Trump 2.0 - capture the justice and investigative arms of government

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

Several top FBI executives promoted by former Director Christopher Wray were told Thursday to resign or retire and that they will be demoted or reassigned if they don’t leave.

The purge of senior officials includes about a half-dozen “executive assistant directors,” who are some of the bureau’s top managers overseeing criminal, national security and cyber investigations. They are career civil servants, meaning they can't be fired without cause.

  NBC

Apparently they can.

A current FBI official told NBC News that the move would be “hugely disruptive,” while a former official who is talking to people at the FBI said there’s a lot of anger because the affected employees aren’t considered political figures in any way.

That's why they're being removed.

Trump fired 18 inspectors general last week, including watchdogs for the State, Defense and Labor departments and the Department of Health and Human Services.

[...]

The Trump administration has also fired career attorneys at the Justice Department who were involved in prosecuting him, raising alarms over his making good on threats of retribution against those who have challenged his conduct.

UPDATE 08:42 pm:

So I assume he got shitcanned.  Also, that's not a look I would have expected to see on a Feeb.  He looks like someone named General Beauregard.

Yes, we ARE going back

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

UPDATE 12/12/2024:

UPDATE 12/13/2024:

I hope Chris Wray has a good protection detail

"With respect to former President Trump, there's some question about whether or not it's a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear," Wray said in response to a question from Chairman Jim Jordan asking whether the FBI has accounted for all bullets fired by the shooter. "It's conceivable, although as I sit here right now, I don't know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else. But I believe we've accounted for all the shots in the cartridges."

  ABC

In other words, it wasn't a bullet that hit Trump's ear.

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

Is Marjorie T Greene the dumbest person in the House?

Or does she just play one in Congress?

Sadly, this is what you get when you have gerrymandered districts providing safe seats in Congress.

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

Never believe the FBI is out to get Trump

I do wonder, however, if Trumpists in the FBI would at least start to sour on MAGA because of all the bad-mouthing they do about the FBI and their calls to defund it.

This is a long post, but the article is much longer.  If you want all the details, they're well laid out there.

[Michael R. Sherwin, then-acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and his] office, with the help of the FBI, was responsible for prosecuting all crimes stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. He had made headlines the day after by refusing to rule out the possibility that President Donald Trump himself could be culpable. “We are looking at all actors, not only the people who went into the building,” Sherwin said in response to a reporter’s question about Trump. “If the evidence fits the elements of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”

But according to a copy of the briefing document, absent from Sherwin’s 11-page presentation to Garland on March 11, 2021, was any reference to Trump or his advisers — those who did not go to the Capitol riot but orchestrated events that led to it.

A Washington Post investigation found that more than a year would pass before prosecutors and FBI agents jointly embarked on a formal probe of actions directed from the White House to try to steal the election.

[...]

[AG Merrick] Garland and the deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, charted a cautious course aimed at restoring public trust in the department.

[...]

In November 2022, after Trump announced he was again running for president, making him a potential 2024 rival to President Biden, Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

[...]

The effort to investigate Trump over classified records has had its own obstacles, including FBI agents who resisted raiding the former president’s home.

[...]

Whether a decision about Trump’s culpability for Jan. 6 could have come any earlier is unclear. The delays in examining that question began before Garland was even confirmed. Sherwin, senior Justice Department officials and Paul Abbate, the top deputy to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, quashed a plan by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office to directly investigate Trump associates for any links to the riot, deeming it premature. [...] Instead, they insisted on a methodical approach — focusing first on rioters and going up the ladder.

The strategy was embraced by Garland, Monaco and Wray. They remained committed to it even as evidence emerged of an organized, weeks-long effort by Trump and his advisers before Jan. 6 to pressure state leaders, Justice officials and Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.

In the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump supporters boasted publicly that they had submitted fake electors on his behalf, but the Justice Department declined to investigate the matter in February 2021. [...] The department did not actively probe the effort for nearly a year, and the FBI did not open an investigation of the electors scheme until April 2022.

[...]

For many months after the attack, prosecutors did not interview White House aides or other key witnesses [...] . In that time, communications were put at risk of being lost or deleted and memories left to fade.

[...]

William P. Barr had left his post as attorney general two weeks before the attack amid a growing rift with Trump. His successor, Jeffrey Rosen, held the office for less than a month, and Garland would not be sworn in until March 11. Biden’s pick to replace Sherwin as the U.S. attorney in D.C. would not take office for another 10 months.

At the FBI, Trump, over the previous year, had repeatedly threatened to fire Wray, 56, who had in turn tried to keep a low profile. [...] Since then, Wray and his team sought to avoid even an appearance of top-down influence by having local field offices run investigations and make day-to-day decisions. In fact, when it came to the Jan. 6 investigation, agents noticed that Wray did not travel the five blocks from FBI headquarters to the bureau’s Washington field office running the investigation for more than 21 months after the attack.

[...]

Two days after the Capitol attack, the FBI began announcing charges that were meant to send a message.

[...]

Beyond short written or video statements denouncing the Jan. 6 violence in general, however, neither Wray nor Rosen came out publicly to reinforce that message.

[...]

[A] group of prosecutors led by J.P. Cooney, the head of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. attorney’s office, argued that the existing structure of the probe overlooked a key investigative angle. They sought to open a new front, based partly on publicly available evidence, including from social media, that linked some extremists involved in the riot to people in Trump’s orbit — including Roger Stone, Trump’s longest-serving political adviser; Ali Alexander, an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot; and Alex Jones, the Infowars host.

[...]

In 2019, [Cooney] oversaw the team that convicted Stone on charges of witness tampering and lying to Congress. Cooney signed off on recommending a prison sentence of seven to nine years, but Barr pressed to cut it by more than half after Trump tweeted that it was “horrible and very unfair.” Trump later pardoned Stone.

[...]

In February 2021, Cooney took his proposal to investigate the ties with people in Trump’s orbit directly to a group of senior agents in the FBI’s public corruption division.

[...]

According to three people who either viewed or were briefed on Cooney’s plan, it called for a task force to embark on a wide-ranging effort, including seeking phone records for Stone, as well as Alexander. Cooney wanted investigators to follow the money — to trace who had financed the false claims of a stolen election and paid for the travel of rallygoers-turned-rioters. He was urging investigators to probe the connection between Stone and members of the Oath Keepers.

[...]

Cooney’s plan would have started agents looking from the top down as well, including directly investigating a senior Trump ally.

[...]

[A meeting was called with top deputies at the FBI, but] Cooney wasn’t there to defend his plan. [...] Cooney wanted membership rolls for Oath Keepers as well as groups that had obtained permits for rallies on Jan. 6, looking for possible links and witnesses. [Two officials at the meeting] saw those steps as treading on First Amendment-protected activities.

[...]

Some in the group also acknowledged the political risks. [...] Seeking the communications of a high-profile Trump ally such as Stone could trigger a social media post from Trump decrying yet another FBI investigation as a “witch hunt.” And what if the probe turned up nothing? Some were mindful, too, that investigating public figures demanded a high degree of confidence, because even a probe that finds no crime can unfairly impugn them.

[...]

In the U.S. attorney’s office, budding investigative work around the finances of Trump backers was halted, an internal record shows, including into Jones, who had boasted of paying a half-million dollars for the president’s Jan. 6 rally and claimed the White House had asked him to lead the march to the Capitol.

[...]

About the same time, attorneys at Main Justice declined another proposal that would have squarely focused prosecutors on documents that Trump used to pressure Pence not to certify the election for Biden.

[...]

The National Archives inspector general’s office asked the Justice Department’s election crimes branch to consider investigating the seemingly coordinated effort in swing states [to replace electors]. Citing its prosecutors’ discretion, the department told the Archives it would not pursue the topic.

[...]

“A decision was made early on to focus DOJ resources on the riot,” said one former Justice Department official familiar with the debates. “The notion of opening up on Trump and high-level political operatives was seen as fraught with peril."

[...]

Some prosecutors even had the impression that Trump had become a taboo topic at Main Justice. Colleagues responsible for preparing briefing materials and updates for Garland and Monaco were warned to focus on foot soldiers and to avoid mentioning Trump or his close allies.

[...]

By fall, some of Biden’s Justice Department nominees began to finally win Senate confirmation.

[...]

With that, 10 months after the attack on the Capitol, Garland finally had a permanent team of chief prosecutors in place to guide the investigation.

[...]

On Nov. 1, 2021, Matthew G. Olsen was sworn in as assistant attorney general for national security.

[...]

Olsen, 61, pressed to take on a role in the Jan. 6 casework, which had been led until then by the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office, according to people familiar with the offices at the time. He argued to senior Justice Department officials that an effort to block the peaceful transfer of power was squarely in the vein of what the national security division should be focused on.

[...]

Since then, with successive new indictments, the government’s evidence had grown stronger.

[...]

The bottom-up approach that had dominated nearly a year of the government’s time had not yielded any significant connection to Trump’s orbit.

“It had become clear that the odds were very low that ‘bottom-up’ was ever going to get very high,” said one of those individuals. “At some point, there was no ladder from here to there.”

[...]

At a meeting in November 2021, W[Thomas] indom asked [an assistant director, Steven] D’Antuono to assist in a grand jury investigation, which would include subpoenaing the Willard hotel for billing information from the time when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was working with Stephen K. Bannon, Boris Epshteyn and other Trump associates in their “war room.”

[...]

“I’m not serving subpoenas on the friggin’ Willard,” D’Antuono told Windom, according to a person familiar with their discussions. “You don’t have enough to issue subpoenas.”

[...]

D’Antuono offered instead to give Windom full access to the FBI’s trove of evidence about Oath Keeper and Proud Boy extremists involved in the riot. Maybe Windom would find a communication or financial link between rioters and Trump deputies, D’Antuono suggested. The two also briefly discussed fake electors,

[...]

In one of several examples, three former military generals warned in The Post that the country had to prepare for the next insurrection after not a single leader who incited the violence had been held to account, and they pressed the Justice Department to “show more urgency.”ut the FBI wasn’t ready to move forward on that topic either.

[...]

On Jan. 13, 2022, the department indicted Rhodes and 10 other Oath Keepers on charges of seditious conspiracy. It did not quiet the criticism, but instead put a spotlight on signs the Justice Department was not, in comparison with the House committee, working as actively to investigate Trump’s role in the attempted coup.

[...]

Behind the scenes, federal prosecutors in Michigan who received Nessel’s referral were waiting to hear from Monaco’s office about how Main Justice wanted to proceed. National Archives officials were dumbstruck; the Justice Department was suddenly interested in the fake electors evidence it had declined to pursue a year earlier.

One person directly familiar with the department’s new interest in the case said it felt as though the department was reacting to the House committee’s work as well as heightened media coverage and commentary. “Only after they were embarrassed did they start looking,” the person said.

[...]

Within a few weeks, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office were again in a meeting with D’Antuono. This time, they did not attempt to link the electors scheme to violence on Jan. 6 but presented it as worthy of its own investigation.

[...]

The process did not go quickly. Lawyers at the FBI and Justice Department launched into what became many weeks of debate over the justification for the investigation and how it should be worded; one time-consuming issue became whether to name Trump as a subject.

With the FBI investigation still not opened, late in March a federal judge presiding over a civil case made a startling ruling: Trump “more likely than not” committed federal crimes in trying to obstruct the congressional count of electoral college votes.

[...]

“More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability. … If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.”

In April 2022, more than 15 months after the attack, [FBI director Chris] Wray signed off on the authorization opening a criminal investigation into the fake electors plot.

Still, the FBI was tentative: Internally, some of the ex-president’s advisers and his reelection campaign were identified as the focus of the bureau’s probe, but not Trump.

[...]

Then, on Nov. 18, Garland abruptly summoned to Main Justice the D.C.-based prosecutors working on the Jan. 6 conspiracy as well as those who had already gathered extensive evidence of Trump concealing classified records at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The attorney general told them that to ensure the appearance of independence into the two probes of a potential Biden rival, he would appoint a special counsel later that day.

  WaPo

I remember at the time people were speculating that the FBI/DOJ likely had a secret investigation going into Trump. Apparently not.

A new chief prosecutor would typically need weeks or months to get up to speed on a high-priority investigation. But Smith issued subpoenas in the Jan. 6 probe after just four days, picking up where the U.S. attorney’s office had left off, seeking communications between officials in three swing states and Trump, his campaign, and 19 advisers and attorneys who had worked to keep him in power.

[...]

In several cases, before the special counsel’s office got in touch, witnesses in the fake electors scheme hadn’t heard from the FBI in almost a year and thought the case was dead. Similarly, firsthand witnesses to Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — in which Trump asked him to “find” enough votes to win that state — were not interviewed by the Justice Department until this year, after Smith’s team contacted them.

[...]

On Tuesday, as Trump pleaded not guilty to those charges in federal court in Miami, Smith’s investigation into efforts to steal the election continued: Michael McDonald and Jim DeGraffenreid, the chairman and vice chairman of the Nevada Republican Party who had signed a document claiming to be electors for Trump, entered the area of the D.C. federal courthouse where a grand jury has been meeting on cases related to Jan. 6.

And now, of course, it's too late to bring anything to trial before the 2024 election.

Judge Aileen Cannon set Donald Trump’s trial for hoarding 31 highly classified documents for August 14, 2023.

The trial won’t happen that quickly. This is, instead, an order stemming from Speedy Trial Act (and in any case, the trial would be set back a few weeks once Walt Nauta is arraigned, because barring a plea or other unforeseen developments, they will be tried together). Per the boilerplate, the two sides have to file Speedy Trial notices every 21 days from here on out.

  Empty Wheel

A lesser-known lawsuit against Trump got a boost

A federal judge has agreed to permit former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to take sworn testimony from former President Donald Trump for two hours as part of their long-running lawsuits related to Strzok’s firing in 2018 after Trump repeatedly and publicly pilloried the pair.

[...]

Strzok and Page contend that Trump and his Justice Department appointees were carrying out a political vendetta.

[...]

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Thursday that Strzok and Page — whose text messages disparaging then-candidate Trump cast a pall over the FBI’s investigation of links between the Trump campaign and Russia — would also be allowed to depose FBI Director Christopher Wray for a similar two-hour period on a limited set of topics.

[...]

Jackson’s order gave the Justice Department a month to “inform the Court whether the current President will invoke … executive privilege” over any aspects of Trump’s testimony.

  Politico

Let me guess....no.

[Jackson] also stressed that she had not yet considered all potential objections to the demands for testimony from Trump and Wray. That could include arguments by Trump that he has the unilateral right as a former president to assert executive privilege.

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

Chris Wray is still head of the FBI

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

FBI Director testifies regarding white supremacy in the US

[FBI director, Chris]Wray described white supremacist extremism as a “persistent, evolving threat” that has grown since he took over the FBI in 2017.

White supremacists make up “the biggest chunk of our domestic terrorism portfolio overall”, he said, adding that such people “have been responsible for the most lethal attacks over the last decade”.

[...]

In his opening statement, Wray said: “6 January was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a number of years now, and it’s not going away any time soon.”

[...]

"That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it’s behavior that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism,” Wray told the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday. He also said the bureau was pursuing about 2,000 domestic terrorism investigations, up from 1,400 at end of 2020.

[...]

Wray told senators the attack had “no place in our democracy, and tolerating it would make a mockery of our nation’s rule of law”.

[...]

The committee chairman, Dick Durbin, asked if the FBI believed the insurrection was carried out by “fake Trump protesters”. The Illinois Democrat’s question came two weeks after the Republican Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson amplified baseless claims that leftwing provocateurs carried out the Capitol attack. “We have not seen evidence of that at this stage,” Wray said. In answer to Patrick Leahy of Vermont, another Democrat, he said: “We have not to date seen any evidence of anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to antifa [antifascist groups] in connection with [6 January].”

  Guardian

Wray asked to investigate criminality of Trump phone call

Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) called on FBI Director Christopher Wray to open a criminal probe into President Trump after the release of a recording of his Saturday call demanding Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) “find” additional votes for him.

The two said that the substance of the call should trigger a full criminal investigation.

  The Hill

They're right. I don't imagine he'll do it, but you never know.

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

The second "perfect call"

We can safely surmise that Trump's Georgia call, along with his Ukraine call, are merely two instances of what have been four years of "perfect calls".

DRUDGE HEADLINE: “COMMANDER IN THIEF?”

CARL BERNSTEIN: “This was something far worse than Watergate.”

[...]

On Sunday, politics here switched from a national fascination to an international spectacle, courtesy of — surprise! — President Donald Trump, who was secretly recorded trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to throw out votes for an opponent and “find” votes for himself.

[...]

It started on Saturday when Trump and his team reached out to talk to Raffensperger, who, according to an adviser, felt he would be unethically pressured by the president. Raffensperger had been here before: In November he accused Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham of improperly exhorting him to meddle in the election to help Trump win Georgia.

[...]

So why not record the call with the president, Raffensperger’s advisers thought, if nothing else for fact-checking purposes. “This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one of them told Playbook. “So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”

  Politico

CREW is investigating Graham's election tampering.

Raffensperger’s team kept quiet about the call and the recording and waited. The president made the next move, claiming on Sunday morning via Twitter that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer” questions about his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. “Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true,” Raffensperger replied at 10:27 a.m. “The truth will come out.” It wasn’t an empty promise.

[...]

“This phone call is bad,” Georgia conservative commentator Erick Erickson said on Twitter. We asked him to expand on that, and here’s what he added: “I think the general worry is that the GOP early vote [in the Georgia runoffs] actually came on strong [late] and there’s a real worry that the president shows up tomorrow and messes it all up. The North Georgia GOP has to turn out on Election Day. They’ve lagged the whole state. The President goes to Dalton tomorrow to get them out and now people are worried he spends his time attacking the GA GOP … There is real nervousness.”

Erickson and other Republicans have been concerned since November that the president’s voter fraud rhetoric will dampen turnout, a fear intensified by far-right activists who’ve suggested that Trump voters not go to the polls unless Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue fight harder to somehow cancel Biden’s Georgia win. Trump’s handling of a coronavirus relief package and his vetoing of a defense bill is another concern: Congress overrode the vote, but Perdue and Loeffler skipped out so they weren’t crosswise with Trump.

[...]

“Look, voters aren’t paying attention to all this stuff, people like us are,” one Georgia Republican strategist who’s working to elect Loeffler and Perdue told Playbook. “But at a certain point, all these little things that don’t look like they matter could matter. I still feel OK. But this doesn’t help. The president needs to cut out the Leeroy Jenkins s---. Unfortunately, he won’t.”

[...]

WAPO’S DAN BALZ: “There are but 16 days left in President Trump’s term, but there is no doubt that he will use all of his remaining time in office to inflict as much damage as he can on democracy — with members of a now-divided Republican Party acting as enablers.”

[...]

Suffice to say it’s a bit alarming that 10 former defense secretaries felt the need to get this on the record in the WaPo: “As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, ‘there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.’ Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”

[...]

Late Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas announced he would not join a dozen of his Republican colleagues and object to the certification of electoral votes on Wednesday.

I wonder who said what to Cotton to get him to correct course. Maybe Paul Ryan's statement did it?

"Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden's victory strike at the foundation of our republic. It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans. The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American Democracy.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that it was unlikely his office would open an investigation into his weekend phone call with President Donald Trump, but suggested a criminal probe could still be launched by an Atlanta-area district attorney.

  Politico

I'd say both are unlikely, even though they should be done.

On Monday, Raffensperger declined to say whether he personally found Trump’s requests in their conversation to be lawful.

“I’m not a lawyer. All I know is that we’re going to follow the law, follow the process,” he said. “Truth matters. And we’ve been fighting these rumors for the last two months.”

[...]

Because Trump personally spoke with Raffensperger on Saturday and recently had a conversation with the chief investigator in the secretary of state’s office, Raffensperger told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview Monday morning that “there may be a conflict of interest" that would inhibit any potential investigation.

Not unless Georgia's AG isn't independent of the secretary's office.

Raffensperger went on to say: “I understand that the Fulton County District Attorney wants to look at it. Maybe that’s the appropriate venue for it to go.”

Good enough. No pardon is possible for Trump for any crimes committed against the state of Georgia.

Trump asked that officials determine that ballots were shredded in Fulton County and that Dominion election machinery was removed or tampered with. He also suggested Raffensperger could be guilty of a “criminal offense” by knowing about alleged election interference and not reporting it.

In fact, it is the president who may have opened himself up to legal liability in the phone call, potentially violating federal and state statutes intended to guard against the solicitation of election fraud.

[...]

And despite the Times’ reporting that the White House switchboard had made 18 other calls to the secretary’s office over the past two months, Raffensperger maintained that he had never spoken to Trump prior to Saturday.

“No, I never believed it was appropriate to speak to the president. But he pushed out — I guess he had his staff push us. They wanted to call,” Raffensperger said.

[...]

Although “I just preferred not to talk to someone when we’re in litigation,” Raffensperger continued, “we took the call, and we had a conversation.”

Perhaps we should be glad he did. But Trump's team is claiming the taping of the conversation violates rules on litigation discussions.

Even Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a staunch Trump ally who plans to join a group of at least 12 Republican senators in challenging Biden’s Electoral College win, offered a negative assessment of the president’s call on Monday.

“One of the things, I think, that everyone has said is that this call was not a helpful call,” she told Fox News.

Oooh, careful with such harsh criticism, Marsha.

On Capitol Hill, two House Democrats [Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.)] wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday morning, urging him to authorize a criminal investigation of Trump’s call with Raffensperger for potential violations of federal election fraud statutes.

[...]

The lawmakers also suggested that Trump violated Georgia laws against soliciting election fraud, and they said that if Wray agreed, he should formally refer the matter to the Georgia attorney general or a local district attorney.

At the very least. 

Also, I'm starting to wonder if Trump made that crazy call to deflect attention from the hacking of all those government agencies. That just dropped out of the news, and it could be the worst threat to national security in our history.

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

Chris Wray gets another black mark in Trump's enemies book

President Trump complained on Twitter Sunday night about the FBI investigating videos of a caravan of the president's supporters surrounding and harassing a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway Friday.

"In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!" the president tweeted.

Biden campaign officials say a caravan of vehicles displaying pro-Trump flags surrounded its bus on Interstate 35 in Texas Friday, yelling obscenities and trying to run it off the road.

The campaign official said they slowed the bus to about 20 mph and attempted to stop it in the middle of the highway. A video posted to Twitter showed a white truck hitting a car as it followed the Biden bus.

[...]

Trump previously posted video of the event on Saturday, writing: "I love Texas!"

He also told a rally in Michigan that "they were protecting [Biden’s] bus yesterday — because they are nice. They had hundreds of cars."

  The Hill

He can't be allowed a second term

The list of planned replacements is much longer, but these are Trump's priorities, starting with Wray.

Wray and Haspel are despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump's inner circle. He would have fired both already, one official said, if not for the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3.

  Axios

What has Haspel done to displease him?

"The view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field," one source with direct knowledge of the internal conversations told Axios. "It's bred a lot of suspicion of her motives."

Trump is also increasingly frustrated with Haspel for opposing the declassification of documents that would help the Justice Department's Durham report.

"The view of Haspel in the West Wing." So, Ivanka and Jared don't like her.

Trump soured on Esper over the summer when the Defense secretary rebuffed the idea of sending active-duty military into the streets to deal with racial justice protests and distanced himself from the clearing of Lafayette Square for a photo op at St. John's church.

Trump indicated to Axios then that he "really wasn't focused on" firing Esper. One senior official cautioned that others who want the Pentagon job could be driving speculation to undercut Esper.

[...]

Trump last week signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order "is a really big deal" that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials.

There could be shake-ups across other departments. The president has never been impressed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for example. But that doesn't carry the urgency of replacing Wray or Haspel.

Unhappy with Betsy DeVos???

While Trump has also privately vented about Attorney General Bill Barr, he hasn't made any formal plans to replace him, an official said.

I doubt if he could find anyone more subservient. Unless he plans to put all his family members in office. I saw recently that Tiffany Trump got her law degree.

Chris Liddell, Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy coordination, is heading the White House’s transition effort, including vetting potential new Cabinet officials, two White House officials told Axios.

He's working closely with White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Johnny McEntee, who runs the Office of Presidential Personnel and has been conducting "loyalty tests" to weed out "Never Trumpers" from the administration.

It was only a matter of time

Will Chris Wray make it to the end of the year?

President Trump on Thursday swiped at FBI Director Christopher Wray, taking issue with parts of his testimony to Congress about foreign election interference and the threat of extremists.

The president, while en route to a campaign rally in Wisconsin, tweeted out two separate portions of Wray's appearance on Capitol Hill earlier in the day. The tweets are likely to spur speculation about Wray's standing as head of the FBI, as Trump has frequently chastised the bureau and questioned Wray's leadership.

[...]

"We look at antifa as more of an ideology or a movement than an organization," Wray said.

"...And I look at them as a bunch of well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the Comey/Mueller inspired FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source, and allows them to get away with “murder”. LAW & ORDER!" Trump tweeted.

The president also took aim at Wray over his testimony that Russia has been "very active" in trying to influence November's election by sowing divisiveness and attempting to "denigrate" Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

"But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia," Trump tweeted. He repeated his claim that foreign actors will be able to interfere with mail ballots being sent to voters, something he has provided no evidence for and that experts say would be both highly unlikely and extremely difficult to pull off.

[...]

Trump has at times questioned Wray's leadership, including in an interview last month with Fox Business Network. He did not directly answer a question then about whether Wray should step down, saying he wished the director had been more "forthcoming" with him.

Trump appointed Wray to the job in 2017.

   The Hill

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

So...they WOULDN'T follow him off a cliff?

Trump’s Senate allies on Monday stopped short of echoing Trump’s claim that Obama acted illegally when the Justice Department began probing incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn in late 2016. And they indicated that the Senate would pass on investigating the former president as they conduct their own investigations that could soon ensnare other senior Obama administration officials.

“I’m not anticipating calling President Obama,” said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), whose panel is investigating the origins of the 2016 Russia investigation, even as he vowed to bring in former senior Obama administration officials as witnesses.

[...]

Senate Republicans [...] sidestepped questions of whether the Justice Department should pursue criminal investigations against the former Obama officials, instead deferring to the ongoing investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was tapped by Attorney General Williams Barr to probe the origins of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.

[...]

Trump allies have honed in, in particular, on a Jan. 5, 2017 meeting of the outgoing Obama national security team during which the Russia investigation was a topic. Obama attended the meeting, along with then-Vice President Joe Biden and other senior intelligence and Justice Department officials. Flynn’s calls with Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak were a subject of the meeting, according to multiple accounts by participants shared with investigators.

[...]

Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), said new questions raised about the prosecution of Flynn should be put directly to Obama and Biden.

“Given all we know now about the fake foundation of the inquiry, it's time we ask: What did Obama and Biden know and when did they know it?” Grassley said Monday on the Senate floor.

But Grassley, too, stopped short of saying the Senate should use its powerful committees to investigate the former president, or that the Justice Department should go after Obama. Rather, he and other Senate Republicans simply agreed that Trump’s fury was justified.

[...]

Though many of them supported special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference while it was active, those same GOP senators have soured on the probe, citing recently released FBI documents that the president’s allies have said is evidence that holdover officials from the Obama administration sought to unfairly target high-level Trump associates like Flynn.

  Politico

They soured on it long before now. They soured on it when it laid out all of the Trump cabal's crimes, which is why Barr came out with a misleading statement about the Mueller report.

Those lawmakers have in particular directed their ire at FBI Director Christopher Wray, accusing him of not doing enough to “clean up” the agency after Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe were removed from their posts.

Trumpland is never at a loss for scapegoats.

Senate Republicans have also largely avoided the posture adopted by Trump’s closest House allies, who have echoed his demands that Obama himself, or his top aides, be targeted by investigators.

“Nobody more than me wants to see these people prosecuted,” Rep. Devin Nunes of California, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a radio appearance on KMJ when asked about senior Obama administration officials being held legally accountable for their role in the Flynn saga.

Is there anybody Nunes doesn't want to see prosecuted?

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

Removing obstacles to Trump 2020

Attorney General William Barr announced Monday that he would raise the threshold for opening counterintelligence probes into presidential campaigns after accusations that the investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign was flawed.

Now, investigations into presidential candidates will require the signature of the attorney general and the head of the FBI, Barr said in a news conference with FBI Director Christopher Wray.

  The Hill

And Barr won't sign off on any investigation into Trump's campaign.

Wray announced Friday that the FBI would toughen its procedures when asking to open electronic surveillance in certain cases.

Former Justice Department official David Kris has been nominated to help advise on proposed changes, but Trump criticized the selection, saying Kris has “zero credibility.”

Did Kris say something bad about Trump?

Taking a cue from a GOP ally, President Trump on Sunday attacked a former senior Justice Department official appointed by a federal judge to review the FBI’s proposed wiretap application reforms in the wake of a critical inspector general report.

“You can’t make this up! David Kris, a highly controversial former DOJ official, was just appointed by the FISA Court to oversee reforms to the FBI’s surveillance procedures. Zero credibility. THE SWAMP!” Trump tweeted.

In his tweet, Trump seemed to reference an interview between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and host Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” On the show, Nunes accused Kris of “defending dirty cops” and “accusing [Nunes] of federal crimes.”

  WaPo

Ah. He said something bad about Nunes.

“You can’t make it up,” Nunes said. “I guess we’re just going to have to abolish this whole FISA system at this point and try to build something new.”

So Trump actually parroted Nunes. You can't make it up.

Nunes’s ire at Kris was provoked by comments Kris made in blog posts after Nunes released a memo in 2018 alleging FBI and Justice Department abuses in seeking to wiretap Page as a suspected agent of the Russian government.

“The Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy,” Kris wrote on the blog Lawfare.

[...]

Kris also took issue with Nunes’s claim then that the FBI misled the court about Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was a source of information in the wiretap application and renewal requests. “Today we know that it was not true,” wrote Kris, who in the early 2000s was involved in creating new FBI rules to make national security wiretap applications more accurate.

Horowitz’s report, however, concluded that Steele’s information “played a central and essential role” in the decision to seek a wiretap on Page.

[...]

Kris is not shy about criticizing the government when he feels it is overstepping legal bounds. In 2006, he publicly rebuked the Bush administration over its legal justifications for warrantless domestic wiretapping.

[...]

The court’s presiding judge, James E. Boasberg, on Friday named Kris to help the court assess the steps the FBI has taken and plans to take to address the flaws exposed by Inspector General Michael Horowitz in his review last month of a wiretap application for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

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

Excerpts from Chris Wray's response to IG Michael Horowitz

[T]he FBI accepts the Report’s findings and embraces the need for thoughtful, meaningful remedial action. I have ordered more than 40 corrective steps to address the Report’s recommendations. Because our credibility and brand are central to fulfilling our mission, we are also making improvements beyond those recommended by the OIG. And where certain individuals have been referred by the OIG for review of their conduct, the FBI will not hesitate to take appropriate disciplinary action if warranted at the completion of the required procedures for disciplinary review.

[...]

Notably, many of the employees described in the report are no longer employed at the FBI.

[...]

First, we are modifying our processes under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), both for initial applications and renewals, to enhance accuracy and completeness.

[...]

Second, we undertook an extensive review of investigative activity based out of FBI Headquarters.

[...]

Third, we are making significant changes to how the FBI manages its Confidential Human Source (CHS) Program.

[...]

Fourth, I am establishing new protocols for the FBI’s participation in Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)-led counterintelligence transition briefings (i.e., strategic intelligence briefings) provided to presidential nominees.

[...]

Fifth, I am mandating a specialized, semiannual training requirement for FBI personnel at all levels who handle FISA and CHS matters.

[...]

Where protection of certain sensitive information is well-founded, I remain committed to upholding the laws and longstanding policies governing classification and public release. I am just as committed to the principle that possible embarrassment and chagrin to the FBI or its employees is not, and should never be, the basis of a decision not to divulge FBI information. The FBI has worked closely with the OIG and DOJ on the classification issues implicated by the Report. Our joint process with the OIG and DOJ has ensured all material facts could be presented in this Report, with redactions carefully limited and narrowly tailored to specific national security and operational concerns. I am grateful for the mutual assistance of the OIG and DOJ in responsible presentation of this extremely sensitive information.

Since becoming FBI Director in August 2017, I have emphasized to FBI agents, analysts, and staff the importance of doing things the right way, by the book. I am humbled to serve alongside these dedicated men and women, and I am confident that the actions we are taking will strengthen our historic institution, ensure that we continue to discharge our responsibilities objectively and free from political bias, and better position us to protect the American people against threats while upholding the Constitution.

  FBI

FBI Director Christopher Wray isn't long for that job

Also, IF his lardship was ever actually given the report, he didn't read it.  But at least he's learned not to disparage the entire agency.

Wray's written response to the report.

UPDATE:

Firing Chris Wray in 3..2..

FBI Director Wray speaks

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that while the US had not seen a "material impact on election infrastructure" from foreign adversaries in the recent midterm elections, foreign influence campaigns pitting Americans against each other on social media have continued "virtually unabated."

  CNN

It doesn't take foreign adversaries to get Americans to attack each other on social media.

Wray, speaking at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, said the FBI has been working closely with the social media companies to counter the threat, and that the cooperation had been a "great example of how the government and private sector can work together in a common defense."

He said the wider cyber threats facing the United States are "unlike anything we have had in our lifetimes," citing an uptick in threats from Russia, Iran, China and North Korea.

[...]

He fingered China, saying that when he became director, "The thing that most shocked me was the breath and the depth and the scale of the Chinese counterintelligence threat."

Hey, CNN? I'm pretty sure he didn't say "breath".

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