The Horowitz report analyzed by former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti

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

Follow Renato Mariotti here.
Wray's written response to the report.

UPDATE:

The Horowitz Report

The New York Times published a preview of the IG report on FBI wrongdoing in the 2016 elections, which is expected to be released December 9.

A highly anticipated report by the Justice Department’s inspector general is expected to sharply criticize lower-level F.B.I. officials as well as bureau leaders involved in the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation, but to absolve the top ranks of abusing their powers out of bias against President Trump, according to people briefed on a draft.

Investigators for the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, uncovered errors and omissions in documents related to the wiretapping of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page — including that a low-level lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, altered an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap, the people said.

Mr. Horowitz referred his findings about Mr. Clinesmith to prosecutors for a potential criminal charge. Mr. Clinesmith left the Russia investigation in February 2018 after the inspector general identified him as one of a handful of F.B.I. officials who expressed animus toward Mr. Trump in text messages and resigned about two months ago, after the inspector general’s team interviewed him.

[...]

Mr. Clinesmith took an email from an official at another federal agency that contained several factual assertions, then added material to the bottom that looked like another assertion from the email’s author, when it was instead his own understanding.

[...]

Additionally, Mr. Clinesmith worked on both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia investigation. He was among the F.B.I. officials removed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after Mr. Horowitz found text messages expressing political animus against Mr. Trump.

[...]

More broadly, Mr. Horowitz’s report, to be made public on Dec. 9, portrays the overall effort to seek the wiretap order and its renewals as sloppy and unprofessional, according to the people familiar with it. He will also sharply criticize as careless one of the F.B.I. case agents in New York handling the matter and say that the bureau and the Justice Department displayed poor coordination during the investigation, they said.

At the same time, however, the report debunks a series of conspiracy theories and insinuations about the F.B.I. that Mr. Trump and his allies have put forward over the past two years, the people said, though they cautioned that the report is not complete. The New York Times has not reviewed the draft, which could contain other significant findings.

  New York Times

So, as always, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves in the drive for a scoop.

[T]he draft report also concludes that the F.B.I. had enough evidence to meet the legal standard for opening the investigation, though Mr. Horowitz emphasized that the bar is low, the people said.

The report is also said to conclude that Joseph Mifsud, a Russia-linked professor who told a Trump campaign official that Russia had damaging information on Mrs. Clinton in the form of hacked Democratic emails — a key fact used to open the investigation — was not an F.B.I. informant. That undercuts an assertion of conservative critics of the inquiry.

[...]

None of the evidence used to open the investigation came from the C.I.A. or from a notorious dossier of claims about Trump-Russia ties compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats, the report concludes, according to the people briefed on it.

[...]

The early accounts of the report suggest that it is likely to stoke the debate over the investigation without definitively resolving it, by offering both sides different conclusions they can point to as vindication for their rival worldviews.

Great. It'll be another Mueller Report. Only, presumably, Mr. Horowitz will, in fact, make some recommendations.

I wonder if we'll ever see an investigation into the New York office of the FBI that was supposedly extemely anti-Hillar and provided information to Rudy Giuliani that might help Trump in the 2016 campaign.

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

UPDATE:

Investigating the investigators

An FBI official is being investigated after allegedly altering a document connected to surveillance of a 2016 Trump campaign aide, CNN reported Thursday, citing people briefed on the matter.

The alleged altering was reportedly discovered as part of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's probe into whether the FBI followed the law and its own policies while applying for a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign official Carter Page during the 2016 election.

[...]

Sources told CNN that a witness admitted to the change after being confronted by Horowitz's team about the document. Whether the FBI employee still works for the bureau and the person's rank and identity are reportedly unknown.

It is also reportedly unknown whether the document in question played a significant role in the investigation of Page.

  The Hill

How was it altered? That could be important. But as long as we don't know, GOP Trumpets are free to scream about it as proof the investigation was illegitimate.  The Hill should tell us this.  The Post did:

The Justice Department inspector general has found evidence that an FBI employee may have altered a document connected to court-approved surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, but has concluded that the conduct did not affect the overall validity of the surveillance application, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

  WaPo

That won't be part of their scream campaign.

The person under scrutiny is a low-level FBI lawyer who has since been forced out of the agency, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss material that has not yet been made public.

The allegation is contained in a draft of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report analyzing the FBI’s Russia investigation, which witnesses have in recent weeks been allowed to review, people familiar with the matter said. The report is scheduled to be released publicly Dec. 9.

The employee was forced out of the FBI after the incident was discovered, two U.S. officials said. Horowitz found that the employee erroneously indicated he had documentation to back up a claim he had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis for the application. He then altered an email to back up that erroneous claim, they said.

That conduct did not alter Horowitz’s finding that the surveillance application of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had a proper legal and factual basis, the officials said.

So,the agent was found out and fired by the FBI itself, and the underlying FISA application still had a proper basis.

Horowitz has been exploring various aspects of the Russia probe but was focused in particular on applications the FBI filed with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor Page’s electronic communications.

Looks like he's turned up nothing to nullify or prosecute.  But the GOP and Trump cabal have until December 9th to make people think he did.  I'm guessing that's why this bit leaked.

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

Whatever happened to the Carter Page whinefest?

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

Retaliation

When asked for clarification on Graham's tweet, his office pointed The Hill to a letter from Graham to Barr about investigating a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant obtained on Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser on Trump's campaign.

Republicans have said the FISA warrant obtained on Page was an abuse of federal power, and based on faulty evidence.

  The Hill

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

UPDATE:

Witch Hunt!

[G]rowing evidence suggests both Trump campaign advisers [Carter Page and George Papadopoulos] made exculpatory statements — at the very start of the FBI’s investigation — that undercut the Trump-Russia collusion theory peddled to agents by Democratic sources.

The FBI plowed ahead anyway with an unprecedented intrusion into a presidential campaign, while keeping evidence of the two men’s innocence from the courts.

[...]

Papadopoulos was the young aide that the FBI used to justify opening a probe into the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after he allegedly told a foreign diplomat that he knew Russia possessed incriminating emails about Hillary Clinton.

Page, a volunteer campaign adviser, was the American the FBI then targeted on Oct. 21, 2016, for secret surveillance while investigating Democratic Party-funded allegations that he secretly might have coordinated Russia’s election efforts with the Trump campaign during a trip to Moscow.

[...]

First, the FBI must present evidence to FISA judges that it has verified and that comes from intelligence sources deemed reliable. Second, it must disclose any information that calls into question the credibility of its sources. Finally, it must disclose any evidence suggesting the innocence of its investigative targets.

Thanks to prior releases of information, we know the FBI fell short on the first two counts. Multiple FBI officials have testified that the Christopher Steele dossier had not been verified when its allegations were submitted as primary evidence supporting the FISA warrant against Page.

Likewise, we know the FBI failed to tell the courts that Steele admitted to a federal official that he was desperate to defeat Trump in the 2016 election and was being paid by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to gather dirt on the GOP candidate. Both pieces of information are the sort of credibility-defining details that should be disclosed about a source.

[...]

Republican lawmakers have suggested for months that [evidence of Page and Papadopoulos' innocence] existed and was hidden from the courts, but none has emerged in public.

[...]

Multiple sources tell me none of the FISA applications the FBI submitted to judges over the course of a year’s surveillance of Page made any mention of exculpatory statements or protestations of innocence that Page made to informants.

  The Hill

Are investigators required to provide a desired FISA warrant target's protestations of innocence with their requests?  That doesn't strike me as "evidence suggesting innocence."  And as far as verifying their supporting documentation "comes from intelligence sources deemed reliable,"  Steele was a known source who WAS considered reliable.

If such statements exist, in the form of a tape or a transcript or an FBI interview report — three routine investigative tools the FBI uses when managing informers — then it would be a huge omission that likely violated FBI rules.

[...]

Sources familiar with the FISA applications say they contain no evidence that Papadopoulos made exculpatory statements unwittingly to an FBI informer.

Again, if such statements exist in transcripts, tapes or FBI reports, they’re a major omission.

[...]

If Page’s and Papadopoulos’s recollections of what they told Halper are accurate, former FBI officials Comey, James Baker, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok — all of whom played a role in the Russia probe and the FISA warrants — have some serious explaining to do. So does departing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who signed the fourth and final FISA warrant.

My reporting suggests a much bigger scandal — the intentional misleading of the nation’s federal intelligence court — soon may eclipse the Russia narrative that has dominated the media the past two years.

I'll wait to be impressed until that happens.

The fastest way to know if that storm is on the horizon is for Trump to declassify the documents showing exactly how the FBI behaved in this case.

It's hard to believe he wouldn't have done so if indeed there were exculpatory documents. I know he's threatened it a few times, but color me highly skeptical that if he had anything that would prove the FBI had acted improperly in starting their investigation, he'd already have released it.

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

A sad day for government legal claims

A new court document filed late on Friday by the U.S. Department of Justice says that when Donald Trump tweets, no one should presume that the statements he posts on Twitter are accurate, or that Trump has any “personal knowledge” of the topic he tweets about. The filing came in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit by USA Today and other organizations, seeking to obtain an unredacted version of the FISA court FBI application to place former Trump presidential campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page under electronic surveillance.

[...]

In the lawsuit, USA Today and the other plaintiffs pointed to a Twitter post by Trump on July 23, 2018, in which he appeared to criticize the fact that the Page FBI surveillance application remained a classified document, saying that Trump’s claim that the application was classified wrongly should be considered a basis for declassifying the document.

“It was classified to cover up misconduct by the FBI and the Justice Department in misleading the Court by using this Dossier in a dishonest way to gain a warrant to target the Trump Team. This is a Clinton Campaign document. It was a fraud and a hoax designed to target Trump,” Trump wrote in the Twitter post.

Trump appear to be quoting a Fox News interview guest in the tweet, namely Tom Fitton, of the right-wing group, Judicial Watch. The DOJ noted that Trump’s tweet should be disregarded because there was “no evidence establishing that (Trump) was vouching for the wholesale accuracy of the statement he was quoting, or that he was commenting based on personal knowledge of the documents or based on personal knowledge of agency conduct. There is no evidence that he was formally overruling agency determinations via tweeted quotation of Fox & Friends.”

  Inquisitr

“DOJ’s argument that the president shouldn’t be presumed to know what he’s talking about is a pretty remarkable one, and it’s not one I’d seen the government make before 2017,” Heath wrote on Twitter.

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

Dear God deliver us

Iranian President Hasan Rouhani warned Trump not to escalate tensions with Iran, saying a confrontation with Iran would be the "mother of all wars".

"Do not play with the lion's tail or else you will regret it," Rouhani said in a televised speech in Iran's capital Tehran.

  alJazeera

Worked for Kim.  Should work for Rouhani.

Trump hit back shortly after Pompeo's speech in a tweet directed specifically at Rouhani.

Because of course he did.



Jesus take the wheel.  This is our president.  Demented words are his trademark.

What an embarrassment.  I guess the capital letters make it extra serious, but why did he pull back from his usual "anyone ever before" to "few throughout history"? 

And those demented words are not for the Iranian president, but for the MAGAheads.

That was last night.  This morning, he's watching Fox & Friends, of course.





That's precisely what we now know is not true.



Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.



Wrong again.



Whoever Tom Fitton is, he's just as wrong as Trump Twitterman.  And if he's repeating all these lies on Fox & Friends outright without pushback, that discredited dog and pony show needs to be dropped.  Now!

The only fraud and hoax and misleading, dishonest part of this whole nightmare is what Fox & Friends, the Trump cabal - and particularly Devin Nunes - is putting out.

Our national nightmare continues.

UPDATE:

Ummmmm...maybe it was the opposite?

It seems everybody else believes they confirm with little doubt that the DOJ and FBI did NOT mislead the courts.  Who's advising him on this?  Those voices in his head that told him his Helsinki trip was a smashing success?

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

F%CKED

Click on the CNN graphics above to hear Tapper's interviews with Smirky McPage.

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

And speaking of collusion and conspiracy...

The Carter Page FISAs are out via the Freedom of Information Act.

[...]

[T]he controversy about these FISA applications first arose in February when House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes released a memo claiming that the FBI misled the FISA Court about Christopher Steele, the former British secret agent who compiled the “dossier” on Trump-Russia ties and who was a source of information in the FISA applications on Page. The main complaint in the Nunes memo was that FBI whitewashed Steele—that the FISA applications did not “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.”

In response to the Nunes memo, the Democrats on the committee released their own memo. That memo quoted from parts of the FISA applications, including a footnote in which the FBI explained that Steele was hired to “conduct research regarding Candidate #1,” Donald Trump, and Trump’s “ties to Russia,” and that the man who hired him was “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump’s] campaign.”

[...]

The Nunes memo accused the FBI of dishonesty in failing to disclose information about Steele, but in fact the Nunes memo itself was dishonest in failing to disclose what the FBI disclosed. I said then, and I still believe, that the “Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy.”

Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse.

[...]

Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it. The FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility.

  Lawfare Blog

Yeah, Nunes is involved personally.  We know he was part of the Trump campaign.  We also know he's an asshole who would be very likely to have his personal fortune tied up in shady deals.

Not gonna happen.  Too many Republicans are complicit in all this shit.

Because the "president" told them to.

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

No Collusion! Conspiracy

Heeeeee's uuuuuuuuuuuuup.

And he's seen the news on Carter Page.







Nervous much?



The foot?

Whatever.  I think we need to have a look at reality, which will not be coming from Don the Con's tweets.

The Justice Department on Saturday released a previously classified application to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was under suspicion by the FBI of being a Russian agent.

[...]

The release of the application, along with three subsequent applications to renew the surveillance, was extraordinary and historic. In the four decades that FISA has been in effect, it’s not clear that any application for surveillance has ever been released. Materials related to FISA operations and legal processes are among the most highly classified and closely guarded in the government. The New York Times, USA Today and the James Madison Project all sued for release of the materials.

[...]

Republicans, who previously released some details about the application, had accused the FBI of relying too much on the Steele dossier, which they painted as politically motivated and uncorroborated.

[...]

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, described the release of the documents a “potentially groundbreaking development” and called for further details to be made public.

“The Carter Page FISA docs should be declassified and further unredacted (protecting only sources and methods) so Americans can know the truth,” Meadows said Saturday on Twitter. “If the previous admin was funneling campaign research toward surveillance, we need to know.”

But Democrats countered that the FISA application relied on more information than what Steele provided. And they said Steele had been a reliable source of information to the FBI in the past.

[...]

Much of the more than 400 pages of applications is redacted, making it impossible to know all the evidence that the FBI presented to a judge in seeking the wiretap order.

In particular, whole sections in the application detailing the FBI’s justification for believing Page was a Russian agent are blacked out.

[...]

The application identifies Page by name and says that he engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities” on behalf of Russia and had been the target of Russian government recruitment. The application describes Russia as having interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

  WaPo

Fox must be off Carter Page now and on to the Helsinki fiasco.




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

So....that didn't go quite the way he planned

First, Giuliani trips him up by revealing that Trump repaid Cohen's hush money, prompting Sean to stutter, "I didn't know that." 

And now these two Trump campaign cronies throw him hooks.

To be fair, though, all three interviewees are buffoons.  Hannity was a fool to have them on.


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

The ancillary payment

It seems that, not only did the Enquirer pay $150K to Karen McDougal for her story only to spike it, they also paid a large sum to a doorman to keep quiet.

The story of the ex-doorman, Dino Sajudin, hasn’t been told until now.

[...]

[T]he tabloid’s parent made a $30,000 payment to [the] former doorman at one of the real estate mogul’s New York City buildings.

[...]

The Associated Press confirmed the details of the Enquirer’s payment through a review of a confidential contract and interviews with dozens of current and former employees of the Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, “in perpetuity,” to a rumor he’d heard about Trump’s sex life — that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations. The contract subjected Sajudin to a $1 million penalty if he disclosed either the rumor or the terms of the deal to anyone.

  AP

Thirty grand for a rumor? That's some rumor.

Cohen, the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin’s story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it. He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman.

I suppose New York's FBI will be noticing any evidence in the records it just seized from Cohen.

Prosecutors are probing whether Cohen broke banking or campaign laws in connection with AMI’s payment to McDougal and a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels that Cohen said he paid out of his own pocket.

Federal investigators have sought communications between Cohen, American Media’s chief executive and the Enquirer’s top editor, the New York Times reported.

[...]

On Wednesday, an Enquirer sister publication, RadarOnline, published details of the payment and the rumor that Sajudin was peddling. The website wrote that the Enquirer spent four weeks reporting the story but ultimately decided it wasn’t true. The company only released Sajudin from his contract after the 2016 election amid inquiries from the Journal about the payment.

It's just so hard to believe a rumor is worth thirty grand.

Asked about the payment last summer, Dylan Howard, the Enquirer’s top editor and an AMI executive, said he made the payment to secure the former Trump doorman’s exclusive cooperation because the tip, if true, would have sold “hundreds of thousands” of magazines. Ultimately, he said the information “lacked any credibility,” so he spiked the story on those merits.

Still. Thirty grand?

But four longtime Enquirer staffers directly familiar with the episode challenged Howard’s version of events. They said they were ordered by top editors to stop pursuing the story before completing potentially promising reporting threads.

They said the publication didn’t pursue standard Enquirer reporting practices, such as exhaustive stake-outs or tabloid tactics designed to prove paternity. In 2008, the Enquirer helped bring down presidential hopeful John Edwards in part by digging through a dumpster and retrieving material to do a DNA test that indicated he had fathered a child with a mistress, according to a former staffer.

John Edwards probably didn't threaten to sue them. Or kneecap them. He didn't have Michael Cohen for an attorney.

After initially calling the Enquirer’s tip line, Sajudin signed a boilerplate contract with the Enquirer, agreeing to be an anonymous source and be paid upon publication.

[...]

One week later, Sajudin signed an amended agreement, this one paying him $30,000 immediately and subjecting him to the $1 million penalty if he shopped around his information.

The Enquirer immediately then stopped reporting, said the former staffers.

[...]

In the tabloid world purchasing information is not uncommon, and the Enquirer routinely pays sources. As a general practice, however, sources agree to be paid for their tips only upon publication.

[...]

[Jerry] George, the longtime former reporter and editor, said the $1 million penalty in Sajudin’s agreement was larger than anything he had seen in his Enquirer career.

“If your intent is to get a story from the source, there’s no upside to paying upfront,” said George, who sometimes handled catch-and-kill contracts related to other celebrities. Paying upfront was not the Enquirer’s usual practice because it would have been costly and endangered the source’s incentive to cooperate, he said.

[...]

The woman at the center of the rumor about Trump denied emphatically to the AP last August that she’d ever had an affair with Trump, saying she had no idea the Enquirer had paid Sajudin and pursued his tip.

The AP has not been able to determine if the rumor is true and is not naming the woman.

“This is all fake,” she said. “I think they lost their money.”

There could be any number of reasons for her to say that. And, of course, there's a very slim chance it could be true.

The company said that AMI’s publisher, David Pecker, an unabashed Trump supporter, had not coordinated its coverage with Trump associates or taken direction from Trump. It acknowledged discussing the former doorman’s tip with Trump’s representatives, which it described as “standard operating procedure in stories of this nature.”

[...]

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Enquirer published a string of allegations against Trump’s rivals, such as stories claiming Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was a bisexual “secret sex freak” and was kept alive only by a “narcotics cocktail.”

Stories attacking Trump rivals or promoting Trump’s campaign often bypassed the paper’s normal fact-checking process, according to two people familiar with campaign-era copy.

Let me guess...that Clinton story was one of those.

With just over a week before Election Day, Howard, the top editor, appeared on Alex Jones’ InfoWars program by phone, telling listeners that the choice at the ballot box was between “the Clinton crime family” or someone who will “break down the borders of the establishment.” Howard said the paper’s coverage was bipartisan, citing negative stories it published about Ben Carson during the Republican presidential primaries.

Sounds like Trump himself owns and runs the Enquirer.

For his part, Sajudin confirmed he’d been paid to be the tabloid’s anonymous source but insisted he would sue the Enquirer if his name appeared in print. Pressed for more details about his tip and experience with the paper, Sajudin said he would talk only in exchange for payment.

“If there’s no money involved with it,” he said, “I’m not getting involved.”

[...]

In a statement last summer, [Dylan Howard, the Enquirer’s top editor and an AMI executive] said the company doesn’t take editorial direction “from anyone outside AMI,” and said Trump has never been an Enquirer source. The company has said reader surveys dictate its coverage and that many of its customers are Trump supporters.

That well-informed sector of American society gets its news from Fox and the Enquirer. And perhaps the Weekly World News.

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

UPDATE:

“Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement that I had with AMI (The National Enquirer) with regard to a story about President Trump was leaked to the press,” Sajudin said in the statement Thursday.

“I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump’s former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child.”

[...]

Sajudin's ex-wife of 14 years cast doubt on his story as well, telling the New York Daily News that her former husband is a "pathological liar" and "infamous for making up stories."

“He’s seen the chupacabra. He’s seen bigfoot," Nikki Benfatto told the newspaper. "One of our friends who passed away, he saw him too, walking down the street.”

She added that she never recalled Sajudin mentioning the rumor to her. She said the two stopped communicating in 2014, a year before the former doorman reportedly approached the Enquirer.

  The Hill

Trump's DOJ wasting more of their time and your money

Still playing games around the Steele dossier and the FISA warrant on Carter Page.

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

Mueller subpoena

Axios reviewed a Grand Jury subpoena Mueller's team served on a witness.  The witness is not named.  But what is revealed is that the subpoena was for any recorded communication from November 1, 2015, to the present, with each of the following people:

Carter Page
Corey Lewandowski
Donald J. Trump
Hope Hicks
Keith Schiller
Michael Cohen
Paul Manafort
Rick Gates
Roger Stone
Steve Bannon


I'll let someone else analyze that.

UPDATE 3/5: Apparently the subpoena was issued to whackadoodle Sam Nunberg.

UPDATE 3/6:  Charlie Pierce has an analysis:

Here’s what all this means. This means that Mueller and his staff have likely concluded now that the entire Trump For President campaign was a corrupt enterprise in one way or another almost since the moment it was first conceived and that the same can be said of the Trump presidency*. It’s the money. It’s the Russians. The whole damn dirty deal is one great writhing ball of poisonous snakes and Mueller seems to be perilously close to untangling it.

  Esquire

Sounds about right.

The subpoenas go back to 2015 and woe betide anyone, as the nuns used to tell us, who fed any subpoenaed material into the shredder. At least a few of those people on that list have already flipped or likely have announced their intentions privately to do so. All of them except Cohen will have left the White House when Hicks leaves in a few weeks.

And Mueller likely has copies of all those emails subpoenaed from Sam Nunberg anyway. Cross-checking what people want to hide is a form of information gathering, too.

The working presumption of the Mueller investigation now is that nobody is clean in all of this. Everybody has something to tell about everybody else. Absent the promise of a presidential* pardon—a promise that is prima facie worthless simply because it comes from this president*—the stampede for the lifeboats is going to be deafening this week.

Kushner's hand in the cookie jar

You might just want to read this whole interesting article.

I'll get you started:

Jared Kushner had a very bad week. So bad in fact, it was hard to keep track of how many bad stories there were. The most publicized event, the White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law losing his security clearance, was the least surprising. The more shocking—and potentially important—revelations are two stories about massive loans he’s sought and their links to Qatar and a third story about how special counsel Robert Mueller is now investigating those links.

  Slate

Perhaps Jared and his father can compare notes on prison one day.  Daddy already has some experience.

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

UPDATE 3/21:

KUSHNER’S SUPPORT FOR Saudi Arabia and the UAE over Qatar in the Gulf crisis has raised questions about a possible conflict of interest. Kushner backed the blockade a month after Qatar’s ministry of finance rebuffed an attempt by Kushner’s real estate firm, Kushner Companies, to extract financing for the firm’s troubled flagship property at 666 Fifth Avenue.

In 2007, Kushner bought the landmark Manhattan building for $1.8 billion, putting down $500 million in cash raised largely by selling thousands of rental units the family had owned in New Jersey. It was widely regarded as overpriced at the time, and when the financial crisis hit, the value plummeted, wiping out much of the initial investment. The clock is now ticking toward a February 2019 deadline when a major mortgage payment will come due.

Since 2011, Kushner and his relatives have been searching the globe for a new investor. As recently as the spring of 2017, Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, asked former Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani to invest in the building. Then in April 2017, Charles Kushner made a direct pitch to the Qatari government through the country’s minister of finance.

Qatar rejected the deal as not financially viable. In May, Trump traveled to Riyadh with Kushner, where the famous glowing orb photo was taken. In the wake of the meeting, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a handful of allied countries announced the blockade of Qatar, which is aligned with Iran, a key Saudi adversary. The crisis continues today.

“We could not understand why the Trump administration was so firmly taking the Saudis’ side in this dispute between the Saudis, the Emiratis, and Qatar, because the United States has very important interests in Qatar,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week,” after The Intercept reported on Kushner Companies’ efforts to obtain financing from Qatar. Murphy was referring to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, home of U.S. Central Command, where thousands of U.S. troops are stationed.

“If the reason this administration put U.S. troops at risk in Qatar was to protect the Kushners’ financial interests, then that’s all the evidence you need to make some big changes in the White House,” Murphy said.

  The Intercept

A little background on Carter Page, "idiot" and "kook"

After Trump’s disorganized and not particularly professional campaign managed to win most of the first GOP primaries, he faced increasing pressure to demonstrate that he was a plausible major-party presidential nominee. His aides decided that part of that task entailed putting together something they could call a “foreign policy team.” The task fell to Sam Clovis, a conservative talk radio host and evangelical activist from Iowa who had distinguished himself by joining the Trump campaign relatively early.

Carter Page didn’t wait for Clovis to find him. According to his later testimony, Page reached out to New York’s Republican Party chair, Ed Cox, in late December 2015, asking to be put in touch with Trump’s team. Cox put Page in contact with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who sent him over to Clovis, who is said to have put him on Trump’s list of advisers.

[...]

Papadopoulos was added to the same team as Page, and according to a plea agreement he signed last year, Clovis told him early on “that a principal foreign policy focus of the [Trump] campaign was an improved US relationship with Russia.” With that in mind, Page would seem a perfect fit, considering his job history and policy views.

  Vox

I keep forgetting about Sam Clovis, who's going to need a XXXXL size orange jumpsuit.

Emails and documents made public in connection with Page’s congressional testimony do show that he was in regular contact with several campaign foreign policy advisers in the spring and summer of 2016 — though it’s not entirely clear what, exactly, he was doing.

On May 16, 2016, Page sent a curious email to two of his fellow foreign policy advisers, J.D. Gordon and Walid Phares. Page wrote (emphasis added):

As discussed, my strategy in order to keep in sync with the media relations guidelines of the campaign has been to make my key messages as low-key and apolitical as possible. But after seeing the principal’s tweet a few hours in response to the cocky “in politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue” quote by the same speaker at Rutgers yesterday, I got another idea. If he’d like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit, of course I’d be more than happy to yield this honor to him.

“The principal” here is Trump, and “this honor” Page wants Trump to “take my place” in, he admitted in congressional testimony, is ... a trip to Russia.

[...]

Trump didn’t end up going to Russia that year — but Page did, for a five-day trip in July 2016. [...] Yet Page and Trump’s team said, then and afterward, that Page took this trip purely as a private citizen and not at all on behalf of the campaign.

[...]

Finally, in September, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reported that the government was investigating Page’s ties to the Kremlin — a revelation that led the Trump campaign to harshly disassociate themselves from Page. (In Page’s own telling, he chose to take a leave of absence.)

[...]

Rumors of the latter soon reached the ears of Christopher Steele, the former British spy researching Trump’s Russia ties. On July 19, 2016, Steele filed a report for what become known as his “dossier” focused on Page’s Russia trip. Citing Russian sources, he wrote:

That Page had met with Igor Sechin, the CEO of Rosneft, the majority Russian government-owned oil company, and discussed lifting US sanctions
That Page had also met with Igor Diveykin, a Russian intelligence official, and discussed Russian “kompromat” on Clinton (and Trump)

In a later report, dated October 18, 2016, Steele made an even more astonishing claim:

That when Page allegedly met with Sechin, the oil executive had offered Page and Trump’s associates “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return” for lifting sanctions, and that Page “expressed interest” and confirmed that Trump would lift sanctions if he won

But in the year and a half since, no one has yet managed to confirm any of the claims in Steele’s dossier about Page’s trip.

[...]

Page, meanwhile, has furiously denied the claims, saying that he’s never met either Sechin or Diveykin and disparaging what he calls the “dodgy dossier” both in media appearances and under oath.

As you would.

George Papadopoulos was also emailing campaign advisers about a potential Trump trip to Russia around the same time. And according to his plea deal, one senior official forwarded his email to another and wrote, “Let’s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

Not knowing what Papadopoulos has said since being "flipped" by Mueller, I'd think the Trump cabal must be desperately nervous. It's obvious they're desperately trying to discredit and muddy the investigation.

Page also wrote an email to two Trump aides saying he’d received “some incredible insights and outreach [...] from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the Presidential administration here.”

Also, Page admitted that he did meet with a different Rosneft executive — Andrey Baranov, the company’s head of investor relations, with whom he had a preexisting relationship. When asked about some of this under oath, Page sounded evasive. He claimed his interaction with Dvorkovich lasted “well less than 10 seconds,” and that his reference to “insights and outreach” referred merely to speeches he’d attended and articles he’d read during his trip.

[...]

The [FBI] was looking into a suspected Russian spy ring and learned that one of their suspects, Victor Podobnyy, had met with Page in hopes of finding a potential recruit.

They listened to a tape on which Podobnyy said he thought Page was an idiot, and...

... I will feed him empty promises. ... You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.

Page did end up giving some energy business documents to Podobnyy, and the FBI interviewed him about it in June 2013. But they decided Page didn’t know Podobnyy was a spy, and didn’t charge him with anything.

In other words, the FBI thought Page was an idiot, too. And, I suppose it's possible Page did know Podobnyy was a spy. At any rate, the FBI told him at that time that he was being looked at by the Russians as a possible asset. And Page, the idiot, continued to go about dealing with the Russians, and the Trump campaign.

Christopher Steele was meanwhile doing his own investigation at the time — and was providing what he found to his own contacts in the FBI (who had worked with him before and viewed him as a reliable source of information).

[...]

But it was on October 21, 2016, that the Justice Department took the particularly dramatic step of asking for permission to surveil Page’s communications. (Note that this was a month after the Trump campaign disassociated itself from Page and said he had nothing to do with it, which would seem to debunk the talking point that this was an excuse for the FBI to spy on the Trump team.)

The following is taken from an article written by J.J. Patrick on November 5, 2017:

That's his Twitter profile.  I don't know about his investigative credentials, but Byline, where the article is written has a profile on him that says he was

 "a police officer for ten years, resigning from New Scotland Yard having acted as a whistle-blower, kicking off a parliamentary inquiry into the manipulation of crime figures by the police. He received open praise at the highest levels, for his integrity.

James now freelances as an independent journalist, blogs, and has created a body of work which includes regular contributions to The Justice Gap and The Common Space."

So, on with the article...

Sometimes, you just have to kick the rocks over and wait for the world to catch up.

[...]

One of the central issues in the investigation into Donald Trump and his relationship with Russia relates to Carter Page – a man whose CV largely consisted of doing financial business with Russia until Trump. Page was somewhat mysteriously hired by the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor, despite holding no qualifications for such a role. During the election, it became public knowledge the FBI was investigating Page’s ties to Russia and, after Trump’s success, Page travelled to Moscow for “unknown” reasons. In February 2017, it was discovered he had “been colluding with Russian intel officials during the election.” Spy agencies, including GCHQ, were not specifically targeting members of the Trump team but happened to gather evidence through what CNN reported as “incidental collection.” Their accidental intelligence was then passed to the US as part of a routine exchange under the so-called “Five Eyes” agreement between the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Page’s own direct connection to Jeff Sessions is not in doubt and, importantly, sources have also been publicly clear: “The Page connection was Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ chief of staff, who hired Page because Dearborn knew nothing about foreign policy but needed to put together a foreign policy staff for Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, policy shop and he happened to know Page.”

Russian agents have not held back from commenting on Page either, highlighting his ambitions in the energy sector. “He got hooked on Gazprom,” Victor Podobnyy, an officer of the SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) said. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money.” Page, it appears, shared a mutual interest with Burt. Christopher Steele’s controversial intelligence dossier went further, alleging Page met with the head of Russian oil giant Rosneft, Igor Sechin – a man described as one of President Vladimir Putin’s key deputies. According to the report, Page and Sechin discussed lifting sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and “support of pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine.”

  Byline

This is a lengthy article whose first two-thirds covers information about banking, Brexit and Russia. It's quite a lot more than I can absorb and assess. You might want to read it for yourself.

Patrick goes on after the business about Carter Page to discuss how Nigel Farage, infamous alt-right Brit whose name became well-known here because of the Brexit movement, is connected to the Trump cabal.

Aside from this monstrously deep web of US business links to Russia, along with speeches by British politicians, my investigations had already established more substantial collaborative efforts between the so-called “Bad Boys of Brexit”, the Trump campaign, and Russia. Yet, the Leave.EU connection was relevant at the time for one further reason: Roger Stone. During the 2016 campaign, Stone was accused by John Podesta of having prior knowledge of Wikileaks publishing his private emails which had been obtained by a hacker. In fact, before the leak, Stone tweeted: “It will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel,” and five days prior to the release he did it again, writing: “Wednesday Hillary Clinton is done. #Wikileaks.” Breitbart News, the Mercer and Bannon disinformation channel, also published a subsequent denial by Stone, in which he claimed he had no advance knowledge of the Podesta e-mail hack or any connection to Russian intelligence.

Patrick's conclusion nails the big picture for me:

I took the time to sit and review everything I’d uncovered so far and decided there was nothing so easy as a simple financial trail which would expose this global mess. Those days of investigative journalism were clearly dead, along with stories compacted to fit headlines and column inches. We were dealing with such a complex problem I still think the whole truth may never be known, especially if the assertions of Christopher Steele – that the cover-up operation began on Putin’s orders as soon as Trump won – are to be given credit. [...] This power play had gone directly for political and financial dominance on a scale which condemned the diplomatic wrangling of independent nations to the past, rendering countries standing as lone entities impotent.

It's always about the money.

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

UPDATE:



Seems highly likely, especially considering that Page said it was "a leave of absence."

Gee, I wonder why Carter Page was on the FBI's radar

[Two months after the FBI interviewed him, a] letter, dated Aug. 25, 2013 , was sent by Page to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript he had submitted for publication, according to an editor who worked with Page.

“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” the letter reads.

[...]

Trump’s defenders argue that he was simply a low-level consultant to the campaign who has overstated his role as an adviser as well as his Russian contacts. The Steele dossier claims that during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page held secret meetings with a senior Kremlin official and a senior Putin ally that included conversations about helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton in the presidential campaign. The Steele dossier does not identify its sources and Page has denied any wrongdoing.

[...]

In January 2013, Page met a Russian diplomat named Victor Podobnyy at an energy conference in New York City, according to court documents. The two exchanged contact information, sent each other documents on energy policy and met several more times to discuss the topic, the documents allege. Two years later, in January of 2015, Podobnyy was charged in absentia — along with two other Russians — with working as a Russian intelligence agent under diplomatic cover.

Court records include a transcript of a conversation where Podobnyy talks about recruiting someone named “Male-1” by making “empty promises” about “connections in the [Russian] Trade Representation.” Page now acknowledges that he was “Male-1.” Podobnyy and one of the Russians had diplomatic immunity and left the U.S. The third Russian was arrested and eventually expelled from the U.S. in April 2017.

[...]

In interviews with reporters over the past year, Page has given inconsistent accounts about his contacts with the Russians.

[...]

[A reveiwer for an academic press] thinks Page was ultimately harmless in terms of national security threats. “I would never have seen him in the center of concern like this, or playing a role or being seen as an intermediary between the Russian government and a political candidate,” the editor said. “He struck me just as someone who had developed some strange academic views … and wanted to have them published,” the editor says.

“I just came to see him as a kook,” the editor says.

  Time

And a Russian who dealt with him called Page an idiot. Plus, he went to his Congressional grilling without a lawyer. And, you've seen him. If I were advising the Trump cabal on the issue of Carter Page, I'd tell them to go with Carter Page is mental, and stick with that. Who could dispute it?  It doesn't look so good that they brought him on to the team, but they also dumped him, so I think it's a good strategy.

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

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

I'm all for it.  It was his guys, Nunes and Ryan, among others, who decided this was the way to go.

UPDATE:



Seems highly likely, especially considering that Page said it was "a leave of absence."