The Russian Connection 2

[onekidanddone]

Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit divisions over black political activism and Muslims

So glad I quit Facebook. 

Quote

The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African-American rights groups including Black Lives Matter and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.

The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to simultaneously send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics -- also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.

The nature and detail of these ads has troubled investigators at Facebook, on Capitol Hill and at the U.S. Justice Department, say people familiar with the advertisements who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share matters still under investigation.

The House and Senate Intelligence committees plan to begin reviewing the Facebook ads in coming weeks as they attempt to untangle the operation and other matters related to Russia’s bid to help elect Trump in 2016.

“Their aim was to sow chaos,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “In many cases, it was more about voter suppression rather than increasing turnout.”

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, said he hoped the public would be able to review the ad campaign.

“I think the American people should see a representative sample of these ads to see how cynical the Russian were using these ads to sow division within our society,” he said, noting that he had not yet seen the ads but had been briefed on them, including the ones mentioning “things like Black Lives Matter.”

The ads which Facebook found raise troubling questions for a social networking and advertising platform that reaches two billion people each month and offer a rare window into how Russian operatives carried out their information operations during an especially tumultuous period in U.S. politics.

Investigators at Facebook discovered the Russian ads in recent weeks, the company has said, after months of trying in vain to trace disinformation efforts back to Russia. The company has said it had identified at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts. Facebook has said this spending represented a tiny fraction of the political advertising on the platform for the 2016 campaign.

The previously-undisclosed ads suggest that Russian operatives worked off of evolving lists of racial, religious, political and economic themes. They used these to create pages, write posts and craft ads that would appear in user’s news feeds — with the apparent goal of appealing to one audience and alienating another. In some cases, the pages even tried to organize events.

“The idea of using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism is an old tactic. It’s not unique to the United States and it’s a global phenomenon,” said Malkia Cyril, a Black Lives Matter activist in Oakland, Calif. and the executive director for the Center for Media Justice. Social media companies “have a mandate to standup and take deep responsibility for how their platforms are being abused.”

Facebook declined to comment on the contents of the ads being turned over to congressional investigators, and pointed to a September 6 statement by Alex Stamos, the company’s chief security officer, who noted that the vast majority of the ads run by the 470 pages and accounts did not specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or any particular candidate.

“Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the idealogical spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights,” Stamos said at the time.

A Cold War tactic

Moscow’s interest in U.S. race relations date back decades.

In Soviet times, operatives didn’t have the option of using the Internet, so they spread their messages by taking out ads in newspapers, posting fliers and organizing meetings.

Much like the online ads discovered by Facebook, messages spread by Soviet-era operatives were meant to look as though they were written by bonafide political activists in the United States, thereby disguising the involvement of an adversarial foreign power.

Russian information operations didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After a lull in tensions, Russia’s spy agencies became more assertive under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, those services have updated their propaganda protocols to take advantage of new technologies and the proliferation of social media platforms.

“Is it a goal of the Kremlin to encourage discord in American society? The answer to that is yes,” said former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael A. McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “More generally, Putin has an idea that our society is imperfect, that our democracy is not better than his, so to see us in conflict on big social issues is in the Kremlin’s interests.”

Clinton Watts, part of a research team that was among the first to warn publicly of the Russian propaganda campaign during the 2016 election, said that identifying and exploiting existing social and cultural divisions are common Russian disinformation tactics dating back to the Cold War.

“We have seen them operating on both sides” said Watts, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI agent.

Targeting a zip code in Michigan

When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, no one could have anticipated the company would become an advertising juggernaut worth almost half a trillion dollars — the largest online advertising company in the world after Google. Roughly a third of the world’s population now log in monthly.

As Facebook’s user base rapidly expanded, it wrote the playbook for digital targeting in the smartphone era — and for the type of micro-targeting that has become critical to modern political campaigns.

The social network invested heavily in building highly-sophisticated automated advertising tools that could target specific groups of people who had expressed their preferences and interests on Facebook, from newlyweds who studied at Dartmouth College to hockey enthusiasts living in a particular zip code in Michigan.

The migration from traditional personal computers to smartphones and tablets also helped Facebook gain a major edge: The company pioneered techniques to help advertisers reach the same user on their desktop and mobile devices, leading Facebook to grow seven-fold in its value since it went public in 2012. Today, advertisers who want to target Facebook users by demographics or interests have tens of thousands of categories to choose from, and they are able to flood users with ads wherever they go on the Internet.

Unlike most websites, where ads appear alongside content, ads on Facebook have directly appeared in people’s newsfeeds since 2012. If users like a page, the administrators of that page can pay for ads and post content that will then appear in the cascade of information from publishers and friends that users see right away when they log onto Facebook.

Since the 2012 presidential election, Facebook has become an essential tool for political campaigns that wish to target potential voters. During the height of election season, political campaigns are among the largest advertisers on Facebook. Facebook has built a large sales staff of account executives, some of whom have backgrounds in politics, that are especially trained to assist campaigns in spreading their messages, increasing engagement, and getting immediate feedback on how they are performing.

The Trump campaign used these tools to great effect, while Clinton’s campaign preferred to rely on its own social media experts, according to people familiar with the campaigns.

Aiming at swing states

Since taking office, Putin has on occasion sought to spotlight racial tensions in the United States as a means of shaping perceptions of American society.

Putin injected himself in 2014 into the race debate after protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an African American, by a police officer who was white.

“Do you believe that everything is perfect now from the point of view of democracy in the United States?” Putin told CBS’s 60 Minutes. “If everything was perfect, there wouldn’t be the problem of Ferguson. There would be no abuse by the police. But our task is to see all these problems and respond properly.”

In addition to the ads described to The Post, Russian operatives used Facebook to promote anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim messages. Facebook has said that one-quarter of the ads bought by the Russian operatives identified so far were targeted to a particular geographic area.

While Facebook has downplayed the impact of the Russian ads on the election, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer for BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that focuses on Facebook ads, said that $100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

“$100,000 worth of very concentrated posts is very, very powerful,” he said. “When you have a really hot post, you often get this viral multiplier. So when you buy this one ad impression, you can get an extra 20- to 40-times multiplier because those people comment and share it.”

Watts, the Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow, has not seen the Facebook ads promised to Congress, but he and his team saw similar tactics playing out on Twitter and other platforms during the campaign.

Watts said such efforts appeared targeted especially heavily at mid-Western swing states such as Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democratic primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders had beaten Clinton. Watts said the disinformation pushed by the Russians includes messages designed to reinforce the idea that Sanders had been mistreated by the Democratic Party and that his supporters shouldn’t bother to vote during the general election in November.

“They were designed around hitting these fracture points, so they could see how they resonate and assess their effectiveness,” Watts said. “I call it reconnaissance by social media.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

CNN just ran this: "Exclusive: IRS shares information with special counsel in Russia probe"

Spoiler

Washington (CNN)The IRS is now sharing information with special counsel Robert Mueller about key Trump campaign officials, after the two entities clashed this summer over both the scope of the investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and a raid on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's home, people briefed on the matter tell CNN.

Part of the concern centered on the far-reaching and broad requests from Mueller's team. In the case of Manafort, Mueller's investigators are reaching back 11 years as they investigate possible tax and financial crimes, according to search warrant documents. Mueller is bound by a written order issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May which allows the special counsel to investigate "any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation."

After several months of being at odds, one source said, the IRS Criminal Investigation division is now sharing information about campaign associates, including Manafort and former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. The sharing happened after the two camps reached an agreement following consultation with officials at the Treasury Department.

CNN has learned the IRS Criminal Investigation agents had been working with the FBI to investigate Manafort since before the election in a similar probe that centered on possible money laundering and tax fraud issues, according to the sources. It's unclear if Flynn is now or was previously under investigation by the IRS. CNN has reported that Mueller's team is examining Flynn's payments from Turkey and Russia.

A former high-level Justice Department official says the information shared would include anything tax return-related such as real estate and banking records. The former official added the IRS is very restricted in what information it can share under Title 26 US Code and would normally need a specific grand jury subpoena in order to share tax returns with another agency.

The new information about the depth of IRS involvement renews questions surrounding the controversial issue of President Donald Trump's tax returns, which he refused to release during the campaign despite decades of precedent by presidential candidates.

It is not clear whether the special counsel has asked for or obtained Trump's tax returns. Sources say if Mueller's office does have Trump's returns, then Rosenstein, who oversees the probe, likely would have needed to sign off, given the sensitivity surrounding the matter.

Tension between the IRS and the special counsel played out behind the scenes of the high-profile raid on Manafort's Alexandria, Virginia, home this summer, according to multiple sources.

CNN has learned that the IRS did not participate in the July raid by FBI agents in part because of IRS objections that the search would interfere with the separate IRS investigation of Manafort, according to people briefed on the investigations.

The special counsel's office decided to proceed with the search on Manafort's home with only FBI agents carrying it out, the sources said.

The absence of IRS criminal investigations agents for the raid is unusual for a probe that centers on tax and financial matters. As CNN has previously reported, during the raid the FBI collected tax and other financial documents from Manafort's home, according to search warrant documents in the Manafort raid. The search warrant documents said the scope of the investigation includes possible crimes beginning January 1, 2006, a source told CNN.

Manafort has previously denied financial wrongdoing regarding his Ukraine-related payments, his bank accounts in offshore tax shelters and his various real estate transactions over the years.

The complications could continue in the event Mueller's team brings charges against Manafort and others under investigation. Mueller's team has warned Manafort that they are working to charge him with possible tax and financial crimes, sources previously told CNN, an indication the investigation could be in an advanced stage.

Flynn's lawyers have previously criticized media reports about his connection to the Russia investigation as peddling "unfounded allegations" and "outrageous claims." Flynn's lawyer declined to comment for this story. Manafort's lawyer didn't immediately comment for this story.

The IRS Criminal Investigation division and the special counsel's office declined to comment.

I heard something the other day that Robert Mueller won't be distracted by Agent Orange's twitter crap. His team is going to keep pushing forward, no matter what. I hope so.

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I heard something the other day that Robert Mueller won't be distracted by Agent Orange's twitter crap. His team is going to keep pushing forward, no matter what. I hope so.

Muller and his team are grownups and aren't distracted by shiny orange things. Trump is too stupid and totally self absorbed  to understand this. So Orange King Lear go on and keep up your NFL tantrum, it still won't save you.

[VixenToast]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Muller and his team are grownups and aren't distracted by shiny orange things. Trump is too stupid and totally self absorbed  to understand this. So Orange King Lear go on and keep up your NFL tantrum, it still won't save you.

Would Ivanka, Tiffany and the Dipshit Dunderboys be Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Albany? Would Barron be Cordelia? Damn. So many different combos to make.

[onekidanddone]

 

7 hours ago, VixenToast said:

Would Ivanka, Tiffany and the Dipshit Dunderboys be Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Albany? Would Barron be Cordelia? Damn. So many different combos to make.

I was thinking Tiffany and Barron could be Cordelia together and Ivanka and Thug one and Thug two  would be Goneril and Regan.

[GreyhoundFan]

Drip, drip, drip: "Trump’s company had more contact with Russia during campaign, according to documents turned over to investigators"

Spoiler

Associates of President Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer possibly traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the upper house of the Russian parliament, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light.

Cohen declined the invitation to the economic conference, citing the difficulty of attending so close to the GOP convention, according to people familiar with the matter. And Cohen rejected the Moscow building plan.

Nonetheless, the information about the interactions has been provided to congressional committees as well as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as they investigate whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election, according to people familiar with the inquiries who, like others cited in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the inquiry.

Details of the communications were turned over by the Trump Organization in August to the White House, defense lawyers and government investigators and described to The Washington Post.

Though there is no evidence that these Russia-related entreaties resulted in further action, the email communications about them show that Trump’s inner circle continued receiving requests from Russians deep into the presidential campaign.

After WikiLeaks began to publish emails from the Democratic National Committee that were widely believed to have been hacked at the direction of Moscow, Trump said on several occasions that he had no financial ties to Russia. In July 2016, he tweeted, “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.”

But the new disclosures add to an emerging picture in which Trump’s business and campaign were repeatedly contacted by Russians with interests in business and politics. Trump’s son, his son-in-law, his campaign chairman, low-level foreign policy advisers and, now, Cohen, one of his closest business confidants, all fielded such inquiries in the weeks before or after Trump accepted the nomination.

The documents also underscore the Trump company’s long-standing interest in doing business in Moscow.

In a statement Monday, Cohen stressed that he did not attend the economic forum. “I did not accept this invitation,” he said. “I have never been to Russia.”

Cohen has said he will cooperate with authorities.

Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organization, said in a statement that the newly disclosed Moscow proposal needed to be understood “in context.”

“Like any other international real estate brand, it is not uncommon for third party developers to submit proposals for potential real estate projects all over the world,” he said, adding that only a “very small percentage of these proposals are ever pursued.”

White House lawyer Ty Cobb declined to comment, saying he was not familiar with the documents.

The June 2016 email to Cohen about the economic conference came from Felix Sater, a Russian-born real estate developer and former Trump business associate. Sater encouraged Cohen to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, with Sater telling Cohen that he could be introduced to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, top financial leaders and perhaps Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence. At one point, Sater told Cohen that Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, could help arrange the discussions, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Robert Wolf, an attorney for Sater, declined to comment.

The correspondence included a formal invitation to the conference from the Russian leader of the event, according to people familiar with the Trump Organization documents. The invitation included a letter signed by a conference official designed to help Cohen get a visa from the Russian government.

The St. Petersburg forum is a premiere government-hosted economic conference held annually under Putin’s auspices. Business leaders from Russia and other countries convene in what is designed to allow high-level conversation similar to the international business conference held each year in Davos, Switzerland, and at the same time to show off Russian investment opportunities. Following Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in 2014, the Obama administration actively discouraged American businesses from attending the event.

Cohen, Sater and Trump had earlier in 2016 been working on a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The June 2016 email exchange did not directly address that Moscow tower plan, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

But Sater was eager to rekindle interest in the project, which had been canceled five months earlier, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

The project had begun in the fall of 2015, when Trump was competing for the GOP nomination. Trump signed a “letter of intent” in October 2015 to license his name to the Moscow developer working with Sater to construct what they hoped would be one of the tallest buildings in the world.

In January 2016, Cohen emailed Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, saying the project had stalled and asking for assistance in pushing it forward. Cohen has said he received no response from Peskov and canceled the deal shortly thereafter.

Peskov has said he received the email but did not reply. He said Sunday that he did not remember any discussions about Cohen attending the St. Petersburg economic forum. But he noted that the annual conference is designed to allow attendees to meet with government and business leaders.

“My job [is] to assist in that!” he wrote in a text message.

Cohen rebuffed the invitation, and the project was not restarted.

Sater, who emigrated from Russia to the United States as a youngster, served time in jail as a young man following a bar fight and then was convicted in 1998 for his role in a Mafia-linked stock fraud. He has also been hailed for cooperating in the past with Justice Department probes in undisclosed national security matters.

Sater has had a long relationship with Cohen, whom he knew in high school, and with Trump. A firm in which Sater played a principal role, Bayrock, partnered in building the Trump Soho tower in New York City. And Sater and Cohen met with a Ukrainian legislator in 2017 to discuss how to promote a Ukrainian peace plan to the new Trump White House team.

The newly disclosed documents show publicly for the first time that, in addition to Sater’s efforts, the Trump Organization fielded another inquiry for a Moscow project during the presidential campaign.

That proposal originated with Russian billionaire Sergei Gordeev, a Moscow real estate mogul who served through 2010 as a Russian legislator.

The discussions about working with Gordeev took place via email between Cohen and an international financier he had worked with in the past, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

A spokesman for Rtskhiladze, Melanie A. Bonvicino, confirmed the proposal for a Trump-branded residential development, saying a 13-page document with pictures was delivered in October 2015.

But, Bonvicino said, Cohen informed Rtskhiladze in 2015 that the Trump company could not pursue the project because it was already committed to another developer in Russia — a reference to the proposal being guided by Sater.

No letter of intent was ever signed, according to people familiar with the interaction. Cohen and Rtskhiladze “did not speak of the project again,” Bonvicino said.

A spokeswoman for Gordeev’s company said he had no comment.

Rtskhiladze has had a long-standing interest in working with Trump in the region and pursued a project to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, Georgia, overlooking the Black Sea. Trump traveled to Georgia in 2012 to promote the Batumi deal and was paid nearly $1 million in upfront cash, but the project was never built and was formally canceled by the Trump Organization in December as Trump prepared to take office.

In an interview in 2016, Rtskhiladze told The Post he was encouraging Trump to build a tower in Moscow.

“Everyone wants to build a magnificent tower,” Rtskhiladze said. “It’s challenging, but I think achievable, with that name.”

More contacts...

[GreyhoundFan]

A good article from Politico: "Robert Mueller has no comment"

Spoiler

Robert Mueller is rarely seen and almost never heard. He doesn’t frequent popular restaurants, appear on television or even issue statements. When he meets in person with President Donald Trump’s lawyers, he does not visit the White House where reporters might notice. He instead summons them to the conference rooms of his southwest Washington D.C. office, whose specific location is among his many well-guarded secrets.

In those meetings and others, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election strictly limits the number of outsiders who can attend. Militant about leaks, the former FBI director swears participants to a secrecy that they have honored to a remarkable degree. Reporters have long considered him among Washington’s toughest nuts to crack: “You’d be embarrassed to ask Bob Mueller for a leak,” said the veteran journalist Steven Brill, who has written extensively about media coverage of special counsels. “It’d be like asking him to watch a porn movie with you.”

Occasionally a savvy Washingtonian scores a chance sighting. When public relations professional Eddie Gonzalez saw the Russia investigator walking alone near Capitol Hill on a mid-September weekday afternoon, he suppressed an instinct to chase Mueller down for a selfie, he said. But a hotel restaurant worker did score a picture with him this spring, which her son posted on Twitter. Mueller grinned for that photo, slightly. But when a CNN crew chased him down a Senate hallway in June — “The president thinks it’s a ‘witch hunt.’ Is there any way you can respond to that?” — the poker-faced G-man just stared ahead and kept walking.

The moment illustrated the strange dynamic of Mueller’s mission. He is leading a highly secretive investigation into a president who publicly criticizes the probe on a regular basis. It also underscored what former colleagues, fellow prosecutors and people close to the investigation call Mueller’s calculated effort, in the face of a president who has contemplated his firing, to make himself as small a part of the story as possible.

Even within his own investigation, Mueller takes steps to remain offstage. He deploys members of his team of 16 lawyers to question grand jury witnesses. When he does take meetings, he regulates their attendees carefully. During four trips to Capitol Hill this summer, he met only with the top-ranking members of committees leading Congress’s three Russia probes. A small handful of staffers were allowed to join, according to two Congressional officials, who said Mueller instructed attendees not to disclose the substance of the meetings. There is no evidence that they have.

People who know Mueller say he has relied on the same head-down style through his four decades in law enforcement, and is fiercely determined to avoid compromising his investigation by exposure to charges of leaking or politicization—accusations some Trump allies have already leveled.

“I play it by the book and I tell anyone who works with me you better play it by the book,” the Washington lawyer Lanny Davis recalls Mueller, then FBI director, telling him in a conversation when Davis served on a federal oversight board.

Mueller has spoken just once in public as special counsel: a late May address at his granddaughter's graduation from a Massachusetts prep school, delivered just twelve days after his appointment, which made no mention of Trump or Russia.

Mueller’s style stands in contrast to that of his successor as FBI director, James Comey, who publicly discussed his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server on multiple occasions last year during the heat of the presidential campaign.

Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh met regularly with reporters and granted a long on-the-record interview with The New York Times in October 1987, less than a year into his tenure. “There is just so much curiosity about what we're doing,” Walsh told the newspaper. “If I don't answer questions, the only other alternative I see is worse.”

But Mueller has thus far followed the path of the last special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who didn’t say a word in public until almost two years after his December 2003 appointment, and then only to announce the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements as a result of the probe into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.

Appearances can be deceiving, however: Kenneth Starr investigated President Bill Clinton for four years before going on the record with Brill to discuss his work as independent counsel, then revealing several undisclosed conversations his office had with reporters. Starr’s chief spokesman was also prosecuted after falsely denying that he leaked to the Times.

Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, is a Justice Department criminal division veteran who spends much of his day refusing to answer questions. In recent weeks Carr has declined to comment on everything from the scope and progress of Mueller’s investigation to the reason why his office address — relocated this summer from a publicly disclosed site near FBI headquarters — is now a secret.

Frustrating as it may be to reporters, political insiders and news junkies desperate for insight into Mueller’s investigation, legal experts say Mueller is playing his cards exactly right.

“It’s not the role of the prosecutor to be making comments about an ongoing grand jury investigation. It’s inappropriate. It’s unwise. It’s inappropriate legally. It’s unethical,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor who served as deputy to Fitzgerald during the Plame investigation.

What’s more, Zeidenberg said, Mueller’s silence can help propel the investigation. “Keeping potential targets in the dark is a good thing,” he said.

Talking to the media in such a politically charged environment is also dangerous business, not just for a special counsel like Mueller—but for his subordinates as well.

Only one person was criminally prosecuted as a result of Starr’s probe: his own spokesman, Charles Bakaly. The cause was a January 1999 New York Times report that Starr believed he could indict a sitting president and attributed to “several associates of Starr.” Bakaly strongly denied that Starr’s office had leaked the story—but later admitted to assisting the Times reporter. (He was charged with lying in a sworn statement; a judge acquitted him.)

The episode may serve as a cautionary tale for Mueller: Clinton’s lawyers quickly filed a legal complaint about the Times story—one of several instances when the White House accused Starr of “illegal and partisan leaking.”

“There are consequences to all of this,” said Robert Ray, who succeeded Starr as the Clinton independent counsel, referring to the examples of both Comey and Bakaly. “If you speak out, boy I tell you, you’ve got to be real sure about what you’re doing and why. The default position to have is to have nothing to say.”

Mueller’s office says it follows Justice Department’s guidelines which prohibit comments on the “nature or progress” of a case beyond what has been publicly filed in court. “The Special Counsel’s Office has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct,” Carr told reporters in June.

Despite Trump’s public anger at Mueller’s investigation, his lawyers aren’t accusing the special counsel of foul play.

John Dowd, Trump’s lead outside attorney, said in an interview that he doesn’t think Mueller—whom he’s known for decades—talks to reporters, even on background.

“I don’t think Bob leaks at all,” Dowd said.

But some Trump allies see it differently.

Conservative legal activist Larry Klayman last month petitioned both the Justice Department and two federal judges to investigate what he calls “how new improper leaks are occurring nearly every single day from Mr. Mueller’s investigation.”

“You don’t get this level of detail on what’s going on in the investigation unless you’re leaking,” Klayman said in an interview.

“The leaks have to be coming from inside Mueller's team. So who’s leaking?” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the House impeachment against Clinton, asked on Fox News in July.

Others reject the premise that Mueller’s team is dishing on its work, noting that many of the stories about his probe could have come from people with whom he has interacted.

“I’ve seen almost nothing at all in any story in any newspaper that could not have come from somebody else,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Starr. “There’s very little evidence that this is Mueller—and if you read it closely in most instances it’s not.”

It’s a “dirty little secret” that defense attorneys can talk to reporters about any aspect of the investigation they’ve seen, said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who edits the blog Lawfare.

Some defense lawyers also speak on background with reporters, agreeing to provide quotes or information if it is attributed in a way that could point a finger back at prosecutors—or in this case, some suspect, at Mueller.

“Then [they] turn around and complain of prosecutorial leaking,” Wittes added—a tactic Starr’s office accused the Clinton White House of using during the Lewinsky investigation.

Rosenzweig noted that Mueller would be wise to avoid a war of words with Trump: “If you get into a public relations fight with the president the prosecutor loses,” he said.

But Rosenzwieg added there is little reason for Mueller to be defensive, noting that the attacks leveled against him so far seem to have done little damage.

“They haven’t gotten a lot of credibility and traction, so why waste time?” Rosenzweig said.

Mueller’s office declined to comment.

Of course, Newt has to be an asshole. Does he know how to be anything else?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Mueller Tasks an Adviser With Getting Ahead of Pre-Emptive Pardons"

Spoiler

U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a distinctly modern problem. The president, judging by his tweets, could try to pardon people in his circle even before prosecutors charge anyone with a crime.

Mueller’s all-star team of prosecutors, with expertise in money laundering and foreign bribery, has an answer to that. He’s Michael Dreeben, a bookish career government lawyer with more than 100 Supreme Court appearances under his belt.

Acting as Mueller’s top legal counsel, Dreeben has been researching past pardons and determining what, if any, limits exist, according to a person familiar with the matter. Dreeben’s broader brief is to make sure the special counsel’s prosecutorial moves are legally airtight. That could include anything from strategizing on novel interpretations of criminal law to making sure the recent search warrant on ex-campaign adviser Paul Manafort’s home would stand up to an appeal.

"He’s seen every criminal case of any consequence in the last 20 years," said Kathryn Ruemmler of Latham & Watkins LLP, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. "If you wanted to do a no-knock warrant, he’d be a great guy to consult with to determine if you were exposing yourself.”

Dreeben, 62, built that expertise over three decades as an appeals lawyer at the Justice Department. As a deputy solicitor general, he’s pored over prosecutors’ moves in more than a thousand federal criminal prosecutions and defended many of them from challenges all they way to the nation’s highest court.

Dreeben has begun working on legal issues as a counselor to Mueller but is also retaining some of his solicitor general work for the sake of continuity, according to Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office. Carr declined to elaborate on Dreeben’s work with Mueller or make Dreeben available for comment.

Pre-emptive pardons are a distinct possibility now that current and former Trump advisers are under Mueller’s scrutiny. Trump himself has tweeted that everyone agrees the U.S. president has “complete power to pardon." Some of those kinds of executive moves have been well studied, including Gerald Ford’s swift pardon of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton’s exoneration of fugitive financier Marc Rich. But the legal territory is largely uncharted over pardons of a president’s own campaign workers, family members or even himself -- and how prosecutors’ work would then be affected.

What Dreeben brings to the question, say those who know him, is a credibility that comes from parsing how criminal prosecutions have played out across the country. A balding and bearded New Jersey native with a slightly nasal delivery, he has a knack for building careful arguments and the eloquence in court to lay them out in well-reasoned paragraphs, said Miguel Estrada, a lawyer at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

His path wasn’t exactly direct. Dreeben intended to pursue an advanced degree in history at the University of Chicago before changing his mind and enrolling at Duke University School of Law, according to a profile of him last year in Law360. He studied at Duke under Sara Beale, who’d worked in the Solicitor General’s office and helped plant the idea of representing the U.S. in arguments before the country’s highest court.

Dreeben got his first shot in 1989. His opponent before the Supreme Court was another first-timer, a private practice lawyer named John Roberts.

Dreeben lost. But the moment left an impression on Roberts, now the court’s Chief Justice. After Dreeben made his 100th argument before the court last year, Roberts called him back to the lectern, recalling the decades-earlier meeting.

“You have consistently advocated positions on behalf of the United States in an exemplary manner,” Roberts said, extending the court’s appreciation for his “many years of advocacy and dedicated service.”

Dreeben had urged the court that day to uphold the conviction of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell on charges of public corruption. The Supreme Court ultimately overturned McDonnell’s conviction.

Dreeben’s reviews of how cases were built against McDonnell and others will be invaluable to Mueller. Appellate lawyers like Dreeben are stuck with decisions already made at the prosecutorial level, said Estrada, who worked in the Solicitor General’s office in the 1990s. But now, he added, Dreeben is in a position to troubleshoot problems before cases are filed.

“You have to argue what you’ve got, and the cake is already baked,” Estrada said. On Mueller’s team, by contrast, Dreeben “has the opportunity to measure the flour.”

Sounds like Dreeben is another ace. I certainly wouldn't want to go up against him.

[GreyhoundFan]

A good one from Jennifer Rubin: "Trump’s coverup now makes sense"

Spoiler

In response to the burgeoning Russia probe, President Trump bases his claim that it is all a “hoax” on two arguments, both of which we have come to see are flagrantly false.

First, Trump has promised he had no contact with Russians during the campaign. No business at all, he claims. We know that’s not true because the Trump Organization actively pursued a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow. We know that his son-in-law, his son and a top campaign aide met in Trump Tower with Russian officials. We recently learned that ex-campaign chairman Paul Manafort was offering private briefings for a Russian oligarch. (“Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions,” The Post reported. “Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.”) This strongly suggests that “Manafort’s willingness to profit from his prominent role alongside Trump … created a potential opening for Russian interests at the highest level of a U.S. presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the probe.”

The Post now reports on two more previously undisclosed contacts:

In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer possibly traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the upper house of the Russian parliament, these people said. The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light.

This is not a situation in which Trump or his son-in-law (who was obliged to revise a national security form to add foreign contacts) could have forgotten one or two brief social interchanges. What we see is a pattern of ongoing contacts between, on one hand, Trump’s personal representatives, relatives and campaign operatives and, on the other, Russian oligarchs and officials.

The second pillar holding up Trump’s contention that this is all a “hoax” is that Russia didn’t meddle on his behalf. That laughable assertion should have been dismissed out of hand when WikiLeaks released emails damaging to Hillary Clinton in the days leading up to election. The notion that Russia wasn’t out to help Trump has been further discredited with each revelation about the extent of Russian disinformation, which came not only in the form of attacks on Clinton but also in social media that mirrored Trump’s own efforts to spur racial animosity and play on white grievance. The Post reports:

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election.

The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists.

The type of campaign material spread by Russian operatives was remarkably Trump-like:

One such ad featured photographs of an armed black woman “dry firing” a rifle — pulling the trigger of the weapon without a bullet in the chamber — the people familiar with the investigation said.

Investigators believe the advertisement may have been designed to encourage African American militancy and, at the same time, to stoke fears within white communities, the people said. But the precise purpose of the ad remains unclear to investigators, the people said.

Another showed an image of Democrat Hillary Clinton behind what appeared to be prison bars.

In an election decided by less than 80,000 votes in three states, no one can say for sure that Russian propaganda didn’t put Trump over the top. Also recall that Trump benefited from the echoes of the disinformation once picked up in social media:

“Any American who knowingly or unknowingly clicked on a Russian news site may have been targeted through Facebook’s advertising systems to become an agent of influence — a potentially sympathetic American who could spread Russian propaganda with other Americans,” said Clinton Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Every successful click gives them more data that they can use to retarget. It feeds on itself and it speeds up the influence dramatically.”

Then with talk radio and Fox News eager to regurgitate the same conspiratorial and racist themes, the Russians got an enviable return on their investment.

In short, Trump through multiple avenues had ongoing contacts with Russians during the campaign, contacts which he, his aides and his relatives went to great pains to deny. Since the extent of Russian propaganda efforts (styled in ways to appeal to his supporters and smear Clinton) has come to light, Trump’s Russia connections have become an exceptionally inconvenient fact pattern. One can imagine why Trump was so agitated by an investigation that sought both to uncover his Russia connections and to examine his business dealings. That investigation was and remains a sword of Damocles hovering over his presidency.

I wonder if we'll ever know the whole story?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Furious Republicans are working hard to make Trump’s Russia scandal disappear"

Spoiler

The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a news conference on Wednesday afternoon to provide a “progress report” on its investigation into Russian sabotage of the 2016 election and possible Trump campaign collusion with it, CNN reports. According to the committee’s Republican chairman, Richard Burr of North Carolina, the presser is intended to brief the public on “the things we are either close to closing the book on or have closed the book on.”

But I have learned new details about why this presser is actually happening, and they do not exactly inspire confidence in the future of this investigation, or at least in how Republicans are going to handle it going forward.

According to a senior aide to a Democratic senator on the committee, the reason this presser is happening is that Burr had initially moved to issue an interim report on the progress made by the probe.

But Democrats on the committee balked at this, the aide tells me. They worried that releasing a report would be premature and that Burr’s desire to do so might be rooted in political pressure he is feeling to wrap up the probe faster.

So after Democrats objected, a compromise was reached to hold this presser instead.

The reason this is worrisome is that Republicans are turning up the volume on their efforts to scuttle the probes. In a good piece this morning, Politico reports that pro-Trump Republicans are angry with the GOP leadership for allegedly allowing these probes to get out of hand. Some Trump allies are even claiming that this is happening because the GOP leadership allegedly opposes Trump. As one put it: “Of course, the Republican leadership is behind these probes. The Republicans cannot get over the fact that Trump won and is our president.”

Remarkably, these Trump-allied Republicans are explicitly asserting that GOP leaders are betraying Trump by failing to squelch ongoing efforts to get to the bottom of a hostile foreign power’s apparent sabotage of our democracy, in addition to the possibility of Trump campaign collusion with it. These probes are also designed to establish whether there was Russian interference, and if so, how it happened.

Yet with Trump himself regularly dismissing the entire Russia story as a hoax, his allies are now openly demanding that GOP leaders work harder to derail the probes and casting any failure to do so as part of a secret GOP plot to destroy Trump’s presidency. For instance, former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon recently suggested that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan “have allowed” these committees to continue “going after President Trump every day,” as if the proper response of GOP leaders is to close down the probes.

The notion that the GOP establishment is out to get Trump — and the companion claim that there is a meaningful ideological schism between them — is a fiction that has been concocted to explain away whatever goes wrong during the Trump presidency. It has been used to explain the failure of Trump to sign major legislation (never mind that Trump went all in with McConnell and Ryan on every failed Obamacare repeal bill and now is largely in sync with their push for huge tax cuts for the rich).

Now that fiction is being employed to explain why the Russia story keeps producing new revelations that continue to weaken the president. It appears that this may be creating new pressure on GOP leaders and Republicans on the relevant committees to wrap up their probes faster.

Indeed, Politico reports that in Burr’s home state of North Carolina, Republicans say a large segment of the grass roots sees these probes as a threat to Trump and don’t want them to be allowed to run their course. This might help explain why Burr wanted (as the Democrat aide told me above) to issue an interim report, though, to be fair, Burr appears to have taken a serious approach to his probe.

Today we will gain a clearer sense of where the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation is heading next. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Mark Warner (Va.), has said he expects the probe to continue into next year. CNN reports that today’s news conference will shed light on what the investigation has uncovered so far confirming Russian meddling, will “sound the alarm” about Trump’s continued dismissal of that meddling as a hoax and will discuss how we can protect future elections from sabotage.

And so, this probe and the others are pivotal to gaining the truth about what happened in 2016 and to future efforts to protect our democracy. But you can expect Trump allies to amplify their claims that the investigations are nothing but a witch hunt against our poor, unfairly persecuted president and to escalate their calls for GOP leaders to shut them down.

Update: Politico previously reported on the push for an interim report. What’s new here is that Dems balked, because they feared Burr was under pressure to wrap up the probe quickly, and that both sides compromised with this presser.

Update II: Rebecca Glover, a spokesperson for Senator Burr, emails this response: “Your opinion piece is not factual.”

...

 

[GrumpyGran]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Furious Republicans are working hard to make Trump’s Russia scandal disappear"

  Hide contents

The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a news conference on Wednesday afternoon to provide a “progress report” on its investigation into Russian sabotage of the 2016 election and possible Trump campaign collusion with it, CNN reports. According to the committee’s Republican chairman, Richard Burr of North Carolina, the presser is intended to brief the public on “the things we are either close to closing the book on or have closed the book on.”

But I have learned new details about why this presser is actually happening, and they do not exactly inspire confidence in the future of this investigation, or at least in how Republicans are going to handle it going forward.

According to a senior aide to a Democratic senator on the committee, the reason this presser is happening is that Burr had initially moved to issue an interim report on the progress made by the probe.

But Democrats on the committee balked at this, the aide tells me. They worried that releasing a report would be premature and that Burr’s desire to do so might be rooted in political pressure he is feeling to wrap up the probe faster.

So after Democrats objected, a compromise was reached to hold this presser instead.

The reason this is worrisome is that Republicans are turning up the volume on their efforts to scuttle the probes. In a good piece this morning, Politico reports that pro-Trump Republicans are angry with the GOP leadership for allegedly allowing these probes to get out of hand. Some Trump allies are even claiming that this is happening because the GOP leadership allegedly opposes Trump. As one put it: “Of course, the Republican leadership is behind these probes. The Republicans cannot get over the fact that Trump won and is our president.”

Remarkably, these Trump-allied Republicans are explicitly asserting that GOP leaders are betraying Trump by failing to squelch ongoing efforts to get to the bottom of a hostile foreign power’s apparent sabotage of our democracy, in addition to the possibility of Trump campaign collusion with it. These probes are also designed to establish whether there was Russian interference, and if so, how it happened.

Yet with Trump himself regularly dismissing the entire Russia story as a hoax, his allies are now openly demanding that GOP leaders work harder to derail the probes and casting any failure to do so as part of a secret GOP plot to destroy Trump’s presidency. For instance, former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon recently suggested that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan “have allowed” these committees to continue “going after President Trump every day,” as if the proper response of GOP leaders is to close down the probes.

The notion that the GOP establishment is out to get Trump — and the companion claim that there is a meaningful ideological schism between them — is a fiction that has been concocted to explain away whatever goes wrong during the Trump presidency. It has been used to explain the failure of Trump to sign major legislation (never mind that Trump went all in with McConnell and Ryan on every failed Obamacare repeal bill and now is largely in sync with their push for huge tax cuts for the rich).

Now that fiction is being employed to explain why the Russia story keeps producing new revelations that continue to weaken the president. It appears that this may be creating new pressure on GOP leaders and Republicans on the relevant committees to wrap up their probes faster.

Indeed, Politico reports that in Burr’s home state of North Carolina, Republicans say a large segment of the grass roots sees these probes as a threat to Trump and don’t want them to be allowed to run their course. This might help explain why Burr wanted (as the Democrat aide told me above) to issue an interim report, though, to be fair, Burr appears to have taken a serious approach to his probe.

Today we will gain a clearer sense of where the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation is heading next. The committee’s ranking Democrat, Mark Warner (Va.), has said he expects the probe to continue into next year. CNN reports that today’s news conference will shed light on what the investigation has uncovered so far confirming Russian meddling, will “sound the alarm” about Trump’s continued dismissal of that meddling as a hoax and will discuss how we can protect future elections from sabotage.

And so, this probe and the others are pivotal to gaining the truth about what happened in 2016 and to future efforts to protect our democracy. But you can expect Trump allies to amplify their claims that the investigations are nothing but a witch hunt against our poor, unfairly persecuted president and to escalate their calls for GOP leaders to shut them down.

Update: Politico previously reported on the push for an interim report. What’s new here is that Dems balked, because they feared Burr was under pressure to wrap up the probe quickly, and that both sides compromised with this presser.

Update II: Rebecca Glover, a spokesperson for Senator Burr, emails this response: “Your opinion piece is not factual.”

...

 

Ball-less GOPs, what a surprise. 

I think it's undeniable that Dumy's support is declining. The puppetmasters who use him are desperate to make this go away before it explodes. These spineless congressmen are going to pay for their cowardice. They will look clueless if we get to a point where massive corruption is discovered.

Even if that doesn't happen, the majority of Republicans and independents will not be happy that these slugs give the party away to lunatics.

Worse case scenario for them is that sometime in the next year Dumpy does something truly abhorrent and finally manages to piss off his crazies. Then they will look at the mainstream congressmen and scream "How could you let this happen?"

[fraurosena]

Did Russia Hack the 2016 Vote Tally? This Senator Says We Don’t Know for Sure

Spoiler

At a packed press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, provided a progress report on his panel’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. Naturally, this is a touchy and dicey matter for a Republican, and Burr tried to make some points that appeared designed to limit President Donald Trump’s political vulnerabilities on this front.

First, Burr declared that although Russian hackers had probed or penetrated the election systems of at least 21 states, he could confidently state that the Russian meddling in the 2016 election resulted in no changes to the vote tallies. That is, there’s no reason to question Trump’s Electoral College win. And second, Burr said that Russia’s use of Facebook ads during the presidential campaign seemed “indiscriminate” and not designed to help a particular candidate—meaning the recent revelations do not bolster the case that Trump was the Kremlin’s choice.

But Sen. Ron Wyden, (D-Ore.), a feisty member of the intelligence committee, says both assertions are bunk. In an interview with Mother Jones on Thursday, Wyden argued that Burr’s confidence in the election system was unwarranted. “The chairman said that he can say ‘certifiably’ that there was no vote tampering,” said Wyden. “I do not agree with this judgment. I don’t think it is possible to know that. There was no systematic analysis of the voting or forensic evaluations of the voting machines.”

Wyden pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security has noted that its assessment that there was no finagling with the vote count was made with only “moderate confidence.” For Wyden, that’s not good enough for such a sensitive and significant matter—and it sends the misguided signal that the voting system is doing just fine. Wyden believes that’s the wrong message. This week he sent a letter to the major manufacturers of voting machines demanding information about how they protect themselves from cyberattacks.

Wyden also said that Burr erred in declaring that the Russian Facebook ads—some of which targeted swing states—did not favor a presidential candidate. (Presumably Wyden has seen or been briefed on the content of the ads.) “That’s one reason why the ads need to be released to the American people,” Wyden remarked, “so Americans can make up their minds.”

At the press conference, Burr said the committee would not be releasing the ads, which Facebook has turned over to the panel. And Facebook so far has declined to make the ads public. Wyden and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, have called on Facebook to release the material. “If the ads don’t come out,” Wyden noted, “it’s within the power of the committee to get them out.” The Russian social media campaign targeting the 2016 election, Wyden said, “certainly hasn’t gotten the attention it should have.” And he noted it has been a focus of his efforts on the intelligence committee. The intelligence committee has scheduled a hearing with representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter for November 1.

Wyden worries that US elections remain vulnerable to interference from Russia and other adversaries. He emphasized that Trump has yet to nominate a secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, the lead federal agency that deals with protecting state voting systems from cyber assaults. Other key cybersecurity DHS positions remain vacant, as well. He said that at the moment just three or so states are taking significant steps to secure their voting systems from hackers. Wyden scoffed at Burr’s assertion that the Trump administration was treating the issue seriously. “The idea that Trump and DHS are full steam ahead on election security? No way!” Wyden exclaimed. “They certainly haven’t moved quickly on this.”

Wyden cited one example of an issue that requires deeper digging from the intelligence committee. When Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a White House adviser, met privately with committee investigators, Kushner released a statementdeclaring he had engaged in no wrongdoing. He insisted, “I did not collude…with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities.” Wyden pointed out the wording of the last part of this denial: I have not relied on Russian funds. “Some lawyer got paid a lot of money to come up with that,” Wyden said. “It doesn’t mean ‘I did not have business dealings with Russians.'”

Wyden added that Kushner should not be able to get away with only a private meeting with the committee instead of a full public hearing where he could be questioned by senators about this statement and many other topics. “Jared Kushner has to come to the intelligence committee in the open,” he said. (Wyden, the top Democratic on the Senate finance committee, has blocked the confirmation of a senior Treasury Department nominee because the department has not provided the finance committee with documents he requested related to Russian banking and money laundering. )

Wyden also took issue with Burr saying that it was not the intelligence committee’s role to probe Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey and that this matter should be left to the Senate judiciary committee. “I don’t agree with that,” Wyden said. “This is about connections with Russia.”

While Burr suggested that the intelligence committee might finish its investigative work regarding the Trump-Russia scandal by the end of the year, Wyden said the panel still had “a long way to go.” Wyden noted that the committee’s efforts to “follow the money” require much more work, and he hinted that the committee might not have enough people working on the investigation to do the job thoroughly. “The committee will need a lot of staff power to get all this done,” he said.

Sen. Wyden is telling it how it is. That's how you MAGA. 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Did Russia Hack the 2016 Vote Tally? This Senator Says We Don’t Know for Sure

  Reveal hidden contents

At a packed press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, provided a progress report on his panel’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. Naturally, this is a touchy and dicey matter for a Republican, and Burr tried to make some points that appeared designed to limit President Donald Trump’s political vulnerabilities on this front.

First, Burr declared that although Russian hackers had probed or penetrated the election systems of at least 21 states, he could confidently state that the Russian meddling in the 2016 election resulted in no changes to the vote tallies. That is, there’s no reason to question Trump’s Electoral College win. And second, Burr said that Russia’s use of Facebook ads during the presidential campaign seemed “indiscriminate” and not designed to help a particular candidate—meaning the recent revelations do not bolster the case that Trump was the Kremlin’s choice.

But Sen. Ron Wyden, (D-Ore.), a feisty member of the intelligence committee, says both assertions are bunk. In an interview with Mother Jones on Thursday, Wyden argued that Burr’s confidence in the election system was unwarranted. “The chairman said that he can say ‘certifiably’ that there was no vote tampering,” said Wyden. “I do not agree with this judgment. I don’t think it is possible to know that. There was no systematic analysis of the voting or forensic evaluations of the voting machines.”

Wyden pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security has noted that its assessment that there was no finagling with the vote count was made with only “moderate confidence.” For Wyden, that’s not good enough for such a sensitive and significant matter—and it sends the misguided signal that the voting system is doing just fine. Wyden believes that’s the wrong message. This week he sent a letter to the major manufacturers of voting machines demanding information about how they protect themselves from cyberattacks.

Wyden also said that Burr erred in declaring that the Russian Facebook ads—some of which targeted swing states—did not favor a presidential candidate. (Presumably Wyden has seen or been briefed on the content of the ads.) “That’s one reason why the ads need to be released to the American people,” Wyden remarked, “so Americans can make up their minds.”

At the press conference, Burr said the committee would not be releasing the ads, which Facebook has turned over to the panel. And Facebook so far has declined to make the ads public. Wyden and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, have called on Facebook to release the material. “If the ads don’t come out,” Wyden noted, “it’s within the power of the committee to get them out.” The Russian social media campaign targeting the 2016 election, Wyden said, “certainly hasn’t gotten the attention it should have.” And he noted it has been a focus of his efforts on the intelligence committee. The intelligence committee has scheduled a hearing with representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter for November 1.

Wyden worries that US elections remain vulnerable to interference from Russia and other adversaries. He emphasized that Trump has yet to nominate a secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, the lead federal agency that deals with protecting state voting systems from cyber assaults. Other key cybersecurity DHS positions remain vacant, as well. He said that at the moment just three or so states are taking significant steps to secure their voting systems from hackers. Wyden scoffed at Burr’s assertion that the Trump administration was treating the issue seriously. “The idea that Trump and DHS are full steam ahead on election security? No way!” Wyden exclaimed. “They certainly haven’t moved quickly on this.”

Wyden cited one example of an issue that requires deeper digging from the intelligence committee. When Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a White House adviser, met privately with committee investigators, Kushner released a statementdeclaring he had engaged in no wrongdoing. He insisted, “I did not collude…with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities.” Wyden pointed out the wording of the last part of this denial: I have not relied on Russian funds. “Some lawyer got paid a lot of money to come up with that,” Wyden said. “It doesn’t mean ‘I did not have business dealings with Russians.'”

Wyden added that Kushner should not be able to get away with only a private meeting with the committee instead of a full public hearing where he could be questioned by senators about this statement and many other topics. “Jared Kushner has to come to the intelligence committee in the open,” he said. (Wyden, the top Democratic on the Senate finance committee, has blocked the confirmation of a senior Treasury Department nominee because the department has not provided the finance committee with documents he requested related to Russian banking and money laundering. )

Wyden also took issue with Burr saying that it was not the intelligence committee’s role to probe Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey and that this matter should be left to the Senate judiciary committee. “I don’t agree with that,” Wyden said. “This is about connections with Russia.”

While Burr suggested that the intelligence committee might finish its investigative work regarding the Trump-Russia scandal by the end of the year, Wyden said the panel still had “a long way to go.” Wyden noted that the committee’s efforts to “follow the money” require much more work, and he hinted that the committee might not have enough people working on the investigation to do the job thoroughly. “The committee will need a lot of staff power to get all this done,” he said.

Sen. Wyden is telling it how it is. That's how you MAGA. 

Richard Burr: "Of course I was legitimately re-elected in 2016!"

[fraurosena]

Well, well, well... the presidunce's legal team has changed tactics. Instead of attacking and criticizing Mueller, which clearly wasn't working, they are now opting for cooperation in the hopes Mueller will declare that the presidunce is not under investigation.

Sounds like the tactic that was tried on Comey. Why would they think it will be successful this time around? 

Hoping to Have Trump Cleared, Legal Team Eases Resistance to Inquiry

Spoiler

White House officials once debated a scorched-earth strategy of publicly criticizing and undercutting Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to disrupt last year’s election. Now, President Trump’s lawyers are pursuing a different course: cooperating with the special counsel in the hope that Mr. Mueller will declare in the coming months that Mr. Trump is not a target of the Russia inquiry.

Mr. Trump has long sought such a public declaration. He fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, in May after Mr. Comey refused to say openly that Mr. Trump was not under investigation.

The president’s legal team is working swiftly to respond to requests from Mr. Mueller for emails, documents and memos, and will make White House officials available for interviews. Once Mr. Mueller has combed through the evidence, Mr. Trump’s lawyers plan to ask him to affirm that Mr. Trump is not under investigation, either for colluding with Russian operatives or for trying to obstruct justice.

More than a half dozen White House officials, witnesses and outside lawyers connected to the Russia inquiry have described the approach, which is as much a public relations strategy as a legal one. The president’s legal team aims to argue that the White House has nothing to hide, hoping to shift the burden to Mr. Mueller to move quickly to wrap up an investigation that has consumed the Trump administration’s first year.

“The White House believes the special counsel shares its interest in concluding this matter with all deliberate speed for the benefit of the country,” said Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer handling the response to Mr. Mueller’s investigation. He said the administration was cooperating “with hope of bringing the matter to a prompt and decisive end.”

Any public declaration by Mr. Mueller about the president’s innocence would also be a clear sign that the special counsel’s investigation has not broadened significantly beyond last year’s presidential campaign to include a close scrutiny of any of Mr. Trump’s past business dealings with Russians.

Whether the strategy will work is another matter. The plan rests on the premise that Mr. Trump has done nothing wrong — something the president has repeatedly told his lawyers and said publicly — and some lawyers connected to the investigation say that Mr. Cobb has been too willing to take the president at his word. If the White House moves too hastily, they argue, materials could end up in Mr. Mueller’s hands that might damage the president and other administration officials.

Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, previously expressed fears that the document production could set a bad precedent for future administrations. Mr. Cobb has told aides that the White House should move deliberately and carefully, but not drag its feet.

Others doubt that Mr. Mueller will publicly clear Mr. Trump anytime soon, even if the documents and interviews do not show that he committed a crime. Mr. Mueller is building cases against two of Mr. Trump’s former advisers, Paul J. Manafort and Michael T. Flynn. Should either man cooperate with investigators, it might change Mr. Mueller’s view of how Mr. Trump fits into the Russia investigation.

Nevertheless, the president’s advisers have concluded that this strategy represents their best chance to lift the cloud hanging over the administration.

“Good for them if they can pull it off,” said Barbara Van Gelder, a prominent Washington white-collar lawyer who served in the Justice Department with Mr. Mueller. She said he was highly unlikely to give the White House any assurances as long as the investigations into Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn were open.

“Mueller’s not going to make a statement,” she said, “because he’s not going to want to claw it back.”

Mr. Comey had similar concerns. While F.B.I. agents investigated whether Mr. Trump’s associates had any connection to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Comey privately told Mr. Trump and members of Congress that the president was not personally under investigation. At least twice, however, he refused requests by Mr. Trump to say so publicly. Mr. Comey later told Congress that he did not want to make a public declaration that he might have to amend after further investigation.

One administration official said it was not yet clear how the White House would make its request for Mr. Mueller to publicly exonerate Mr. Trump, and there have been delays in getting documents to the special counsel. The internal White House review of the documents is not yet complete, and Mr. Mueller does not plan to interview many key White House officials until his team has reviewed all the documents he requested.

Mr. Cobb and several White House lawyers have spent weeks reviewing documents related to numerous subjects, including Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey, and his role in July in drafting a misleading statement to The New York Times about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016.

Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors have indicated that they plan to ask detailed questions about that statement, written aboard Air Force One, which withheld the purpose of the June 2016 meeting: to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s efforts to help Mr. Trump.

Some of Mr. Trump’s associates remain suspicious of the special counsel and his team of aggressive prosecutors.

“While it would be good to clear the air on this entire issue so that the president can focus on governing, it presupposes that Mueller is an honest broker, and that he would not take nothing and make it into something, which would be my concern,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser.

Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, said the White House should challenge Mr. Mueller if he investigates anything beyond whether Mr. Trump or his associates colluded with the Russian campaign to disrupt the election.

But White House officials say they do not want a repeat of some of the tactics used in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton battled an independent counsel in court and in the media as the investigation dragged on for years. Since Mr. Cobb joined the White House, Mr. Trump’s team has significantly muted its criticism of Mr. Mueller.

One sign of the White House’s willingness to cooperate is that officials are strongly considering letting Mr. McGahn speak to investigators about his private conversations with Mr. Trump, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Many presidents insist that conversations with their White House counsel be kept secret under the principle of executive privilege, but Mr. McGahn is seen by some as a witness who could be helpful to Mr. Trump.

Mr. McGahn was involved in the discussions about firing Mr. Comey, and officials believe he would say that Mr. Trump was warned that firing Mr. Comey would only prolong the Russia investigation. Lawyers believe that would help make the case that Mr. Trump was not trying to obstruct justice when he fired the F.B.I. director.

Even as the White House pushes for a swift resolution of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry, administration officials are bracing for fallout from the investigations into Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn. Prosecutors have signaled that they intend to indict Mr. Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign, who is under scrutiny for tax and foreign lobbying matters.

But lawyers in the case say they see no evidence yet that Mr. Manafort will face charges of conspiring with Russia to disrupt the election.

The White House also hopes for a favorable report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating Russian election interference and several related matters. The committee’s leaders said this week that they planned to release a public report about their findings.

That report could be finished before Mr. Mueller’s investigation. Although committee leaders said they would leave any criminal matters to the Justice Department, a determination by the committee that none of Mr. Trump’s associates assisted the Russian campaign would be a boon for the White House even if Mr. Mueller refuses to publicly clear Mr. Trump.

“They want them to write a report saying ‘no collusion,’” said Ms. Van Gelder, the defense lawyer. “And then they can let Mueller twist in the wind.”

 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Well, well, well... the presidunce's legal team has changed tactics. Instead of attacking and criticizing Mueller, which clearly wasn't working, they are now opting for cooperation in the hopes Mueller will declare that the presidunce is not under investigation.

Sounds like the tactic that was tried on Comey. Why would they think it will be successful this time around? 

Hoping to Have Trump Cleared, Legal Team Eases Resistance to Inquiry

  Hide contents

White House officials once debated a scorched-earth strategy of publicly criticizing and undercutting Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian efforts to disrupt last year’s election. Now, President Trump’s lawyers are pursuing a different course: cooperating with the special counsel in the hope that Mr. Mueller will declare in the coming months that Mr. Trump is not a target of the Russia inquiry.

Mr. Trump has long sought such a public declaration. He fired his F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, in May after Mr. Comey refused to say openly that Mr. Trump was not under investigation.

The president’s legal team is working swiftly to respond to requests from Mr. Mueller for emails, documents and memos, and will make White House officials available for interviews. Once Mr. Mueller has combed through the evidence, Mr. Trump’s lawyers plan to ask him to affirm that Mr. Trump is not under investigation, either for colluding with Russian operatives or for trying to obstruct justice.

More than a half dozen White House officials, witnesses and outside lawyers connected to the Russia inquiry have described the approach, which is as much a public relations strategy as a legal one. The president’s legal team aims to argue that the White House has nothing to hide, hoping to shift the burden to Mr. Mueller to move quickly to wrap up an investigation that has consumed the Trump administration’s first year.

“The White House believes the special counsel shares its interest in concluding this matter with all deliberate speed for the benefit of the country,” said Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer handling the response to Mr. Mueller’s investigation. He said the administration was cooperating “with hope of bringing the matter to a prompt and decisive end.”

Any public declaration by Mr. Mueller about the president’s innocence would also be a clear sign that the special counsel’s investigation has not broadened significantly beyond last year’s presidential campaign to include a close scrutiny of any of Mr. Trump’s past business dealings with Russians.

Whether the strategy will work is another matter. The plan rests on the premise that Mr. Trump has done nothing wrong — something the president has repeatedly told his lawyers and said publicly — and some lawyers connected to the investigation say that Mr. Cobb has been too willing to take the president at his word. If the White House moves too hastily, they argue, materials could end up in Mr. Mueller’s hands that might damage the president and other administration officials.

Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, previously expressed fears that the document production could set a bad precedent for future administrations. Mr. Cobb has told aides that the White House should move deliberately and carefully, but not drag its feet.

Others doubt that Mr. Mueller will publicly clear Mr. Trump anytime soon, even if the documents and interviews do not show that he committed a crime. Mr. Mueller is building cases against two of Mr. Trump’s former advisers, Paul J. Manafort and Michael T. Flynn. Should either man cooperate with investigators, it might change Mr. Mueller’s view of how Mr. Trump fits into the Russia investigation.

Nevertheless, the president’s advisers have concluded that this strategy represents their best chance to lift the cloud hanging over the administration.

“Good for them if they can pull it off,” said Barbara Van Gelder, a prominent Washington white-collar lawyer who served in the Justice Department with Mr. Mueller. She said he was highly unlikely to give the White House any assurances as long as the investigations into Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn were open.

“Mueller’s not going to make a statement,” she said, “because he’s not going to want to claw it back.”

Mr. Comey had similar concerns. While F.B.I. agents investigated whether Mr. Trump’s associates had any connection to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Comey privately told Mr. Trump and members of Congress that the president was not personally under investigation. At least twice, however, he refused requests by Mr. Trump to say so publicly. Mr. Comey later told Congress that he did not want to make a public declaration that he might have to amend after further investigation.

One administration official said it was not yet clear how the White House would make its request for Mr. Mueller to publicly exonerate Mr. Trump, and there have been delays in getting documents to the special counsel. The internal White House review of the documents is not yet complete, and Mr. Mueller does not plan to interview many key White House officials until his team has reviewed all the documents he requested.

Mr. Cobb and several White House lawyers have spent weeks reviewing documents related to numerous subjects, including Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey, and his role in July in drafting a misleading statement to The New York Times about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016.

Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors have indicated that they plan to ask detailed questions about that statement, written aboard Air Force One, which withheld the purpose of the June 2016 meeting: to get damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s efforts to help Mr. Trump.

Some of Mr. Trump’s associates remain suspicious of the special counsel and his team of aggressive prosecutors.

“While it would be good to clear the air on this entire issue so that the president can focus on governing, it presupposes that Mueller is an honest broker, and that he would not take nothing and make it into something, which would be my concern,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser.

Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, said the White House should challenge Mr. Mueller if he investigates anything beyond whether Mr. Trump or his associates colluded with the Russian campaign to disrupt the election.

But White House officials say they do not want a repeat of some of the tactics used in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton battled an independent counsel in court and in the media as the investigation dragged on for years. Since Mr. Cobb joined the White House, Mr. Trump’s team has significantly muted its criticism of Mr. Mueller.

One sign of the White House’s willingness to cooperate is that officials are strongly considering letting Mr. McGahn speak to investigators about his private conversations with Mr. Trump, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Many presidents insist that conversations with their White House counsel be kept secret under the principle of executive privilege, but Mr. McGahn is seen by some as a witness who could be helpful to Mr. Trump.

Mr. McGahn was involved in the discussions about firing Mr. Comey, and officials believe he would say that Mr. Trump was warned that firing Mr. Comey would only prolong the Russia investigation. Lawyers believe that would help make the case that Mr. Trump was not trying to obstruct justice when he fired the F.B.I. director.

Even as the White House pushes for a swift resolution of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry, administration officials are bracing for fallout from the investigations into Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn. Prosecutors have signaled that they intend to indict Mr. Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump campaign, who is under scrutiny for tax and foreign lobbying matters.

But lawyers in the case say they see no evidence yet that Mr. Manafort will face charges of conspiring with Russia to disrupt the election.

The White House also hopes for a favorable report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating Russian election interference and several related matters. The committee’s leaders said this week that they planned to release a public report about their findings.

That report could be finished before Mr. Mueller’s investigation. Although committee leaders said they would leave any criminal matters to the Justice Department, a determination by the committee that none of Mr. Trump’s associates assisted the Russian campaign would be a boon for the White House even if Mr. Mueller refuses to publicly clear Mr. Trump.

“They want them to write a report saying ‘no collusion,’” said Ms. Van Gelder, the defense lawyer. “And then they can let Mueller twist in the wind.”

 

This was long and quite frankly, I'd like a break from this incompetant dolt, so I scanned but I wonder if the people around him(aside from the three barnacles) are planning an advanced strategy that doesn't include Dumpy. This 'hey, let's hurry up and get through this' approach could be in the hopes that after a grace period, they will regain some of their credibility. Especially if Pencey is gathering people.

Watergate sent several people to prison, but the sentences were not that long for most, in America we have a hard time keeping rich people in prison for the full sentence. They got out, wrote books and moved on with little recrimination. And remember, Pencey will have the power of pardon too.

But I think they're foolish to believe that a Senate Intelligence Committee report that clears Trump would be believed by anyone but Trumphumpers.

[onekidanddone]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Well, well, well... the presidunce's legal team has changed tactics. Instead of attacking and criticizing Mueller, which clearly wasn't working, they are now opting for cooperation in the hopes Mueller will declare that the presidunce is not under investigation.

Just how stupid do the think Mueller is? All this crafty bull shit might have worked for TT's business scams but  I'm doubt it is working now.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Newly disclosed email sheds light on Trump Jr. meeting with Russian lawyer"

Spoiler

A newly disclosed email sent on the morning of a Trump Tower meeting held during last year’s presidential campaign between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer raises new questions about how the key session came together.

The note was written by the Russian lawyer and sent to a music promoter who had helped arrange the session.

It could offer evidence backing up the Russian lawyer’s claims that she was meeting with Trump Jr. solely to discuss a 2012 law despised by the Kremlin that imposed financial sanctions on wealthy Russians as punishment for human rights abuses.

That is the version of events the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, has asserted in media interviews since the New York Times first disclosed the Trump Tower meeting in July.

But her version conflicts with explosive correspondence released previously that shows the music promoter told Trump Jr. before the meeting that Veselnitskaya would bring damaging information about Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Russian government to help the Trump campaign.

The newly disclosed email was provided to The Washington Post by Scott Balber, a U.S. lawyer representing Aras Agalarov, the Russian billionaire who hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 and who had helped secure the Trump Tower meeting for Veselnitskaya.

Balber said he was releasing the email from Veselnitskaya because he thinks it bolsters his clients’ claim that the Trump Tower meeting was not part of a Russian government effort to assist President Trump’s campaign, despite what music publicist Rob Goldstone had written.

The newly disclosed email shows Veselnitskaya wrote Goldstone on the morning of the scheduled meeting to ask whether she could bring a “lobbyist and trusted associate.”

The lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, “is working to advance these issues with several congressmen,” she continued. “He has invaluable knowledge about the positions held by the members of the Foreign Relations Committee that will be important to our discussion.”

At the time, Veselnitskaya was preparing to testify before the congressional committee about the law, the Magnitsky Act.

The email offers no conclusive evidence about why Trump Jr. accepted the meeting with Russians as his father prepared to accept the Republican nomination for president. Trump Jr. had reacted enthusiastically when told over email by Goldstone that Agalarov had met with a top prosecutor in Russia and been provided incriminating information about Clinton that the Russian lawyer would convey.

“If it’s what you say, I love it,” Trump Jr. wrote.

Balber’s clients also include Agalarov’s pop star son, Emin, who is represented by Goldstone and asked Goldstone to set up a meeting. He also represents Ike Kaveladze, a U.S.-based employee of the Agalarovs. Agalarov denies that he met with a Russian prosecutor about the U.S. presidential campaign, as Goldstone wrote.

Balber said Veselnitskaya provided him with the email during an interview in Moscow last month, which he conducted to better understand how the Trump Tower meeting came together by speaking to the person who had first requested it.

“My clients have been implicated, in my view unfairly, in some theory that they were involved in an effort to influence the election campaign by providing some secret damaging information about Hillary Clinton,” he said. The documents, he said, are “consistent with what my clients have said.”

Veselnitskaya did not respond to a request for comment.

Balber said Veselnitskaya also provided him a detailed account of how she secured the meeting.

Her account began when she was extended an offer to testify at a June 14, 2016, congressional hearing about the Magnitsky Act by U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), an advocate of closer ties with Russia. The Post has reported that her testimony was ultimately scuttled after opposition from Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.).

Veselnitskaya has said she was interested in the Magnitsky Act issue on behalf of a private client. She was working closely in the United States with Akhmetshin, a Russian American lobbyist who has been accused of having ties to Russian intelligence. He has denied ties to the Russian government.

Veselnitskaya told Balber that she met with a series of well-connected Russians in early June 2016 to discuss her upcoming trip to the United States. One person with whom she met was Agalarov, for whom she had previously done legal work.

Veselnitskaya told Balber she did not seek a meeting with the Trump campaign but was “surprised and pleased” when Agalarov explained his business connection to the presidential candidate and offered to make a connection. Veselnitskaya told Agalarov that she had in October 2015 provided information intended to undermine the U.S. law to Yuri Chaika, the Russian prosecutor general, Balber said. Balber said he believes it is possible Veselnitskaya’s statement resulted in a misunderstanding about the prosecutor’s role.

Robert Gage, an attorney for Goldstone, declined to comment.

By June 7, 2016, Goldstone had confirmed that Veselnitskaya and her translator were confirmed to meet with the candidate’s son, along with top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Two days later, Veselnitskaya sent the email asking if she could bring Akhmetshin.

Akhmetshin has previously told The Post that he was invited to the meeting at the last minute, after having lunch in New York City with Veselnitskaya, where she asked his advice on what to say. The newly released email shows Veselnitskaya asked Goldstone if the lobbyist could attend at 9:24 a.m., not after lunch, and that she wrote she had a signed a nondisclosure agreement with Akhmetshin.

Michael Tremonte, a lawyer for Akhmetshin, said that the lobbyist was invited to the meeting over lunch.

“He has no recollection of signing a nondisclosure agreement in connection with the meeting and was not aware of the communications between Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Goldstone,” Tremonte said.

Yeah, somehow this doesn't pass the smell test.

[Howl]

Ladies and gentlemen, Exhibit A:  Carter Page taking The Fifth.  It's a strategy, but I'm not understanding it, exactly.   

Quote

Carter Page says he will plead the Fifth to Senate Russia investigators

By Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb, CNN

Updated 8:36 PM ET, Tue October 10, 2017

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• The FBI had obtained a warrant to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page
• Page has demanded an opportunity to testify publicly

(CNN)Former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page told CNN Monday he is going to plead the Fifth Amendment to keep from turning over a "vast array" of documents the Senate Intelligence committee requested, which he said is "beyond the charter" of the inquiry.

But Page demanded an opportunity to testify publicly before the panel, saying he offered to appear November 1 at the committee's open hearing on Russian attempts to influence the election through social media.

That request has been denied, he suggested. A Senate intelligence spokeswoman did not immediately return a request for comment.

Page has been demanding the government release information about his communications that were picked up during surveillance operations. The FBI obtained a warrant to monitor Page on suspicions he knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, according to an April report from The Washington Post.

Page contends that he does not want to be caught in a "perjury trap" since the government has more detailed records about his communications.

Shit's getting real, but this have been going on since last May when Page wanted to testify publicly to the House.  As noted above, I'm not sure what his meta strategy is.   

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, Howl said:

Ladies and gentlemen, Exhibit A:  Carter Page taking The Fifth.  It's a strategy, but I'm not understanding it, exactly.   

Shit's getting real, but this have been going on since last May when Page wanted to testify publicly to the House.  As noted above, I'm not sure what his meta strategy is.   

What does he mean by perjury trap? He doesn't want to be caught telling lies? Huh. There's a simple sollution to that, though, that doesn't necessitate taking the 5th: don't tell lies in the first place.

What I think we're seeing is a man desperately jumping every which way trying to minimize what he'll be accused and convicted of in this whole Russian mess. He knows he is guilty as shit.  His original tactic was to indicate he has damning information on others that he might be willing to share if he can make a deal for reduced sentencing. Now he knows that investigators may already be in possession of this information already, and he wants to find out exactly how much they know so he can assess just how much his bargaining chip is worth to them. Plus, knowing what they know also gives him the advantage of preparing a defense/explanation/excuse. Pleading the 5th is a common tactic when you don't want to implicate yourself, but I also think he's signalling that he's only going to share his information if there is a deal to be made for himself.

[K'Z'K]

I would just like to take a moment to say that my friends in high school used "Pleading the Fifth" as a euphemism for masturbation. So when people mention the colluders planning to plead the Fifth in front of whatever committee, I get a rather. . . different idea of what they plan to do.

 

I feel so much better having shared that.

[Yes, there's a story behind it. I was the token female in a nerd group. Boy A was being an asshole and decided to ask the other guys if they masturbated. Boy B got very embarrassed and muttered something about "I plead the Fifth" to which Boy A said something like "yeah, you do" and a euphemism was born. I know this because I was there--when you want to embarrass the shit out of a teenage boy, you don't just ask him about his, er, self-incrimination habits, you ask him in front of a girl. Boy A answered his own question with "I'm a 16-year-old boy, what do you think?" He kinda had a point there.]

 

Now back to your regularly scheduled horror at what this country has become.

[Howl]

I was wondering about congressional immunity and the Fifth Amendment, and came up with this article, prompted by Flynn's play back in April to get congressional immunity.  Congress wasn't interested. 

What is congressional immunity?

Spoiler

 

Last Updated Apr 1, 2017 7:30 AM EDT

You may never have heard of it.  That’s because in recent years, it’s rarely granted. But Congress has long had the power to protect witnesses from being prosecuted for what they’re compelled to say under oath. 

Frustrated by witnesses who refused to testify, “taking the Fifth” before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Congress in the 1950s granted itself the power to force a witness to answer questions, even after they’ve said they won’t. (“The Fifth” refers to the Fifth Amendment, which protects individuals from self-incrimination.) 

If the full House or Senate, or two-thirds of a congressional committee, vote to issue a subpoena to a witness who refuses to testify, a federal court will order that person to appear and answer questions -- and the answers cannot be used against them in any criminal proceeding. 

The Justice Department has no power to stop this. It’s entirely up to Congress.

However, these days, lawmakers tread into the immunity arena with trepidation. In the 1980s, grants of congressional immunity to Oliver North and John Poindexter wound up ruining the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute the Iran-Contra players. Both of their convictions, for lying to Congress, were overturned because the appeals court ruled the testimony they gave before Congress under immunity may have tainted the statements of other witnesses who testified at their trials. 

In return for testifying before the intelligence committees, former national security adviser Michael Flynn has sought protection. The committees are empowered to grant Flynn immunity if they want to, but if the North-Poindexter case is any guide, doing so could damage some future federal prosecutor’s case against him, or others who may be the subjects of the FBI probe.

 

However, Carter Page's situation is the reverse.  The Feds have the information already and Page wants to know what they have.  He's a little roach scurrying about, and may have already wandered into the Roach Motel. 

[GrumpyGran]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

What does he mean by perjury trap?

My very limited understanding of this and how he may be applying it is that he is insinuating that they are pressuring him to testify, ostensibly to gather information on the larger investigation, but in fact to simply catch him committing perjury. Then they turn around and threaten to prosecute him for the perjury unless he turns and gives damning evidence?

Of course, as you said there's a simple solution-don't lie.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump urged by some to go on the attack against Mueller"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even as President Donald Trump’s advisers encourage him to accept the realities of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, longtime friends and allies are pushing Trump to fight back, citing concerns that his lawyers are naive to the existential threat facing the president.

Trump supporters and associates inside and outside the White House see the conciliatory path as risky to the maverick president’s tenure. Instead, they want the street-fighting tweeter to criticize Mueller with abandon.

The struggle between supporters of the legal team’s steady, cooperative approach, and the band of Trump loyalists who yearn for a fight, comes as the Mueller probe begins lapping at the door of the Oval Office. Mueller, who is investigating the firing of former FBI director James Comey and other key actions of the Trump administration, has signaled that his team intends to interview multiple current and former White House officials in the coming weeks and has requested large batches of documents from the executive branch.

In private, Trump remains relatively calm for now, but that doesn’t mean he thinks the Russia probe is legitimate, and he could return to fighting Mueller at any moment, according to a group of about 15 Trump allies, advisers and former campaign aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations with the White House.

The president still periodically flashes his anger, blasting the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation in a tweet last Thursday and urging them to investigate journalists instead of his campaign and family. And in a private dinner with social conservatives last month, Trump expressed frustration over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal, which helped pave the road to Mueller’s appointment.

“The president respects what Bob Mueller is doing and has fully cooperated and asked everyone around him to fully cooperate with Bob,” said Trump’s attorney, John Dowd. “And as a result,” he added, there has been for months “a very productive, professional relationship.”

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer responsible for responding to Mueller’s information requests, said it’s important to Trump “and the country to get this behind us.”

“The White House is working diligently in full cooperation with the special counsel to complete the responses to all pending requests, and the president’s frustration does not extend to the special counsel personally in any way,” he added.

Lawyers have been gathering documents requested by Mueller’s investigators — which include records about the brief tenure of ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn — and working to schedule interviews with aides. In recent weeks, they’ve also discussed a legal defense fund that could cover the cost of lower-level White House officials who may get wrapped up in the probe, and about the possibility of a single “pool counsel” to represent some aides.

But the question of cooperation is far from settled for Trump’s allies, many of whom are pressing him to fight Mueller more aggressively.

That tension was apparent at a private dinner of close to a dozen conservative leaders with Trump and his top aides on Sept. 25, though accounts of the gathering vary.

In one version, one guest peppered Trump with questions about what he was going to do about the special counsel’s investigation. While Trump was dismissive, the president said he was keeping his head low and such questions should be posed to Sessions himself, according to two people who were present and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private dinner.

But a third person in the room said that Trump was visibly angry with Sessions and made a flippant remark about the attorney general’s decision to recuse himself from overseeing the federal Russia probe.

One former Trump campaign aide in contact with the president said Trump’s feelings about Sessions have evolved in the last few months. Trump believes Sessions hurt him by not disclosing his interactions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the vetting process for attorney general.

Sessions should have been upfront with Trump and alerted him to those encounters rather than waiting for word of them to become public, the former campaign aide said. But the president’s anger with Sessions also has diminished greatly in recent months, the same aide noted.

Supporters of Trump’s legal team and the discipline imposed by Chief of Staff John Kelly are hoping that Trump will remain even-keeled and not jeopardize himself with public outbursts. They consider Mueller’s appointment the product of the most serious of self-inflicted wounds — Trump’s firing of Comey — but are confident Trump will survive the investigation.

The president, the White House staff and others are “relieved” to have some structure inside the White House after months of chaos growing from the combative approach, said one White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private talks inside the White House.

But others, including many who worked closely with Trump on his successful election campaign, don’t trust Mueller and believe White House lawyers are foolhardy to cooperate when the president is at risk.

The president and his team need to understand that this is a “political brawl” — not just a legal fight — and take that fight to Mueller, said the former campaign aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private discussions with the president and his team.

Trump will remain under control, one associate noted, as long as Mueller remains focused on Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, both of whom are under investigation. If the federal probe turns back toward the Trump family and business empire, then Trump may try to fire Mueller, the associate predicted.

The lay-low strategy is a departure in style for a president accustomed to rhetorical bombast. But after a period several months ago in which his advocates discussed ways to undercut the credibility of Mueller’s investigation, his attorneys now talk openly about their respect for Mueller and their desire for full cooperation.

The anger inside and outside the White House stems from almost everyone in the president’s orbit seeing the allegations of collusion as a “nothing burger.” But, with the reality of the investigations, it’s a “nothing burger” they’re now acknowledging they have to deal with.

 

[Flossie]

I can't help but believe that those who are encouraging Trump to start fighting with Mueller are more concerned that the investigation will uncover their own shady dealings.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, Flossie said:

I can't help but believe that those who are encouraging Trump to start fighting with Mueller are more concerned that the investigation will uncover their own shady dealings.

I agree, this would not serve him well, but as we know he is always looking for a fight so it's an easy sell. He wouldn't know what's good for him if it kissed him good morning every day, so it's easy to manipulate him into trouble.

Any speculation, FJers, as to who these 'friends' are?