239

Ari Melber and Brit Hume think Carter Page is a modern day MLK

 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/james-comey-calls-clinton-dirt-tipster-joseph-mifsud-a-russian-agent

Like the Deplorable base who believe Papadopoulos’ fantasies that Mifsud worked for the State Department…

 

So another question for Mueller is if he agrees with Comey and if so why didn’t he state this in his report?

 

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/one-overlooked-incident-in-the-mueller-report-could-open-up-a-brand-new-line-of-inquiry-over-trumps-obstruction/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/03/here-are-seven-reasons-trump-should-be-impeached/?utm_term=.83830f14f9f5

Say it aint so Judge Sullivan

 

 

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/02/729131609/michael-wolff-defends-his-reporting-of-new-trump-tell-all

 

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/homeland-security-investigating-laptops-used-by-nc-poll-workers-in-2016-for-russian-hacking-report/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

 

https://twitter.com/TreasonHappens/status/1136086972919877634″McGurn obscures the difference between the government showing probable cause that someone is an agent of a foreign power and charging them as such”

As does Ari Melber

 

 

 

 

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/06/british-intel-did-not-spy-on-trump-campaign-at-obamas-behest-despite-the-presidents-claims-report/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

 

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/southern-california-businessman-comes-forward-as-manafort-familys-mysterious-1-million-lender/

 

 

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-knew-who-trump-was-but-elected-him-anyway-we-cant-impeach-him-for-that/2019/06/02/c803a294-83cf-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html?utm_term=.910a04572bff

 

 

BREAKING: Roger Stone Insists Russia Hacked the DNC

On the Fizzle and Boom in Friday’s Mike Flynn Friday Night News Dump

 

 

https://twitter.com/tcleveland4real/status/1121948397060198400

 

 

Currently at Pg 125

 

The Game of Telephone that Has Attorney General William Barr in a Lather

 

EmptyWheel’s deep skepticism and suspicion about the dossier.  

 

Christopher Steele Probably Saved Carter Page from Prosecution

“I leave. We go to a hotel room where Charles is saying, I’m going to take care of the hotel for the night. He’s like, Come in my room, and he hands me $10,000 in cash. And at the time, I was incredibly confused. I was intimidated. I didn’t know what really was going on, except that I started to feel that I was being set up. And just months before that, I saw that the FBI was really going after me for being some sort of agent of Israel. So it all started to make sense to me, that this potentially was a frame or entrapment of some nature. ”

After I leave him and I travel back to Greece, I’ve flown into Athens Airport probably 20 times in my life. This was the first time that there were about 20 dogs sniffing for money. And fortunately, they didn’t smell the money and I got out. I emailed him and I said, I want you to take your money back, because I really don’t know what this is all about and I’m not comfortable, something along those lines. And my money is in Greece, it’s in a safe or with my lawyers, and you’re free to come pick it up. Oh, I don’t want the money back. Mr. Meadows. What was the money for originally?”

Mr. Papadopoulos. It was supposed to be for some sort of government consulting that I really didn’t understand. That’s why I said, come take your money back, because I don’t know what you’re paying me for, and you paid me cash, $10,000 cash. I get to Greece. I tell him, take your money back. A couple days later I fly to Dulles and I’m arrested. And my understanding is the agents were looking for that money when they arrested me, and that’s — Mr. Meadows. And the money was in Greece? Mr. Papadopoulos. It’s — and it’s still in Greece. And I believe, I believe, I don’t have evidence about this, but I truly believe that those are marked bills. And there’s a reason I’ve kept that money safe, because I would certainly like to know if that money would potentially be part of some — an operation. I’m happy to share it with you and you can — or, you know

Mr. Meadows. Have you had any — have you had any contact with Mr. Tawil since then? Mr. Papadopoulos. Strangely enough, 2 days after I was sentenced, he was demanding his money back, after going a year without asking for it.

Pgs 121-123

Charles Tawil himself remembers this just a little bit differently:

 

The Coffee Boy claims that the FBI was keen to ‘get the money back’ but in fact:

Mr. Meadows. And they still do not have that money. Is that correct? It’s still in a safe. Mr. Papadopoulos. My understanding is that money is safely located right now in a safe in Greece, and I am more than happy to provide it to any — to the committee if — [Witness conferring with counsel.] Mr. Papadopoulos. And my counsel just has informed me that they let the special prosecutors know about the money and where it is, and the special counsel is fully aware of the situation with that money.

Pg. 124

Another question for MUeller:

Mr. Papadopoulos. Okay. My understanding is, with my former lawyers, the special counsel was interested in that money being part of some sort of forfeiture. But then they said that forfeiture is not applicable in this case. So I don’t — I really don’t know how it evolved, but I could try and get back to you on exactly how their stance on the money evolved.

 

 

Mr. Papadopoulos. Reading — reading Twitter and people saying that Azra in Turkish means pure and then Turk. So unless she has the name of pure Turk. I don’t know. Maybe that’s — those are common names in Turkey. I don’t know. But it just seems that it was probably a fake alias. Another beautiful young lady — you know, I had many young beautiful ladies coming into my life with Joseph Mifsud and now another professor. The professors liked to introduce me to young beautiful women. And we’re sitting there, and she didn’t strike me as a Cambridge associate at all. So right away, I was suspicious that there was something not right here. She — her English was very bad. She spoke with — I think she was a Turkish national, but she also might have been a dual American citizen. I’m not sure. And she took me to — out for drinks in London and was probing me a lot.

Pg. 98

Speaking of beautiful women he met through Mifsud there’s his wife Ms. Mangiante-Papadopoulos.

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/28/bannon-trump-organization-criminal-enterprise-comments-michael-wolff-book

 

 

Comey piece that’s welcome in a way but then it’s his own fault we’re here.

But wait, the conspiracy idea gets dumber. On Oct. 28, after agonizing deliberation over two terrible options, I concluded I had no choice but to inform Congress that we had reopened the Clinton email investigation. I judged that hiding that fact – after having told Congress repeatedly and under oath that the case was finished – would be worse than telling Congress the truth. It was a decision William Barr praised and Hillary Clinton blamed for her loss 11 days later. Strzok, alleged architect of the treasonous plot to stop Trump, drafted the letter I sent Congress.

And there’s still more to the dumbness of the conspiracy allegation. At the center of the alleged FBI “corruption” we hear so much about was the conclusion that Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to internal investigators about a disclosure to the press in late October 2016. McCabe was fired over it. And what was that disclosure? Some stop-Trump election-eve screed? No. McCabe authorized a disclosure that revealed the FBI was actively investigating the Clinton Foundation, a disclosure that was harmful to Clinton.

There is a reason the non-fringe media doesn’t spend much time on this “treason” and “corruption” business. The conspiracy theory makes no sense. The FBI wasn’t out to get Donald Trump. It also wasn’t out to get Hillary Clinton. It was out to do its best to investigate serious matters while walking through a vicious political minefield.

Well a lot of people actually were out to get Hillary Clinton…

https://www.greenwichtime.com/opinion/article/Lies-about-treason-and-coups-13901877.php

Pg. 113:

Then there’s a second encounter I have with the FBI, and they basically tell me — this is where it’s very — if Mifsud really was working with the FBI, this is incredibly problematic, because during my second meeting with the FBI agent, Curtis Heide, he tells me basically, we want you to wear a wire to go after Joseph Mifsud or to get some sort of information about him. I rejected it.”

The fact that this agent wanted him to wear a wire talking to Mifsud makes the idea Mifsud was in fact an FBI agent pretty dubious.

UPDATE:  Up to page 52 in Coffe Boy transcripts

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/james-comey-no-treason-no-coup-just-lies–and-dumb-lies-at-that/2019/05/28/45f8d802-8175-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html?utm_term=.901473b042f8

 

Pg. 47 Papadopoulos and Mark Meadows agree collusion is-bad. That’s a different view than Rudy and as EW says Roger Stone engaged in conduct Meadows defines as collusion.

Mr. Meadows. Do you think it would be appropriate to collude with the Russians to affect an election? Would that be appropriate?

Mr. Papadopoulos. Of course not. Mr. Meadows. Of course not. And so any narrative that is out there that you colluded with the Russians for an advantage in the election, is that false or? Mr. Papadopoulos. That’s false.

 

 

Pg. 48:

 

Mr. Papadopoulos. I had a friend — or I should say, an acquaintance of mine in Chicago, who was interviewed by the FBI shortly after I mentioned that they started this sweep after I told them, Yeah, I met with Downer. And he told me that they, the FBI presented surveillance photos of me to him, of us, I don’t know, going to a casino or just walking around. But he told me this. And his name is Jeffrey Wiseman. Mr. Meadows. So Jeffrey Wiseman actually saw photos of you actually, that they presented — the FBI presented to them photos of you in — where was this? In London? Mr. Papadopoulos. I never saw these photos, just to be clear. Mr. Meadows. Right

 

But Papdopoulous apparently spoke to another Jeff in Chicago-Jeff Wilson.

 

 

Mr. Meadows. And when would this — when would they have — these are not photos off of Facebook?

Mr. Papadopoulos. My understanding is they were surveillance photos. Mr. Meadows. All right.

 

Pg. 49.

Pg. 37:

Mr. Meadows. Here. Mr. Papadopoulos. Here, I’ll show you. And I told the special counsel this over a year ago. I’m sitting down within 5 or 6, 7 minutes of meeting this person, I’m talking and he goes like this to me, stone-faced, just holding his phone like this towards me.”

This is another question for Mueller as the Coffee Boy asserts he told all this to Mueller.

Pg. 36

What I’m going to tell you right now is what I remember telling special counsel directly to their face, too.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5781493/Papadopoulos-Transript-House-Judiciary.pdf

There’s a Discrepancy about When Papadopoulos Left the Trump Campaign

 

 

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/26/rashida-tlaib-house-democrats-impeachment-1345024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most Americans want to see Mueller, McGahn testify: poll

 

https://twitter.com/msfarmhand/status/1131376690360397826

Cohen needs to be careful about any more lying.

 

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/putin-out-prepared-trump-in-key-meeting-rex-tillerson-told-house-panel/2019/05/22/9523c60f-865d-4917-898b-cb32b922e93c_story.html?utm_term=.fec2e1ff9ef3

 

 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/anthonycormier/cohen-transcripts-trump-directed-lie-congress

 

 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/21/robert-mueller-testifying-russia-226932

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/secret-irs-memo-implies-the-administration-must-turn-over-trumps-taxes-unless-one-condition-is-met-report/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/21/robert-mueller-testifying-russia-226932

 

Telling the truth is ‘political?

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.axios.com/house-intel-votes-release-michael-cohens-closed-door-testimony-73ac45a1-a4a1-4344-ab44-de0b4ae286a9.html

 

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/michael-cohens-closed-door-testimony-was-just-unsealed-here-are-6-stunning-moments-from-the-hearings/?utm_source=push_notifications

 

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/us-judge-denies-trump-bid-to-quash-house-subpoena-for-years-of-financial-records/2019/05/20/74e45880-7b21-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html?utm_term=.61bd04c4d5c9

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/Budz442Bud/status/1130107102779912192

 

 

Did Mueller acquire Trump’s tax returns

https://medium.com/the-new-york-times/5-takeaways-from-10-years-of-trump-tax-figures-bb18c6758b7b

 

 

CF: Chapter A about Cohen receiving closed door testimony witness information from Devin Nune’s House

 

https://twitter.com/traciemac_Bmore/status/1129544453755219974

 

 

Mike Flynn’s “Cooperation” Did Not Extend to Remembering Bob Foresman’s Back Door Discussions

 

Donald Trump just gave Steve Bannon and Hope Hicks every motivation to publicly testify against him

 

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/444374-gop-mueller-critic-says-flynn-contacted-him-during-special-counsel

 

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/JerryDeDomenico/status/1129424538318639106

 

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1129381423952084993

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nadler-blasts-white-houses-unprecedented-refusal-to-hand-over-documents/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/judge-orders-public-release-of-what-michael-flynn-said-in-call-to-russian-ambassador/2019/05/16/1e68712a-7825-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html?utm_term=.73fe63c52331

 

 

https://twitter.com/qjurecic/status/1129148139850612736

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UPDATE 2.0: For more on Reince Priebus’s role as covered in the Mueller Report see here and here.

Even if Priebus resisted Trump’s demand to fire Jeff Sessions he’s hardly a hero in all this-as Mueller makes clear his aides would refuse to carry out some of his orders but carried out many others. Speaking of Sessions while he did at least recuse himself as the DOJ Ethics Counsel recommended he did many other foul things and directed his subordinates to lie about his knowledge of being under FBI investigation when he fired Andy McCabe. In fact the nice little unreconstructed segregationist from Alabama-the state that just banned abortion in contradiction to Roe v Wade-knew perfectly well he was under investigation when he fired McCabe 26 hours before the former Deputy FBI Director was eligible to receive his pension.

The real question for Mueller when he testifies-Adam Schiff tells us he’s certain that he will-is why he felt he didn’t have enough evidence that Sessions perjured himself-what would he have needed to show that he had? How did he attempt to and how many did he speak to in order to corroborate wether Sessions committed perjury? Just like in the case of Donald Jr and others, Mueller seemed to have had a very high if not impossible standard to establish Sessions’ pretty clear perjury.

In addition Mueller ought to be asked if he was aware that Sessions knew and lied about being under investigation when he fired McCabe?

 

Another question for Mueller: why wasn’t this story about Bannon trying to get the FBI to join #TeamTreasonTrump in the report?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/14/steve-bannon-white-house-fbi-trump-meeting?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

A good question: “It also raises questions about why the incident was not included in the report by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian influence during the 2016 election, which contained detailed allegations of the ways in which Trump sought to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the president and his campaign.”

A terrible answer if accurate:

McCabe’s potential legal problems could be one reason why several memos he wrote describing his interactions during the early days of the administration were not used extensively in Mueller’s report. Mueller cited two memos by McCabe on the events around Comey’s firing on 9 May 2017.”

McCabe was dismissed from the FBI after being accused of misleading internal justice department investigators in an unrelated investigation into a press leak. While McCabe has denied lying, that matter has reportedly been referred to federal prosecutors who may still decide to charge McCabe with a crime

It’s just very interesting the situational politics of ‘credibility’ work. Trump can lie 73% of the time and yet his statements-as well as Donald Jr’s and Paul Manafort’s are treated as credible enough for Mueller at least credible enough to take them seriously. Yet McCabe didn’t lie-at most he was ‘insufficiently candid’ and this means you discount everything he’s ever said in his life?

As for this assumption that the basis for McCabe being fired-26 hours before he was eligible to receive his pension-was unrelated to to the Russia investigation if you believe that I have a Trump U subscription to sell you.

He was presented in Mueller’s report as having tried to stop Trump from firing Comey.”

Did Mueller simply take Bannon’s comments at face value or was there any effort to independently verify them? If you believe the Guardian he refused to even attempt to corroborate McCabe for a politically motivated charge of ‘insufficient candor’ while on the other hand he took Bannon totally at his word without any attempt to independently verify his assertions.

McCabe said he learned a couple of days before Flynn resigned that a Trump loyalist on the National Security council had questioned McCabe’s “commitment to the Trump administration”.

A week later, McCabe wrote, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus “told me that I, personally, and the FBI as a whole, were ‘not being good partners’.”

 

 

Rick Gates’ Status Report Suggests Trump Will Be a Focus of Roger Stone’s Trial

 

 

 

 

 

UPDATE 6.0: Today the consensus is that somehow it has been disproved by the Mueller Report-though it actually hasn’t been. Mueller should-of course-be asked about it.

 

One very crucial question raised by Rachel Maddow is wether Bob Barr and Rod Rosenstein forced Mueller to end then. Remember after Barr took over a conservative pundit declared the investigation was over? The Dems also need to  ask Mueller that-they need to ask him a lot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/e/1/e16e2ac0-f084-4c88-901b-c2651d7149c3/5783E587D2BCC9B14868D0D71B6A232C.2019.05.08-jud-dems-to-chairman-graham-re-mueller-hearing-attachments-.pdf

 

 

Q&A on House-Justice Dept Showdown Over Release of Unredacted Mueller Report and Contempt of Congress

 

 

 

 

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/may/07/mueller-report-foia-exemptions/?utm_content=bufferb4ddc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

https://twitter.com/TwitterMoments/status/1125934448787066880

 

https://twitter.com/austinwriting/status/1125832548918149121

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/06/its-time-start-impeachment-hearings-today/?utm_term=.4bec9681e794

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1125762984121393152

 

Dems Mueller agree to hearing May 15

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/05/politics/mueller-testify-house-judiciary-committee/index.html?cid=web-alerts&nsid=97514058

 

To say he’s won is no understatement:

In no particular order:

1.

A. Why wasn’t Jerome Corsi charged. 

B. Isn’t the fact pattern of Roger Stone-Jerome Corsi-Wikileaks and the Trump campaign a clear case of coordination between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks-a cutout for the Russians?

2. Wasn’t Russia if you’re listening a call for the commission of a crime?

Why is the Trump campaign’s attempt-starting with Trump himself to acquire Clinton’s emails a crime?

Michael Flynn-Peter Smith search for Clinton’s deleted emails. Isn’t this a crime?

Adam Schiff’s comment that Smith is one area ‘we’ve been able to make good progress on.’m

3. Why weren’t Don Jr and Kushner charged?

Why was Jr allowed to avoid an interview? As you weren’t able to interview Jr how could you be so sure you can’t establish intent?

Is ignorance an excuse? As a layperson I’d always understood the opposite-that ignorance is not an excuse. Would a reasonable person really not know that taking oppo from the Russian government or representatives of the Russian government is a crime?

4.  Your report seems to strongly suspect that Papadopoulos spoke to the campaign about the incriminating emails from the Russians on Hillary Clinton that Mifsud told him about though you apparently don’t feel you established it.

Are you aware of Jason Wilson, a Chicago sports bar patron told the DailyBeast? He asserted that Papadopoulos actually told him that he had told Jeff Sessions about the emails.

So I wonder what level of corroboration you feel you need to establish he told the campaign. Because at this point we can count at least three pieces of evidence that Papadopoulos did so:

A. You elude to evidence he told Sam Clovis

B. John Mashburn told the Senate Intel Committee the same

C. Jason Wilson.

D. Beyond that it’s not an unfair logical inference. We have Papadopoulos telling high ranking officials in both the Greek and Australian governments yet we’re supposed to believe he withheld this from the campaign itself? It seems both simple logic and the facts dictate he did so. Yet you don’t feel it was adequately established?

What would it take to establish it?

5. Jared Kushner and Dimirtri Simes-who’s very close to Putin and offered Russian dirt on the Clintons. 

6. References:

A. Seth Abramson’s Olympian 480 tweet Twitter thread

B. Ryan Goodman’s great summation of all the different variations of collusion Mueller in fact did document.

C. Bob Bauer: Mueller’s faulty campaign law analysis

pecial Counsel Robert Mueller’s report contains several surprises, most famously in declining to determine whether the President committed obstruction of justice. The Special Counsel does, however, engage in an extensive discussion of the facts and the law on that and other issues within his remit. On the constitutional law issues, he confronts and methodically refutes the claim advanced by the President’s legal team that, in the exercise of Article II authority, corrupt motive is irrelevant.

So it is also a surprise that this approach—a careful assessment of the legal case—is not one Mueller also follows in addressing the campaign finance issues raised by Donald Trump and his campaign’s solicitation and acceptance of assistance from the Russian government. The Report treats the campaign finance issues almost cursorily—one could say, superficially— even to the point of failing to identify and address all the applicable law. The results are an unconvincing decision to decline any prosecutions, and a major question about the enforcement of this law in 2020 and beyond.

Second, the Report considers a range of authorities in describing the campaign finance laws, including the Federal Election Commission’s regulations and advisory opinions. However, this section of the analysis remarkably does not include a regulation that squarely prohibits campaigns from “substantially assisting” foreign nationals in any effort to expend funds to influence American elections. 52 U.S.§ 30121(h).

It’s not clear from the Report why it omits this rule, but the omission has the effect of significantly narrowing the analysis of the potential legal violation. It puts the entire weight of its decision on one specific offer of assistance from a foreign national, accepted by the campaign, resulting in the Trump Tower meeting between the senior campaign staff and a delegation from Russia. As a result, Mueller’s analysis fails to situate the Trump Tower meeting within the broader context of the Trump Campaign’s months-long bid for assistance from a Russian government eager to help the campaign win and actively working to do so.

So it was soon after the June 9 meeting that a Russian military front organization began releasing the DNC emails. Then after the U.S. intelligence agencies made an unprecedented public announcement on Oct. 7 tying WikiLeaks’ disclosures to “Russian-directed efforts,” candidate Trump began promoting WikiLeaks on the trail, “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” and using his massive Twitter platform to do the same.  Donald Trump Jr. appears to have tweeted a specific link to WikiLeaks’ documents upon the organization’s secret request. These repeated interactions and communications are what reasonably, on the law, could be construed to be the Trump Campaign’s “substantial assistance” to the Russians’ 2016 electoral intervention.”

Even in its highly circumscribed examination of the legal consequences of the Trump Tower meeting, the Mueller Report is bewilderingly self-limiting. The question it poses is whether, in the arrangement and then the conduct of the Trump Tower meeting, the Campaign illegally solicited and then received foreign national assistance. The Mueller Report concludes (1) that the assistance is difficult to value and (2) that the “senior representatives of the Trump Campaign” in the June 9 Trump Tower meeting might not have understood that they were running afoul of the law.

To reach these conclusions, the Report strains hard to give the law a highly constricted reading and the Campaign a magnanimous share of the benefit of the doubt on the facts.”

 

If anything, the factual setting in this case, including the Campaign’s dogged search for Clinton’s emails upon Trump’s repeated requests, shows how much they valued such “very high level and sensitive information” from the Kremlin. As Mueller acknowledges, the law appropriately takes into account in any valuation the significance of the information to the donee. The Trump Campaign could hardly have valued it more.

The Mueller Report then moves to the question of whether the prosecution would founder on the failure to show that the participants in the Trump Tower meeting “knowingly and willfully” broke the law in soliciting support from the Russian government. Mueller sees no evidence that, at the time of the meeting, the American participants were trying to hide their actions. Later, he concedes, they lied to prevent its public disclosure, but this may have reflected “an intention to avoid political consequences rather than any prior knowledge of illegality.”

Of course, the “political judgment” that Mueller imagines may have included a belief that disclosures would lead to legal as well as political trouble. Indeed even the political judgment could have had a legal dimension: that adverse public reaction could be influenced by the charge that the meeting with the Russians violated the law. Mueller inexplicably divorces the “political” from the “legal” motives at work in the substantive falsehoods later told about the meeting.”

Consciousness of guilt?

It is also unnecessary to speculate about the motive to escape legal exposure—from actions they took and statements they made around the time of the meeting, not just when the team drafted a cover story on Air Force a year later. According to the Report, in the meeting preceding the June 9 encounter with the Russians, “Manafort warned the group … they should be careful,” and that what he had in mind at least included legal concerns seems borne out by Don, Jr. testimony to Congress that he knew to seek legal counsel if the Russians did offer something valuable at the meeting. Moreover, Chris Christie wrote that the Campaign deliberately left its General Counsel Don McGahn out of the loop on the Trump Tower meeting because the lawyer “would never have allowed the meeting to occur.”

The Report then goes out of its way to minimize what the participants may have understood about the law. In Manafort’s case, Mueller acknowledges that he is “experienced with political campaigns,” but the Special Counsel’s “Office has not  developed evidence showing that he had relevant knowledge of these legal issues.” Again, the foreign spending ban is decades old, and this was Manafort’s fifth major presidential campaign. He could not have been unaware of the 1997 congressional hearings that dominated the headlines in inquiring into alleged foreign national support for the Clinton reelection campaign. Indeed, Manafort had worked as a senior advisor for Clinton’s opponent, Bob Dole, during that presidential campaign. On Mueller’s assessment of what constitutes “relevant knowledge” of the campaign finance laws on the part of seasoned political operatives, many in that class may now have reason to believe they’ve just been issued a “get out of jail free” card for any number of illegal activities

Terrible precedent

And Donald Trump Jr., who put the meeting together? He gets off the hook because the Russians did not offer a detailed preview of what “dirt” they had on Hillary Clinton, only references to damaging material, and he may have been uncertain that he was going to receive useful material. Mueller quotes the email in which Don, Jr. wrote to his intermediary in the negotiations with the Russians “If it’s what you say, I love it.” Mueller emphasizes the first clause as evidence of uncertainty.

It is strange for Mueller to assign much weight to this language.  Don, Jr. was sufficiently confident that the Russians would deliver valuable information that he welcomed them to the United States and assembled the senior campaign staff to hear them out. If someone calls me to ask if I would be interested in meeting them at a specific time and place to accept an envelope with a $1000 in it, I might reply—“if you are offering me $1,000, I will be there”—and no one could reasonably read into this reply skepticism about the offer. When I showed up, my actions would end all doub

For reasons that are not clear, but perhaps reflecting some of the traditional uneasiness of prosecutors in charging violations of the federal campaign finance laws, the Mueller team passed on the option to bring an indictment for a foreign national spending violation in connection with the Russia-Trump campaign political alliance of 2016. Even if reluctant to charge individuals who arranged and attended the Trump Tower meeting, the prosecutors could have charged the Trump Campaign as an entity. Yet they also declined to pursue that route to legal enforcement.

Certainly the President’s lawyers were giddy, with Rudy Giuliani quickly spreading his message that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with soliciting or accepting information from a foreign government seeking to influence an American political campaign. Trump’s Attorney General appears willing to say only that if a foreign intelligence service, as opposed to a foreign government, offers dirt on an opponent, a campaign should contact the FBI. What Donald Trump and his legal team will now feel free to do in 2020 remains to be seen.”

D. Adam Schiff loaded to find financial connection between Trump and the Russians

E. The accuracy of the Steele Dossier post Mueller Report:

F.  Seth Abramons’s list of reading companions to Mueller Report

 

G. Ben Wittes analysis of the Mueller Report

The first notable thing about this section is that it very clearly lays out how Mueller understood and operationalized his jurisdiction—which was both quite limited and which Mueller largely did not seek to expand. This makes the Mueller investigation highly unusual in the history of special counsel investigations, which we normally think of as hoarding jurisdiction and as ever-expanding in their scope.”

When a Republican is being investigated suddenly everyone gets very conservative. Again was Mueller too conservative? If so why? Did Rosenstein limit him? Rosenstein had promised Trump he’d be treated ‘fairly’-in what ways did Rosenstein ensure that the investigation was fair? 

Mueller, by contrast, makes clear that his jurisdiction was narrow. It was defined by a series of orders and clarifications from Rod Rosenstein, the first of which defined three elements: (1) “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” (2) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation, and (3) “any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a)”—which covers efforts to obstruct special counsel investigations. To this basic mandate, Rosenstein later clarified two points in a separate letter: He made clear that it included allegations involving Carter Page, Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos in their possible “collusion” with Russia, and he made clear that it included as well allegations about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine and another corruption matter. Rosenstein later wrote an additional letter clarifying that the original order also applied to Michael Cohen, Richard Gates, Roger Stone and two other names that are redacted for privacy reasons.

Mueller has hewed closely to this original mandate. Unlike prior special counsel’s offices, as matters came to him that pushed the edges of his jurisdiction, he referred them to other Justice Department components. He also referred matters at the end of his investigation that were ongoing. A list of all of the referrals appears in Appendix D of the report, which lists 10 transfers of cases begun by the special counsel’s office and an additional 14 “referrals,” which Mueller describes as covering “evidence of potential criminal activity that was outside the scope of the Special Counsel’s jurisdiction.” These referrals are, with the exception of the Michael Cohen campaign finance matters and the Greg Craig Foreign Agents Registration Act matter, all redacted.

Call them children of the Mueller investigation—and keep a close eye on them.

Regarding the IRA social media active measures:

And while Trump and his people did not “collude” with the operation, they did fall for it. The investigation identified “multiple occasions” on which “members and surrogates of the Trump Campaign promoted … pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA” or engaged directly with IRA trolls. Mueller notes that the “investigation identified no similar connections between the IRA and the Clinton Campaign.” To some degree, no doubt, this was because the IRA message was hostile to Clinton and thus not something her people would want to engage. But no doubt the Trump folks were also particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation. While they weren’t active partners in this scheme, they were suckers”

But why were they particularly vulnerable? It’s fair to ask that even if they didn’t realize this was the Russians would them having knowing this made any difference? Considering what Rudy Giuliani is now saying, it’s reasonable to feel dubious.

And regarding social media what about Zamel and Nader? What about Brad Parscale?

If the active measures section of the report is exonerating of Trump and his campaign, the section that follows it—the Russian hacking section—is not. It is much worse than is commonly understood for Trump. Just how damning it is has gone somewhat unnoticed for, I think, four reasons. First, like the social media discussion, the hacking section to some degree tracks material already in a Mueller indictment—in this case, the GRU indictment—so what is new is woven in among already familiar material. Second, as with the IRA discussion, there is no ultimate decision to charge anyone on the U.S. side with participation in the hacking. Third, a key portion of this section is significantly impaired by redactions. And finally, the story Mueller is telling here is one that’s a little different from the one everyone was looking for. The result of these four factors in combination is that the full story Mueller presents has not quite come through.

So let’s tease it out, because it’s actually a whopper.

H. If Trump weren’t President he’d already be charged.

I. Trump initiated the 90 minute phone call with Putin-this fits a pattern like after he fired Comey. This refers to the question of wether Trump remains a counterintelligence threat to the country

Does Pelosi have Dems on the road to impeachment?

7. What do you say to those who argue every day regular people go to prison for far less evidence than folks like Don Jr and Kushner to say nothing of the ‘President?’

8. Just because you don’t establish a crime doesn’t mean there’s no evidence-but this is exactly the fallacy that Trump and Bill Barr have spun. Can you elaborate on why this is a fallacy?

Even if you weren’t able to establish conspiracy to commit computer crimes how much evidence did you find of it? Was it enough for preponderance would you say?”

As for the counterintelligence aspect-we have an answer as to what happened to it-it stayed at the FBI.

Because the Mueller investigation was born out of a counterintelligence investigation, there has been an enduring impression that it had both criminal and counterintelligence elements. I have assumed this myself at times. How these two very different missions integrated within the Mueller probe has been much discussed. This section of the report answers this question, and the answer is actually striking: The Mueller investigation was a criminal probe. Full stop.

It was not a counterintelligence probe. Mueller both says this directly in this section and also says what happened to the counterintelligence investigation. Here’s how Mueller describes his investigation: “The Special Counsel structured the investigation in view of his power and authority ‘to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions of any United States Attorney.’ 28 C.F.R, § 600.6. Like a U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Special Counsel’s Office considered a range of classified and unclassified information available to the FBI in the course of the Office’s Russia investigation, and the Office structured that work around evidence for possible use in prosecutions of federal crimes …” (emphasis added).

At the bottom of page 13, Mueller then answers the question of what happened to the counterintelligence components of the investigation. They stayed in the FBI:

From its inception, the Office recognized that its investigation could identify foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information relevant to the FBI’s broader national security mission. FBI personnel who assisted the Office established procedures to identify and convey such information to the FBI. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division met with the Office regularly for that purpose for most of the Office’s tenure. For more than the past year, the FBI also embedded personnel at the Office who did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but whose purpose was to review the results of the investigation and to send—in writing—summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to FBIHQ and FBI Field Offices. Those communications and other correspondence between the Office and the FBI contain information derived from the investigation, not all of which is contained in this Volume. This Volume is a summary. It contains, in the Office’s judgment, that information necessary to account for the Special Counsel’s prosecution and declination decisions and to describe the investigation’s main factual results.

In other words, the Mueller probe was a criminal probe only. It had embedded FBI personnel sending back to the FBI material germane to the FBI’s counterintelligence mission. But Mueller does not appear to have taken on any counterintelligence investigative function. And the report is purely an account through the lens of the criminal law. This partly, though only partly, explains why there is no classified information in the report, which contains no “portion markings” anywhere.

This point has a major analytical consequence for the entire way one reads the Mueller report: Don’t assume it answers counterintelligence questions. Where it concludes that someone didn’t engage in a conspiracy, don’t confuse that with answering the question of whether there is some counterintelligence risk associated with that person. Instead, read the report only as an account of the disposition of the criminal questions associated with L’Affaire Russe. But keep in mind the following question as well: If I were an FBI counterintelligence agent and I knew this material, how concerned would I be about the individual in question?

I will try to flag such questions as I go through the report.”

This is what Adam Schiff needs going forward.

9. Jeff Sessions-why wasn’t he charged?

And the thing is, these redactions are hiding not just innocent bystanders. Don Jr is someone whom Mueller believed broke the law — at least on campaign finance and maybe on CFAA when he accessed a non-public site using a password obtained from WikiLeaks (I had thought the redaction on page 179 was of some script kiddies investigated in Philadelphia, but now that I realize these PP redactions are not of peripheral people at all, I’m reconsidering) — but who couldn’t or shouldn’t be charged.

Compare his treatment with that of Jeff Sessions’ forgetfulness about meeting with Sergey Kislyak, which the report presents as a complete exoneration. The discussion of that exoneration is unredacted in both the investigative scope on page 12 and declinations section (197-198).

Mueller in his letter makes it clear he doesn’t consider that PP category peripheral people. Rather, he treats it as a declination decision.

Ryan Goodman:

First, although Kilimnik and Manafort shared the view that Trump’s support for the Ukraine “peace” plan would help it succeed, “[t]he investigation did not uncover evidence of Manafort’s passing along information about Ukrainian peace plans to the candidate or anyone else in the Campaign or the Administration.” That said, the Report then notes that the Special Counsel could not gain access to all of Manafort’s electronic communications, and that Manafort lied to the Special Counsel Office about the peace plan and his meetings with Kilimnik. Also, the Report states that Kilimnik continued “efforts to promote the peace plan to the Executive Branch (e.g., U.S. Department of State) into the summer of 2018.”

Second, the Special Counsel’s Office “did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2 meeting.”

Loose ends: The report states that the Special Counsel’s Office “could not reliably determine” Manafort’s purpose in sharing the internal polling data with Kilimnik (p. 30).

9. What about the August 2 Trump Tower meeting with George Nader setup by Erik Prince?

 

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