A new whistleblower from the FBI

A veteran FBI counterintelligence agent says his supervisor told him to stop investigating Rudy Giuliani and to cut off contact with any sources who reported on corruption by associates of former President Donald Trump, according to a whistleblower complaint obtained by Insider.

[...]

The whistleblower told Insider that he was finally ordered to stop investigating Giuliani and the rest of the Trump White House in August 2022, after months of what he says were persistent efforts to frustrate his work, at a meeting with three FBI supervisors at a bureau field office. Insider was able to confirm the agent's account of the meeting with a second source with knowledge of what took place.

[...]

The agent, who served 14 years as a special agent for the bureau, including a long stint in Russia-focussed counter-intelligence, claims in a 22-page statement that his bosses interfered with his work in "a highly suspicious suppression of investigations and intelligence-gathering" aimed at protecting "certain politically active figures and possibly also FBI agents" who were connected to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs.

Those figures, the statement claims, explicitly included "anyone in the [Trump] White House and any former or current associates of President Trump."

[...]

He said his work had been recognised with eight consecutive years of "excellent" or "outstanding" performance appraisal reports running from 2010 to 2018, and he had been tapped to help verify information obtained by investigators working for Robert Mueller during his time as special counsel.

But in the August 2022 meeting, he was called onto the carpet to discuss "performance issues and concerns" and given suggestions for how to improve, according to the agent's account provided to lawmakers. The directions he received included a strict prohibition on filing intelligence reports relating to Giuliani or any other Trump associate.

[...]

The statement, which was prepared for staffers of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was apparently leaked and posted in mid-July to a Substack newsletter. Insider has independently obtained a copy of the complaint and verified its authenticity, but has not corroborated all of its claims.

[...]

The whistleblower [...] blames "a group of people surrounding [Giuliani] with existing or historical ties to the bureau" for a pattern of "retaliatory action." The statement points to Charles McGonigal, the now-indicted former head of FBI counterintelligence in New York, as one possible source of the apparent "suppressive efforts."

[...]

Months before the agent was told to stop looking at Giuliani and the rest of Trump's circle, he met with the same high-ranking supervisor to pass on information he had received from his confidential sources about Hunter Biden and his ties to Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that had paid Hunter Biden $83,333 a month to sit on its board. "My supervisors were delighted that I had collected this information about Burisma," the agent wrote in his statement.

But when the agent tried to talk about what their sources had to say about Giuliani, his boss's reaction was very different. The supervisor "forcefully interrupted me and ended my presentation," he wrote.

[...]

In the interview with Insider, the new whistleblower said that he had approached the GOP subcommittee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan. But when the subcommittee's staff learned from the whistleblower that the Hunter Biden information had been handled appropriately, their interest dwindled, the whistleblower said.

"The FBI made a diligent attempt to run the Biden material to the ground," the whistleblower said. "It wasn't slow-played. Chairman Jordan should not be using this as an example to show that the FBI is biased against the right."

[...]

Insider is withholding the name of the whistleblower because he has made claims about retaliation from the FBI, where he remains an employee, and because he is in the process of seeking whistleblower protections from Congress.

[...]

"There are people in the FBI who are biased," he said. "We aren't robots. But the bureau itself has integrity. It's necessary. Despite the scars that I bear, I believe that the majority of my colleagues are doing the right thing."

  Business Insider

There is no justice where Trump is concerned

And it often looks like there never will be.

Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

  NYT

Surprised?

Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Durham to scour the origins of the Russia investigation for wrongdoing, telling Fox News that he wanted to know if “officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” in deciding to pursue the investigation.

[...]

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another.

[...]

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump.

Was that the basis for Trump's false claims that Italy was involved in nefarious activity against his 2020 campaign? An attempt to preempt whatever might come out from that investigation? No doubt it would have been retaliation, a typical kneejerk Trump reactionto any negative publicity.

The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

[...]

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore. But rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself — giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time — even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham’s assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry.

[...]

The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.

Well, until now, I guess.

Taciturn and media-averse, the goateed Mr. Durham had spent more than three decades as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump appointed him the U.S. attorney for Connecticut.

[...]

As a career federal prosecutor, Mr. Durham already revered the office of the attorney general, people who know him say. And as he was drawn into Mr. Barr’s personal orbit, Mr. Durham came to embrace that particular attorney general’s intense feelings about the Russia investigation.

[...]

Referring to the C.I.A. and British spies, Mr. Barr also said he suspected that the N.S.A.’s “friends” had helped instigate the Russia investigation by targeting the Trump campaign, aides briefed on the meeting said. And repeating a sexual vulgarity, he warned that if the N.S.A. wronged him by not doing all it could to help Mr. Durham, Mr. Barr would do the same to the agency.

[...]

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

[...]

The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

[...]

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all.

I'm guessing it wasn't a "hunch" anyway.  It was simply Barr's own attempt to "find" something to exonerate Trump and keep him in power.

Mr. Barr has never prosecuted a case and is known for using his law enforcement platform to opine on culture-war issues and politics. He had effectively auditioned to be Mr. Trump’s attorney general by asserting to a New York Times reporter that there was more basis to investigate Mrs. Clinton than Mr. Trump’s “so-called ‘collusion’” with Russia, and by writing a memo suggesting a way to shield Mr. Trump from scrutiny for obstruction of justice.

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

As was Bill Barr.

Your tax dollars at work

Should Trump be worried?

Federal agents were seen searching a Park Avenue high-rise and a Southhampton estate Thursday connected to a Russian oligarch who recently had his yacht seized, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and FBI agents along with NYPD detectives were seen carrying boxes during a search of 515 Park Ave. in Manhattan and 19 Duck Pond Lane in Southampton. Records show those properties are linked to sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, a billionaire and close ally of President Vladimir Putin who heads the Moscow-based Renova Group, a conglomerate encompassing metals, mining, tech and other assets, according to U.S. Treasury Department documents.

[...]

A search is also underway at a property in Miami’s Fisher Island.

[...]

In addition to sanctions, Vekselberg has been the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice Investigation surrounding allegations of bank fraud. No charges have been filed in that regard, and sources say Thursday's law enforcement activity at the Manhattan and Long Island sites were just searches in connection with the ongoing sanctions. Those properties were not seized Thursday.

[...]

Vekselberg has long had ties to the U.S., including a green card he once held and homes in New York and Connecticut. He was also questioned in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and has worked closely with his American cousin, Andrew Intrater, who heads the New York investment management firm Columbus Nova.

  NBC

They're allowed to use whatever they find that was within the scope of the legal search.

Also...

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

The Comey Rule

More clips from the series.

And, if you can't sit through the special podcast above, you'll not want to miss the final word from the director.

Well, well, well

Full story

UPDATE:

A reason for Mike Pence to be covering up Russian election interference

This is from an article by Bill Conroy published on May 29, 2017.

When President Donald Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, spoke clandestinely with Kremlin officials this past December about the status of US sanctions against that nation, Pence defended him initially — but claimed later that Flynn lied to him about the content of the conversations.

Despite the fact the Trump administration was informed by a member of Congress in November of last year that Flynn was working as a paid agent of the Turkish government while advising Trump on national security matters, Pence insists he only learned of Flynn’s Turkish lobbying pact through the media this past March.

Pence’s claimed ignorance of these events, until they became public via the media, is even more surprising in light of the fact he was responsible as head of Trump’s transition team for overseeing the vetting process for White House appointees like Flynn.

  Narco News

And the we come to the personal reasons Pence might not want to admit knowing anything.

[O]ne of Pence’s main corporate backers, Eli Lilly & Co., was charged by U.S. officials with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in 2012 in relation to its business practices in Russia.

[...]

While serving as a US congressman from 2001-2013, and thereafter as governor of Indiana [...] , Pence also served the interests of another Indiana-based corporation that has deep business roots in Russia — Cummins Inc.

These two Indiana-based Fortune 500 companies with major business interests in Russia — diesel-engine manufacturer Cummins and drug-maker and distributor Eli Lilly — ranked as the No. 2 and No. 3 donors, respectively, to Pence’s federal campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

[...]

In addition to being a leading contributor to Pence’s congressional and gubernatorial campaigns, Eli Lilly also donated $15,000 to an economic development fund used by Pence “to travel overseas, rent luxury sports suites, lobby lawmakers and fly to Iowa ahead of its first-in-the-nation presidential nominating contest,” according to an investigation by the Indianapolis Star.

[...]

Jon Mills, media spokesman for Cummins, stressed that the company has “no concern about our perception” with respect to donations made to Pence’s political campaigns over the years or because of the fact Vice President Pence’s brother is an executive at Cummins.

[...]

That’s not to say Pence’s brother has done anything wrong, but he would be considered a potential target of a foreign intelligence service looking to compromise the vice president.

[...]

Some media outlets, including CBS News and the Daily Beast, have reported that behind the scenes [Paul] Manafort played a key role in convincing Trump to pick Pence as his vice presidential running mate. Is it possible that Manafort took an interest in Pence, in part, because he saw him as a Moscow-friendly ally, if push came to shove?

[...]

Given his home state’s reliance on these two huge employers and their past financial support of his political career, it can’t be ruled out that Pence is willing to carry some water for Trump on the Russian front, if that path dovetails with Cummins’ and Eli Lilly’s investment interests in Russia’s economy.

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

Trump's criminals: George Nader update

The Justice Department on Tuesday announced it had indicted eight men for conspiring to illegally funnel $3.5 million to political committees supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. Prosecutors say the money came from George Nader—a businessman who was was recently charged with trafficking a child for sexual purposes. Nader was a key figure in the Trump-Russia scandal. According to special counsel Robert Mueller, he helped arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian emissaries.

  Mother Jones

Sounds like he played both sides.

The charges paint a picture of an effort by Nader to gain influence with Clinton’s supporters, and to hedge his bets by cultivating Trump’s team—all while reporting back to unnamed foreign masters. According to the indictment, in a July 19, 2016, WhatsApp message to an unidentified foreign official, Nader said he was “developing a steady, consistent and constructive relationship with both camps!” After Trump’s electoral victory, Nader appears to have hustled to ingratiate himself with the incoming administration.

[...]

But this week’s indictment leaves a key question unanswered: Was Nader also the source of a $1 million donation from one of the defendants to Donald Trump’s inaugural committee?

[...]

According to the indictment, Nader conspired with Andy Khawaja, the CEO of an embattled online payment processing company, in a plot to provide massive campaign donations to Democratic groups. Khawaja allegedly made the contributions in his own name and through his wife and his company, and was then reimbursed by Nader.

[...]

While arranging the payments to Democratic groups, Nader “reported to an official from a foreign government about his efforts to gain influence,” prosecutors said in a statement Tuesday. They didn’t name that government. According to the Mueller report, Nader “worked for the United Arab Emirates royal court” in 2016. The report described Nader’s efforts during the presidential transition period to help the UAE set up meetings between the Trump team and Russia.

[...]

According to emails obtained by Mother Jones, Khawaja brought Nader as his guest to [Trump's] inauguration. In a form apparently sent to the inaugural committee, Khawaja described Nader as an “advisor” to [Khawaja's company] Allied Wallet.

In interviews and electronic messages prior to his indictment, Khawaja denied that Nader was his guest at the inauguration or an adviser to Allied Wallet. Any email suggesting this, he said, “is inaccurate. It’s bullshit. It’s fabricated.”

Tuesday’s indictment contradicted this denial, alleging that Nader had indeed attended the inauguration as Khawaja’s guest. Prosecutors also charged Khawaja with obstructing the investigation.

[...]

Khawaja says Nader had nothing to do with it. “Nader did not give me money for [the] inauguration,” he told Mother Jones Thursday. He also disputed the charges in the indictment. “Nader never gave me any money to give to [Hillary Clinton],” he said, asserting that Nader had instead simply done business with his company.

“Nader was a Trump supporter and never cared about Hillary or her campaign,” said Khawaja. “This is a hit job to make Democrats look bad.”

[...]

[Nader's] attendance at the inauguration came as part of an effort in which he developed relationships with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy, and Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

The indictment also detailed WhatsApp messages in which Khawaja and Nader allegedly discussed plans for Nader to reimburse Khawaja for his donations, in part through allegedly fake invoices Khawaja sent Nader.

[...]

When Khawaja pressed Nader in early July 2016 about the status of a reimbursement, Nader responded, “I shall pursue it vigorously!” Nader also told Khawaja that he was conferring with someone he called “HH.”

[...]

According to the Mueller report and other public sources, Nader in 2016 was in direct contact with Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the effective ruler of the UAE. Bin Zayed, known as MBZ, is referred to by many Emirates as “High Highness.” Press officials at the Emirati embassy in Washington, DC, did not respond to questions about whether the UAE is the unidentified foreign government referenced in the indictment.

[...]

Khawaja’s indictment makes him the second major Trump inaugural donor to be charged with illegally funneling earlier political donations to Democrats. In October, Imaad Zuberi, a California businessman who gave $900,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee, agreed to plead guilty in connection with a nearly 10-year scheme in which he solicited money from foreign people and firms to donate to US political campaigns on the foreigners’ behalf.

[...]

[T]he statute that prohibits making a contribution in the name of another person to a political campaign does not apply to inaugural committees. Thirteen of the charges in Tuesday’s indictment relate to violations of that law.

[...]

The charges against Khawaja and Nader come amid other legal problems for both men. Nader, who was convicted in the Czech Republic in 2003 of sexually abusing minors, was arrested in June in New York. He remains jailed on charges that include child pornography and transporting a 14-year-old child for sexual activity. On Monday, six attorneys representing Nader in that case filed motions to withdraw as his counsel.

[...]

In May, Khawaja and his firm agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $110 million to settle charges that the company knowingly processed payments for online firms—including sketchy debt collection and pornography outfits—that were engaged in fraud.

[...]

Khawaja, who did not respond to questions about this probe, told Mother Jones in October that he had retained a high-powered legal team that includes former FBI director Louis Freeh [...] Robert Shapiro and Alan Dershowitz. Dershowitz, a prominent defender of Trump, said Tuesday that he cannot comment on who he represents. Freeh and Shapiro did not respond to inquires.

Khawaja has said he has been traveling abroad for the past few months. In message sent Thursday, he said that he is in China but plans to return to the US to “deal with these fake accusations.” In a phone call in October, speaking from what he said was Tokyo, he was defiant. He argued that the allegations against him were manufactured by unnamed Republican operatives worried about his support for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Khawaja said his lawyers will “come down on” his critics “like the hand of God.” “Tell them Andy is not gonna stop supporting Democrats,” he said. “He’s not gonna stop supporting Joe Biden. And let them go fuck themselves.”

Yeah, he's not coming back to the US.

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

Rick Gates sentenced

Rick Gates, Donald Trump's one-time deputy campaign manager, received 36 months of probation on Tuesday after pleading guilty last year to financial fraud and lying to investigators.

Gates will also serve 45 days in jail on weekends or in accordance with the schedule of the probation office.

  Politico

Fair enough. He cooperated and testified in both the Manafort and Stone trials.

Now I understand the timing

This is why Trump brought Lavrov in for a presser:

Right in front of the Secretary of State, and he's allowed to say it unmolested?

Yeah, here's a better response:

Lavrov's answer was, "We read it.  There was no collusion." 

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

It's not just Rudy who's still committing acts of virtual treason

One of the strongest arguments made by experts testifying against President Trump is that he poses a present and continuing threat to our democracy. By adopting the stance that extorting a foreign leader into helping him rig the election was perfectly fine, Trump has confirmed he’ll keep using the levers of government to continue to corrupt it on his behalf.

[...]

The latest nefarious doings of none other than William P. Barr and Rudolph W. Giuliani have now forcefully underscored this very point.

[...]

Two new investigative reports demonstrate that Barr and Giuliani are, in effect, continuing to carry out elements of the very same corrupt scheme for which Trump is currently getting impeached. Their activities have been described as “brazen,” but the truth is worse: They demonstrate with great clarity that Trump’s efforts to corrupt our political system will continue — a reminder of why he’s being impeached in the first place.

The Post reports that Barr has hit a major snag in his efforts to validate Trump’s claim that the investigation into Russian sabotage of the 2016 election was a hoax. Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, privately asked Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, who’s executing Barr’s review of the origins of that investigation, to validate a key element of Trumpworld’s “theory” of those origins — and he did not.

[...]

Central to this is the idea that [Joseph Mifsud] the Maltese professor who first told a Trump adviser about dirt gathered by Russia on Hillary Clinton — which launched the original FBI probe — was a U.S. agent setting up the Trump campaign. Horowitz, who is also examining the probe’s origins, has reportedly determined that he was not, and asked Durham — and intelligence agencies — to produce evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t.

It’s true that Horowitz will also reportedly announce serious irregularities with the FBI’s original handling of the investigation, and Trump’s propagandists will hype this to the skies. But the bottom line is Horowitz is expected to conclude that the investigation’s basis was legitimate, and while we don’t know what Durham will conclude, it seems clear he’s finding little to validate Trumpworld’s wild theories.

The key point here is that Barr, who is gearing up to cast doubt on Horowitz’s conclusions, is continuing to use the levers of government to carry out Trump’s overall corrupt project.

[...]

Even as Trump is getting impeached for using the power of his office to falsify the story of his corruption of our last election and to corrupt the next one, he’s still trying to accomplish both goals. And in Barr’s case, he’s cheerfully continuing to rely on the manipulation of the levers of government to do so.

  WaPo

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

Lisa Page speaks

Page, of course, is the former FBI lawyer whose text-message exchanges with agent Peter Strzok that belittled Donald Trump and expressed fear at his possible victory became international news. They were hijacked by Trump to fuel his “deep state” conspiracy.

[...]

I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11.

[...]

“I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” she says. “It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative. I decided to take my power back.”

She is also about to be back in the news cycle in a big way. On Dec. 9, the Justice Department inspector general report into Trump’s charges that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign will come out. Leaked press accounts indicate the report will exonerate Page of the allegation that she acted unprofessionally or showed bias against Trump.

[...]

She said she wouldn’t discuss the findings until they were officially public, but she did note: “While it would be nice to have the IG confirm publicly that my personal opinions had absolutely no bearing on the course of the Russia investigations, I don’t kid myself that the fact will matter very much for a lot of people. The president has a very loud megaphone.”

  Daily Beast

Yeah, that will get her some new nasty tweets from Trump.

“It’s like being punched in the gut. My heart drops to my stomach when I realize he has tweeted about me again. The president of the United States is calling me names to the entire world. He’s demeaning me and my career. It’s sickening.”

“But it’s also very intimidating because he’s still the president of the United States. And when the president accuses you of treason by name, despite the fact that I know there’s no fathomable way that I have committed any crime at all, let alone treason, he’s still somebody in a position to actually do something about that. To try to further destroy my life. It never goes away or stops, even when he’s not publicly attacking me.”

[...]

“There are two things that happen in the late summer of 2016,” Page says. “The first, of course, is that the FBI gets the predication [courtesy of loose-lipped George Papadopoulos], which starts the Russian investigation. We learn about the possibility that there’s someone on the Trump campaign coordinating with the Russian government in the release of emails, which will damage the Clinton campaign.”

“Predication” sounds mild for what it really means; in the summer of 2016, the FBI and the intelligence community were seeing increasing signs from a variety of intelligence sources and programs (that Page cannot and will not discuss due to classification reasons) that members of the Trump campaign were tied to a variety of Russian intelligence services, and that the Russian Federation was in the midst of trying to manipulate the 2016 United States election with a sweeping information-warfare and propaganda effort.

[...]

At the end of July 2016, Page finds herself transitioning from one investigation, the Hillary Clinton email inquiry, to another, the Russian government disinformation probe. Trump is not under investigation, but the FBI is trying to determine if someone associated with his campaign is working with Russia.

“We were very deliberate and conservative about who we first opened on because we recognized how sensitive a situation it was,” Page says. “So the prospect that we were spying on the campaign or even investigating candidate Trump himself is just false. That’s not what we were doing.”

[...]

Page would have probably just been another FBI lawyer if it wasn’t for the extraordinarily politicized environment and a president who had a habit of attacking career government employees. Page, like many other targets of Trump’s wrath, felt the pressure both from the external force of his massive social media presence, but also from within the government.

“At the end of July in 2017, I am informed by the DOJ Inspector General's Office that I’m under investigation for political text messages and honestly, I have no idea what they’re talking about,” she told me. “I have no recollection. And initially they’re very coy about it. They don’t tell me much about it. I don’t have the first clue what they’re talking about. What I do know is that my text messages will reveal that I had previously had an affair. I’m overwhelmed by dread and embarrassment."

[...]

The few texts that so convulsed the Republicans involved Page asking for reassurance that Trump wouldn’t become president, and Strzok replying with “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”

[...]

She is convinced that she’s followed the rules. She is, after all, a lawyer and knows that she is a restricted employee under the Hatch Act and can’t engage in partisan political activity. “And I know I’m nowhere close to that,” she says. “I don’t engage in any sort of partisan politicking at all. But having an opinion and sharing that opinion publicly or privately with another person is squarely within the permissible bounds of the Hatch Act. It’s in the regs. Yeah, it says it plainly. I’m thinking, I know I’m a federal employee, but I retain my First Amendment rights. So I’m really not all that worried about it.”

[...]

Then in early December 2017, the day after [Gen. Mike] Flynn’s plea, a report comes out about Page being under investigation for political bias—and it includes the affair. The affair was not part of IG’s investigation and not part of their review.

[...]

The Inspector General’s Office had guaranteed Page and Strzok that the affair would not be made public. But then, The Washington Post included the affair in its story. And in a slip of a second, Page goes from being an anonymous government lawyer to playing an unwilling and recurring role in Trump’s twisted tweetstorms.

“So now I have to deal with the aftermath of having the most wrong thing I’ve ever done in my life become public,” she says. “And that’s when I become the source of the president’s personal mockery and insults. Because before this moment in time, there’s not a person outside of my small legal community who knows who I am or what I do.

[...]

“A week or two later, Rod Rosenstein [then the deputy attorney general] was scheduled to testify on the Hill. And the night before his testimony, the Justice Department spokesperson, Sarah Flores, calls the beat reporters into the Justice Department. This is late at night on a weekday. Calls them in to provide a cherry-picked selection of my text messages to review and report on in advance of Rod Rosenstein going to the Hill the next morning.”

Why does she think the administration released her text messages?

“You’d have to ask Sarah Flores,” she says. “I can tell you that the reporters there that night were told that they weren’t allowed to source them to the Justice Department, and that they weren’t allowed to copy or remove them, just take notes."

[...]

Sarah Isgur Flores has left the administration and referred questions to the Justice Department. The department declined to comment.

[...]

Ben Wittes wrote on the Lawfare blog, “Rosenstein here has, at a minimum, contributed to that circus—at the expense of his own employees. In throwing a career FBI agent and career FBI lawyer to the wolves by authorizing the release to the public of their private text messages—without any finding that they had done anything wrong—he once again sent a message to his workforce that he is not the sort of man with whom you want to share your foxhole.”

Page felt abandoned by the FBI and Justice because of the release of the messages and because the bureau issued no statement defending her and Strzok. “So things get worse,” she continues. “And of course, you know, those texts were selected for their political impact. They lack a lot of context. Many of them aren’t even about him or me. We’re not given an opportunity to provide any context. In a lot of those texts we were talking about other people like our family members or articles we had sent each other.”

[...]

[Page] left the FBI in May 2018 (which is why she says she is now free to talk to the press—she hasn’t worked for the government for 18 months).

Could she have stayed if she had wanted to? “No, not for much longer. It was very inhospitable.

[...]

"[I]t’s not over. It’s ongoing. It’s not a historical event that is being relived. It just keeps happening.

[...]

“I mean, he tweeted about me four days ago,” she told me on Nov. 18. “When Roger Stone got convicted, he asked, why isn’t Page in jail too? Not to mention, you know, his truly reprehensible, degrading stunt at his rally, in which he used my name to simulate an orgasm. And I don’t ever know when the president’s going to attack next. And when it happens, it can still sort of upend my day. You don’t really get used to it.”

[...]

One thing becomes quickly apparent talking to Page: What really upset her, what still devastates her, was not the end of her extremely promising career at the FBI, but instead what Trump has done to the FBI itself.

[...]

“The thing about the FBI that is so extraordinary is that it is made up of a group of men and women whose every instinct is to run toward the fight. It’s in the fiber of everybody there. It’s the lifeblood. So it’s particularly devastating to be betrayed by an organization I still care about so deeply. And it’s crushing to see the noble Justice Department, my Justice Department, the place I grew up in, feel like it’s abandoned its principles of truth and independence.”

[...]

[Page is] still married to her husband and they have two small children. Ultimately, she was just another public servant like Fiona Hill or Marie Yovanovitch. She was dragged into the spotlight, her text messages weaponized, and her life destroyed so that the Trump administration could have a brief distraction.

The era of Trump populism always had an ugly edge, particularly toward women. Trump revels in bringing misery to his opponents and will always seek out and exploit any weakness. Page “wasn’t nice to him,” and so in his eyes she can be endlessly targeted and assaulted.

It’s tempting to describe this as just part of Trump’s deep, baked-in misogyny and sociopathy, but in Page’s case it’s worse; it’s a sign of how deeply he’s corrupted the government to serve his will and his whims. His apologists have become part of Trump’s own squad of witch-hunters, hunting fantasies like “Ukrainian interference” while attacking the people who tried to protect us from Russian attacks.

UPDATE:

Judiciary Committee to get McGahn - maybe

Former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn must comply with a House subpoena, a federal court ruled Monday, finding that “no one is above the law” and that top presidential advisers cannot ignore congressional demands for information. The ruling raises the possibility that McGahn could be forced to testify as part of the impeachment inquiry.

U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of Washington found no basis for a White House claim that the former counsel is “absolutely immune from compelled congressional testimony.”

  WaPo

Aka: above the law.

The House Judiciary Committee went to court in August to enforce its subpoena of McGahn, whom lawmakers consider the “most important” witness in whether President Trump obstructed justice in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Trump blocked McGahn’s appearance, saying McGahn had cooperated with Mueller’s probe, was a key presidential adviser, and could not be forced to answer questions or turn over documents. Jackson disagreed, ruling that if McGahn wants to refuse to testify, such as by invoking executive privilege, he must do so in person and question by question.

[...]

The judge ordered McGahn to appear before the House committee and said her conclusion was “inescapable” because a subpoena demand is part of the legal system — not the political process — and “per the Constitution, no one is above the law.”

The president has yet to learn that, as he has yet to be held accountable for anything.

“However busy or essential a presidential aide might be, and whatever their proximity to sensitive domestic and national-security projects, the President does not have the power to excuse him or her from taking an action that the law requires,” Jackson wrote in a 118-page opinion. “Fifty years of say so within the Executive branch does not change that fundamental truth.”

And McGahn isn't even in the administration any longer.

William A. Burck, McGahn’s attorney, said Monday: “Don McGahn will comply with Judge Jackson’s decision unless it is stayed pending appeal. DOJ is handling this case, so you will need to ask them whether they intend to seek a stay.”

No, we don't need to ask. We already know.

After the ruling, the Justice Department, which represents McGahn, said it would appeal.

See?

Even if McGahn were to appear before the committee, but decline to answer in full or on some matters, his case sets up a potentially landmark Supreme Court test of the Constitution’s checks and balances, pitting Congress’s impeachment and oversight authority against the powers of the presidency.

With a court packed to be biased toward the executive.

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

The Senate trial

Senate Republicans are planning to use the trial to promote the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election, in collusion with Democrats. They will do this even though intelligence officials have privately warned those same Republicans that this has been a central trope in Russian disinformation efforts for years.

[...]

Indeed, there may be an easy way to show that Republicans privately possess extensive concrete information that undermines this theory — yet continue to push it anyway.

In an ugly preview of what’s to come, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) on Sunday brushed off our intelligence services’ hard conclusion that Russia sabotaged the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. “It could also be Ukraine,” Kennedy shrugged. “I’m not saying that I know one way or the other.”

[...]

The GOP-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has been running its own investigation into Russia’s attack on our political system for three years. The committee has already released the first two volumes of its findings, detailing efforts to infiltrate U.S. elections infrastructure and sow social discord with disinformation warfare.

But here’s something that has been overlooked: As part of this investigation, the committee has also been examining whether there was U.S. coordination with foreign interference — by the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns.

The committee’s findings on that front are currently in the beginning stages of getting written up into a report, a Democratic aide on the committee tells me.

And so, if Kennedy is uncertain about whether Ukraine, too, interfered in 2016, he should just ask his colleague who chairs the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, what he has found.

[...]

The central [Trump-Republican] theory here is that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic servers and that the FBI failed to investigate that crime. Trump’s own former homeland security adviser told him this is nonsense, but Trump nonetheless pressed Zelensky to make it true, and Trump’s propagandists regularly claim he had good reason to want this investigated.

Indeed, at Trump’s impeachment trial, Republican plan to use this story line to portray Trump as the “victim” of the “deep state,” the fake news media and Democrats, the New York Times reports.

The second way this theory serves Trump is that it purportedly absolves Russia of its role in sabotaging the 2016 election — and by extension the Trump campaign’s extensive efforts to coordinate with and benefit from it.

That’s why Russia has spent years pushing this theory, to “frame” Ukraine and protect its own ongoing electoral interference, which will continue in 2020, with Trump’s blessing. As the Times also reports, intelligence officials briefed GOP senators about the centrality of this theory to Russian propaganda.

[...]

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, recently dropped a tantalizing hint about what this has turned up, suggesting the committee was “wrapping up” this part of the investigation, and that it wouldn’t even “remotely” support various Trump narratives.

So it’s time for Republicans to put up or shut up: What did their investigation find?

[...]

The answer to this is likely to be: Nothing.

Indeed, every Republican on that committee may well already know this to be the case. If and when they echo the Trump narrative, they should be pressed on that point as well. And so should Burr.

  WaPo

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

All the president's lawyers

If we survive Trump and there are still things called museums around that display artifacts that present things called facts about historic events, I suspect John Dowd’s October 3 letter to the House Intelligence Committee will be displayed there, in all its Comic Sans glory.

In it, Dowd memorializes a conversation he had with HPSCI Investigation Counsel Nicholas Mitchell on September 30, before he was officially the lawyer for Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, now placed in writing because he had since officially become their lawyer. He describes that there is no way he and his clients can comply with an October 7 document request and even if he could — this is the key part — much of it would be covered by some kind of privilege.

  Emptywheel

"Attorney-client, attorney work product and other privileges."

Parnas and Fruman do work for Rudy Giuliani in the service of the President of the United States covered by privilege, Rudy does work for them covered by privilege, and they also do work for Joseph Di Genova and Victoria Toensing about this matter that is covered by privilege.

[...]

[During the Mueller investigation,] John Dowd, Jay Sekulow, and Rudy Giuliani offered things of value to the others in the JDA [Joint Defense Agreement] — pardons — in exchange for their silence or even lies. Conspicuously, Toensing represented two people that — the Mueller Report seems to suggest — weren’t entirely candid in their testimony, Erik Prince (who managed to lose texts that explained why he was taking back channel meetings with Russians) and Sam Clovis (who sustained his lack of memory of being told that Russians were offering emails long enough for George Papadopoulos to change his mind on that front). Papadopoulos even managed to call Marc Kasowitz, when he still represented the President, to ask if he also wanted to represent a coffee boy with an inclination to lie to the FBI. The strategy all built to its successful crescendo when, instead of cooperating with prosecutors as he signed up to do, Paul Manafort instead figured out what they did and didn’t know, lied to keep them confused, and reported it all back through his own attorney, Kevin Downing, and Rudy to the President.

[...]

And as details of Manafort’s lies came out, it became clear there was some kind of kick-back system to keep the lawyers paid.

Still, Mueller never tied Manafort’s trading of campaign strategy for considerations on Ukraine and payment by Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs to the President. And so it may have seemed sensible for Dowd, in a bit of a pinch, to adopt the same strategy, with Rudy representing everyone, Dowd representing the Ukrainian grifters, and Kevin Downing even filling in in a pinch.

It all might have worked, too, if Parnas and Fruman hadn’t gotten arrested before they managed to flee the country, headed for what seems to have been a planned meeting a day later with their sometime attorney Rudy Giuliani in Vienna, just one day after a lunch meeting with him at Trump Hotel across the street from the Department of Justice that was busy inking an indictment against the Ukrainians even as they paid money to Trump Organization for their meal.

I mean, it still could work. Trump is still the President and DOJ, at least, will give some consideration to the attorney-client claims, so long as Rudy and Trump can maintain the illusion that Rudy is and was really doing legal work for the President.

[...]

[But] by the time Dowd sent the letter, DiGenova and Toensing were on the record as representing Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who was named in some of the early search warrants targeting Paul Manafort. And in March, Rudy Giuliani went on the record to explain that Firtash was, “one of the close associates of [Semion] Mogilevich, who is the head of Russian organized crime, who is Putin’s best friend.” Yesterday, Reuters closed the circle, making it clear that Parnas and Fruman work for Firtash, the former as a translator for DiGenova and Toensing’s representation of Firtash.

[...]

Thus, when Dowd wrote Congress, explaining that Rudy worked for both Trump and the Ukrainian grifters, and the Ukrainian grifters worked for DiGenova and Toensing, he was asserting that the President is a participant in an ethical thicket of legal representation with a mob-linked Ukrainian oligarch fighting extradition (for bribery) to the United States. And all of that, Dowd helpfully made clear, related to this Ukraine scandal (otherwise he could not have invoked privilege for it).

In other words, the President’s former lawyer asserted to Congress that the President and his current lawyer are in some kind of JDA from hell with the Russian mob, almost certainly along with the President’s former campaign manager, who apparently gets consulted (via Kevin Downing) on these matters in prison.

If this land still goes by the rule of law - and I know that's a very big if - and if the Supreme Court doesn't go all in with the mobsters itself - Trump's going to be looking at some serious shit when he's out of office. I halfway expect him to make a deal at some point: freedom in return for leaving office.

The reason Rudy was emphasizing the mob ties of his current partner in crime lawyering, Dmitry Firtash, back in March is because the President’s former former lawyer, Michael Cohen, shared a lawyer at the time with Firtash, Lanny Davis. Davis, the Democratic version of Paul Manafort, is every bit as sleazy as him [...] .

[...]

John Dowd’s desperate attempt to make this scandal go away the same way he made the Russia scandal go away (if you pretend they’re not actually all the same scandal and thus even the past JDA strategy may end up failing) at the same time involved admitting, in a letter to Congress, that his former client and his then current not-yet-but-soon-to-be-indicted clients are in a Joint Defense Agreement with the Russian mob.

I didn't know Dowd made the Russia scandal go away. I thought Dowd quit when the heat got turned up.

At any rate, all this shit now happening must have been known to Mueller at least in some part. I still have to wonder about Mueller.

Judge Beryl Howell's comment in a ruling last week noted there were two witnesses Mueller didn't call before the Grand Jury, even though they would have been deeply involved: Junior and White House Counsel Don McGahn.

Did Mueller get cut off by Barr? That seems possible - maybe even likely. But what about all this other info about Trump's legal connections to the Russian mob?  Was he told to stay away from that?  It certainly seems more and more like he didn't do his job even beyond not stating a finding.



In a word: yes.  Still does.

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

Coming soon

Are we really too far gone to salvage our democracy?

This is so depressing, but it needs to be heard.

You're going to recognize more connections than you ever wanted to believe exist.  (For one: Listen for the name Robert Maxwell, which is recently in the news for another connection.)

Audio documentary: The Mueller Report

A series from Lawfare.

Episode 1: Active Measures
Episode 2: Hack, Dump, Divide
Episode 3: The Campaign and the Leaks
Episode 4: A Tale of Two Trump Towers

Also, there's a video documentary (currently streaming on Hulu) called "Active Measures" that covers a lot of the same information. Here's a trailer:

GOP talking points are loud, not necessarily revelatory

Supporters of President Donald Trump are seizing on newly released FBI reports to argue that the law enforcement agency had clear warnings within weeks after the election that the former British intelligence officer who authored a disputed dossier about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia was intent on preventing the real estate mogul from becoming president.

[...]

“These new Bruce Ohr FBI 302s show an unprecedented and irregular effort by the FBI, DOJ, and State Department to dig up dirt on President Trump using the conflicted Bruce Ohr, his wife, and the Clinton/DNC spies at Fusion GPS,” said Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, the conservative group who obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. “The FISA courts weren’t informed of this corrupted process when they were asked to approve and reapprove extraordinary spy warrants targeting President Trump.”

However, the first interview with Ohr — at least in the files released Thursday — was more than a month after the FBI asked a judge to approve surveillance on Page on October 21, 2016.

That application makes clear that the FBI was already dealing with Steele directly and includes a cautionary footnote disclosing that “a U.S.-based law firm” hired Fusion’s owner Glenn Simpson to conduct research on Trump. (Neither Steele, Simpson or Trump were mentioned by name.)

“The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign,” the application said.

  

While it's important to note that the FISA application was made before the Ohr interview, I would just like to point out that someone wanting to make sure Trump wasn't elected is NOT a bad thing. If the person passionate about that was aware of Trump's criminal money laundering activity and his usefulness as a Russian agent, one would HOPE that person would try to obtain evidence to prevent his election. It's never mentioned even by anti-Trumpers. If someone had tried to prevent Hitler from becoming Fuhrer, we would be celebrating that person.  In fact, we already do that in movies and stories about the people who even tried to assassinate Hitler.

Trump will be tweeting about this, and retweeting Trump fellator Tom Fitton, something he does regularly.

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

Mark your calendars