging than imagined at the time of the Mueller Report, but by the time voters learned it, Trump had already bought Manafort’s silence with a pardon, one that because it reversed the forfeiture, ended up being worth millions to Trump’s former Campaign Manager.
Though the evidence is sketchier, Trump may have pardoned his way out of even worse Russian trouble with Roger Stone. A jury found that Trump’s rat-fucker lied to cover up the true means by which he learned that WikiLeaks would release files from John Podesta (Manafort and Gates both testified that he did get advance knowledge). As Stone was about to report to prison, Stone did a series of appearances where he specified the number of calls Stone had with Trump during 2016 that (Stone claimed, unreliably) prosecutors had asked him about, a list of calls that may have come from a notebook of such contacts prosecutors hoped to find in the search of Stone’s properties. And amid Stone’s claims to have refused to tell prosecutors about the substance of dozens of contacts he had with Trump during 2016, Trump first commuted Stone’s sentence and then — the same day as Manafort — pardoned him.
Importantly, within days of getting that full pardon, Stone met with Trump to thank him for that pardon. At what was likely the same meeting, they talked about January 6, including Trump speaking; the meeting immediately preceded the White House’s shift on making that speech happen. Prosecutors have tied a January 3 appearance Stone did with the Proud Boys with efforts some of those Proud Boys made days later to prevent the vote certification.
Which leads to the most remarkable unremarked pardon of one of Trump’s co-conspirators, that of Steve Bannon.
Bannon did not get pardoned, directly, for lying to cover up what went on in 2016 (indeed, Bannon’s testimony helped to convict Stone).
Rather, as one of his last acts as President, Trump pardoned Bannon for defrauding Trump voters, to the tune of millions, using Trump’s image to do that.
Several of Bannon’s victims testified about believing they were investing in Trump’s wall at his co-conspirator Timothy Shea’s trial. Public school teacher Nicole Keller described investing because border security was so important to her late border patrol agent spouse.
Q. Why did you decide to donate to We Build the Wall? A. My late husband was a border patrol agent. We lived at the southern border in the Rio Grand Valley from 1998 through fall of 2007. Border security is something that is very — was very important to him. He dedicated his career to it. At that point in time, I was a teacher at the southern border. I taught sixth grade and high school science. And we believed that the southern border should be secure, just like the door to our house. It’s not that we’re trying to keep people out; it’s just making sure when someone comes in to our home or residence, we know who they are and what business that they might have at our house.
William Ward, a veteran and retired Washington State Medicare fraud administrator, described contributing because he didn’t believe Congress was doing enough to build Trump’s wall.
Q. Why did you decide to make that donation to We Build the Wall?
A. It was symbolic on my part more than anything else, that I thought if there were a whole lot of people that donated that way, that it might draw some attention to what I think is a difficulty along our Southern Border.
Q. Why do you think there’s a difficulty along the Southern Border? Explain what you mean by that, please.
A. Well, it’s a personal view, but I’m not sure that Congress has done what they should in passing laws that have sort of gotten out of date with the truth on the ground now, for a couple of decades, and that I think that’s where it should start. It should be a congressional thing.
Both described feeling cheated when they discovered their donations were being misused. Keller:
Q. Did there come a time when you became concerned that We Build the Wall wasn’t using donors’ money properly?
A. There did, yes.
Q. Why did you become concerned about that?
A. Again, it was something that was being talked about on news websites.
Q. And when you saw news that caused you concern, what, if anything, did you do about it?
A. I went to the GoFundMe website and tried to get my money back. Mr. Kolfage had implied that if I did not — if the monies were not used as they could be, that we would get our money back.
Q. Were you able to get your money back?
A. I was not, no.
Q. Why did you want your money back?
A. I was insulted that somebody had taken what should be a position of honor and valor, being injured for their country, and, instead, used it to defraud me.
And Ward:
Q. Did there come a time when you became concerned that We Build the Wall wasn’t using donated money in the right way?
A. Yes, there was.
Q. Why did you become concerned about that?
A. The — again, going through a news feed at breakfast every morning, I saw something that there was an investigation of misuse of the funds.
Q. When you saw that, what, if anything, did you do?
A. I got a hold of the GoFundMe page to see if I could recover my donation.
Q. Were you able to get your donation back?
A. No, I was not.
Q. Why did you want your money back?
A. I just felt I’d been cheated.
A restitution filing ordered the defendants to pay over $25 million to their victims.
Bannon cheated people who believed in Trump and his goddamn wall. And Trump pardoned him for it. And Kaitlan Collins didn’t think it worth mentioning to an audience of potential Trump supporters.
Trump obviously didn’t find the charges themselves faulty; he didn’t pardon Bannon’s co-conspirators. They were just sentenced — to three to four-plus years in prison — for the fraud they perpetrated against Trump supporters. And while Dustin Stockton’s testimony to the January 6 Committee has proven unreliable, he and Jennifer Lawrence claimed they were floated pardons in conjunction with their involvement with planning January 6.
The full story of why Trump pardoned Bannon in one of his last acts as President has not been — may never be — told. But there’s no way to regard a pardon for defrauding Trump supporters outside the context of Bannon’s involvement in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. And, particularly given the absence of any defect in the charges themselves — given that Trump didn’t pardon all the Build the Wall fraudsters — it’s impossible to understand Bannon’s pardon as anything but payback.
And yet, when Kaitlin Collins talked about how horrible it would be if Trump started pardoning everyone else who helped Trump attack Congress, she treated as if it would be an unprecedented abuse. She did so even though she made that tie herself in breaking the story of the Bannon pardon.
Bannon’s pardon would follow a frantic scramble during the President’s final hours in office as attorneys and top aides debated his inclusion on Trump’s outgoing clemency list. Despite their falling out in recent years, Trump was eager to pardon his former aide after recently reconnecting with him as he helped fan Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election.
[snip]
Things shifted in recent months as Bannon attempted to breach Trump’s inner circle once again by offering advice before the election and pushing his false theories after Trump had lost.
One concern that had stalled debate over the pardon was Bannon’s possible connection to the riot of Trump supporters at the US Capitol earlier this month, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN.
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon promised listeners of his podcast – “War Room” – on January 5, the day before the deadly siege on the Capitol.
[snip]
While some advisers believed it was decided last weekend that Bannon was not getting a pardon, Trump continued to raise it into Tuesday night. Throughout the day, Trump had continued to contemplate pardons that aides believed were settled, including for his former strategist – something he continued to go back and forth on into Tuesday night, sources told CNN.
Ultimately, Trump sided with Bannon.
It would be the exact same thing Trump did in the wake of the November 2020 election, at a time he thought he would face no consequences for such an abuse of the pardon power.
Trump waited to pardon those who had protected him until after voters weighed in. He waited, because he knew that making these pardons before an election would harm his chances of getting elected.
And yet no one — not even Collins, when discussing pardons in the direct context of the next election — could be bothered to mention how abusive were Trump’s past pardons.
Of course Trump will pardon January 6 criminals if he wins in 2024, Kaitlan! Why wouldn’t he?!?! You let him blather on for an hour, even discussed future pardons with him, with not a single mention of his past abuses.
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Enrique Tarrio has already been investigated by a grand jury in Prettyman Courthouse for any role he had in threats to undermine a criminal prosecution.
That’s important background to Brandi’s report, at the end of her update on the Proud Boys trial, of how much of last week the trial was halted for a series of sealed hearings.
Apart from routine objections launched by the defense to even the most mundane of issues and separate from the unending series of motions for mistrial, last week featured a new and unwelcome variable: the sealed hearing.
A sealed hearing, or a hearing closed to the public and press, is typically held when sensitive or classified matters are being discussed by the parties. Trial days were stopped and started three times last week for sealed hearings that stretched for more than an hour. A press coalition moved to unseal proceedings on at least one of those days but was promptly denied by Judge Kelly for reasons he failed to describe on the record.
Though the exact reason was not disclosed by the court (nor would one expect it to be at this point), CNN reported that multiple sources said the sealed hearing was prompted after a juror raised concerns that she was being followed. Another juror has said they were “accosted” but no further details were available.
As CNN reported, a juror had become worried that someone was following her.
A juror told the court an individual came up to her outside of a Washington, DC, metro station and asked if she was a juror, multiple sources told CNN. The juror told court staff she had seen the same individual on several occasions and thought they might be following her.
Some jurors appear to be split on their views of the incidents, people familiar said. One juror told the judge he thought it was possible the interactions were random and it might have been someone experiencing homelessness in the area.
[snip]
When other jurors found out about the incident, they also began to look out for the individual and had taken at least one picture of the person, according to someone familiar with the matter.
Other jurors also told the court in sealed hearings this week that they had been “accosted,” one source told CNN, though it’s unclear to what extent.
But that report and some of the discussions I’ve seen elsewhere didn’t describe the list of reasons why such threats should be taken seriously.
First, there’s the fact that defendant Enrique Tarrio has already been investigated in this courthouse for his potential role in a threat against a judge. In 2019, Amy Berman Jackson put Roger Stone under oath and asked how he came to post an Instagram post of her with crosshairs on it. He blamed the “volunteers” who had made the meme — one of whom, he named, was Tarrio.
Amy Berman Jackson. How was the image conveyed to you by the person who selected it?
Stone. It was emailed to me or text-messaged to me. I’m not certain.
Q. Who sent the email?
A. I would have to go back and look. I don’t recognize. I don’t know. Somebody else uses my —
THE COURT: How big is your staff, Mr. Stone?
THE DEFENDANT: I don’t have a staff, Your Honor. I have a few volunteers. I also — others use my phone, so I’m not the only one texting, because it is my account and, therefore, it’s registered to me. So I’m uncertain how I got the image. I think it is conceivable that it was selected on my phone. I believe that is the case, but I’m uncertain.
THE COURT: So individuals, whom you cannot identify, provide you with material to be posted on your personal Instagram account and you post it, even if you don’t know who it came from?
THE DEFENDANT: Everybody who works for me is a volunteer. My phone is used by numerous people because it can only be posted to the person to whom it is registered.
[snip]
[AUSA] Jonathan Kravis. What are the names of the five or six volunteers that you’re referring to?
Stone. I would — Jacob Engles, Enrique Tarrio. I would have to go back and look
As CNN itself later reported, those whom Stone named were subpoenaed to testify about whether Stone had paid them to make threatening memes targeting his judge.
Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, had been helping him with his social media, Stone said under oath, as had the Proud Boys’ Florida chapter founder Tyler Ziolkowski, who went by Tyler Whyte at the time; Jacob Engels, a Proud Boys associate who is close to Stone and identifies himself as a journalist in Florida; and another Florida man named Rey Perez, whose name is spelled Raymond Peres in the court transcript.
A few days later, federal authorities tracked down the men and gave them subpoenas to testify to a grand jury, according to Ziolkowski, who was one of the witnesses.
Ziolkowski and the others flew to DC in the weeks afterwards to testify.
“They asked me about if I had anything to do about posting that. They were asking me if Stone has ever paid me, what he’s ever paid me for,” Ziolkowski told CNN this week. When he first received the subpoena, the authorities wouldn’t tell Ziolkowski what was being investigated, but a prosecutor later told him “they were investigating the picture and if he had paid anybody,” Ziolkowski said. He says he told the grand jury Stone never paid him, and that he hadn’t posted the photo.
So four years ago, in this very courthouse, Tarrio or his associates were questioned about the circumstances of any participation they had in threatening a judge.
That wasn’t the only role the Proud Boys had in Stone’s witness tampering in that case. The first contact that Randy Credico had with FBI agents investigating 2016 was not the highly publicized grand jury testimony to which he brought his comfort dog Bianca. It was a Duty to Warn contact earlier that summer after the FBI had identified credible threats against him. Those credible threats came from the gangs, including the Proud Boys, that Stone hung out with.
In entirely unrelated news, Credico posted pictures showing him in Moscow last week.
It didn’t end with Stone’s guilty verdict, either. After the verdict, Stone associates got leaked copies of the jury questionnaires. Mike Cernovich started hunting down details on the jurors to retroactively cast doubt on the judgment, and Trump joined in the effort to create a mob. In the wake of those efforts, the jurors expressed fear and some regret at having served.
ALL 12 OF the jurors in the Roger Stone case have expressed fear in court filings on Wednesday. They worry they will continue to be harassed and they fear for the safety of themselves and their families if their identities are revealed.
According to The National Law Journal, jurors cited tweets from President Trump and remarks from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as the reason “the threats to the jurors’ safety and privacy persist” after the trial ended in November.
One juror wrote, “I try to stay away from danger, but now it seems like the danger is coming to me.”
The jurors are looking to thwart the legal efforts of right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who is attempting to make public the pretrial questionnaires the jurors filled out. Those questionnaires include jurors’ private information and employment history. The supposed aim of the petition to release the questionnaires is to vet them for bias in hopes of getting a new trial for Stone.
Another juror wrote, “Given the current climate of polarization and harassment, I do not want to draw any attention to myself, my family, or my employer in any way, shape, or form. It is intimidating when the president of the United States attacks the foreperson of a jury by name.”
“I am frightened that someone could harm my family simply because I was summoned and then chosen to serve on the jury,” another juror wrote.
The efforts to intimidate have continued to this case. During a period when Zach Rehl was reportedly considering a plea, Tarrio sent messages to other Proud Boys about remaining loyal.
“The bigger problem with that is the guys that are in prison right now are holding on to hope that everybody is f—ing staying put because they didn’t do anything wrong,” Tarrio said. “The moment that they think one of the guys flipped, it throws everything off and it makes everybody turn on each other, and that’s what we are trying to f—ing avoid.”
Asked about the audio message, Tarrio told Reuters he was simply trying to stop members from speculating that anyone had decided to help prosecutors who are examining the deadly insurrection. “What I was trying to avoid is them turning against each other because of media stories,” he said.
Trial testimony showed that witnesses for the defense — in this case Fernando Alonzo — made threatening comments about Eddie Block for posting the video of the Proud Boys he shot on January 6. [Warning: he used an ableist slur against Block, who relies on a mobility scooter.]
Witnesses for other January 6 defendant have been harassed, as when one January 6 participant confronted Sergeant Aquilino Gonell during the trial of Kyle Fitzsimons on assault charges.
[January 6 participant Tommy] Tatum also tried to confront another officer, this one with the Capitol Police, in a courthouse elevator on Wednesday. He recorded and posted clips of both exchanges with the officers and identified himself outside the courthouse.
U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who is also testifying in the trial, said that Tatum told him that he should be ashamed of himself in an exchange near the bathroom inside the courthouse on Wednesday. Shortly after, Tatum got into an expletive-laden confrontation with David Laufman, an attorney for Gonell, after he tried to get into an elevator with Gonell, Laufman and an NBC News reporter.
NBC News separately heard Tatum make negative comments inside the courthouse about how he believed Gonell was acting. Outside the courthouse, Tatum recorded himself accusing Gonell of committing perjury.
The confrontations with Gonell came before the conclusion of his testimony in the case against Fitzsimons, who is accused of assaulting Gonell inside the tunnel. Gonell’s cross-examination by Fitzsimons’ federal public defender will continue on Thursday morning.
“For Sgt. Gonell to be accosted like that, within the courthouse and while he remains a live witness at trial, was outrageous and amounts to witness intimidation that promptly should be addressed by the court as well as the FBI and the Department of Justice,” Laufman, who is representing Gonell pro bono, told NBC News on Wednesday night.
Finally, there are other key players in January 6 — most notably former Green Beret, Ivan Raiklin, who played a key role in Operation Pence Card, the effort to pressure Pence to overturn the election — who lurk around all events associated with January 6. Fellow Proud Boy Gabriel Garcia, in a recent bid to avoid pre-trial release sanctions for going to CPAC after he told Judge Amy Berman Jackson he was coming to DC to observe — among other things — the Proud Boys trial, claimed that he hung out with Raiklin at CPAC to formulate his defense.
While at CPAC, Mr. Garcia was working on his defense to these charges. Indeed, he asked Congressman M. Gaetz, who is from Mr. Garcia’s home state, how and when could his defense team access the 40,000 hours of unreleased video Capitol Police have. Also, he and his counsel met, and conferred extensively with, attorney Ivan Raiklin, whom they may retain for assistance and trial preparation. Mr. Raiklin had spoken to Mr. Garcia on March 2 at CPAC, and he told Mr. Garcia to return the next day with his counsel to discuss at length defense strategies, which they did.
Former Army Captain Garcia is one of the Proud Boys who, in exhibits submitted at trial (here, Gabriel PB), was issuing the most chilling threats in advance of January 6.
None of this makes things easier for Tim Kelly, as he tries to sustain this jury long enough to get through deliberations. It’s not yet clear whether the jurors, watching testimony about the extent to which Proud Boys using intimidation to protect their organization, are seeing shadows, or whether there’s a real attempt to intimidate jurors before they start deliberating.
But given the history of individuals directly associated with the defendants, the threat is not an idle one.
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On July 28, 2017, Robert Mueller’s investigators served two warrants on the company (probably Rackspace) that hosted Paul Manafort’s DMP emails to obtain Manafort, Rick Gates, and Konstantin Kilimnik’s company emails.
Mueller obtained several things with that warrant that remain unresolved. Those are just some of the many things about the Russian investigation — the one Jeff Gerth claims had no there, there — that remain unanswered, four years after Mueller closed up shop.
Manafort’s lies about the plan to carve up Ukraine
One thing Mueller obtained with that warrant would have been an email Manafort sent Konstantin Kilimnik on April 11, 2016, “How do we get whole” with Oleg Deripaska, Manafort asked. The email showed that Manafort was using his position as the “free” campaign manager for Donald Trump to fix his legal and financial woes.
Another was an email Kilimnik wrote, but did not send, on December 8, 2016, but which Manafort knew to and did read, a “foldering” technique to prevent interception also used by terrorists. The email referenced a plan to carve up Ukraine that Kilimnik had first pitched to Manafort on August 2, 2016.
Russians at the very top level are in principle not against this plan and will work with the BG to start the process of uniting DNR and LNR into one entity, with security issues resolved (i.e. Russian troops withdrawn, radical criminal elements eliminated). The rest will be done by the BG and his people.
[snip]
All that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from DT saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass [sic] back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.
The email — and a text Kilimnik sent around the same time — talked about “recreating old friendship” with Deripaska at an in-person meeting. Less than a month later, Manafort flew to Madrid and met with a different Deripaska associate.
Six years later, we don’t know the fate of Manafort’s efforts to “get whole” with Deripaska, to recreate that old friendship.
It’s something that Manafort promised to tell Mueller’s prosecutors on September 13, 2018, when he entered into a plea agreement that averted a damaging trial during the election season. But it’s something that, Judge Amy Berman Jackson found, Manafort lied to hide from prosecutors in the ensuing weeks. We know that the last thing on Manafort’s schedule before he met with Kilimnik on August 2, 2016 was a meeting with Trump and Rudy Giuliani. We know that during the period when Manafort was lying to hide what happened with this plan to carve up Ukraine, his lawyer was speaking regularly with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. We know that during the period when Rudy Giuliani was seeking campaign assistance from Ukraine, he was consulting with Manafort. We know that Trump tried to coerce Volodymyr Zelenskyy to enter into a quid pro quo on July 25, 2019, but was caught by a whistleblower. We know that Bill Barr went to extraordinary lengths to protect Rudy Giuliani from any consequences for his dalliance with Russian agents in Ukraine.
We know that on December 24, 2020, Donald Trump pardoned Manafort, rewarding him for his lies. Yesterday, a judge in Florida approved a $3 million fine to settle Manafort’s failure to reveal the money he earned from working in Ukraine, money Manafort got to keep as a result of Trump’s pardon.
SDNY alleges that even as Manafort was lying about his plans with Kilimnik in September 2018, a different Deripaska associate was cultivating recently retired FBI Special Agent in Charge Charles McGonigal, someone who could tell him about what DOJ was learning (or not learning) from Manafort. We know that Seth DuCharme, who played a key role in Barr’s efforts to protect Rudy, now represents McGonigal.
We know that after Trump’s efforts to exploit dirt from Ukraine failed and Joe Biden became President, Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine, trying to achieve by force what it attempted to achieve by coercing Trump’s “free” campaign manager and his personal attorney.
When I wrote the last installment of my series demonstrating the false claims about “Russiagate” made by Jeff Gerth, I wrote a long passage (included below) that showed what Mueller was discovering in August 2017, a period when Gerth falsely claimed prosecutors had determined there was “no there, there” to Trump’s ties to Russia.
There was not only a lot there, where Gerth never bothered to look. In fact, the “there, there” remains unresolved and raw, six years later.
The investment in Michael Cohen
Take the investigation into Michael Cohen. One thing Mueller would discover in August 2017 is that Trump Organization was not fully complying with subpoenas, at least not subpoenas from Congress. As I noted in my piece, Mueller almost certainly obtained an email with an August 1, 2017 warrant that showed Michael Cohen had direct contact with the Kremlin during the campaign. The email also showed, Mueller would learn once Felix Sater and Cohen began to explain this to investigators, that Cohen and Trump were willing to do business with a former GRU officer and sanctioned banks in pursuit of an impossibly lucrative real estate deal in Moscow. The email obtained in August 2017 was proof that Trump was publicly lying about his ongoing pursuit of business in Russia. And for two more years, Trump kept that secret from the American public. That entire time, Russia knew he was lying to the American people. Russia knew, the American public did not.
Mueller got that email by asking Microsoft, not Trump Organization, for the email. But shortly after Mueller did so, Microsoft made it far harder to obtained enterprise emails without notifying Microsoft’s client. There are other questions about missing records — such as a letter Trump sent to then Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko — that might have been answered with more records from Trump Organization.
There’s also the matter of the big infusion of money — more than $400,000 over the course of a few months — that Cohen got from a Columbus Nova, in investment fund controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Mueller investigated whether the money had some tie to the different Ukrainian peace deal that Felix Sater got Cohen to bring to the White House.
It didn’t. As Cohen explained to Mueller in 2018, he got the money to explain how Trump worked to Andrew Intrater, who claimed to be looking to spend money on an infrastructure project in the US.
The pitch was to assist in Columbus Nova’s infrastructure fund. [redacted] invests in several different areas. At the time, there were discussions of significant foreign investment interest dedicated to U.S. infrastructure.
[snip]
In Cohen’s discussions with [Intrater] Cohen did not provide any non-public information. Cohen was not selling non-public information. Cohen could assist [Intrater] because Cohen understood Trump and what Trump was looking for.
But the payment, while legal, remains dodgy as hell.
Republicans, certainly, don’t want to talk about it. When Mark Meadows accused Cohen of omitting his contracts with foreign companies at his 2019 testimony before the Oversight Committee, Trump’s future Chief of Staff made no mention of Columbus Nova.
Mr. MEADOWS. Mr. Cohen, I’m going to come back to the question I asked before, with regards to your false statement that you submitted to Congress. On here, it was very clear, that it asked for contracts with foreign entities over the last two years. Have you had any foreign contract with foreign entities, whether it’s Novartis or the Korean airline or Kazakhstan BTA Bank? Your testimony earlier said that you had contracts with them. In fact, you went into detail——
Mr. COHEN. I believe it talks about lobbying. I did no lobbying. On top of that they are not government——
Mr. MEADOWS. In your testimony — I’m not asking about lobbying, Mr. Cohen.
Mr. COHEN. They are not government agencies. They are privately and——
Mr. MEADOWS. Do you have—do you have foreign contracts——
Mr. COHEN [continuing]. publicly traded companies.
Nor did Republicans include Nova in the FARA referral they sent to DOJ.
But Viktor Vekselberg was among the oligarchs Treasury would sanction in in 2018, along with Deripaska and Alexandr Torshin, and he was among the first people hit with expanded sanctions last year, after the invasion.
A December 2018 article about those payments to Cohen and the sanctions against Vekselberg was likely the article that Vekselberg associate Vladimir Voronchenko was sharing in 2018, which was cited as proof he knew of the sanctions, in his indictment for maintaining Vekselberg’s US properties in his own name after Vekselberg was sanctioned. Today, the government started the process of seizing Vekselberg’s US properties.
Then there’s the matter of Julian Assange, whose extradition remains hung up at the final approval stage.
When Candace Owens confronted Trump about why he didn’t pardon Assange last year, he got really defensive, folding his arms. He explained, seemingly referring to Assange and probably referencing the Vault 7 and Vault 8 releases of stolen CIA hacking tools, “in one case, you have sort of a spy deal going on … there were some spying things, and there were some bad things released that really set us back and really hurt us with what they did.”
But Twitter DMs Mueller obtained with the first August 2017 warrant targeting Roger Stone showed that, in the wake of Mike Pompeo’s designation of WikiLeaks as a non-state intelligence service in the wake of that release, Stone and Assange discussed a pardon. On June 4, 2017, Stone said, “I don’t know of any crime you need to be pardoned for.” On June 10, Stone told Assange, “I am doing everything possible to address the issues at the highest level of government.”
Nine days later, on June 19, 2017, Trump ordered Corey Lewandowski to order Jeff Sessions to limit the investigation to prospective meddling from Russian, an order that — had Lewandowski obeyed — would have had the effect of shutting down the entire investigation, including that into Assange’s role in the hack-and-leak.
Texts obtained from Stone much later would show that he and Randy Credico discussed asylum for Assange on October 3, 2016 — before WikiLeaks started releasing the John Podesta emails.
Stone claimed to be pursuing a pardon for Assange at least through early 2018. It was only after Mueller asked Trump about such pardon discussions in September 2018 that Don Jr’s close friend Arthur Schwartz told Cassandra Fairbanks the pardon wouldn’t happen.
Those pardon discussions are just one of the things that Stone held over Trump’s head to ensure he’d never do prison time.
After the win, STONE tried a full court press in order to get a meeting with TRUMP. [redacted] eventually set up a meeting with TRUMP and STONE in early December 2016 on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. TRUMP didn’t want to take the meeting with STONE. TRUMP told BANNON to be in the meeting and that after 5 minutes, if the meeting hadn’t concluded, to throw STONE out. STONE came in with a book he wrote and possibly had a folder and notes. [full sentence redacted] TRUMP didn’t say much to STONE beyond “Thanks, thanks a lot.”. To BANNON, this reinforced STONE [redacted] After five to six minutes, the meeting was over and STONE was out. STONE was [redacted] due to the fact that during the meeting TRUMP just stared.
After Stone was convicted of lying to cover up the real nature of his contacts with Russia during the election, he lobbied for a pardon by claiming, repeatedly and publicly, that prosecutors offered him a deal if he would reveal the content of the phone conversations he had with Trump during the election.
On December 23, 2020, Stone got that pardon. Four days later, Stone and Trump spoke about January 6 at Mar-a-Lago. That same day, also at Mar-a-Lago, Kimberly Guilfoyle, started the planning for Trump to speak (at that point, the plan included a march to the Capitol).
Earlier this month, DOJ included Stone’s contacts with Proud Boy Dan Scott at a January 3 Florida rally in Scott’s statement of offense for attempting to obstruct the January 6 vote certification. It included Stone’s ties to various Oath Keepers as part of the proof DOJ used to prosecute Stewart Rhodes of sedition.
“The boss is aware”
It took an extra week for prosecutors in the Mike Flynn case to get approval for his sentencing memo in early 2020. So senior officials at DOJ had to have approved of the explanation of why Flynn’s lies about calling the Russian Ambassador to undermine Obama’s sanctions on Russia were serious. “Any effort to undermine the recently imposed sanctions, which were enacted to punish the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election,” the memo explained, “could have been evidence of links or coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia.”
From the time that Mueller’s team obtained KT McFarland’s transition device and email on August 25, 2017, they had reason to believe Flynn’s calls with the Russian Ambassador were a group affair, not (as Trump had claimed) simply Flynn’s doing. McFarland’s emails showed that before Flynn called Kislyak, he had received an email from Tom Bossert reporting on what Lisa Monaco told him about Russia’s response to the sanctions, immediately after which he spoke to McFarland from his hotel phone for 11 minutes.
Mueller came pretty close to concluding that was why Flynn intervened with the Russian Ambassador, too. “Some evidence suggests that the President knew about the existence and content of Flynn’s calls when they occurred,” the Mueller Report explained in laying out reasons why Trump might have wanted to fire Jim Comey. “[B]ut the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the President’s knowledge.” That’s because, after first denying that such calls happened at all, KT McFarland ultimately claimed not to remember telling Trump about the calls and Steve Bannon claimed not to remember discussing it with Flynn.
That was the conclusion Mueller reached in early 2019, a conclusion that already didn’t account for the fact that Flynn called the Russian Ambassador from a hotel phone, not his cell, or that he admitted that he and McFarland had deliberately written a text to cover up the contact. But the following year, in his effort to protect Trump, Bill Barr and other Republicans made available multiple pieces of evidence that make Trump’s knowledge of Flynn’s contacts more clear.
For example, after the House Intelligence Committee transcripts came out in 2020, it became clear that the White House had used Steve Bannon’s two appearances, with the assistance of Devin Nunes, to script certain answers. One of those answers denied continuing to discuss how to end sanctions against Russia after the inauguration. That scripting process happened between the time Flynn pled guilty and the time Bannon first denied remembering knowing of the sanctions discussion. Effectively, the White House scripted Bannon to deny knowledge of those sanction discussions in December 2016.
Then, in September 2020, as part of his efforts to justify overturning the prosecution of Flynn, Barr released the interview report from FBI agent Bill Barnett, who reportedly sent pro Trump texts on his FBI issued phone. It described how, after refusing to take part in that part of the Flynn investigation four different times, he nevertheless, “decided to work at the SCO hoping his perspective would keep them from ‘group think.'” He described being told that “was the only person who believed MCFARLAND was not holding back the information about TRUMP’s knowledge of [the sanction discussions].” He then asked a series of questions that would provide space for a denial: “BARNETT asked questions such as ‘Do you know that as a fact or are you speculating?’ and ‘Did you pass information from TRUMP to FLYNN?'”
Importantly, Barnett claimed it was “astro projection” that Trump directed Flynn’s contacts with the Ambassador.
He said that even after John Ratcliffe declassified the evidence that Mueller could never have used in the investigation, but which proved it wasn’t projection at all: the transcripts of Flynn’s calls with then-Ambassador Kislyak. They reveal that in the call on December 31, 2016, which Kislyak made to tell Flynn that “our conversation was also taken into account in Moscow” when Putin decided not to retaliate against the US for its sanctions, Flynn told Kislyak that “the boss is aware” of a plan to speak the day after Trump would be inaugurated. That would only be possible had Flynn either told Trump directly or had McFarland passed it along.
Once Barr came in, Flynn attempted to unwind all the things he had said to Mueller, directly contradicting multiple sworn statements. Just weeks after DOJ noted the centrality of Flynn’s lies to the question of whether Trump attempted to reverse sanctions just after Russia helped get him elected, Barr, too, joined the process of attempting to reverse the impact of the things Flynn had admitted to under oath. That effort extended to introducing notes with added, incorrect dates that Trump used in an effort to blame Biden for the investigation into Flynn. “We caught you,” Trump claimed to Biden in a prepared debate attack about the investigation that showed how his team first contacted Obama’s team to learn what they knew of the Russian response to sanctions, minutes before they called Russia to undermine those sanctions.
On November 25, Trump pardoned Flynn not just for his lies about the calls to the Russian Ambassador and working for Türkiye, but for any lies he told during the period he was reneging on his plea agreement. That same week, Flynn and Sidney Powell were in South Carolina together plotting ways to undermine Joe Biden’s election. Three weeks later, they would pitch Trump on a plan to seize the voting machines so he could stay in office.
When Bill Barr wrote his corrupt memo claiming there was no evidence that Trump obstructed the Mueller investigation, he was silent about the topic he had admitted, three times, would amount to obstruction: those pardon dangles. Those pardons aren’t just proof that Trump obstructed the investigation, stripping prosecutors of the leverage they might use to get Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Mike Flynn to tell the truth. But they’re also some of the most compelling proof that the secrets Stone and Manafort kept would have confirmed the suspicions that Trump coordinated with Russia in an attack on US democracy.
Update, 3/14: Corrected that Mueller closed up shop four years ago, not three. Time flies!
Just days earlier, on July 28, 2017, DOJ had already established probable cause to arrest George Papadopoulos for false statements and obstructing the investigation. His FBI interviews in the days after August 2 would go to the core questions of the campaign’s knowledge and encouragement of Russia’s interference. On August 11, Papadopoulos described, but then backed off certainty about, a memory of Sam Clovis getting upset when Papadopoulos told Clovis “they,” the Russians, have Hillary’s emails. On August 19, Papadopoulos professed to be unable to explain what his own notes planning a September 2016 meeting in London with the “Office of Putin” meant.
The investigation into Paul Manafort, too, was only beginning to take steps that would reveal suspect ties to Russia. Also on July 28, for example, DOJ obtained the first known warrant including conspiracy among the charges under investigation, and the first known warrant listing the June 9 meeting within the scope of the investigation. On August 17, DOJ would show probable cause to obtain emails from Manafort’s business involving Manafort, Gates, and Konstantin Kilimnik that would (among other things) show damning messages sent between Manafort and Kilimnik using the foldering technique, likely including Manafort’s sustained involvement in a plan to carve up Ukraine that started on August 2, 2016 (which Gerth omits from his description of that meeting).
Similarly, Mueller was still collecting evidence explaining why Flynn might have lied about his calls with Sergey Kislyak. On August 25, Mueller obtained a probable cause warrant to access devices owned by the GSA showing that Flynn had coordinated his calls with other transition officials, including those with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, when he called Kislyak to undermine Obama’s sanctions against Russia.
Plus, Mueller was just beginning to investigate at least two Trump associates that Rosenstein would include in an expanded scope in October 2017. On July 18, Mueller would obtain a probable cause warrant that built off Suspicious Activity Reports submitted to Treasury. That first known warrant targeting Michael Cohen never mentioned the long-debunked allegations about Cohen in the Steele dossier. Instead, the warrant affidavit would cite five deposits in the first five months of 2017 from Viktor Vekselberg’s Renova Group, totaling over $400K, $300K in payments from Korean Aerospace Industries, and almost $200K from Novartis, all of which conflicted with Cohen’s claim that the bank account in question would focus on domestic clients. On August 1, Mueller would obtain a probable cause warrant for Cohen’s Trump Organization emails from Microsoft. Mueller did so using a loophole that Microsoft would sue to close shortly afterwards, a move which likely stymied the investigation into a suspected $10 million donation to Trump, via an Egyptian bank, that kept him in the race in September 2016. That warrant for Trump Organization emails likely obtained Cohen’s January 2016 contact with the Kremlin – the one not turned over, to Congress at least, in response to a subpoena – a contact that Cohen would lie to Congress about four week later.
On August 7, Mueller used a probable cause warrant to obtain Roger Stone’s Twitter content, which revealed a mid-October 2016 exchange with WikiLeaks that disproved the rat-fucker’s public claims that he had never communicated with WikiLeaks during the campaign (a fact that Gerth gets wrong in the less than 1% of his series he dedicates to Stone). It also revealed that the day after the election, WikiLeaks assured Stone via DM that “we are now more free to communicate.” Those communications would, in one week (the subsequent investigation showed), turn into pardon discussions, which provides important background to the June 2017 Twitter DMs Stone had with Julian Assange, obtained with that August warrant, about “doing everything possible to address [Assange’s] issues at the highest level of Government.”
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Dan “Milkshake” Scott pled guilty to obstruction and assault yesterday. He faces 41 to 63 months of prison.
His plea does not include a cooperation agreement, so unless DOJ has kept that hidden in some way (everything about the Proud Boy cases is weird, so I don’t rule it out, and his plea also does not include the standard cooperation paragraph, which often means someone has already been interviewed), Scott will not be called as a witness in the Proud Boy leader trial to explain why he yelled, “Let’s take the fucking Capitol” two hours before the Proud Boys did just that.
Indeed, his statement of offense is interesting for the abundant evidence that Scott knew his objective for the day was to stop the vote certification, but did not know Joe Biggs and Ethan Nordean’s plans for doing so. In addition to his “take the fucking Capitol” comment, for example, Scott is quoted as gleefully saying, “Oh god, we’re going to the Capitol, guys.” And he admitted that,
Scott’s purpose in being in this restricted area was to influence or impede Congress’s certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was occurring inside the U.S. Capitol Building.
But the statement of offense also repeatedly describes that he was not aware of the alleged conspiracy to obstruct the vote or engage in sedition that Biggs and Nordean are being tried for.
Scott did not attend any meetings with Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, or Zachary Rehl on January 5, 2021
Scott also was not a member of the Proud Boys’ coordination chats on Telegram, “Ministry of Self-Defense” (or “MOSD”) or “Boots on the Ground,” and did not know the content of the messages in those chats
Prior to his entry onto Capitol grounds, Scott had not been told the details of any plans made by Proud Boy leaders, such as Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl, for January 6
This statement of offense, even without a cooperation component, is written just as prosecutors on the Leader prosecution team would need it to support their argument that the Leaders used people like Scott as “tools,” not co-conspirators, to achieve their alleged goal of stopping the vote certification. The statement describes how the Leaders moved behind him, and then after he assaulted two cops, they went up the stairs towards the Capitol.
Scott did not go up the stairs after the assault. Once he saw them going up the stairs, Scott believed that that [sic] the group of Proud Boys led by Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl would attempt to enter the building to obstruct Congress’s certification of the vote including through the use of force if necessary.
Milkshake’s complete dissociation from the even the Telegram chats used to plan the attack and his acute awareness that the goal was to storm the Capitol is interesting for the one other detail used to substantiate his obstruction: Roger Stone.
It turns out, Milkshake was helping Roger Stone intimidate Rick Scott on January 3.
On January 3, 2021, Daniel Scott, Worrell, and other members of their local Proud Boy chapter attended a “Stop the Steal” rally in Naples, Florida. The headline speaker at this event was Roger Stone. Daniel Scott helped Stone up a ladder that Stone used to talk to the crowd. During this speech, Stone asserted that the 2020 presidential election was rigged due to voting fraud, and urged Florida’s U.S. Senators to vote against the certification of the Electoral College vote. Stone stated: “Rick Scott has a fundamental choice. He will either stand up for the constitution…” At that point, Daniel Scott yelled “Or give him the rope!” At another point in the rally, Daniel Scott chanted “Stop the Steal!” into a megaphone, along with the crowd at the rally.
I can’t recall another statement of offense that mentions that earlier Stop the Steal efforts — not even Brandon Straka or Baked Alaska, who were key players in the movement (though both, inexplicably, got off without pleading to obstruction). Even Jacob Chansley, who played a key role in storming the AZ Capitol prior to January 6 and who did plead to obstruction, does not include that earlier action.
Again, unless I’m mistaken, this is also the first mention of Roger Stone in a statement of offense, even among the cooperating Oath Keepers who had interaction with Stone in the weeks before the attack on the Capitol.
Milkshake, in this statement of offense, is described as a tool used by Nordean and Biggs.
But, by description, Roger Stone is what made him one.
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There’s something curious about the Proud Boys trial.
Thus far, DOJ has made no mention of the Friends of Stone thread that Enrique Tarrio was part of, along with Alex Jones, Owen Shroyer, Ali Alexander, and Kellye SoRelle, as well as the rat-fucker himself.
That’s true even though it was mentioned repeatedly at Stewart Rhodes’ trial. DOJ submitted some texts Rhodes sent, including one seeming to ask Stone to get Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.
And DOJ used those comms as part of their graphic showing the ties between all the alleged co-conspirators.
I find the silence about Tarrio’s involvement in the FOS list especially interesting given some Telegram texts submitted yesterday at trial.
In a thread of Telegram texts showing how the Proud Boys went from being called out by Donald Trump to planning for actions in DC, it included an exchange between Tarrio and Jeremy Bertino from November 7, showing their response to the media calling the election for Joe Biden.
Bertino immediately says, “should we roll out to the state houses?”
“Yes,” Tarrio says.
At the time, Ali Alexander, another participant on the Friends of Stone list, was working on a series of events at which mobs intimidated election workers.
On the 8th, Bertino informed Tarrio, “we[‘]re going to Raleigh this afternoon.”
Tarrio instructs, “Make sure…no colors,” meaning not to wear Proud boy yellow and black.
“Why not?” Bertino asks.
“The campaign asked us to not wear colors to these events,” says the guy whose relationship with Donald Trump’s rat-fucker goes back years.
Defense attorneys renewed their fight yesterday, without success, to prevent prosecutors from introducing Trump’s Stand Back and Stand By comment. It’s now officially an exhibit in a seditious conspiracy case, along with Trump’s December 19 tweet announcing January 6 that has been introduced in scores of January 6 cases.
But thus far, DOJ has made no move to mention Tarrio’s tie with Trump’s rat-fucker. Or to explain whether the Proud Boys were coordinating these efforts to intimidate election workers with Stone’s protégé, Alexander.
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In his CJR series claiming the NYT and WaPo botched coverage of the Russian investigation, Jeff Gerth makes a great show of transparency, with the same disclosure statement appended to each installment of his 23,000-word series.
But the statements hide the most important details, given Gerth’s project (and his past history tilting at Hillary Clinton’s windmills and other real estate investments). For example, when he says he “helped ProPublica decide whether to collaborate with a book that was critical of the Clintons’ involvement with Russia; the arrangement didn’t happen,” he doesn’t explain whether that book was Clinton Cash, a piece of political oppo research written by Steve Bannon associate Peter Schweitzer that has a structurally similar position, in the 2016 election, as the Steele dossier does. When he says that he “approached [the NYT] on my own about the Clinton family foundation,” but “expressed disappointment to one of the Times reporters about the final result,” he’s engaged in press criticism about his own work, without disclosing which work that is (in his series he otherwise discusses this story about Clinton Cash and the Foundation). When he discloses that he wrote about Clinton at ProPublica, he does not explicitly describea story he wrote using emails stolen by Guccifer 1.0, Marcel Lazar, putting him at the forefront of the relentless reporting on Hillary based on stolen documents.
There’s nothing, per se, wrong with writing about those things.
Where it becomes a problem, however, is in the way Gerth approaches his project, purportedly an attempt to decide why, after the 2016 election, trust in media nose-dived. Even beyond limiting his project to just the NYT and WaPo – or rather, claiming to; as I showed, he ignored great swaths of the most important work from both – Gerth simply assumes that the thing that damaged press credibility in 2016 was coverage of the Russian investigation, and not any of the other closely linked politicized investigations into one or another of the candidates, including the ones he played a role in.
There have been at least six investigations, at least four criminal, of events tied to the 2016 election:
The investigation into Hillary Clinton’s server that arose partly out of the Benghazi investigation and partly as a result of a hack of Sidney Blumenthal
An investigation of the Clinton Foundation, predicated in part by oppo research from Steve Bannon associate Peter Schweitzer, an investigation which leaked in the weeks leading up to the election and which was staffed by an FBI team that included a pro-Trump agent running an informant targeting the Foundation
The investigation into two strands of Russia’s influence operation – a hack-and-leak and a social media campaign – which ultimately merged, in part, with Crossfire Hurricane, under Robert Mueller
The UNSUB investigation, named Crossfire Hurricane, that attempted to learn which Trump aide got a tip that Russia would intervene to help beat Hillary; this investigation became the Mueller investigation
A review by US Attorney John Huber of Uranium One allegations against Hillary
The Durham investigation that Bill Barr would initiate, with no evidence that a crime had been committed, into the initiation of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation
That should provide the opportunity to apply a consistent approach to covering the investigations, particularly for someone lecturing others about press standards. But it would require including the Clinton server and Clinton Foundation coverage – coverage including Gerth’s own – somewhere besides the disclosures section. It would require reviewing documentation showing the Trump team’s plotting to find Hillary’s deleted emails – including consideration of plans to reach out to hostile intelligence services to do so.
And it would require reviewing Trump’s efforts to optimize the release of the files stolen by Russian hackers, something that Mark Meadows, in describing allegations that the Trump campaign might be “benefitting from Hillary Clinton emails,” said would be “collusion.” George Papadopoulos himself told Stefan Halper that “reaching out to wiki leaks or whoever it is … to tell them please work with us, collaborate,” as Stone undeniably attempted, would be “a form of treason.” Yet Gerth doesn’t consider whether the media’s relentless focus on the emails stolen from the Democrats, and not the investigation into that theft, drove at least part of the ensuing distrust in the media.
Along with avoiding those issues, Gerth ignores many of the materials released as part of the Mueller investigation (and most of the materials released in two Congressional investigations), and instead draws on materials released in the investigation into the Russian investigation, whether by Congress or as part of Durham’s two failed prosecutions. That is his fact-set: not the underlying “collusion” (adopting Meadows’ measure), not the investigation itself, but the effort to weaponize the investigation.
That’s how Gerth comes up with this statement of the scope of what he includes in “Russiagate.”
By 2016, as Trump’s political viability grew and he voiced admiration for Russia’s “strong leader,” Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and publicly promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia. The media would eventually play a role in all that, but at the outset, reporters viewed Trump and his candidacy as a sideshow.
When he first raises it, Gerth doesn’t date the timing of this claimed effort.
That’s important because Gerth obscures the public reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia, barely addresses the reliable open source research Fusion was doing on the topic (which was the part of the project taken over after Paul Singer stopped paying), and completely leaves out Trump efforts that were underway already by then.
For example, Gerth made much of a June 17, 2016 WaPo story, on which Tom Hamburger had the lead byline, which described Trump’s business pursuits in Russia, including his ties with Aras Agalarov. It was a remarkable story, particularly when you consider WaPo focused on Trump’s ties with Agalarov just 8 days after Agalarov arranged the June 9 meeting, promising “high level and sensitive information … that is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Gerth raises no questions about the accuracy of the report – indeed, much of it has since been confirmed by the Russia investigation. Rather, he notes that Hamburger, “was a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had worked with [Glenn] Simpson; the two were friends, according to Simpson’s book,” as if any association with Fusion would taint otherwise solid reporting.
But WaPo’s story came out before the first of Steele’s dossier reports, and Gerth himself distinguished between the “records on Trump’s business dealings and associates, some with Russia ties,” that Fusion collected via open source and the dossier (Gerth falsely suggests that Fusion stopped its open source research after the Democrats started paying). If Hamburger had an assist from Fusion, he would have been relying on their accurate work.
Gerth focuses closely on Josh Rogin’s critique of the treatment of the RNC platform regarding Ukraine, but presents no evidence that Hillary seeded the critique or that Hillary’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, should have doubted it before he focused attention on it (the best pre-Mueller Report debunking of Rogin’s claims about the platform came from Byron York, but not until November 2017). Much of this early reporting was organic, and even assuming the Hamburger story relied on Fusion research and that research was conducted after the Democrats started paying, it would be little different from the Schweitzer efforts about which Gerth is almost silent.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign was already pursuing emails – both the 30,000 emails from Hillary’s server she had deleted, and whatever emails became available from the Russian hack of Democratic targets. For example, GOP Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen BCCed Mike Flynn on a pitch to journalist Catherine Herridge on May 24 promising stories about Hillary emails found on the dark web. Ledeen sent Flynn more information on June 16, which he called, “amazing!” Per Flynn’s testimony to the FBI, Ledeen’s pursuit, which continued up to the election, included travel by others overseas in search of emails purportedly hosted in Eastern Europe.
Rick Gates testified that Roger Stone claimed to have knowledge, prior to Julian Assange’s public announcement on June 12, that WikiLeaks had Hillary’s 30,000 deleted emails. He claimed that in a call on June 15, Stone said he was in touch with Guccifer 2.0, the persona alleged to be set up by Russian intelligence officers. He explained that when Stone asked for contact information for Jared Kushner that same day, Stone intended to debrief Jared and another campaign aide about the DNC’s announcement they’d been hacked. Gates testified at Stone’s trial that the campaign thought the hack of the DNC would give the campaign “a leg up.” Even accounting for uncertainty about which efforts were an attempt to get the deleted Hillary emails and which were an attempt to optimize the hacked emails, Stone’s efforts easily meet the definition of “collusion” – seeking to benefit from the stolen emails – that Mark Meadows adopted in 2018.
And the drumbeat coverage of Hillary’s server was part of what set up the later WikiLeaks releases. That’s a press coverage issue – a matter that undoubtedly led to frustration among many with the press, but not one that Gerth, who wrote an early article in the unrelenting mass of coverage, chose to mention.
Gerth’s efforts to pitch the Russian investigation as uniquely corrupt get more problematic once he tries to date the purported Hillary “conspiracy theory” that Trump’s campaign – which had already accepted a meeting promising help from Russia – did have ties to Russia.
In coverage of the initial release of the stolen DNC emails, Gerth makes much of the fact that Fusion GPS founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch traveled to the 2016 DNC convention a few hours away in Philly, though he doesn’t describe a single thing they did there.
At the end of July, the DNC held its nominating convention in Philadelphia. In attendance were legions of journalists, as well as Simpson and Fritsch. On the eve of the events, the hacked emails from the DNC were dumped, angering supporters of Bernie Sanders, who saw confirmation in the messages of their fears that the committee had favored Hillary.
The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”
Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later. [my emphasis]
But, just as John Durham did, Gerth treats the release of emails on the most important day of Hillary’s campaign – stolen by Russia – as merely “not helpful,” rather than an unprecedented attack on the country and democracy and a presidential candidate. (Gerth, based primarily on the public uncertainty about how WikiLeaks got the emails, claims elsewhere the attribution of the hack to Russia, “is far from definitive,” an opinion which CJR presents while ignoring virtually all of the evidence, not to mention a 2016 NYT Pulitzer-winning story presenting what the hack looked like to the Democrats). And rather than focusing on Hillary as the victim of a hack-and-leak — something reflected indocuments released in the Michael Sussmann trial that Gerth elsewhere relies on but ignores here — Gerth instead describes being targeted by a hack-and-leak operation as an opportunity to “promot[e] the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators.”
Even at this level, Gerth’s description is astounding. He cites Jennifer Palmieri,writing in 2017, claiming she later confirmed this was all just about “promoting the Russia narrative.” But Palmieri’s “did not succeed” comment was not just or even primarily about Trump’s encouragement of the operation, it was about accountability for Russia, a topic the importance of which would have been reinforced had Gerth reviewed more of the 2016 NYT stories that won a Pulitzer prize. Indeed, Palmieri described how, “the sheer spectacle of Trump” distracted from Russia’s influence operation, a worthy topic for a 23,000-word narrative trying to understand the press coverage of 2016, and one that might better explain Trump’s always-contradictory claims in press conferences than Gerth’s far less convincing explanations.
Gerth’s misrepresentation about Palmieri’s 2017 piece is all the more important given how his sloppiness soon turns to malpractice. The Brennan briefing he cites (bolded above), one of Gerth’s primary pieces of proof that Hillary promoted a secret “conspiracy theory” and one that falls far short of his claim that she was claiming “a secret alliance between Trump and Russia,” comes froma document released by John Ratcliffe in September 2020, as part of Trump’s effort (with Bill Barr) to weaponize the Russian investigation before the election.
When that document was released, Inoted that its distribution represented the same unmasking of identities in intelligence reports that had provoked Republican complaints for three years – something that itself probably merited more press coverage. Gerth, however, uses it to suggest that any attempt by Hillary to impose a cost on Trump for exploiting Russian interference – something the Mueller Report concluded he did – was itself scandalous. “[T]he Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” the Mueller Report concluded in the same sentence that stopped short of alleging a conspiracy.
There’s no scandal there. Trump did exploit Hillary’s woes, and had already been doing so, for more than a month, by the time of Brennan’s briefing. It was, per documents released as part of the Mueller investigation and the SSCI Report, a key campaign focus. To suggest Hillary’s efforts to exploit Trump’s goading of the Russians was more sinister than it was, Gerth misstates what the briefing said. “[V]ilify[ing] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services” becomes, in Gerth’s earlier translation of it, “promot[ing] an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia.” Brennan’s briefing didn’t say Hillary was planning to claim there was an alliance between Trump and Russia.
Worse still, Gerth hides a critical detail about that document. When Ratcliffe shared it with Lindsey Graham in 2020, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence did so witha warning: The document was a Russian intelligence report, and even four years later, the Intelligence Community still didn’t know how reliable it was.
The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
Gerth makes no mention of the warning. None. He simply parrots a Russian intelligence product of uncertain reliability without notice that it is one.
During Ratcliffe’s confirmation to become Trump’s top spook, the press laid out how Ratcliffe misrepresented his background to get elected. Yet Gerth, in the middle of a 23,000 word screed lecturing other journalists they need to be more transparent, fails to match even Ratcliffe’s standard for disclosure. He doesn’t reveal that one of his only pieces of evidence to support his thesis is a Russian intelligence product that the IC would not verify.
I asked CJR editor Kyle Pope twice whether the outlet should have disclosed this, first in my general list of questions, then in a specific follow-up.
Finally, you did not answer this question.
Do you believe your treatment of the John Brennan briefing should have revealed the briefing was based on a Russian intelligence document? Do you believe you should have noted the John Ratcliffe warning that, “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication”? Is there a reason you’re certain the date was July 26 when it’s not clear whether it says 26 or 28?
Is it your view that CJR owes its readers neither notice that it is relying on a Russian intelligence report for its interpretations about Hillary Clinton’s motives nor reveal that the IC would not vouch for the accuracy of that report?
I got no answer.
Compare that with Gerth’s incomplete treatment of Trump’s actions at the time. In the passage immediately following one where he misrepresents Palmieri’s column and then relies on a Russian intelligence product to describe Hillary’s intent, he accuses the press of misrepresenting Trump’s intent in their coverage of the statement, “Russia if you’re listening.”
Trump, unaware of any plan to tie him to the Kremlin, pumped life into the sputtering Russia narrative. Asked about the DNC hacks by reporters at his Trump National Doral Miami golf resort on July 27, he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” The quip was picked up everywhere. Clinton national-security aide Jake Sullivan quickly seized on the remarks, calling them “a national-security issue.” The comment became a major exhibit over the next several years for those who believed Trump had an untoward relationship with Russia. Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began to fade into the background.
Hope Hicks, Trump’s press aide, later testified to Congress that she told Trump some in the media were taking his statement “quite literally” but that she believed it was “a joke.”
I asked Trump what he meant. “If you look at the whole tape,” he said in an interview, “it is obvious that it was being said sarcastically,” a point he made at the time.
I reviewed the tape. After several minutes of repeated questions about Russia, Trump’s facial demeanor evolved, to what seemed like his TV entertainer mode; that’s when, in response to a final Russia question, he said the widely quoted words. Then, appearing to be playful, he said the leakers “would probably be rewarded mightily by the press” if they found Clinton’s long-lost emails, because they contained “some beauties.” Trump, after talking with Hicks that day in Florida, sought to control the damage by tweeting that whoever had Clinton’s deleted emails “should share them with the FBI.”
Before I get into Gerth’s backflips to diminish damning aspects of Trump’s press conference, let me address his claim that, “Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began to fade into the background.” First, though this is his second reference to what he claims is real Russian baggage on Hillary’s part, Gerth never subjects the claim of baggage to his own standard, which is that, short of a charged criminal conspiracy, such allegations are merely a “conspiracy theory.” He never mentions that these allegations were part of the Clinton Foundation investigation (itself significantly predicated on the Clinton Cash narrative and according to the DOJ IG Report, investigated by a pro-Trump FBI agent), asubsequent review done by a Trump US Attorney, and even reviewed by the Durham investigation. Three different DOJ investigations made nothing of these allegations, yet Gerth treats them as more worthy of press coverage than the Russian ties that Trump’s aides lied to the FBI to cover up.
Worse still, Gerth’s claim is factually wrong. In precisely this period, the NYPost rolled out another Peter Schweitzer product, again crafted in close coordination with soon-to-be Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, alleging improprieties pertaining to Russia, this time focused on John Podesta. The narrative hadbeen in the works since March, even before the Russian hack of Hillary’s campaign manager. A 2017 Berkman Center report on the press and propaganda in the 2016 election showed that coverage of the topic spiked through much of August.
As it laid out, the later spike in attention – the one Gerth says doesn’t exist – milked the earlier coverage by the NYT for credibility, coverage that Gerth might or might not have had a hand in.
As the Trump campaign sought to resurface the Clinton Foundation allegations, that early 2015 New York Times story became the second most shared story about the Clinton Foundation on Facebook in August 2016.
Gerth’s omission of this spike in attention is not just a factual error, it’s a fatal error for someone claiming to write about the Russian investigation. That’s because the packaging of these allegations was a central part of Mueller’s investigation intoStone’s alleged request that Jerome Corsi help him craft a cover story in the days after he predicted it would soon be John Podesta’s time in a barrel, in a period when Stone was pitching both Manafort and then Bannon on a way to win dirty.
And to the extent Stone was trying to cover something up, it would have been efforts to optimize the WikiLeaks releases, efforts that preceded the date of the Brennan briefing. The date of the briefing is uncertain (Gerth agrees with Ratcliffe’s reading that it took place on July 26, not July 28, though Brennan’s handwriting and a redaction obscure that), but one way or another, the briefing took place after Manafortordered Rick Gates to ask Roger Stone to pursue more emails (though Gerth doesn’t mention that) and afterStone instructed Corsi to check with Julian Assange about them (something else Gerth doesn’t mention). It comes days before Stone sent Trump pro-Russian tweets that,he claimed, Trump had requested (they had spoken for ten minutes the night he sent them). It comes in the same time period, according to a Paul Manafort interview with the FBI, when, “Stone told Manafort that there would be a WikiLeaks drop of emails with Podesta, and that Podesta would be ‘in the barrel’ and Manafort would be vindicated.” It’s not me or Hillary Clinton saying that, or – worse! – the NYT. It’s Stone’s life-long friend and Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Based on his review of Trump’s facial expression, Gerth seems to credit Hope Hicks and Trump’s suggestion that his comment, inviting Russia to go get more Hillary emails, was just a joke. (Gerth doesn’t mention that Russian hackers swarmed a new Hillary target hours later.) But that should not matter! Even if that’s all this was, a presidential candidate, making light of the fact that his opponent was the victim of a serious crime, no matter the culprit, that should be taboo in political campaigns.
And even though Gerth insists, here and in his coverage of Trump’s Lester Holt and Helsinki comments, that Trump’s damning seemingly pro-Russian comments would look less damning if journalists simply consulted the full context, he doesn’t do that himself.
He doesn’t mention that in the same presser Trump made two more damning comments, which would also be a key focus of the Russian investigation. “We’ll be looking” at recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, said Trump. And he claimed he had already “decided not to do” any of the real estate deals he had considered in Russia (a claim belied by Michael Cohen’s later cooperation and therefore Trump’smost damning lie to Mueller).
Both of these comments were important details in continuing suspicion about Trump. Indeed, Trump’s false claim about real estate deals is critical in understanding why the Michael Cohen allegations in the dossier might be deliberate disinformation, designed to exploit the fact that Russia knew Trump had lied to cover up an election-year contact that Cohen had with the Kremlin. And Trump’s disavowal of ongoing business pursuits was one of the reasons, records from the Michael Sussmann case made clear, that researchers who discovered an anomaly tying a Trump marketing server to Russia’s Alfa Bank latched onto the anomaly. These statements in Trump’s presser were central to what came next, regardless of what facial expression Trump adopted when saying them. But Gerth simply doesn’t mention them, choosing instead to blame much of what followed on a deliberate campaign by Hillary and her aides.
That’s how Gerth crafts his narrative about a Hillary conspiracy theory: ignoring several damning statements – one provably false – that Trump made as well as the efforts Trump’s rat-fucker took to pursue stolen emails that preceded the Brennan briefing. He then rewrites a Russian intelligence product to claim Hillary was affirmatively manufacturing an alliance, when all the Russians said is that she was trying to gin up a scandal about clearly scandalous behavior. And he does so – in a piece lecturing other journalists that they need to be more transparent – without describing either that he’s parroting a Russian line or that the IC won’t vouch for the reliability of the Russian line he’s parroting.
