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The Media Started Capitulating to Trump with Russia Russia Russia

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I took a few days to go wander around Paris.

In the meantime (as Nicole and I discussed on Friday), the WaPo has subjugated itself to Donald Trump by spiking an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Whatever else WaPo and LAT’s capitulation to Trump has done, it has focused attention on media failures this year.

I concluded back in February that the media was not going to help hold Trump accountable this year. I concluded that when zero traditional outlets pursued the story of how Donald Trump’s DOJ used a side channel to ingest dirt Rudy Giuliani collected from — among others — known Russian spies to criminally frame Joe Biden, with the Alexander Smirnov bribery allegation.

One candidate’s DOJ criminally framed the other candidate and it has been simply ignored.

That’s not the only way the media has failed. Hell, there have been maybe two stories about Trump’s abuse of pardons. There has been no scrutiny about whether Trump works for the Saudis, rather than the American people. We don’t talk about the fact that Trump stole 100 classified documents, and probably more we haven’t located.

This failure is not surprising. After all, the first act via which Trump cowed the media came with his success at spinning the results of the Russian investigation.

The Mueller investigation and its aftermath obtained legal judgments that Trump’s Coffee Boy, his National Security Adviser, his campaign manager, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover-up what happened with Russia in 2016. That’s an astoundingly productive investigation, one that should keep the issue of what really did happen at the forefront (particularly after Treasury confirmed that Russian spooks did get the internal campaign information Paul Manafort shared). And yet the media has never taken the time to fact check Trump’s Russia Russia Russia chant, via which he dismisses the result of the Russian investigation as a witch hunt. The media never calls him on that lie.

For whatever reason — perhaps ignorance, perhaps exhaustion — the media has allowed Trump to dodge accountability for the help Russia gave him in 2016. They have allowed him to apply a double standard on the Iran and Chinese hacks this year, when Trump invited foreign hacks in 2016. They simply ignored how in advance of 2020, Rudy Giuliani flew around the world soliciting help from — again, this is uncontroversial — at least one known Russian spy, right out in the open.

This is one thing I’ve tried to accomplish with the Ball of Thread series. Here’s how it worked.

  • Trump and the media let the Steele dossier serve as a substitute for the actual things Trump did, both before and after the election.
  • Trump turned an investigation into people grifting off their access to him into an attack on him by the Deep State.
  • Republicans in Congress picked up and expanded the Steele dossier substitution.
  • Along the way, these efforts did real, undoubtedly intentional damage to the FBI, especially those with expertise on Russia.
  • Bill Barr thwarted what was intended as an impeachment referral.
  • In his effort to kill Zombie Mueller, Barr created propaganda about the investigation and Joe Biden and laid the groundwork for January 6.
  • The Durham investigation criminalized Hillary’s victimization by Russia.
  • Bill Barr helped Rudy criminally frame Joe Biden.
  • The Hunter Biden investigation(s) sucked up all the oxygen that should have been focused on Trump.

This is the process by which Trump has stoked grievance out of a Russian investigation that concluded that five top aides lied to hide what really happened.

And the media, to this day, lets him dismiss all that by chanting only Russia Russia Russia.

The media’s surrender, led by Jeff Bezos, to Trump’s authoritarianism is not new. The media has been doing this for six years.

Trump Pardoned Unindicted Co-Conspirator Steve Bannon for Defrauding Trump’s Supporters

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On December 13, [Chesebro] sent [Rudy] a memorandum that envisioned a scenario in which Pence would use the fraudulent slates as a pretext to claim that there were dueling slates of electors from the targeted states and negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.312 On the same day, the defendant resumed almost daily direct contact with [Bannon,] who maintained a podcast that disseminated the defendant’s false fraud claims.313 On December 14, [Bannon’s] podcast focused on spreading lies about the defendant’s fraudulent electors—including the false claim that their votes were merely a contingency in the event the defendant won legal challenges in the targeted states.314 [my emphasis]

Let me make something explicit to serve as background for a post on what fuckery we might expect in the next month or so.

  1. October 31: “He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” J6C (Originally sourced to MoJo)
  2. November 13: “Trump just fired.”
  3. December 13: Bannon resumes daily contact.
  4. December 14: Alternate electors. J6C
  5. January 2: “The Vice President’s role is not “ministerial.” J6C
  6. January 2: Trump wanted Pence briefed by Eastman immediately.
  7. January 4: Pre-Pence Willard Hotel meeting, from which Rudy calls Trump.
  8. January 4: Post-Pence Willard Hotel meeting.
  9. January 5: “Fuck his lawyer.”
  10. January 5: Call with Trump before “All hell is going to break loose.” J6C

Between the period on October 31, 2020, when Steve Bannon was explaining that Trump would declare victory regardless if he won, and the period, starting on December 13, when Bannon started planning events that would lead to “All Hell [Breaking] Loose” on January 6, alleged co-conspirator Bannon had less contact with Trump for a period, then resumed “almost daily direct contact” with him. In that period, Bannon was trying to figure out how to get out of his prosecution for cheating Trump supporters in the Build the Wall scheme (here’s the RECAP docket).

He was arrested on August 20 on Guo Wengui’s yacht (a yacht allegedly acquired through Guo’s separate conspiracy to cheat his supporters, a fraud in which Bannon was also treated as a co-conspirator). That day, Bill Burck — who had successfully gotten Bannon through slowly evolving testimony the Mueller investigation with no charges — represented him at his arraignment, as he did for an initial appearance via Zoom on August 31. Bannon spent some part of the next two months working with Rudy Giuliani, Robert Costello, and Jack Maxey, fiddling with a hard drive copied from a laptop once associated with Hunter Biden’s iCloud account. Meanwhile, Burck delayed the first status hearing in the case — originally scheduled for October 26 and rescheduled for November 9 — based on his own trial schedule.

On November 3, Donald Trump did declare victory before key swing states were counted.

On November 5, Steve Bannon called to put Anthony Fauci and Chris Wray’s heads on pikes.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci.

Now I actually want to go a step farther but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you’re gone — time to stop playing games. blow it all up, put Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that’ll light them up, right.

The day after Bannon threatened the FBI Director, on November 6, Burck asked for a second delay of the initial status hearing, because Bannon was in the process of retaining new counsel. “Mr. Bannon and Quinn Emanuel have mutually and amicably agreed that alternative counsel would be better suited to his defense strategy,” Burck explained later that month when he requested permission to drop off the case.

On November 7, Pennsylvania declared Joe Biden the victor of the state. There would be no second term in which Bannon could impale the FBI Director — at least not one in 2021.

It actually took longer for Bannon to arrange replacement counsel than Burck represented.

On December 11, Robert Costello entered his appearance as Bannon’s new lawyer. At the time, Costello was best known for the allegations from the Mueller Report seeming to offer assurances from “friends in high places” that Michael Cohen would be pardoned if he covered for Trump. But Costello’s role, as a participant as much as counsel, in the Hunter Biden laptop caper would seemingly expand the timeline of his relationship with Bannon.

Two days after Costello entered his appearance for Bannon, according to Jack Smith’s immunity filing, Bannon and Trump resumed near-daily conversations leading up to January 6.

Bannon’s actual pardon would make short work for Costello. On January 19, 2021 — less than two weeks after “All hell [broke] loose” with Bannon as an alleged co-conspirator — Trump pardoned Bannon for cheating Trump’s own supporters. But Trump made it clear with his selectivity that the pardon had nothing to do with a perceived injustice: Trump pardoned none of Bannon’s co-conspirators. His three co-conspirators remain in prison at least through next year.

Trump pardoned Bannon for cheating Trump’s own supporters. He cared more about meeting Bannon’s needs than protecting those who believe in Trump.

When tangential We Build the Wall associates Dustin Stockton and Jennfier Lawrence explained why they provided (unreliable) testimony to the January 6 Committee, they implied it arose, in part, from frustration that Bannon had gotten pardoned but they had not.

Stockton and Lawrence say they subsequently worked with Kremer to plan a rally in Washington on Nov. 14, 2020. That event featured a drive-by from Trump in the presidential motorcade. That night, there were clashes between Trump supporters and counterprotesters. Turnout among the pro-Trump contingent was high enough that Kremer was inspired to launch a nationwide “March for Trump” bus tour with Stockton and Lawrence.

They were also, they say, encouraged by a suggestion that participating in the protests challenging Trump’s election loss could win them Trump’s help with the fallout from the We Build the Wall debacle. In December 2020, as the tour rolled around the country, Stockton and Lawrence say they got a call from Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and his chief of staff, Thomas Van Flein. According to Stockton, Van Flein claimed he and the congressman had just met with Trump, who was considering giving them a “blanket pardon” to address the “We Build the Wall” investigation.

“We were just in the Oval Office speaking about pardons and your names came up,” Van Flein allegedly said. Van Flein did not respond to a request for comment.

Gosar suggested the bus tour was helping Stockton and Lawrence build support for a pardon from the caucus and Trump. “Keep up the good work,” Gosar said, according to Stockton. “Everybody’s seen what you’re doing.”

While Stockton says Gosar previously supported the wall project and would likely have “moved to get the pardon regardless of what was happening post-election,” the call made clear to him that the protests against the 2020 vote could help get Trump on their side. “Trump was taking interest because of the notoriety of what we were currently doing,” Stockton says.

In the end, Bannon’s short-term resolution of his criminal exposure may not have helped much,

Like his co-conspirators, he’s in prison as we speak, for contemptuously blowing off the January 6 Committee. He’ll be in Danbury prison for several more weeks. Six weeks after that, he faces state trial on the same charges of which his co-conspirators have already been found guilty.

I raise all this for two reasons.

First, John Roberts says none of this matters. The evidence that Donald Trump was using pardons as leverage to associates to help attack democracy doesn’t matter. He doesn’t want to hear any evidence of such official conduct, even if used as part of a quid pro quo.

And more obviously, as Bannon faces his state trial and gets named as an unindicted co-conspirator in Trump’s effort to “break loose all hell” on January 6, he’s in the same position he was four years ago: facing down legal consequences for his past criminal attacks on truth and rule of law.

Trump pardoned Bannon, and only Bannon, for defrauding his own supporters four years ago.

From the Willard to Danbury Correctional: Steve Bannon Allegedly Joins the Conspiracy

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One of Danbury’s Federal Correctional Institution’s most illustrious residents likely discovered on Wednesday that he had been promoted.

Steve Bannon is now P1, a feature player in Jack Smith’s latest description of Trump’s conspiracies to steal the election.

The initial description of Bannon in Jack Smith's immunity filing.

Bannon’s new prominence in Smith’s description has been noted by others. NYT noted it in a story on yesterday’s front page, cataloging at some length how Bannon’s described role in this has changed. WaPo noted it too, though with far less detail than NYT.

But Smith did more than simply talk about Bannon a lot.

He promoted him: right up into the group Smith says entered into a conspiracy with Trump.

A screen cap using red boxes to show that Steve Bannon, referred to as P1, is included among those referred to as “private co-conspirators.”

There are Rudy Giuliani (CC1), John Eastman (CC2), Sidney Powell (CC3), Ken Chesebro (CC5), Boris Epshteyn (CC6), and Steve Bannon (P1), listed as “private co-conspirators.” By contrast, even Mike Roman (P5), described as a co-conspirator when he was ginning up riots at Michigan’s TCF Center, is described in this introductory paragraph as an “agent,” along with Bill Stepien (P2), Justin Clark (P3), and Jason Miller (P4).

The distinction may be a legalism. The other P-labeled people mentioned in this paragraph were employed by Trump’s campaign, whereas none of the co-conspirators were. To admit the words and actions of those private lawyers and political operatives — the co-conspirators — under a hearsay exception, prosecutors need to persuade Judge Chutkan that they entered into an agreement to commit crimes together. That is, the designation may be about nothing more than making evidence readily admissible without having to call these people as witnesses at some hypothetical trial if SCOTUS ever lets Jack Smith have one.

But it must reflect a change in the way Jack Smith has come to treat Bannon over the last 14 months. The reason why Rudy and the others have “CC” labels, designating them as co-conspirators, is because they did in the original indictment. Those labels were retained with the superseding indictment to minimize confusion; even with Jeffrey Clark (formerly CC4) removed, Chesebro and Epshteyn retained their old numbers, 5 and 6.

Bannon didn’t even make it into the superseding indictment.

But he shows up in the Immunity filing at least nine times (where these incidents show up in the January 6 Report I’ve included links — a number of these details were already known).

  1. October 31: “He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” J6C (Originally sourced to MoJo)
  2. November 13: “Trump just fired.”
  3. December 13: Bannon resumes daily contact.
  4. December 14: Alternate electors. J6C
  5. January 2: “The Vice President’s role is not “ministerial.” J6C
  6. January 4: Pre-Pence Willard Hotel meeting, from which Rudy calls Trump.
  7. January 4: Post-Pence Willard Hotel meeting.
  8. January 5: “Fuck his lawyer.”
  9. January 5: Call with Trump before “All hell is going to break loose.” J6C

Prosecutors added a reference to Bannon’s explanation of the plan to declare victory on October 31. They described that Bannon knew, in real time, that Trump was going to fire his campaign staff and put Rudy in charge. For some reason they suggest Bannon fell out of regular contact for a month (remember that immediately after the election, Bannon — not yet pardoned out of his Build the Wall charges — threatened to put Chris Wray’s head on a pike), only to rejoin again on December 13, just as the fake elector plot was getting up and rolling. There were a number of famous comments that appeared on Bannon’s podcast, including the prediction, on January 5, that “All hell is going to break loose” on January 6.

And then there are two meetings on January 4, both before and after the effort to pressure Pence to throw out Joe Biden’s votes. In the meeting prior to that January 4 meeting with Pence, Rudy called Trump while they were meeting at the Willard. Trump was on the phone with the plotters in the Willard Hotel.

A screen cap showing that Rudy called Trump while the co-conspirators were meeting at the Willard Hotel.

The Trump conspiracy has finally reached the Willard Hotel.

To be clear, none of this means Bannon will be charged. The five remaining co-conspirators have been sitting out there for 14 months without being charged (though it doesn’t make sense to charge anyone until you ensure that Trump wouldn’t just pardon them out of their trouble, like he did the last time and already did once with Bannon).

Bannon’s inclusion as a co-conspirator may mean little more than that his communications are of some import to tell this story — perhaps his prediction that Trump would declare victory, perhaps his involvement in Trump’s decision to replace his campaign team with Rudy (remember that Robert Costello was involved in all this, building off the common purpose with the Hunter Biden “laptop”).

But those details could have come in via Boris Epshteyn. They’re captured in texts between the two (the delay in including Bannon could arise from a delay in reconstructing someone’s phone).

Where you’d need Bannon’s designation as a co-conspirator in particular is his prediction that, “all hell is going to break loose,” after his conversation with Trump.

Still that was all available back in August 2023, when this was first indicted. As noted, it was included in the J6C.

Which raises the question of whether Jack Smith has new information, perhaps about those two meetings at the Willard, bookending the January 4 attempt to pressure Pence. The filing describes that Rudy, Eastman, Epshteyn, and Bannon attended the meeting beforehand, from which Rudy called Trump; Rudy is not described to have attended the meeting afterwards. But that doesn’t rule out someone else attending those meetings, and some possible attendees have entered cooperation agreements in the state conspiracy cases (though Chesebro does not appear to have attended the meetings). Absent someone who attended the meetings cooperating, Smith might have little more from those meetings than business records from the Willard and calendars to prove they were all there (though he did get proffers from Rudy and Epshteyn).

The Federal conspiracy charges against Donald Trump have finally arrived at the Willard Hotel, and they brought along Steve Bannon as a co-conspirator.

Update: Added the screencap showing that Rudy called Trump while the co-conspirators were meeting at the Willard Hotel before the Pence meeting.

Bill Barr, “So Far as We Knew”

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As I described, the book written by Aaron Zebley and two of Robert Mueller’s other former prosecutors breaks most new ground in its description of discussions between Mueller’s team, Trump’s lawyers, and those supervising the investigation at DOJ.

As it describes, for months, the investigation was working towards a January 27, 2018 interview of Trump, to be held at Camp David. But shortly after Mike Flynn pled guilty, Trump attorney John Dowd (whose call to Rob Kelner floating a pardon made it into the report but not the book), started getting cold feet. On January 30, Dowd told Jim Quarles, “I can’t let this guy testify. I will resign before he does.” On March 1, Dowd and Jay Sekulow first pitched the idea of written questions. Four days later, Mueller first raised the possibility of a subpoena; Dowd said that would be war. Trump would plead the Fifth before he’d respond to a subpoena.

Three weeks later, Dowd resigned.

On April 18, Sekulow told Quarles that Trump was close to bringing on new lawyers. Of Jane and Marty Raskin, Sekulow spoke of their high stature.

“We are talking to people with high stature to take over the representation,” Sekulow said. “Just finalizing everything now.”

“Good,” Jim said.

“You know them, actually. I think you’ve worked with them in the past. They are like-minded people who share our desire to get to the goal line.”

Of Rudy Giuliani (who was officially disbarred in DC yesterday), Sekulow said he hoped he wouldn’t join the team.

Sekulow continued, “There’s a third person too, but I’m hopeful he won’t join.” He did not divulge this person’s identity.

[snip]

Sekulow then said, “And the third person is, well, America’s Mayor.”

Jim thought for a brief moment. “Rudy?”

“That’s correct,” Sekulow said. “Rudy Giuliani is coming on too.”

Rudy almost immediately ran afoul of the Mueller team.

At a meeting on April 24, there was a discussion about whether Trump even could be charged. Bob told Rudy that “we plan to follow the [OLC] regulations” prohibiting the indictment of a sitting President, though in a way that left wiggle room in case (as the book describes) the team found “evidence proving Trump truly was a Manchurian candidate.” Rudy asked whether Trump was a witness, a subject, or a target; Mueller answered he was a subject.

Giuliani asked, “Is he a subject regardless of the OLC opinion?” In other words, were we not labeling Trump a “target” simply because he couldn’t be indicted? Or was he a subject because there was not enough evidence to make him a target?

Bob said that we had deliberately withheld making a judgment about the president’s conduct, but we would get back to them if we could say more.

In spite of repeated assurances the meeting was confidential, Rudy promptly ran to the press and (per the book, at least) misrepresented what Mueller said. As the book describes, Rudy told journalists that if Trump couldn’t be indicted, he couldn’t be subpoenaed.

That’s all background to the discussion of whether Trump could be charged with obstruction. As the book describes, Trump’s request that Don McGahn make a false statement disclaiming Trump’s effort to replace Mueller involved the creation of a false record in an attempt to obstruct the investigation; it clearly involved creating a false evidentiary record, and so would qualify no matter how you interpret 18 USC 1512(c)(2). But the other obstruction incidents did not (this issue has now been decided by Fischer to require evidentiary impairment, meaning the only obstruction incident that could be charged against Trump, ignoring the immunity opinion, is the McGahn one). So there was an extended dispute, starting in May 2018, which a long chapter discusses at length.

But then, unbeknownst to Mueller, Bill Barr weighed in, writing Rod Rosenstein and OLC head Steven Engel that Mueller’s views on obstruction were wrong.

As the book describes, Barr’s allegedly unsolicited memo was “remarkably timely,” because, from that point forward, Rosenstein’s team seemed to adopt precisely the analysis Barr offered.

We didn’t know it at the time, but just as we were starting our subpoena discussion with the DOJ, another person weighed in with the department on these very issues.

On June 8, 2018, the once-and-future attorney general, William Barr, submitted a nineteen-page memo to Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, who was then head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. In his memo, Barr argued that section 1512 did not apply to President Trump in the manner Barr imagined we might be seeking to apply it. We say “imagined” because Barr had no actual insight into our work, so far as we knew.

Given that Barr was a private citizen at that time, his memo was remarkably timely. It posited (fairly accurately) that we were then “demanding that the President submit to interrogation about [obstruction] incidents, using the threat of subpoenas to coerce his submission.” Barr’s bottom line was that a prosecutor, even a special counsel, should not be allowed to require an examination of the president regarding these incidents, end of story. According to Barr, section 1512 prohibited only corrupt acts that impaired the integrity or availability of evidence, for instance, an act that destroyed a document or induced a witness to change his testimony. Barr’s memo stated that a president’s conduct can “obviously” be considered obstruction of justice in the “classic sense of sabotaging a proceeding’s truth-finding function. Thus, for example, if a President knowingly… induces a witness to change testimony… then he, like anyone else, commits the act of obstruction.”

But Barr maintained that the obstruction statute did not apply to what he termed the president’s “facially-lawful” actions—such as firing an FBI director or ending a federal criminal prosecution—even if such an action were done with corrupt intent and impacted a grand jury proceeding. In other words, even if Trump fired Comey for a corrupt purpose, that could not be a crime, in Barr’s view.

We wouldn’t become aware of Barr’s memo until December 2018, the day before his Senate confirmation hearing for attorney general. Nevertheless, his memo seemed to capture the fundamental issues Rosenstein and the department would raise throughout that summer when it came to subpoenaing the president. Barr may have previewed the department’s position when he wrote: “It is inconceivable to me that the Department could accept Mueller’s interpretation of 1512(c)(2). It is untenable as a matter of law and cannot provide a legitimate basis for interrogating the President.” [my emphasis]

A couple of points about this.

First, the Zebley book doesn’t address any documents that have subsequently been released. Most notably, while the book discusses the events immediately following the conclusion of the report at length, it doesn’t address Bill Barr’s memo declining prosecution on obstruction (the chapter on Barr’s letter to Congress is called “The Barr Report”), even though Barr egregiously avoided comment on the pardons that Trump was using to silence Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone.

Similarly, it doesn’t address the communications with OLC that were liberated via FOIA. Those show that starting on July 12 — the day before the GRU indictment incorporating reference to Roger Stone — Ed O’Callaghan shared everything that went between Mueller and Trump’s lawyers with Engel who, like Rosenstein, got the Barr obstruction memo, and along with O’Callaghan would “advise” Barr to release his letter to Congress. Starting on July 26, National Security Division head John Demers got added. Those things, taken together, strongly suggest that OLC was involved from the start to find a way to find that Trump couldn’t be charged (remember that Engel did similar cover-up work during impeachment).

All that is not that suspicious if, indeed, “Barr had no actual insight into our work.”

“So far as we knew.”

But it would be if Barr did have actual insight into what Mueller was doing.

LOLGOP and I are hard at work on our Ball of Thread episode on precisely how Bill Barr killed the Mueller investigation. And in that context, I’ve returned to something I’ve puzzled over for years: Barr’s description, in his book, of his decision to return to government with the intent of killing the Mueller investigation and starting an investigation without a crime, the Durham investigation.

I would soon make the difficult decision to go back into government in large part because I saw the way the President’s adversaries had enmeshed the Department of Justice in this phony scandal and were using it to hobble his administration. Once in office, it occupied much of my time for the first six months of my tenure. It was at the heart of my most controversial decisions. Even after dealing with the Mueller report, I still had to launch US Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the genesis of this bogus scandal. At the end of my first year in office, the President was impeached over a harebrained effort, involving Rudy Giuliani, to push back on the Russia collusion canard by digging up an alleged counter-scandal in Ukraine implicating the Clinton campaign or Vice President Biden and his son Hunter.

The fallout from Russiagate continued during my last year in office. My relationship with the President frayed as he became frustrated by my failure to bring charges against those who had ginned up Russiagate and the failure of Durham’s investigation to produce more rapid results.

I’ve always believed — even already taped for the podcast my belief — that you need no more than Barr’s reactionary views (which happen to match those of several SCOTUS justices), his past work obstructing Iran-Contra, and years of submersion in Fox News propaganda to explain his actions. Just like you need no more than Trump’s narcissism to explain his actions, you need no more than those three characteristics of Barr to explain his willingness to chase Russian disinformation in his effort to kill concerns about Trump’s ties to  Russia.

You need no more to explain their actions, but I can never shake the possibility there’s more.

All the more so given Lev Parnas’ claim, in interviews after the release of From Russia with Lev, that Victoria Toensing got Barr hired.

Now, Parnas’ reference — and his visibility on interactions between Toensing, Rudy, and Barr — post-dates Barr’s June 2018 memo. He’s talking about Toensing’s assurances to Trump, after he fired Jeff Sessions, that Barr would make the Mueller investigation go away (though if Toensing made that assurance, the Ukraine stuff looks far different, as does Barr’s treatment of it as a mere “counter-scandal”).

But Toensing was involved in the effort to make the Mueller investigation go away far earlier.

She represented Sam Clovis (who was interviewed, without an attorney, in two parts on October 3, 2017, and interviewed, including before a grand jury, with Toensing, on October 26, 2017). George Papadopoulos probably told Clovis that Russia had Hillary’s emails and Clovis was involved in Papadopoulos’ apparent discussions about setting up a September 2016 meeting with Russia, but Clovis testified that he had no memory of either of those things. And she represented Erik Prince (who was interviewed on April 4 and May 3, 2018) — who, like Steve Bannon, deleted their texts to each other from during the period when Prince was meeting with Kirill Dmitriev in the Seychelles, but has no memory of doing so.

Indeed, Toensing’s spouse, Joe DiGenova, even briefly said he was representing Trump, during that transition where Rudy got added. During his Ukraine caper a year later, Rudy repeatedly proposed that he do the work while Toensing billed for it. So if you got Rudy, you got Toensing.

And if Toensing later was involved in getting Barr hired, it would be unsurprising if she was a contact with him before that.

Incidentally, Barr never once mentions Toensing in his book. He mentions Rudy, who is a central focus of his book, around 44 times. He exercised his right to remain silent about Toensing.

In a follow-up, I’m going to talk (again) about the blind spot that connects the Mueller investigation and the Durham investigation — the blind spot at the core of Bill Barr’s effort to cover up Trump’s ties to Russia.

For now, though, consider the possibility that Barr had a great deal more insight into the Mueller investigation when he wrote that memo than he let on.

Why No One Went to Prison for Rudy Giuliani’s Hunter Biden Corruption

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Like many people, I’ve watched From Russia with Lev since it was released the other day.

The documentary tells a story I’ve covered here in real time: of how, with Lev Parnas’ help, Rudy Giuliani solicited dirt on Hunter (and Joe) Biden from foreigners, mobsters, and Russian spies, in hopes of helping Trump stay in office.

As told, with Lev’s spouse Svetlana serving as a key narrator, it’s a compelling, personal story.

I’ve also told — am one of the only people who has told — the story that many people are now asking: why no one went to prison for this caper. The documentary has led many people, understandably, to demand to know why no one (besides Lev, they sometimes say, inaccurately) went to prison for all this, which has, predictably, led to the same conspiratorial bashing of Merrick Garland we saw with the January 6 investigation.

The question is premised on certain choices the filmmakers made: focusing away from Dmitry Firtash and especially from Andrii Derkach (who got involved after Lev was done), crediting the spin of Lev’s attorney, Joseph Bondy, and simplifying the investigation of Hunter Biden. The film doesn’t fill in any of the gaps I noted in Lev’s book, and creates new ones. It creates the appearance that Lev was prosecuted solely to protect Trump from impeachment and that the investigation into Hunter arose solely out of Rudy’s efforts. Those choices make sense for narrative and legal reasons, but as a good story does, it simplifies the issue.

And I promise you, the film vastly understates the corruption that went on. Wildly understates it. One goal I have for Ball of Threads is to unpack what is currently known of that far deeper corruption, but that still just scratches the surface.

The quick explanation of why Rudy didn’t go to prison for this is that:

  • Bill Barr did wildly corrupt things to protect him, Donald Trump, and himself
  • By the time, shortly into the Biden administration, DOJ tried to pursue Rudy, Rudy’s phones were corrupted

Trying to hold Garland responsible for failing to prosecute the underlying crime amounts to doing Bill Barr’s propaganda work, because Barr worked relentlessly to protect Rudy.

You can, however, hold Garland responsible for one thing: the continued appointment as Special Counsel of David Weiss, who as a witness to Barr’s corruption, is conflicted in any investigation pursuing Alexander Smirnov’s attempts to criminally frame Joe Biden.

This post explains all that in more detail.

 

Lev didn’t go to prison for the Hunter Biden stuff

As I said, the film leaves the impression that Lev was arrested to protect Trump during impeachment by silencing the key witness.

But that’s not why Lev went to prison (as a news clip in the movie tacitly admits).

Lev and Igor Fruman (along with David Correia and Andrey Kukushkin) were first charged on October 9, 2019, via indictment that was (according to then US Attorney for SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s memoir) drafted quickly overnight in advance of Lev and Igor’s trip to meet Dmitry Firtash in Vienna. From Berman’s memoir, I’m not 100% sure whether he pushed it because he genuinely feared they were about to flee the country, felt he had to do so before Barr intervened … or for more nefarious reasons.

The charges were:

  • Conspiring to make a bunch of political donations in the name of Global Energy Producers
  • Lying to the Federal Election Commission
  • Falsifying a document to the FEC
  • Laundering donations from Russian Andrey Muraviev to pay pro-cannabis politicians

As Bondy described, the indictment implied that Lev and Igor’s political contributions to Pete Sessions were tied to an attempt to fire Marie Yovanovitch. But that was not charged as FARA.

On September 17, 2020, the indictment was superseded. Lev and Correia’s longterm Fraud Guarantee fraud was added and the charges tied to Muraviev (who was secretly indicted that same day) were bumped up. The paragraph describing a payment to Sessions took out the reference to an Ambassador, describing it instead as to “further their political goals.” There were still no FARA charges though.

Ultimately, Lev was convicted at trial in October 2021 of the GEP and Muraviev donations, and in March 2022, pled guilty to the fraud guarantee charges. He was never charged with FARA violations.

Bondy’s insinuation that SDNY took out the foreign agent aspect to protect Rudy is wholly inconsistent with the warrants (linked below) targeting Lev and Rudy unsealed last year.

They show that the investigation into Lev, which started based on a Campaign Legal Center complaint, initially focused on campaign finance crimes. In August 2019 — after the firing of Marie Yovanovitch but before the disclosure of the Perfect Phone Call — SDNY began to turn to Foreign Agent suspicions (though one of two warrants obtained in August 2019 was not executed). After the arrest, SDNY more aggressively turned to developing the Foreign Agent prong of the investigation. On November 4, 2019, SDNY obtained warrants targeting Rudy (which were not released last year). On December 10, 2019, the Foreign Agent prong continued.

That’s when Bill Barr intervened to kill that prong of the investigation, certainly as it pertained to Rudy, as I’ll lay out below.

After that point, SDNY focused on the Fraud Guarantee fraud.

It’s not that Lev went to prison for this but Rudy did not. On the contrary, Barr worked hard to ensure no one could go to prison on such charges.

While Barr was doing that, SDNY appears to have put that investigation on ice and attempted, without success, to resuscitate once Barr was out of office.

SDNY believed Lev was not fully forthcoming

The film makes it sound like SDNY refused Lev’s efforts to cooperate against Rudy and everyone else.

It’s more complicated than that.

SDNY has a rule: To enter into a cooperation agreement with them, one has to plead to all crimes. Geoffrey Berman described it this way in his memoir, explaining why SDNY didn’t give Michael Cohen a cooperation deal.

Cooperation in the Southern District means full cooperation—taking responsibility for all criminal actions, not just a select few. If any one area of a defendant’s life is off limits, we do not recommend leniency in sentencing. (Some districts are more transactional: you give a little, you get a little.)

When defendants agree to this and become cooperating witnesses against others, their testimony is more credible. Our prosecutors can tell juries that if the cooperator is caught lying, the agreement can be revoked and he or she will be prosecuted not only for the crimes covered at trial but for a host of others that the cooperator copped to as part of his agreement.

The SDNY rules also serve as a powerful investigative tool, because when you acquire absolute cooperation, your avenues for making other cases expand dramatically. We often learn of additional criminal activity—whole new threads of wrongdoing that in some instances we knew nothing about.

That’s one reason why SDNY didn’t give Lev a cooperation agreement. As SDNY explained in their sentencing memo for him, Lev’s attorney, Joseph Bondy, proffered information in the months after his arrest in October 2019. But Bondy provided details that were contradicted by the evidence (at the time, Lev may not have understood that FBI had obtained iCloud content he deleted). SDNY then did a reverse proffer on November 6, 2019 (two days after obtaining a warrant for Rudy’s comms), meaning they told Lev and Bondy all the evidence they had against Lev. After that, Bondy replied saying that Parnas was unwilling to plead guilty to the campaign finance crimes charged against him.

After that meeting, Parnas’s counsel wrote the Government to report that he could not “accept responsibility for criminal activity for which he is not guilty,” which based on discussions with counsel, the Government understood to be a reference to, among other things, the campaign finance and false statements offenses of which Parnas now stands convicted.

That’s consistent with Parnas’ own memoir, in which he still attributes the campaign finance stuff as a lack of awareness of the law and of the Russian source of the money he was throwing around.

According to SDNY, that unwillingness to fully accept responsibility continued when Parnas did sit for a proffer on March 5, 2020.

In addition, SDNY was unable to corroborate some of the things Parnas claimed in that March proffer.

[T]he Government was ultimately unable to corroborate significant portions of what Parnas said.

This was during a period when Barr was aggressively trying to limit SDNY’s investigation, so it may not have been Lev’s fault they couldn’t corroborate this stuff.

Finally, DOJ generally has a rule: Cooperating witnesses who chat to the press are usually useless as witnesses. This makes sense for a lot of reasons, not least that it alerts criminal targets of what prosecutors do and don’t know. SDNY told Parnas this early on, in November 2019, and his early 2020 interviews would have only exacerbated this.

At the close of that [November 6, 2019] meeting, the Government informed Parnas that public spectacles, leaks, and social media postings could undermine his credibility and diminish his value as a potential cooperating witness.

Given Barr’s fuckery, I don’t know if Parnas could have pulled off cooperation in any case. But even without it, things he himself did made it virtually impossible he could get a deal from SDNY.

And honestly, it wouldn’t have served his purposes. He needed to come out publicly against Trump, but that was inconsistent with the ability to cooperate criminally. The impeachment was his one shot for accountability, and Congress blew that. (As I was writing this, I considered that, had Democrats made Lev’s testimony more central to impeachment, Republicans might have forced Hunter Biden to testify, as they were threatening at the time; I have long wondered whether Trump’s impeachment defense team had a copy of the laptop.)

Bill Barr insulated the impeachment review from the Hunter Biden caper

The film focuses closely on how, after Trump’s Perfect Phone Call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy was released, onetime Trump defense attorney John Dowd, speaking as a lawyer for Lev and Igor, first refused to cooperate with Congress. Their arrest, days later, put Parnas and Fruman at the mercy of lawyers arranged by Trump, until Parnas hired Bondy.

It is true that their arrest discredited them as witnesses.

But it wasn’t just their arrest that limited the investigation from impacting impeachment. DOJ also did some tactical things to prevent the Trump impeachment from merging with Lev’s prosecution.

When Lev and Igor were arrested, DOJ told the press that Barr had been briefed on the investigation from early in his tenure as Attorney General.

That seems inconsistent with a claim that Barr made in his memoir (which IMO is largely CYA about these matters). Barr claimed he had no awareness of Rudy’s efforts to investigate Biden, and only learned of it from news reports.

By the spring of 2019, I had noticed news stories stating that Giuliani was pushing the Ukrainians to investigate Biden’s role in Shokin’s dismissal. But other than what I glimpsed in the media, I had no knowledge of the former mayor’s activities. During the spring, I expressed my concern about Giuliani with the President. As I was leaving an Oval Office meeting on another topic, I paused briefly to raise the matter.

“Mr. President,” I said, “I don’t think you are being well served by Giuliani at this point. Mueller is over, and Russiagate is dying. Why is Giuliani thrashing about in Ukraine? It is going to blow up—”

“Yeah,” the President said, cutting me off. “I told him not to go over there. It was a trap.” President Trump gave the impression Giuliani had a degree of independence and was going to pull back. I did not press the point.

Even imagining that SDNY kept these details from Barr, by August 14, 2019, it is highly likely that the National Security Division had notice of the focus on Rudy. That’s when possible Foreign Agent charges (and a reference to Marie Yovanovitch) got added to the warrants targeting Lev and Igor.

NSD head John Demers was one of the first people at DOJ to review the Perfect Phone Call. He did so, on August 15, 2019, after SDNY had turned to FARA crimes normally overseen by NSD.

That may explain why DOJ did something that served to insulate the Public Integrity (PIN) review of the Perfect Phone call from the ongoing investigation of Rudy’s efforts with Lev and Igor: Demers and Criminal Division head Brian Benzkowski only had PIN review the transcript of the call, not the full whistleblower complaint. Had investigators done what investigators have been ordered to do since 9/11 with the full complaint, they would have searched on all the references in the complaint, including those in the OCCRP report on Lev and Igor referenced repeatedly in it. That, in turn, should have identified the SDNY investigation, which would have immediately implicated Trump in the investigation.

Effectively, by focusing solely on the transcript, someone at DOJ deliberately blinded that PIN review to an ongoing FARA investigation, thereby eliciting a clean bill of health for Trump.

There’s a lot more that Barr did as the scandal unfolded, as I’ve laid out here and here. But the first thing someone at DOJ did was to gin up a prosecution declination before anyone could tie Trump’s coercion of Zelenskyy with the existing investigation into Lev and Igor.

Bill Barr played a shell game to protect Rudy’s “collusion” with a known Russian spy

Barr was nowhere near done.

There seems have been an ongoing cat-and-mouse between SDNY and Barr.

When SDNY got the indictment, according to Berman, they got approval from two PIN prosecutors in the middle of the night, not NSD, which may be why only the campaign finance crimes were in the indictment and only the campaign finance crimes were on the warrants for the searches done the day of arrest (this would have served to hide that part of the investigation from Lev and Igor, too). That’s the biggest piece of evidence that SDNY did not arrest Lev and Igor as a favor for Barr, as he attempted to kill impeachment, but the reverse.

In October, SDNY got warrants to search everything for the FARA crimes. On November 4, 2019, SDNY got warrants targeting Rudy for FARA crimes.

On December 5, 2019, Rudy met, with Barr’s foreknowledge, known Russian asset Andrii Derkach.

And on December 10, 2019, SDNY got further warrants in that investigation.

DOJ had just let Rudy meet with a Russian spy while SDNY had an ongoing investigation into whether Rudy was working with foreign spies. It was insane to let that happen in any case. All the more so given the ongoing investigation from the Sovereign District of New York, as SDNYers like to call themselves.

So Barr had to gut SDNY’s sovereignty.

Barr did several things:

  • Assigned any investigation of Derkach, with whom Rudy had just met, to EDNY, not SDNY where it would be a natural follow-on.
  • Made EDNY US Attorney Richard Donoghue the gate-keeper for all Ukraine investigations, requiring SDNY to get permission from him before taking any investigative steps against Rudy or Lev.
  • Asked Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady to play a role. Publicly, Barr and Brady claimed this was a vetting process of tips from Ukraine. But Brady’s congressional testimony revealed he did almost no functional vetting; he ignored evidence from the impeachment and some key public articles. Plus, he did more than vetting. Brady also checked in on investigations into all the oligarchs from whom Rudy had solicited dirt on Hunter Biden, with uncertain outcome; he tried to tell SDNY he knew better than they did about their investigation; he demanded details about the investigation into Hunter Biden. Most importantly, some yet unidentified person told Brady to seek out FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who had made a reference to Hunter Biden in an informant report about Mykola Zlochevsky years earlier. By May 2020, Smirnov was allegedly attempting to frame Joe Biden with allegations of bribery, and Brady made that part of his work. Once again with Smirnov’s allegations, Brady did little functional vetting, falsely claiming that his travel schedule confirmed the claim, rather than debunked it.
  • Barred the FBI Agents working with SDNY from receiving certain information, including Rudy’s interview with Scott Brady.
  • Ordered David Weiss, whom DOJ had put in charge of an investigation into DC and CA resident Hunter Biden, to consult with Brady on his tips.

These efforts halted what should have been obvious next steps in the SDNY investigation, ensured Rudy could share information obtained from a known Russian spy with no legal risk, and ordered that some of Rudy’s information be used in an investigation of Joe Biden’s kid. DOJ was literally protecting a Russian influence operation, because it served the interest of the President.

The biggest reason why Rudy didn’t go to prison for this is that Barr protected this entire process, including the solicitation of dirt from a known Russian spy.

DOJ approved steps against Rudy on Lisa Monaco’s first day on the job

While Trump remained in office, SDNY tried several more times to get warrants targeting Rudy, but were denied.

On Lisa Monaco’s very first day on the job, April 21, 2021, SDNY finally obtained warrants targeting Rudy. Merrick Garland’s DOJ did precisely what everyone is wailing for: He immediately permitted prosecutors to advance this long-thwarted investigation.

Based on what we can see, there were at least two limitations on the investigation, however. First, the warrants targeting Rudy did not include the Trump lawyer’s January 29, 2020 interview with Scott Brady. That suggests Rudy’s effort to share dirt from Russian spies was still protected as cooperation rather than confession, even after Garland took over (indeed, that’s what Rudy pointed to to argue he couldn’t be searched at all, his “cooperation” with Barr). Just as importantly, while some of the 2019 warrant affidavits mentioned Donald Trump’s call to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the 2021 warrants did not. I would be unsurprised if Barr got OLC to write a memo putting all that off limits before they left office.

Aside from that, DOJ’s approach to Rudy Giuliani remained remarkably aggressive, contrary to what virtually every news outlet will tell you. Importantly, SDNY did something no one else has reported: They installed a Special Master and got permission to review Rudy’s content — all Rudy’s post-2017 content — for privilege. Among other things, that freed up content, including at least one document the January 6 Committee did not get, for any other investigations.

Nevertheless, the delay (or possibly corrupt Rudy dead-enders in NY) appears to have killed any chance of pursuing Rudy for his role in soliciting dirt from Russian spies and others to attack Hunter Biden. On November 14, 2022, SDNY informed the court that the grand jury had concluded without filing charges (though Rudy’s lawyer and Hunter Biden laptop co-conspirator, Robert Costello, has never substantiated a declination letter). In a July 25, 2023 declaration in the Ruby Freeman lawsuit, Costello revealed one potential explanation: many of the devices seized from Rudy obtained in April 2021 were corrupted. Costello blamed the FBI’s contractor for making the phones unusable.

Not all the devices were corrupted, however. As noted, the privilege log from Freeman’s case shows a great deal of files pertaining to January 6 were successfully extracted, including a few identifiable files not obtained by the January 6 Committee.

DOJ also seized a phone from Victoria Toensing. But the value of that may have been limited by attorney-client privileged tied to Firtash, the same privilege which has, at times, led Lev (because he was a translator in that relationship) to limit his own comments about Firtash in all this. To fully unpack what happened, you’d need to know what promises Toensing made to Firtash and what Barr knew about them.

Attorneys General have vast discretion

In a just world, Bill Barr could be held accountable for the corruption he enabled. But that’s virtually impossible under the structures of impunity our system accords prosecutors and Attorneys General.

I’m neck-deep in a post on the three IG investigations pertaining to Bill Barr’s corrupt conduct.

All of them conclude that however nuts Bill Barr’s conduct was, the expansive authority of the Attorney General means that his actions, including his intervention into the sentencing for Trump’s rat-fucker and his decision to share details of minor infraction by someone whom Barr knew would never be charged for political gain, were within the discretion of the Attorney General.

DOJ IG has spent over four years investigating Barr’s corruption, and thus far, they have always concluded that as Attorney General, Barr’s discretion was so vast that he can break all of DOJ’s rules prohibiting its politicization.

There’s still at least one IG Report including Barr’s conduct outstanding (almost certainly, the ongoing investigation into DOJ getting the communications records of journalists for whom people like Jim Comey might have been a source). But of all the fuckery I know Barr to have committed, I can envision only a few details of his conduct might even remotely end up the focus of criminal investigation.

Even the most corrupt insinuations about Rudy’s efforts, in which Rudy allegedly offered Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Dmitry Firtash, and Mykola Zlochevsky relief from criminal investigations for dirt on Hunter Biden, would be included in this.

Lev explains why in his book: This was deliberately framed as the exact equivalent of Andrew Weissmann’s efforts to flip Firtash for information on Paul Manafort.

Andrew Weissman, who was lead prosecutor for the investigation of Russian collusion in the 2016 Election, had gotten there first. He offered a deal in which Firtash could avoid prison if he testified about the relationship between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The inclusion of Putin meant that Firtash would never take the deal. Nobody over there wants to make Putin angry.

Nobody else knew about the deal he was offered. Giuliani and Solomon wanted Firtash’s legal team to make it public. His Viennese lawyers were against it, so Firtash was reluctant. Soon, in a heated meeting in Vienna, an argument between some of Firtash’s legal team led to Victoria Toensing, who was on our team, confronting Dan Webb about it months later. Webb — who was connected with Weissmann, William Barr and other heavy hitters — admitted to the deal.

Still, we convinced Firtash that we — who were representing Trump’s interests — could help him with his extradition far more effectively than Weissman. The real goal for us was to get Firtash to use his contacts to pressure President Zelenskyy to announce an investigation of the Bidens. Our pitch was successful, Firtash agreed to hire Giuliani for $1 million. And $200,000 for me to be official translator and to be under the attorney-client privilege umbrella.

Prosecutors trade leniency for information on other crooks all the time. Here, however, it was the Attorney General, who had never served as a prosecutor himself, who would be making those deals, offering leniency to foreign oligarchs if they could offer dirt on Donald Trump’s likely opponent.

It’s unclear whether, and if so what, deals were made: an investigation into Zlochevsky was reportedly shut down in December 2019; investigations into Kolomoyskyi ratcheted up in 2020; and the prior investigation into Dmitry Firtash remains deadlocked on his extradition, as it has been for years.

But these kinds of deals would be consistent with an elaborate effort Barr makes in his book to spin Trump’s pursuit of dirt on the Bidens as a legitimate law enforcement pursuit, the logic of Trump’s impeachment defense taken to its logical conclusion.

It’s all transparent bullshit. But it would also be virtually impossible to debunk at trial, even if you could get beyond the vast discretion of an Attorney General.

David Weiss’ appointment threatens to limit further fallout

There’s one thing I do fault Merrick Garland for: For not removing David Weiss from the investigation into Alexander Smirnov.

By all appearances, Weiss asked to be appointed Special Counsel only after he renewed his focus on Smirnov in July 2023, after receiving, but blowing off, the allegation days before the 2020 election, on October 23, 2020.

Investigating Smirnov’s allegation that Joe Biden accepted a bribe from Burisma was the first thing that focused the investigation onto Biden, after the original prosecutor, Lesley Wolf had successfully avoided that focus for years. It was the first thing that created a real conflict with working for Joe Biden.

And Weiss bases his authority to prosecute Smirnov for lying when he started chasing that hoax on his Special Counsel authority. He could only do so if he were legitimately chasing that hoax as witness testimony.

Here’s the problem with that: David Weiss is a witness in what should be a broader investigation into how a side channel set up by Bill Barr ended up discovering an informant who once met Mykola Zlochevsky and then not vetting the false claims he made. At the very least, there should be an investigation into who — everyone swears it was not Rudy, and Smirnov has at least three other links to people close to Trump — alerted Brady that Smirnov might offer up such claims.

Bill Barr’s deputy ordered David Weiss to accept briefing on this hoax. He ordered him to let Scott Brady snoop on Weiss’ investigation of Joe Biden’s kid. That makes Weiss a witness. Once Smirnov became a subject rather than a witness, that created a conflict that should disqualify Weiss from overseeing an investigation into the former informant and the circumstances that allowed him to make allegedly false allegations against Joe Biden.

Merrick Garland should (at a minimum, though I could argue more broadly) move the primary team prosecuting Smirnov under supervision without such conflicts. A system set up by Bill Barr criminally framed Joe Biden, and a guy who worked with Bill Barr on that case continues to supervise the aftermath.

The complicity of the press

There’s one more party that demands accountability: The press.

Much of what I wrote in this post is public. It requires diligent reading, but not great access to Donald Trump or anyone else.

Not only has this entire story not been reported by mainstream outlets. Not only did NYT affirmatively obscure Rudy’s role in all this (and therefore Trump’s) in their one attempt to cover it. But one after another journalist — especially at NYT — writes stories that disappear the Hunter Biden pursuit from all of Trump’s abuse of DOJ. Indeed, some outlets, including Rachel Maddow’s parent company, seem to treat Hunter Biden as a gossip rag to drive clicks, rather than the locus of unprecedented corruption. Rather than chasing this story, or even asking Bill Barr direct questions about it, one after another TV star invites him on as if he’s a critic of Trump’s corruption, rather than a key player in it. WaPo’s Will Lewis pointed to a badly conflicted Hunter Biden piece as his antidote against accusations of lefty bias.

Want to know how Rudy Giuliani was allowed to solicit dirt from Russian spies to help Trump get elected, without accountability? Want to know why Barr is considered a critic of Trump rather than his most corrupt enabler? Ask the journalists who lost interest in that story as soon as Rudy released a laptop full of Hunter Biden’s dick pics.

From Russia with Lev begins to reverse all that. But as infuriating as it is, it barely scratches the surface.

Timeline

Below, every bullet is a known warrant. The ones not linked were described in a passage that failed to be fully redacted in a Lev Parnas filing. This document compares the Foreign Agent focus of the three warrants bolded below.

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

May 15, 2019: Marie Yovanovitch firing public

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

September 25, 2019: Disclosure of Perfect Phone call

October 9, 2019: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman arrested

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 20, 2020: Barr fires Geoffrey Berman

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

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

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

April 21, 2021: Lisa Monaco sworn in

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

Kamala Harris Is Not Goading Journalists to Publish Emails Iran Stole from Roger Stone

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As I’ve alluded to a few times, I was sent what I believe to be three of the files Iran puportedly stole from Trump’s team. I received them after I explained why I thought this hack-and-leak was different than the Hillary one in ways that should influence considerations about publishing:

  • Trump doesn’t compartment his campaign from his crimes, meaning Iran could be — could have been trying, could have succeeded in — stealing information about the Iran-related documents Trump took when he left the White House. The report that Susie Wiles was the intended target of the hack confirms that risk. In addition to running Trump’s campaign, Wiles decided who would be provided defense attorneys paid by the campaign. Aside from the classified information Trump shared with her, she should never have had anything implicating classified discovery and the classified discovery itself should never have left the SCIFs in which it was provided to defense attorneys. But she is likely to know some of what — for example — witnesses like Kash Patel said about classified information.
  • In addition to the hack, Iran allegedly was also trying to solicit a hit squad to kill Trump (indeed, the alleged recruiter, Asif Merchant, was just indicted on Wednesday). That makes the possibility of Iran exploiting internal information from Trump’s campaign (such as travel details) far more dangerous.

I had decided it wasn’t worth participating. And then I got sent files I believe to be those vetting files.

In the last few days, Google has slapped a phishing warning on the files I got sent.

Even though I offered that explanation a month ago, I still get questions from people about why I, and why other outlets, haven’t published the documents.

Don’t get me wrong, other outlets are, without a doubt, exercising a double standard in choosing not to publish these documents, or at least reviewing whether the JD Vance vetting document includes some of the really damning videos surfaced since Trump picked him. It’s not just the Hillary emails in 2016. Every single outlet known to have received these files has also chased the Hunter Biden laptop, even though they never succeeded in implicating Joe Biden in anything found in the laptop. The dick pics were enough to sustain many outlets for a year (and longer, in the case of the NYPost).

But there’s one other big, big difference — one that I think explains the entire difference.

As far as I know, no one in the Kamala Harris campaign is goading journalists to post the documents.

Compare that to 2016, where Trump’s top people were strategizing how to maximize attention on John Podesta’s risotto recipe. Somebody who may be Don Jr was getting all his trolls to push hashtags so “liberal news forced to cover it.” Or 2020, when Trump’s personal lawyer flew around the world, even meeting with known Russian spies, looking for dirt on Joe Biden’s kid. And when a laptop of dick pics dropped in Rudy Giuliani’s lap, like magic, the far right demanded that private social media companies let those dick pics disseminate like wild, because — they claimed — the dissemination of distractions about Hunter Biden was absolutely crucial to Trump’s election strategy.

If I’m right that Kamala Harris has never encouraged journalists to post these documents, there would be a very good reason why not, even beyond the considerable national security risks of encouraging hack-and-leak operations from hostile intelligence services.

Kamala has just 107 days to win an election. And she has a story that she is very very busy telling.

Hack-and-leak operations are about attention, about distraction. If she focused on these stolen documents, she would distract from her own campaign, from the story she is busy telling.

In 2016, Trump used the documents Russia stole to suck up media attention, which served to distract from his own corruption. That’s what he tried in 2020, too. And media outlets have, quite literally, argued that they could avoid accusations of liberal bias by printing error-riddled stories about Hunter Biden, still sucking on that dick pic, three years later.

Hack-and-leak operations help someone like Donald Trump, because too much scrutiny of his own actions might sink his campaign.

But Harris is doing something different than Trump. She’s trying to convince voters that government can improve their lives. She’s trying to convince voters that she cares about their issues and plans to [try to] address them. She needs to sustain their attention long enough to tell that story.

She doesn’t have the time to chase distraction with documents stolen from Trump.

Besides, the press has barely scratched the surface of the corruption or right wing extremism of Trump and his running mate, just sitting in plain sight, such as JD’s claim that we’re still fighting the Civil War and he’s fighting on the side of the south, or Trump rolling out another effort to cash in on his campaign, just weeks before the election.

There’s no shortage of dirt on Donald Trump. Nothing Iran has offered, thus far, at all compares to the stuff sitting out in plain sight.

There is, however, a shortage of time. And wasting time on stolen emails would squander what little time there is.

In Attempting To Claim WaPo Doesn’t Chase Rat-Fucks, WaPo Lies about Chasing Rat-Fucks

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I’m the rarity among lefties who supports the decision of Politico, WaPo, and NYT (thus far) to not publish the actual files that a persona suspected to have ties to Iranian hackers sent them. That’s true, partly because I think this hack could be even more dangerous than the one of Hillary. But it’s also true because of the opportunity cost that publishing stolen documents incurs.

I prefer Kamala Harris’ message to remain the affirmative message she’s running on, and to the extent that those outlets are doing reporting like the story further developing the suspected $10 million payment via Egypt to Trump, I’d like them to continue to pursue real reporting, as well.

One of the real impacts of the files Russia hacked in 2016 is that they distracted journalists from harder work, work about what a corrupt man Trump is. Campaign reporters are already distracted too easily by nonsense stuff; they don’t need any further distractions from their day job.

That said, reporters don’t have to publish the actual documents to address something that is clearly newsworthy about the files. As Politico explained, the main thing the persona has sent so far was a draft of the vetting document for JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Note, this mirrors one of the first things Guccifer 2.0 released in 2016: Hillary’s oppo dossier on Trump. So in addition to its use of an AOL account, this persona is adopting another of the Russian persona’s tactics.

Again, I’m cool with outlets sitting on the dossier itself. But the content of it is newsworthy. That’s because after JD Vance’s rocky rollout, both donors and Trump himself are asking whether vetters were surprised by Vance’s misogynist public statements.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as news coverage exploring Mr. Vance’s past statements unearthed — and then exhaustively critiqued — remarks including a lament that America was run by “childless cat ladies.”

Mr. Trump dismissed out of hand donors’ suggestions that he replace Mr. Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women before Mr. Trump chose him.

I’d also like to know if Trump’s vetting team knew of the pictures of JD wearing drag while at Yale, which have become the subject of memes on social media.

Whether the dossier was comprehensive matters (particularly given that a law firm also involved in Trump’s criminal defense completed it). It matters, most of all, because Trump has swapped the mediocre Ivanka as his primary familial advisor for the incompetent Don Jr, and the failson had a key role in picking JD.

So it would be newsworthy to reveal the scope and the thoroughness (or not) of the vetting document.

That said, I think every outlet that is sitting on these documents, particularly if they’re withholding details about any oversights in JD’s vetting document, owes the public an explanation of why they’re adopting a double standard as compared to their poor choices from 2016.

WaPo, which is trying to hunker through controversy about Will Lewis’ possible role in covering up Murdoch’s phone hacking,  tried to do that yesterday. Matt Murray boasted that outlets were taking a breath, and then went on to claim that the vetting document isn’t newsworthy because the six-month old vetting document isn’t, “fresh or new enough.”

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

[snip]

“In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough,” Murray said.

WaPo even attempted to address something virtually all discussions about using rat-fucked documents in the context of the suspected Iranian hack do not: the treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop, the most innocent provenance explanation for which is that, after pursuing a laptop from foreigners with ties to Russian intelligence for a year, Rudy Giuliani received just such a laptop out of the blue from a blind computer repairman.

Here’s what WaPo claims about how reserved news organizations were with the hard drives described as the Hunter Biden laptop.

News organizations have been tested since 2016. Wary of (1) hacked materials since then, many proved reluctant to report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that they were the result of a hack. As the conservative press latched on to (2) allegedly incriminating emails found on the computer in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, more mainstream outlets did not join in a 2016-style frenzy over the material, and Facebook and Twitter limited distribution of a New York Post story about the laptop.

An analysis by The Post nearly two years later confirmed the authenticity of many of the emails on the laptop and found no evidence of a hack. [my annotation]

Note the two reasons alluded to in this passage, both of which show up in Murray’s claimed explanation for sitting on the JD Vance dossier. There were two concerns, according to the WaPo:

  1. Was the laptop “hacked”?
  2. Did the “allegedly incriminating emails” prove what the NYPost claimed they did?

Then, in the next paragraph, WaPo addresses just one of those two issues, whether the hard drive copied from a copy of a laptop, was hacked. WaPo claims, falsely, that the linked story describing the results of Jake Williams and Matt Green’s analysis “found no evidence of a hack.”

For starters, that’s a category error. This is a copy of a copy of a laptop, not the laptop itself. What their analysis attempted to assess was the authenticity of the emails on the laptop — but two different security researchers were only able to do so for a fraction of the emails. This analysis made no attempt to assess whether the stuff on the laptop was packaged up from authentic files (or from a combination of authentic and doctored files). Far more importantly, given details of Hunter’s cloud accounts, it did not assess whether people besides Hunter Biden had access his cloud data (evidence at his gun case described that not just his mistress, Zoe Kestan, accessed his cloud data, but his drug dealers accessed at least his bank account).

But it did find that the copy of a copy of a laptop lacked marks of reliability and did include files placed there by someone other than Hunter Biden.

Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

[snip]

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

[snip]

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

[snip]

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

[snip]

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

There are several details, disclosed subsequent to the story, that it lacks: It doesn’t talk about the ways the story John Paul Mac Isaac’s attorney told WaPo conflict with the story JPMI would tell in his book (one very significant conflict pertains to the date when JPMI reached out to the FBI). It doesn’t describe that JPMI himself disavowed some of the content on the Jack Maxey hard drive, the one shared with the WaPo. It doesn’t describe that Hunter has sued Garrett Ziegler and Rudy Giuliani for hacking him (the former survived Ziegler’s motion to dismiss; the latter was dismissed pending the end of Rudy’s bankruptcy; as far as I know, Hunter has not yet renewed the suit against Rudy given the imminent dismissal of Rudy’s bankruptcy). It doesn’t describe that in court filings, Abbe Lowell affirmatively claimed that the data on the laptop itself — not the copy! — had been compromised before being shared with the FBI.

Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel’s claim that the underlying data is “authentic” (id. at 4) and accurately reflects “defendant’s Apple Macbook Pro and [] hard drive” (id. at 2) is mistaken.

Mr. Biden’s counsel told the Special Counsel on May 10, 2024 it agrees not to challenge the authenticity of the electronic data the Special Counsel intends to use with respect to it being what law enforcement received on December 9, 2019 from John Paul Mac Isaac (owner of The Mac Shop), and from Apple on August 29, 2019 and in a follow-up search on July 10, 2020. (Mot. at n.3.) However, Mr. Biden cannot agree this electronic data is “authentic” as to being his data as he used and stored it prior to Mac Issac obtaining it.

WaPo relies on a two year old story that has been significantly preempted to claim that the copy of the copy of the laptop was not hacked. The story never made such a claim, and the claims it has made have been undermined since.

But there’s an even more telling aspect of WaPo’s self-satisfied claim that reporters gave up their rabid addiction for rat-fuckery after 2016. It doesn’t address whether the laptop subsequently became newsworthy.

There’s good reason for that: Because after the election, WaPo did embrace the laptop, even the doctored one they got from Maxey, as part of a years-long campaign of dick pic sniffing. Their lead dick pic sniffers, Matt Viser and Devlin Barrett, even made shit up when disgruntled IRS agents released details that raised questions about the integrity of the original copy. Since then, prosecutors themselves have described that the extraction of the copy of the laptop they received — the one whence all the data that sloppy reporters call “the laptop” came — is 62% bigger, measured in terms of pages, than the laptop itself. There are potentially innocent explanations for why the hard drive purporting to be a copy of the laptop would not match it, but those explanations would conflict with JPMI’s explanations for how he made the copy. And, scandalously, the FBI never made an index of the laptop, and Judge Maryellen Noreika allowed it to be used in the trial against Hunter without ever even assuring that the forensic reports on the extraction of the two devices matched what got certified to her in a court filing.

And WaPo is not alone in its continuing addiction to relying on a copy of a copy of a laptop with such provenance problems. Just yesterday, NYT’s Ken Vogel did a story that relied on the laptop which basically said, Hunter Biden asked the Commerce Department for help on Burisma but it blew him off (unsurprisingly, Vogel also struggles with the court filings on which he bases his news hook). Four years after Vogel’s chum Rudy Giuliani released the laptop, three weeks after Joe Biden dropped out, NYT is still reporting the absence of news in an 8-year old email as news, precisely the kind of attention suck that rat-fuckers seek when they provide stolen documents to people like Vogel.

Again, in my opinion, WaPo is right not to publish the JD Vance dossier, though that’s different than using it to assess whether there were big gaps in the vetting of Trump’s unpopular running mate.

But WaPo is telling fairy tales about whether mainstream outlets gave up their fondness for rat-fuckery.

They did not. For four years, they have been utterly addicted to the rat-fuckery of the laptop, to the exclusion of reporting on all the details that should raise cautions disclosed since then.

And as such, the decision not to embrace this rat-fuckery, however correct it might be, is a double standard.

Fridays with Nicole Sandler (and LOLGOP and Spocko)

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Nicole Sandler was quite sick today so LOLGOP and Spocko helped fill in.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

Denial and Forgetting at the Hunter Biden Trial

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Consider the levels of denial and forgetting that it takes to write this paragraph the week that Hunter Biden, charged by a Trump US Attorney turned Special Counsel using evidence significantly sourced from a laptop handed over by John Paul Mac Isaac, stood trial.

While president, Mr. Trump repeatedly told aides he wanted the Justice Department to indict his political enemies. The Justice Department opened various investigations of Mr. Trump’s adversaries but did not ultimately bring charges — infuriating Mr. Trump and contributing to a split in 2020 with his attorney general, William P. Barr. Last year, Mr. Trump promised that if elected again, he would appoint a “real special prosecutor” to “go after” Mr. Biden and his family.

Five years ago, Donald Trump was impeached for extorting Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. The press covered it — and the way Rudy Giuliani continued to solicit such dirt from known Russian spies as impeachment loomed — with seriousness.

The following year, when Rudy rolled out a “laptop” once associated with Hunter Biden’s Apple account days before the 2020 election, media outlets including WSJ and Fox exercised some skepticism about the story of Hunter Biden abandoning a laptop with a blind computer repairman who would then share it with the guy who had been seeking just such a laptop for almost two years. Even at the NYPost, some reporters withheld their byline.

Yet that caution, and the details disclosed by past diligent reporting, has disappeared. It seems that, over the course of the last five years, Hunter Biden has become icky, leading almost all interest in the source of this investigation that led to his conviction to disappear. And Hunter Biden has become icky precisely through the process of the unprecedented GOP hit job against him.

Even Judge Maryellen Noreika bought into the icky storyline, dismissing the claim that Rudy Giuliani had any impact on this prosecution by claiming that texts that only existed publicly thanks to Rudy Giuliani instead appeared in Hunter Biden’s memoir.

That process of making Hunter Biden icky enough that his due process didn’t matter simply got whitewashed in the trial.

WaPo described the guy who started snooping through Hunter Biden’s private data almost immediately, whose claims to the FBI about what he found have not borne fruit, and who then sought out Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and shared bootable hard drives of Hunter Biden’s laptop, “a sort of whistleblower.”

That John Paul Mac Isaac even shared the bootable hard drive with Rudy (who then shared it with Jack Maxey, who then shared it with WaPo) has disappeared from this narrative.

NBC’s biggest scoop of the week — one representative of their tabloid coverage of the trial — likewise laundered the hit job that led to this trial. In describing how Hunter’s spouse attacked the man who had spent years demanding criminal investigations into Hunter based on texts extracted from the bootable hard drive, Sarah Fitzpatrick described Garrett Ziegler as no more than a former Trump trade policy aide, not someone who played a key role in the Big Lie and the coup attempt.

In a tense moment outside the courtroom where Hunter Biden is on trial for gun charges, his wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden, confronted former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler, who has been in the courtroom.

Ziegler, who worked on trade policy in the White House, was part of an effort by Trump allies to make public the contents of a laptop to embarrass Joe Biden’s son in the final days of the 2020 election. Hunter Biden sued Ziegler and the company he founded, Marco Polo, in September of last year, claiming they broke state and federal laws in an effort to create a searchable online database with 128,000 emails.

And Fitzpatrick whitewashed the substance of the lawsuit, which focuses on Ziegler’s admission that he broke the encryption of a phone backup included on the hard drive. Hunter isn’t suing because Ziegler made the texts from that phone available (Ziegler also made Ashley Biden’s diary available). He’s suing because Ziegler took actions to access the content that go well beyond publication.

In his response to the lawsuit, Ziegler argued that because Hunter never owned the hard drive on which the phone backup had been transferred, cracking that password does not amount to hacking.

Finally, as noted, WSJ similarly laundered part of the campaign that brought Hunter Biden to the point of facing felony gun charges. As a story on Merrick Garland’s relationship with some Special Counsels (WSJ ignores John Durham), it describes that David Weiss asked for Special Counsel status so he could pursue a list of FBI tasks, specifically the Alexander Smirnov allegations.

By 2022, prosecutors and agents had already believed that Hunter Biden committed tax crimes, but Weiss still seemed no closer to charging him or resolving the case. FBI officials asked Garland’s office if he could help move Weiss along.

Garland refused to prod Weiss, saying he had promised him broad independence to pursue the inquiry as he saw fit.

FBI agents drafted a list of final steps to push the probe forward—including to follow up on allegations from an FBI source that tied Hunter Biden’s financial misdeeds directly to his father.

Weiss’s office reached a tentative plea deal with Hunter Biden in June 2023, in an agreement that would likely include no jail time. Republicans in Congress alleged that Hunter Biden was getting a sweetheart deal, which fell apart a month later. In August, Weiss asked Garland to make him a special counsel, pointing to the FBI’s list and asking for independence. Garland agreed, recognizing that he had earlier promised Weiss autonomy and any resources he sought. [my emphasis]

There’s so much that any story about the Smirnov allegation might include: the way in which Bill Barr effectively immunized Rudy’s dalliance with Russian spies and set up a side channel targeting Joe Biden’s kid, FBI’s failures to respond when Smirnov shared recycled Murdoch dirt, the pressure brought to bear by Bill Barr’s public comments last summer, Smirnov’s self-proclaimed ties to Russian spooks, Weiss’ own conflicts as a witness to the side channel.

But at the very least, describe that David Weiss sought Special Counsel status to chase an effort to frame Joe Biden, one he had had in hand since 2020, one identified because Barr set up a way to look for it.

The felony gun charges against Hunter Biden might never have happened without the Special Counsel status. And the Special Counsel status arose out of a foolish effort to pursue a transparently false effort to frame Joe Biden.

The jurors did their job Tuesday. They looked at the evidence provided to them, and judged that Hunter Biden had knowingly lied when he purchased a gun over five years ago.

It is not their place to measure whether the process by which Trump partisans relentlessly campaigned to demand the criminal investigation into Joe Biden’s kid — and with the Smirnov hoax, into Joe Biden himself — amounts to due process or justice.

But it is the job of journalists to remember how we got here, to convey the role that Trump’s effort to investigate Joe Biden and his kid has had in this process.

This prosecution happened because of stupid things Hunter did five years ago, during the depths of his addiction.

But it would never have happened without the partisan interventions of John Paul Mac Isaac, Rudy Giuliani, and Bill Barr (to say nothing of the House GOP chasing the files they all made available). It likely would never have happened if David Weiss hadn’t credulously chased a hoax from a snitch with ties to Russian intelligence. It might never have happened without the gun shop owner — the same guy who admitted selling a gun without proper paperwork because he wanted to get Joe Biden’s kid out of his store — making a stink about the gun purchase just in time for the election.

It is true that almost nobody else would have been charged based on the facts of this case.

It is also true that almost nobody else (with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton) has faced such an unrelenting partisan campaign demanding criminal prosecution.

How to Think about the Hunter Biden “Laptop”

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As noted, yesterday the summary FBI witness in the Hunter Biden trial, Erika Jensen, testified that she did not do an analysis to find out whether any of the files on the laptop attributed to Hunter Biden, “had been tampered with, added to, or subtracted?” She also testified that, as someone who had, “a small basis of my understanding of how [FBI’s digital forensics experts] work” and having not done such an analysis, had not “seen any evidence whatsoever from the data [she] reviewed from [the] laptop to suggest that there was tampering”

Her job was not to do such an assessment. Her job was to do a summary of a very narrow cherrypick of files prosecutors asked her to summarize.

Indeed, her further testimony revealed how useless her opinion on the laptop is. Aside from matching the laptop serial number with one of at least seven laptops Hunter had used in the two years leading up to its delivery to John Paul Mac Isaac in 2019, the only other validation Jensen described was the emailed receipt JPMI sent Hunter Biden’s publicly identifiable email account on April 17, 2019, which is utterly and completely useless to validate the laptop. Jensen further described that she didn’t review any emails beyond a small handful prosecutors gave her. The file did not include the kind of metadata that would be necessary to assess its usefulness.

The investigative team had never validated whether anything had been added to the laptop before October 20, 2020. No one made an index before handing over the data in discovery to Hunter Biden’s team.

While everyone was focusing on Jensen’s testimony yesterday, Zoe Kestan actually gave far more interesting — and useful, for assessing the reliability of his data — testimony about Hunter’s digital life. She described, for example, that fairly early in their relationship, Hunter “sent me images of his credit card and asked me to call hotels and find somewhere for us to stay that night.” Kasten described that Hunter would get 5-minute codes and send them to her and to drug dealers so they could pull money from his ATM without his ATM card. She described how, sometime around March 2018, the two went together to drop broken devices off at an Apple store, but he left and she finished that process.

We went out for dinner one night, we went to the Apple store because his phone and his computer were broken, and he had to leave in the middle, so I dropped off, and you know, submitted his phone and laptop at the Apple store for him.

She testified he lost maybe 5 or 6 phones in the period they were in a relationship, a period intermittently spanning a year (though I think this might be high). She described trying to locate him once by logging into his bank account (the credentials for which were on her machine) to see where he was withdrawing money from an ATM. She described that he would do his business from her laptop.

This is just one person! And she had the means to totally pwn his life. As, too, undoubtedly, some of the drug dealers who supported his habit.

This is the kind of thing I’ve focused on for a long time. In the depths of his addiction, Hunter Biden exercised almost no digital security, meaning his girlfriends, his drug dealers, his sex workers, and even the junkies he partied with all had easy means to compromise his devices. And every time Hunter lost a device — the five to six Kasten testified to, the seven or so laptops he had over that year, two more phones she wouldn’t have known about — every single time, it would present the opportunity for someone to take over his digital identity as a bunch of right wing Trump supporters have since and tamper with it.

With all that said, I want to address all the reasons why no one should be admitting Hunter Biden’s digital data into a criminal trial without proving the provenance of each message.

Start with his iCloud. Contrary to widespread belief — belief sown by false claims from prosecutors parroted by credulous journalists — it is not true that all the data on the laptop was backed up to Hunter’s iCloud account.

As I have shown, only half the messages admitted in the trial came from one of two device backups saved to iCloud (these numbers are based off an early draft of the summary).

But there’s a mistaken belief that everything on his iCloud had to be authentic.

That’s because people like Kasten — and people who undoubtedly have a lot less affection for Hunter Biden — have devices that include the login data for Hunter’s iCloud or for phones that were set to back up automatically to iCloud. People with his devices might also be able to access his two main Gmail accounts, his RosemontSeneca one (which frequently suffered what Google believed to be compromises but which might just be Hunter trying to get in), or the droidhunter account he used for adult entertainment (which was accessed by a burner phone in a period when the droidhunter account had access to his iCloud during the period his digital life was packed onto to the laptop that would end up at the FBI).

The reason Hunter’s cloud data was vulnerable to tampering stems from the way he kept his own — and, per Kasten, his associates’ — laptops. We know from the hard drives shared publicly that that laptop included means to access Hunter’s iCloud, an iPad backed up exclusively to the laptop, the phone from which the most important texts used in his trial were extracted (protected by password), and the cookies and passwords to get into much of the rest of his digital life.

What everyone knows as the [multiple hard drives] copied from the laptop is better thought of as a set of a significant chunk of Hunter’s digital activity (much of it unavailable elsewhere), as well as keys that a sophisticated actor could use to access what was stored in the cloud.

And a whole lot of dick pics.

If we believe John Paul Mac Isaac, then he delivered that entire package of Hunter Biden’s digital life plus another two laptops,to the Mac Shop on April 12, 2019. (Remember that there’s another laptop in the wild, which purportedly was left at Keith Ablow’s guest cottage during the period some of this data was being assembled.)

Whether you believe that part of the story or not is not actually all that important. Except insofar as it raises the chances that what went into JPMI’s store was packaged up to maximal damage. Except insofar as right wingers and gossip columnists posing as journalists claim it gives them license to do anything they want with the data. Indeed, the way that story has been used as license to do something grotesque is about all that story does, whether true or not.

Which may be the point.

JPMI has made it clear he started snooping long before he claims his terms and conditions gave him property rights over the device (even if that extended to the data on the device, which Hunter’s team argues it does not). JPMI’s claims about what alarmed him enough to reach out the FBI and Congress and Donald Trump’s personal lawyer aren’t backed by the documents on the laptop. JPMI’s claims about what laptops he received that day don’t match the laptop shared with the FBI.

In other words, there are gaping holes all over JPMI’s story, which differs from the FBI’s story about what they did with the laptop in key ways.

And yet, that didn’t lead the FBI to validate the laptop associated with the iCloud account of the (then) former Vice President’s son beyond confirming that some but not all of the data matched what was in Hunter’s iCloud.

Whether you believe JPMI or not, he has copped to giving Rudy Giuliani, members of Congress, and through them, the whole world, the gateway to Hunter Biden’s digital life. There’s no defense of that, and yet virtually the entire DC press corps likes to pretend they’re doing ethical journalism if they whitewash it.

There’s not much, yet, to add to the discussion above of how David Weiss used the laptop. As noted above, the FBI never did real due diligence on this laptop.

There’s a lot yet to learn — including whether there was a connection between FBI getting a warrant on the laptop and then DOJ Chief of Staff Will Levi’s text to Bill Barr the next day, “laptop on way to you.”

We do know that the (known) December 2019 warrant only permitted the search of the laptop for the three tax crimes charged against Hunter Biden in Los Angeles (which seems inconsistent with the subpoena that described money laundering). The FBI did not have authority to search the laptop or data from Hunter’s iCloud for gun related evidence until December (though Agent Jensen’s summary of the evidence submitted at trial cited earlier warrants for reasons that have not been aired at trial).

The [hard drive containing the contents of the] laptop is not the same thing as the laptop entered into evidence this week.

That’s something about a bazillion trolls who responded to something I said in 2023, about the disseminated laptop: that it had been tampered with.

It has.

There are known (albeit minor) alterations on the content of the hard drive that Rudy Giuliani shared with the NYPost and, after that, the entire world. There are reportedly more significant compromises, which we might learn about if Rudy’s bankruptcy doesn’t entirely kill Hunter Biden’s lawsuit of Rudy. There was far more significant alteration done on two other sets of data: one, disseminated by Guo Wengui (including some of the files taken down by Twitter in October 2020), and another, released by Jack Maxey.

And there were different public and non-public means of using the hard drives passed on from JPMI to access further Hunter Biden data. Garrett Ziegler, for example, fully admits he compromised the encryption of the iPhone backed up to iTunes on the laptop (though in his response to Hunter Biden’s lawsuit, claims it was legal because the drive he hacked had never belonged to Hunter). Vish Burra is more outspoken about having hacked Hunter Biden.

Many many many of the people who froth over content from the laptop — and journalists who whitewash the hit job against Hunter — don’t know there are multiple versions of altered laptops that relied on multiple means to access (or create) the data.

Many — including many journalists — have just decided Hunter must a horrible person so they are not obligated to care what really happened here.

Hunter Biden’s laptop is not any one thing. It’s not real or authentic or not. It is, rather, the shoddy state of affairs when an entire country enthusiastically exploits the fact that an addict’s digital life was in a permanent state of half-compromise for most if not all of the time of his addiction.

Update: Corrected spelling of Kestan’s last name.

Update: Fixed the super confusing reference about why the FBI didn’t respond differently to the compromise of Biden’s son.