The hits just keep on coming

The examination of Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko’s records began when an associate, conservative commentator Jerome Corsi, accidentally sent an email intended for Zelenko to another “Z” name in his address book — federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, who as a member of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team had spent months scrutinizing Corsi’s activities during the 2016 presidential election.

[...]

Corsi is best known for his promotion of the false theory that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States, a topic over which he bonded with Trump before the celebrity mogul ran for president.

[...]

In his YouTube video, Corsi displayed the email he inadvertently sent to Zelinsky. In it, he wrote that Zelenko had “an FDA approved randomized test of HCQ underway” — a reference to hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial.

Despite a lack of scientific evidence, President Trump has enthusiastically promoted the drug as a potential treatment for patients infected with covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration, citing reports of “serious heart rhythm problems” associated with hydroxychloroquine, warned doctors against its use outside of a hospital or clinical trial.

[...]

Corsi said that Zelinsky responded to the unexpected email by reaching out to Corsi’s lawyer and requesting all of Corsi’s communications with Zelenko.

  WaPo

Probably should have deleted Zelinsky's contact info as soon as he got past the Mueller investigation.

Corsi said he and Zelenko are collaborating on a website designed to connect people with doctors. They have acted lawfully, Corsi added, but he plans to cooperate with the request and has handed over his communications.

Zelinsky is tasked now with investigating coronavirus-related crimes in the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office, as part of a directive from U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr to prioritize such cases. The department already has charged a medley of fraudsters for peddling fake cures, selling personal protective equipment they didn’t actually have or running more complicated Medicare reimbursement schemes, and officials say tips are coming in droves.

I bet that's right. Anybody send in a tip on the president's constant ill-advised suggestions and snake oil?

After learning of the federal prosecutor’s interest, Corsi said he asked Zelenko about whether he had an FDA approved study — as Corsi said Zelenko had told another physician at a training event. Zelenko, Corsi said, then suggested his study was approved instead by an internal hospital panel.

“I pointed out to Zelenko, ‘But it’s not registered as an FDA test, and you can’t say it is,’ ” Corsi said Thursday on YouTube, adding that he did not feel Zelenko was trying to defraud anyone, but rather did not understand what it meant to have an FDA-approved test.

Everything that comes within 10 feet of Donald Trump can be counted on to contain a large percentage of sleaze.

Zelenko consults frequently with some of Trump’s closest allies. Trump aides say he has been in contact with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and other officials. In a recent interview, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said he and Zelenko speak frequently — often more than once a day.

“He’s a very smart doctor,” Giuliani said.

Praise from Giuliani. Should raise red flags.

Corsi said he was referred to Zelenko by another doctor also interested in covid-19 and hosted Zelenko for the first time on his podcast earlier this month.

Corsi’s website, speakwithanmd.com, offers people the opportunity to schedule a virtual appointment with a doctor, by clicking on a button and inputting their name and address. It advertises a “low consult fee” of $59.95, as well as “Prescriptions Delivered Right to Your Door, Same Day!” through a partner.

[...]

It is unclear how seriously prosecutors are scrutinizing the matter. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. But even passing interest from federal authorities into efforts to promote the anti-malarial is likely to chafe the president and his allies, particularly given the involvement of a former member of Mueller’s team.

Leave the pig sty behind, maybe you'll have fewer problems.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dueling dingbats

In their attempts to outdo each other in TV time and publicity, these two imbeciles are going to talk their way into orange jumpsuits as sure as the sun comes up tomorrow.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Jerome Corsi requests the DOJ prosecute Robert Mueller

(I'm guessing Corsi isn't writing his own tweets.)

[...]

Corsi must have an attorney akin to Rudy Giuliani.  Aren't there laws against filing frivolous suits?

Check out Charlie Savage's Twitter thread on the subject here.

Here are excerpts from an analysis of it from Law & Crime:

Right-wing author Jerome Corsi claimed that he was going to be filing a “criminal complaint” with the U.S. Attorney General’s Office against Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s office on Monday morning. Since criminal complaints are filed by the government (not individuals) with courts (not an AG’s office), this led to some confusion. Well, Monday morning is here, and so is Corsi’s “complaint,” so let’s break down the main points of what it is and what he’s alleging that Mueller’s office has done to warrant it.

1. It’s definitely not a criminal complaint

[...]

This document is a letter from Corsi’ attorney Larry Klayman, to Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, the D.C. Bar, and various Justice Department officials, requesting an investigation.

[...]

2. Corsi explains his advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ data dump (spoiler: it’s about Hillary Clinton)

[...]

Klayman’s letter explains that Corsi did not have any special advance knowledge of the emails like those of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta from WikiLeaks or Julian Assange, rather he pieced it together by going through Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails.

  Law & Crime

Don't laugh. He's obviously very brilliant. He hired Klayman.

3. He accuses Mueller’s office of illegally leaking grand jury information

The letter accuses the Special Counsel Press Office, specifically spokesperson Peter Carr, of “orally leak[ing] grand jury and other confidential information to the media, avoiding any written record of the leak.” The letter cites news articles referencing anonymous sources as evidence that the Press Office leaked information about the focus of Mueller’s investigation.

Presumably he doesn't say how he knows Carr leaked information, and Carr's office declined to comment when asked by Law & Crime.

4. Witness tampering, obstruction, retaliation, and more

A great deal of Corsi’s allegations surround what he claims was an effort by Mueller’s team to have him lie about ties to Stone and WikiLeaks as part of his guilty plea.

[...]

Corsi alleges that Mueller committed witness tampering and obstruction of justice by trying to coerce him to give false testimony. By allegedly threatening to prosecute him if he did not comply, Mueller and his team allegedly retaliated against a witness, in violation of 18 U.S. Code § 1513.

[...]

Also mentioned is conspiracy to violate securities regulations because Mueller allegedly wanted to keep Corsi’s plea secret, even though he’d have to report it to the (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) FINRA, because he holds a securities license.

5. Angry Democrats

Corsi takes a cue from President Donald Trump, alleging that Mueller and his team are saddled with conflicts of interest and are unfit to work on this investigation. These conflicts includes some of their past political contributions to the Democratic party.

[...]

6. More on Clinton

Corsi specifically takes aim at prosecutor Jeannie Rhee for her past work for the Clintons. He claims that because she worked for Trump’s 2016 opponent, Rhee would not be willing or able to investigate evidence against Hillary Clinton or the Clinton investigation.

Jeannie Rhee’s previous work for the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons would prevent her from exploring evidence or explanations that might point to criminal or even unethical actions of the President Trump’s [sic] adversary in the 2016 campaign, including alternative explanations of allegations, the $12 million that Hillary Clinton’s campaign trolled through the Russian intelligence community through the law firm of Perkins Coie and former British spy Christopher Steele.

Gee, I wonder who put him up to veering from complaints about his own treatment to attacking Mueller about Hillary, which is not even an issue assigned to the special prosecutor in the probe?

7. Uranium One and Russian Collusion … with Clinton

Now the “complaint” takes a turn by pointing to the Uranium One story, where several government agencies in the Obama Administration approved the sale of a significant amount of the U.S. uranium production to a Russian government-owned company. Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time, has been accused of being influenced by Clinton Foundation donors with ties to Uranium One, the company purchased by the Russian firm Rosatom.

[...]

Again, this ignores the fact that Mueller’s investigation is about Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible Trump campaign ties to such interference, not the 2010 Uranium One deal.

8. Political Discrimination

Corsi also claims that the reason why he’s been targeted by Mueller’s team is because of his politics.

[...]

9. Treasonous ‘Coup’ to Overthrow the President

Finally, Corsi lobs a grenade in the form of accusations of treason.

And here's the "complaint" if you care to read it.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No collusion!

Conservative author and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi agreed in a new interview that he "absolutely" intended to help President Trump's campaign by trying to get stolen Hillary Clinton emails from Wikileaks.

Appearing Wednesday on Ari Melber's MSNBC show, Corsi was grilled about his involvement in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's election interference and possible collusion between Trump's campaign and Moscow in 2016.

[...]

Corsi said he would have loved to see the emails, saying “I was happy to do it and I was happy that it would benefit Donald Trump.”

  The Hill

Brilliant. That's not going to help his chances for a pardon.

Draft court documents from the special counsel’s team obtained by The Hill show that prosecutors allege that Corsi made false statements during a Sept. 6 interview. The documents claim that Corsi initially told investigators that he declined a request from an individual, whom Corsi identified as Roger Stone, to get in touch with WikiLeaks about "pending ... emails."

However, the documents state that Corsi later replied to Stone, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging," appearing to refer to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In his interview with Melber he made it clear that Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser, and Assange were the people in question.

[...]

Earlier this week, Corsi said he had rejected a plea deal from Muller on a charge of lying to federal investigators, claiming that he did not believe he willfully lied.

Good luck with that.

He spiked Trump's blood pressure, as evidenced in this morning's tweets. I'm surprised His Lardship didn't insist Corsi was just a coffee boy.  He will of course, deny any knowledge of or connection with the man.

Trump's criminal cabal

They're not brilliant. They've just been getting a pass all their lives.

You’ll be shocked when I tell you that movies and television have given us a distorted view of how conspiracies work.

[...]

In the real world, conspiracies are more likely to involve the lack of any coherent plan, a bunch of bumbling fools only partially understanding what the other fools are up to and then frantic attempts by all concerned to avoid responsibility when the whole thing unravels or gets revealed.

That appears to be what the conspiracy to get Donald Trump elected president was like.

[...]

[T]he picture that’s coming into focus as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation approaches its conclusion is one in which a collection of charlatans and cranks, connected both directly and indirectly to the future president, joined in an effort to use the Russian government’s help to bring Trump to victory.

[...]

For the third morning in a row, President Trump rage-tweeted about the Mueller investigation, making it clear that he’s increasingly worried about what might happen next. He should be.

[...]

For his part, [Roger Stone associate Jerome] Corsi insists that he didn’t communicate with Assange and only knew that Clinton campaign chair John Podesta would later be the subject of WikiLeaks releases (the Russians gained access to Podesta’s email through a phishing scam) because he brilliantly deduced it from other documents. Corsi says he did not intentionally lie to Mueller; he blames his false assertions on a faulty memory.

[...]

Speaking of faulty memory, according to The Post’s latest reporting: “Rudolph W. Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, said the president does not recall ever speaking to either Stone or Corsi about WikiLeaks.”

For Trump, that’s unusually hedged. Which means the most damaging version of events is at least possible. It would be this: Russia gave the emails it stole from Podesta to WikiLeaks; Assange gave Corsi a preview of them before they were released; Corsi passed that information on to Stone; Stone passed that information on to Trump. That would be a direct if multipointed line from Russian intelligence to Trump, and the only part of it that Mueller has not yet shown evidence for is the last step, Stone telling Trump of what was to come.

But we should note that Stone said in an interview on Aug. 4, 2016, that the previous day he had spoken to Trump. The day before that, Aug. 2, was when Corsi sent him an email saying Podesta would be a target up the upcoming WikiLeaks dump. If the conversation between Stone and Trump took place, it’s hard to believe Stone wouldn’t have shared the juicy nugget he had just received.

  WaPo

Of course he did, but I suspect that a number of issues are going to come down to the case that they can't be proven if no one in the inner cabal will admit the truth.

The story coming from Trump and his defenders all along has been that there was no collusion, nobody did anything wrong, and any actions that might look questionable were in fact perfectly ordinary. But if that were true, why did so many people involved lie about what they did when it first came to light, whether it was to investigators or to the public? President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Corsi — all have been caught lying about what they did with regard to some part of this scandal. That’s not how innocent people act.

Of course, if it was a conspiracy, it worked — after all, Trump is president.

To the detriment of the planet and the nations of the world.

The House GOP’s near-total abdication of any oversight role has done more than just shield President Trump on matters involving his finances and Russian collusion. It has also resulted in almost no serious scrutiny of the true depths of cruelty, inhumanity and bad-faith rationalization driving important aspects of Trump’s policy agenda — in particular, on his signature issue of immigration.

That’s about to change.

[...]

“We will visit the border,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who is expected to chair the [House Homeland Security Committee], which has jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security, told me. “We will hold hearings in committee on any and all aspects of DHS. … We will not back off of this issue.”

This oversight — which could result in calling for testimony from Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — will include scrutiny of the administration’s justifications for its policies.

[...]

“All this innuendo we hear about criminals coming in the caravan, we just want to know, how did you validate this?” Thompson told me, adding that DHS officials would be called on in hearings to account for Trump’s claims. “Policy has to be backed up with evidence. So we will do rigorous oversight.”

[...]

Even if you take some of Trump’s complaints about asylum seeking seriously — there are serious issues with backlogs that have real consequences — you should want this oversight. If done well, it could shed light on actual problems, such as the role of the administration’s deliberate delays in processing asylum seekers in creating the current border mess, to the real need to reorganize the bureaucracy to relieve backlogs and to pursue regional solutions to the root causes of migration surges.

[...]

Thompson told me the committee would also look at the process leading up to the travel ban, which proceeded despite the fact that two internal Homeland Security analyses undercut its national security rationale.

[...]

Thompson also said the run-up to the implementation of the family separation policy and its rationale would receive similar scrutiny, as well as at the conditions under which children have been held, such as the reported Texas “tent city.”

[...]

One big question: What will House Democrats do legislatively against such policies? Thompson told me the goal is to secure cooperation with DHS, but in cases where the agency continues policies that Democrats deem terribly misguided or serious abuses, they can try to legislate against them. That would run headlong into Trump and the GOP-controlled Senate, at which point one could see discussion of targeted defunding of certain policies, though whether that will happen or what that might look like remains to be seen.

[...]

The big story here is that Trump has relied on the outright dismissal of his own administration’s factual determinations to justify many policies, not just on immigration, but also with his drive to weaken efforts to combat global warming despite the big report warning of the dire threats it poses.

The administration will strenuously resist Democratic oversight, and I don’t want to overstate what it can accomplish. But House Democrats must at least try to get into the fight against Trump’s war on facts and empiricism wherever possible.

  WaPo

Manafort has been feeding the Trump team

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said Kevin Downing, a lawyer for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, has continued to brief the president’s legal team on his dealings with the special counsel even after Mr. Manafort pleaded guilty—an arrangement that is highly unusual.

  WSJ

But quite predictable if you're looking for a pardon.

“They shared with me what they thought was appropriate and what their client authorized them to tell us,” Mr. Giuliani said. Asked how often Mr. Manafort’s lawyers briefed the president’s legal team, he said: “often enough.”

[...]

In another twist, Mr. Giuliani said a member of the president’s legal team, Jay Sekulow, received a packet of court papers two weeks ago relating to [Roger Stone associate Jerome] Corsi that included [Corsi's] draft plea document. The sender was anonymous, Mr. Giuliani said.

The president’s legal team notified the Justice Department that it had received the documents, Mr. Giuliani said.

[...]

Mr. Giuliani said Mr. Mueller is subjecting Messrs. Corsi and Manafort to inordinate pressure.

I should hope so, the lying SOBs.

Mr. Mueller is keeping Mr. Manafort in solitary confinement, he said, as if he were “the head of the mafia or a terrorist bomber.”

He's absolutely mob-connected.

A more appropriate punishment for Mr. Manafort would be home detention, Mr. Giuliani said.

Yeah? He tried that. And Manafort set about trying to buy off witnesses.

Asked if the president might pardon Mr. Manafort, or potentially Mr. Corsi, Mr. Giuliani said, “Right now would not be the time.”

He added, “It’s my job as his private lawyer to tell him you should not even consider it now because it will be misunderstood. That doesn’t mean you give away your presidential prerogative to do it at the right time.

So, yes.

Again, why is Giuliani blabbing this?  They just don't care.  In fact, Sarah Kendzior has always claimed that getting away with shit and rubbing our faces in it is the fun of having power for Trump and Manafort.  Rudy, too, apparently.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Today's Grand Jury appearances

It seems Randy Credico is in the hearing now, but scuttlebutt has it that Jerome Corsi will not be called.  There's some talk about having made a deal with investigators.

More when it gets confirmed.

A red letter day in the Trump-Russia connections affair

The Grand Jury will meet to consider indictments of two Roger Stone figures, Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, and George Papadopoulos will be sentenced.

In the meantime, more Trump-is-insane leaks:

[Yale University psychiatrist] Dr. Bandy Lee told Salon and The New York Daily News on Thursday that two White House officials flagged Trump's behavior last October.

"[They] said that Trump was 'scaring' them, that he was 'unraveling," Lee, who wrote the book, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told Salon.

"Not wishing to confuse the role I chose, as an educator of the public, and a potential treatment role, I referred them to the local emergency room without inquiring much further," Lee added to Salon.

[...]

"I thought I would be more effective by retaining my public role then getting involved in either the treatment of those who were feeling scared or in the actual intervention with the President," she added.

  The Hill

Pretty sure Bob Woodward keeps receipts.  And, Dr. Lee, you're the expert, but I don't think there's anything that can cure a pathological liar.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Closing in on Roger Stone

Jerome Corsi, [...] political commentator with connections to the former Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., has been subpoenaed to testify on Friday before the grand jury in the special counsel investigation into Russia’s election interference and whether Trump associates conspired with the effort, his lawyer said on Wednesday.

  NYT

Comedian Randy Credico is also going before that jury.

Mr. Corsi, who works with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Infowars operation, has dealt with Mr. Stone on and off for years. Mr. Corsi was also one of the people whom President Trump, before he was a candidate, contacted for information about former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate in pressing the false claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States.

[...]

Mr. Mueller’s team appears to be zeroing in on Mr. Stone as a possible nexus between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which was used by Russian intelligence officers to spread information stolen from Democrats, according to an indictment by Mr. Mueller’s team.

[...]

In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last year, Mr. Stone, who had predicted in a 2016 tweet that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, would face his “time in the barrel,” said he based his tweet off research given to him by Mr. Corsi, whom he identified as an investigative journalist.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.