Looking back on Friday's document dumps

This was the Friday news dump to end all news dumps, the news dump equivalent of that giant barge full of garbage from New York that couldn’t find a home back in 1987. In rough order, it was reported:

1) That Lev Parnas, one of Rudy Giuliani’s Volga Bagmen who now sits under federal indictment, has indicated that he can put Rep. Devin Nunes, the famous White House lawn ornament, in the middle of the effort to concoct the Ukrainian Fantasy about the ratfcking of the 2016 election.

2) That the inspector general of the Department of Justice will produce his report on December 9, and early reports are that, while it will be critical of sloppiness in the FBI, it will state that there was no bias against the president* in how the FBI investigation into the involvement of the Russian ratfckers was launched.

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3) That The New York Times reports that the intelligence community has concluded that the entire Ukrainian Fantasy about the ratfcking of the 2016 election is an intercontinental okey-doke perpetrated by the Russian intelligence services.

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4) That a massive release of State Department documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request ropes in practically everyone, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in the effort to smear former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich, in order to get her out of the way so that the shakedown might proceed. This, of course, involves Rudy Giuliani, because anything that’s screwed up about this administration now involves Rudy Giuliani.

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Just on Friday, we learned that Nunes and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were roped into this mess, too. It’s nowhere near time for the garbage barge to make port. Sail on, brothers and sisters. Sail on.

  Charles P Pierce

And somewhere, some day, I wonder if we'll get a report on the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump. As far as we know, it's still going on quietly in the background.

Following reports that the probe into Giuliani's business dealings in Ukraine included counterintelligence concerns, Asha Rangappa, a former FBI special agent who specialized in counterintelligence investigations, told Newsweek that the revelation should be raising questions around whether the counterintelligence probe into the president was still in motion.

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While special counsel Robert Mueller completed his investigation in March, finding insufficient evidence to conclude that Trump and his campaign had colluded with Russia in interference in the 2016 election, that does not mean the counterintelligence investigation into the president [confirmed by James Comey in May 2017] is a closed case, Rangappa said.

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"The other piece that we don't really know, which is the hugely important piece: is the counterintelligence investigation on the president still ongoing?" Rangappa, who now serves as the director of admissions and as a senior lecturer at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where she teaches national security law, said.

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"Because it's so opaque," Rangappa said, "we obviously have zero idea whether or not [the two investigations - Russian interference in 2016 and Trump extortion of Ukraine] intersect. I cannot speculate," she said.

"But, we do know that there have been many people in [Trump's] orbit who have had counterintelligence investigations—not just President Trump and Giuliani, but, before that, [Paul] Manafort, [George] Papadopoulos, [Michael] Flynn... So, what I'm saying is that you definitely do see an existing pattern.

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"I think that picture, the national security picture, the idea underlying principles of the constitution that are being undermined here, those are being overlooked."

The fact alone that Giuliani could be subject to a counterintelligence investigation suggests that the FBI believes the attorney could be putting U.S. national security at risk, she said.

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"The investigation is a) there to determine whether or not the threat does in fact exist and then b) if the threat does exist, how to neutralize it," she said.

  Newsweek

Which is what the counterintelligence investigation into Trump would be for, as well.

Back in May, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) told The Washington Post that his committee had largely been kept in the dark on the issue.

"The short answer is: We don't know," he said. "We don't know what happened to the counterintelligence investigation that James Comey opened."

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Asked in May whether he had any reason to believe the probe had been closed, Schiff said: "You know, I have not been able to get clarity on that."

"We have been seeking to get it, to get an answer from the Justice Department, from the counterintelligence division at the FBI, and we don't have clarity, which is concerning," he said.

Adam Schiff is also now saying that there may be more depositions in the impeachment hearings, and now we have the Nunes-Parnas-Giuliani connection information, so we're not done here.

As for the counterintelligence investigation into Trump, my guess is that Barr is keeping it under wraps if he hasn't stopped it altogether so that he can advise Trump on what to do, up to and including flee the country.