The Russian Connection 2

[GrumpyGran]

I'm introducing the "WRL" acronym. Will read later. Thanks for these @fraurosena and @AmazonGrace. I swear I will. It was the day to go to Costco in the big city and I'm on my second glass of wine. Almost time for "Stranger Things" Thanks you two. . And of course, @GreyhoundFan, who is a living, breathing newspaper. 

[Howl]

Quote

BREAKING NEWS: The Washington Post reports that Trump's plan is to frantically call Flynn a liar if it's found Flynn gave Mueller any incriminating evidence on Trump or his aides (which, by definition, he did).

Nothing personal, Misha.  This is legal defense strategy 101 -- disparage your opponent in every way possible to nullify their credibility. 

This could also mean the possibility of a pardon for Flynn is circling the drain because you don't call someone a lying liar who lies and then grant them a pardon.  Or maybe Trump would see no logical fallacy in doing just that. 

Priest standing by the altar yells out, "Next sacrifice!" 

 

 

[formergothardite]

29 minutes ago, Howl said:

you don't call someone a lying liar who lies and then grant them a pardon. 

Trump would if he thought it would get him out of this pickle. Trump will throw anything and everything at the wall just to see what sticks. He has been sucking up to Flynn for a while now, if that doesn't work(and it appears it hasn't) he will call him a liar. If that doesn't work he will offer a pardon.  if it ends up the FBI has stuff on him that Trump can't pardon, he will go right back to the liar stage. 

[fraurosena]

No surprise that a Russian admits to hacking the DNC. Will he also admit to hacking the RNC?

Jailed Russian says he hacked DNC on Kremlin’s orders and can prove it

Quote

A jailed Russian who says he hacked into the Democratic National Committee computers on the Kremlin’s orders to steal emails released during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign now claims he left behind a data signature to prove his assertion.

In an interview with Russia’s RAIN television channel made public Wednesday, Konstantin Kozlovsky provided further details about what he said was a hacking operation led by the Russian intelligence agency known by its initials FSB. Among them, Kozlovsky said he worked with the FSB to develop computer viruses that were first tested on large, unsuspecting Russian companies, such as the oil giant Rosneft, later turning them loose on multinational corporations.

Kozlovsky first came to public attention in early December when word spread about his confession last Aug. 15 in a Russian courtroom that he was the person who hacked into DNC computers on behalf of Russian intelligence. The Russian was jailed earlier this year, alleged to have been part of a hacking group there that stole more than $50 million from Russian bank accounts through what’s called the Lurk computer virus.

The alleged hacker posted to his Facebook page in December a transcript and an audio recording of his confession during a pre-trial court hearing. He also confessed online to having hacked investigators looking into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, brought down in July 2014 by a missile near the disputed Ukrainian border with Russia.

In written answers from jail made public Wednesday by RAIN TV, a Moscow-based independent TV station that has repeatedly run afoul of the Kremlin, Kozlovsky said he feared his minders might turn on him and planted a “poison pill” during the DNC hack. He placed a string of numbers that are his Russian passport number and the number of his visa to visit the Caribbean island of St. Martin in a hidden .dat file, which is a generic data file.

That allegation is difficult to prove, partly because of the limited universe of people who have seen the details of the hack. The DNC initially did not share information with the FBI, instead hiring a tech firm called CrowdStrike, run by a former FBI cyber leader. That company has said it discovered the Russian hand in the hacking, but had no immediate comment on the claim by Kozlovsky that he planted an identifier.

The newest allegations are potentially significant. If the FSB did in fact direct Kozlovsky, then it debunks Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that his government had nothing to do with hacking that all major U.S. intelligence agencies put at his feet. It also calls into question the view of a hack that was conducted as a closely held, organized FSB campaign directed from central offices. Kozlovsky says he worked largely from home, with limited knowledge of others and that the political hack was just part of larger relationship with the FSB’s top cyber officials on viruses directed at other countries and the private sector.

“Based on my experience and understanding of professional intelligence operations, the blending of criminal activity with sanctioned intelligence operations is an old page out of the Russian intelligence-services playbook,” said Leo Taddeo, chief information security officer for Cyxtera Technologies and a former head of cyber operations in the FBI’s New York office. “What the defendant (in Russia) is describing would not be inconsistent with past Russian intelligence operations.”

Kozlovsky’s claims include an assertion that for the past seven years he was under the control of Major Gen. Dmitry Dokuchayev, who he said gave him orders to breach the DNC servers to interfere in the U.S. election process. A federal court in San Francisco in February issued an arrest warrant for Dokuchayev for his alleged role in a hack of Yahoo accounts. A month later the FBI put the former hacker-turned-spy on a Wanted poster for his alleged role in directing hackers. He was arrested in Russia in late 2016 on treason charges in a high-profile incident that included the arrest of another FSB cyber leader.

The jailed Kozlovsky told RAIN TV that he had a relationship with Dokuchayev that preceeded the latter’s rise to a prominent post in the FSB.

4

 

[Howl]

Putting Konstantin Kozlovsky on my death watch list.  He could be pushed out of a window, shot on a bridge, given plutonium laced tea.....

 

 

[onekidanddone]

3 minutes ago, Howl said:

Putting Konstantin Kozlovsky on my death watch list.  He could be pushed out of a window, shot on a bridge, given plutonium laced tea.....

Yea I'm thinking the same thing. I'm thinking ricin. Only this time it might not be the Russians behind it.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The big problem with Trump’s strategy to attack Michael Flynn’s credibility: His own mouth"

Spoiler

The White House has fired a warning shot in Michael Flynn's direction, with The Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig reporting that it plans to label him a liar who can't be trusted if he makes claims against it.

The strategy isn't that shocking — Trump seemed to preview it with that fateful tweet, and his lawyers have hinted in this direction too — though it makes it crystal-clear that Trump's loyalty to his former national security adviser is far from absolute.

...  < tweet from twitler >

But if there is one big hole in the strategy, it's precisely that: Trump's demonstrated loyalty.

Basically, Trump's legal team is preparing to argue that Flynn isn't a credible witness because he lied to investigators. Yet this particular lie was one that Trump himself was well aware of — by his team's own accounts — and didn't seem all that perturbed by. And it's actually only part of a large volume of red flags on Flynn that the White House and Trump himself seemed to dismiss, even after Flynn was fired.

Here's a quick recap (with an assist from Philip Bump's great Flynn timeline):

• Flynn informed White House counsel Don McGahn on Jan. 4 that he was under investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government.
• Then-acting attorney general Sally Yates informed McGahn on Jan. 26 that Flynn had misrepresented his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to the White House, by saying the two of them didn't discuss sanctions. Then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer said McGahn shared this information with Trump “immediately.” Despite this, Flynn would again deny having discussed sanctions with Kislyak in an interview with The Post on Feb. 8.
• Flynn in March belatedly disclosed fees and expenses paid to him by Russia-related entities, including travel paid for by Russian government-backed television station RT.

After the first two, Trump sought leniency for Flynn from FBI Director James B. Comey during a Feb. 14 meeting, according to Comey's contemporaneous notes. (Trump recently denied this.) He would also go on in late March to try to get CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to intervene with the FBI, according to what Pompeo and Coats told associates.

Trump has also gone to bat for Flynn's character publicly. As Leonnig noted in her report, Trump called Flynn a “wonderful man” after firing him in February. He said earlier this month that what prosecutors did to Flynn was “very unfair” and that he had “led a very strong life.” He told NBC News in May that Flynn was a “very good person.” He tweeted in March that Flynn should ask for immunity because the investigation was a “witch hunt.” And he has told aides repeatedly that he regretted firing Flynn, as The Post's Josh Dawsey reported back in May for Politico.

... < another tweet from twitler >

None of this paints the picture of a president who thinks Flynn lacks credibility or character; instead, Trump has repeatedly testified in the court of public opinion in support of Flynn's character — even doing so after learning about many of his alleged misdeeds. As recently as earlier this month when Flynn cut a deal with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's investigators, Trump played down the allegations against Flynn.

We've seen before how Trump's past comments and tweets can come back to bite him during legal proceedings. Any effort to impugn Flynn's character should be undercut by Trump's repeated public defenses of that very same character.

The question from there is why did Trump keep defending Flynn? If he didn't truly think Flynn was a person of solid character, what's the alternative? That's the scariest prospect for the White House.

Yeah, the internet is forever. The TT seems to forget that regularly.

[GreyhoundFan]

Dear orange menace, no, it's YOU who makes the U.S. look "very bad': "Trump Says Russia Inquiry Makes U.S. ‘Look Very Bad’"

Spoiler

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump said Thursday that he believes Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation, will treat him fairly, contradicting some members of his party who have waged a weekslong campaign to try to discredit Mr. Mueller and the continuing inquiry.

During an impromptu 30-minute interview with The New York Times at his golf club in West Palm Beach, the president did not demand an end to the Russia investigations swirling around his administration, but insisted 16 times that there has been “no collusion” discovered by the inquiry.

“It makes the country look very bad, and it puts the country in a very bad position,” Mr. Trump said of the investigation. “So the sooner it’s worked out, the better it is for the country.”

Asked whether he would order the Justice Department to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Trump appeared to remain focused on the Russia investigation.

“I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” he said, echoing claims by his supporters that as president he has the power to open or end an investigation. “But for purposes of hopefully thinking I’m going to be treated fairly, I’ve stayed uninvolved with this particular matter.”

Hours after he accused the Chinese of secretly shipping oil to North Korea, Mr. Trump explicitly said for the first time that he has “been soft” on China on trade in the hopes that its leaders will pressure North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

He hinted that his patience may soon end, however, signaling his frustration with the reported oil shipments.

“Oil is going into North Korea. That wasn’t my deal!” he exclaimed, raising the possibility of aggressive trade actions against China. “If they don’t help us with North Korea, then I do what I’ve always said I want to do.”

Despite saying that when he visited China in November, President Xi Jinping “treated me better than anybody’s ever been treated in the history of China,” Mr. Trump said that “they have to help us much more.”

“We have a nuclear menace out there, which is no good for China,” he said.

Mr. Trump gave the interview in the Grill Room at Trump International Golf Club after he ate lunch with his playing partners, including his son Eric and the pro golfer Jim Herman. No aides were present for the interview, and the president sat alone with a New York Times reporter at a large round table as club members chatted and ate lunch nearby. A few times, members and friends — including a longtime supporter, Christopher Ruddy, the president and chief executive of the conservative website and TV company Newsmax — came by to speak with Mr. Trump.

Noting that he had given Mr. Herman $50,000 years ago when he worked at the president’s New Jersey golf club and was trying to make the PGA Tour, Mr. Trump asked him how much he made playing on the professional circuit.

“It’s like $3 million,” Mr. Herman said.

“Which to him is like making a billion because he doesn’t spend anything,” Mr. Trump joked. “Ain’t that a great story?”

In the interview, the president touted the strength of his campaign victories and his accomplishments in office, including passage of a tax overhaul this month. But he also expressed frustration and anger at Democrats, who he said refused to negotiate on legislation.

“Like Joe Manchin,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Democratic senator from West Virginia. He said Mr. Manchin and other Democrats claimed to be centrists but refused to negotiate on health care or taxes.

“He talks. But he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t do,” Mr. Trump said. “‘Hey, let’s get together, let’s do bipartisan.’ I say, ‘Good, let’s go.’ Then you don’t hear from him again.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump said he still hoped Democrats will work with him on bipartisan legislation in the coming year to overhaul health care, improve the country’s crumbling infrastructure and help young immigrants brought to the country as children.

Mr. Trump disputed reports that suggested he does not have a detailed understanding of legislation, saying, “I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most.”

Later, he added that he knows more about “the big bills” debated in the Congress “than any president that’s ever been in office.”

The president also spoke at length about the special election this month in Alabama, where Roy S. Moore, the Republican candidate, lost to a Democrat after being accused of sexual misconduct with young girls, including a minor, when he was in his 30s.

Mr. Trump said that he supported Mr. Moore’s opponent in the Republican primary race because he knew Mr. Moore would lose in the general election. And he insisted that he endorsed Mr. Moore later only because “I feel that I have to endorse Republicans as the head of the party.”

Mr. Mueller’s investigation appears to be moving ahead despite predictions by Mr. Trump’s lawyers this year that it would be over by Thanksgiving. Mr. Trump said that he was not bothered by the fact that he does not know when it will be completed because he has nothing to hide.

Mr. Trump repeated his assertion that Democrats invented the Russia allegations “as a hoax, as a ruse, as an excuse for losing an election.” He said that “everybody knows” his associates did not collude with the Russians, even as he insisted that the “real stories” are about Democrats who worked with Russians during the 2016 campaign.

“There’s been no collusion. But I think he’s going to be fair,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Mueller.

In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers have seized on anti-Trump texts sent by an F.B.I. investigator who was removed from Mr. Mueller’s team as evidence of political bias. At a hearing this month, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, said that “the public trust in this whole thing is gone.”

Although Mr. Trump said he believes Mr. Mueller will treat him fairly, Mr. Trump raised questions about how the special counsel had dealt with the lobbyist Tony Podesta. Mr. Podesta is the brother of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, and Tony Podesta is under investigation for work his firm, the Podesta Group, did on behalf of a client referred to it in 2012 by Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.

“Whatever happened to Podesta?” Mr. Trump said. “They closed their firm, they left in disgrace, the whole thing, and now you never heard of anything.”

Mr. Trump tried to put distance between himself and Mr. Manafort, who was indicted in October. The president said that Mr. Manafort — whom he called “very nice man” and “an honorable person” — had spent more time working for other candidates and presidents than for him.

“Paul only worked for me for a few months,” Mr. Trump said. “Paul worked for Ronald Reagan. His firm worked for John McCain, worked for Bob Dole, worked for many Republicans for far longer than he worked for me. And you’re talking about what Paul was many years ago before I ever heard of him. He worked for me for — what was it, three and a half months?”

Mr. Trump said it was “too bad” that Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump did not directly answer a question about whether he thought that Eric H. Holder Jr., President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, was more loyal than Mr. Sessions had been.

“I don’t want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”

Mr. Trump said he believes members of the news media will eventually cover him more favorably because they are profiting from the interest in his presidency and thus will want him re-elected.

“Another reason that we’re going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes,” Mr. Trump said, then invoked one of his preferred insults. “Without me, The New York Times will indeed be, not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times.”

He added: “So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, ‘Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.’ O.K.”

After the interview, Mr. Trump walked out of the Grill Room, stopping briefly to speak to guests. He then showed off a plaque that listed the club’s golf champions, including several years in which Mr. Trump had won its annual tournament. Asked how far he was hitting balls off the tee these days, Mr. Trump, who will turn 72 next year, was modest. “Gets shorter every year,” he said.

Good grief. 'nuff said.

[Howl]

Quote

“I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,” he said, echoing claims by his supporters that as president he has the power to open or end an investigation. 

Even after a year of his unrelenting crap, I'm still shocked at something like this. 

[Smoochie]

He's so fkn delusional ... if anything the investigation makes the US look good, that no one is above the law including the president and his 'team'.  

I always come back to the same thing with this moron, if it's a faux, made up, witch hunt started by the Democrats (not sure how that works since it took full flight after he was in office and the Repubs have full control over both houses) why oh why did Flynn & what's his face (LOL can't remember now) plead guilty and is he saying that the charges against Manafort, etc. are 'trumped' up charges!  

[GreyhoundFan]

I agree: "Leave Robert Mueller alone"

Spoiler

David E. Kendall, an attorney at the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly LLP, has represented former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton since 1993, including during impeachment proceedings stemming from Kenneth W. Starr’s independent counsel investigation of President Clinton.

In his Dec. 24 Sunday Opinion commentary, former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr proposed a “reset” of the Russia investigation in which Congress “steps up” to establish a bipartisan investigative panel and the “executive branch’s approach” changes from criminal law enforcement to some kind of nebulous fact-finding. Despite its bland profession of respect for the probe, Starr’s column was really just a subtler version of suddenly pervasive efforts by Trump apologists to undermine the investigation into Russian tampering with the 2016 election.

The reasons given for Starr’s reset are wholly specious: There is ostensibly a “drumbeat of criticism” aimed at special counsel Robert S. Mueller III which “has become deafening,” including “cascading revelations of anti-Trump bias.” This is true only on Fox News, in President Trump’s tweets and in the shoe pounding of the Freedom Caucus at legislative hearings.

The claims of bias amount to some private comments of an FBI official criticizing candidate Trump (and other candidates). Despite the fact that government employees are entitled to have political opinions (so long as they do not interfere with their work, and there was no evidence of this), Mueller promptly removed this official. Additionally, Mueller “has chosen poorly by having smart but deeply politicized senior aides” who have “virulently anti-Trump political leanings.” The evidence for this? Some of his staff have made past political contributions to Democratic candidates. Also, the FBI deputy director, who is not even on Mueller’s team, has a wife who ran for a state legislative seat in 2015 with financial support from a friend of the Clintons, after the deputy director (who was not then deputy director) disclosed and cleared this internally at the FBI.

Thin gruel indeed, since the current leadership of the Justice Department has contributed heavily to Republican candidates and since Starr himself, when appointed to investigate a Democratic president, had been a Republican donor and had given assistance to a conservative group filing a friend-of-the-court brief in a case involving President Bill Clinton.

Starr decries the “heavy overreliance on the criminal-justice system” in investigating the problem of Russian meddling in the U.S. electoral process and advocates for moving “toward decriminalizing presidential politics.” For those of us who lived through the five-year Starr pursuit of Clinton, this calls to mind Oscar Wilde’s comment on Dickens’s depiction of the death of Little Nell in “The Old Curiosity Shop”: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” The Starr investigation was the paradigm of criminalizing presidential politics.

More important, the proposed “Watergate solution” ignores the fact that in January, U.S. intelligence agencies, through the director of national intelligence, made public a formal assessment “with high confidence” that Russian President Vladi­mir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” whose goals were to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” while favoring candidate Trump. Much of the fact-finding that Starr calls for has been done.

This Russian tampering is a fundamental threat to our democracy, and must be addressed in two ways: by improving our safeguards against foreign manipulation of our electoral process, and by investigating, publicizing and prosecuting past criminal conduct involving this meddling. The former must be addressed by Congress and the Trump administration, but the latter is properly the province of the independent investigation led by Mueller — a decorated Marine combat veteran, a Republican and a highly esteemed, long-serving law-enforcement professional.

Starr’s misleading call for a “Watergate model” ignores the work of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. It is true that the investigations of the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 and of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 were generally bipartisan and produced valuable information. But equally important was the work of the Watergate special prosecutor, first Archibald Cox and then Leon Jaworski, who fairly and thoroughly investigated criminal wrongdoing by President Richard M. Nixon and many of his top officials. It was that office’s successful pursuit of the Nixon White House tape recordings all the way through the Supreme Court, and its successful prosecution of several Nixon officials, that finally revealed the facts about Watergate.

So while a thorough, public, fair and bipartisan congressional investigation of Russian tampering would be terrific, good luck with that. Benghazi hearings anyone? The House and Senate intelligence committees have for months been conducting hearings on these issues, but these have been, particularly in the House, partisan, meandering, contentious and closed-door.

And calling for a vague “fundamental . . . reset within the halls of the executive branch” on the part of the Trump administration is also utterly unrealistic. Firing the special counsel and all his staff would be the most likely “reset” by this White House.

The real “Watergate model” here is to hope for the best from Congress but protect and continue the work of the special counsel. In five months, it has obtained two convictions and two indictments. It has worked in secret and without leaks. It should be left to finish the work it has so ably begun: investigating thoroughly, prosecuting when the evidence justifies it and closing up shop silently — without harshly criticizing those not charged — when prosecution is not warranted.

 

[GrumpyGran]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Starr decries the “heavy overreliance on the criminal-justice system” in investigating the problem of Russian meddling in the U.S. electoral process

Yes, heaven forbid we use law enforcement to investigate possible crimes. What would they know about that?

Starr, such a worthless shit, calling for a "reset". Let's make sure there are no Democrats involved, only Republicans investigating their President. Because they're so good at cleaning house.

These people, just unbelievable. Shame appears to be in short supply within the Republican party now, with all of these contorted statements attempting to establish some doubt about what is obvious.

[AmazonGrace]

The moral of this story: don't drink and spy

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html

How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt

By SHARON LaFRANIERE, MARK MAZZETTI and MATT APUZZODEC. 30, 2017

Spoiler

 

WASHINGTON — During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.

While some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have derided him an insignificant campaign volunteer or a “coffee boy,” interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign. Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Mr. Papadopoulos played a critical role in this drama and reveal a Russian operation that was more aggressive and widespread than previously known. They add to an emerging portrait, gradually filled in over the past year in revelations by federal investigators, journalists and lawmakers, of Russians with government contacts trying to establish secret channels at various levels of the Trump campaign.

The F.B.I. investigation, which was taken over seven months ago by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has cast a shadow over Mr. Trump’s first year in office — even as he and his aides repeatedly played down the Russian efforts and falsely denied campaign contacts with Russians.

They have also insisted that Mr. Papadopoulos was a low-level figure. But spies frequently target peripheral players as a way to gain insight and leverage.

F.B.I. officials disagreed in 2016 about how aggressively and publicly to pursue the Russia inquiry before the election. But there was little debate about what seemed to be afoot. John O. Brennan, who retired this year after four years as C.I.A. director, told Congress in May that he had been concerned about multiple contacts between Russian officials and Trump advisers.

Russia, he said, had tried to “suborn” members of the Trump campaign.

‘The Signal to Meet’

Mr. Papadopoulos, then an ambitious 28-year-old from Chicago, was working as an energy consultant in London when the Trump campaign, desperate to create a foreign policy team, named him as an adviser in early March 2016. His political experience was limited to two months on Ben Carson’s presidential campaign before it collapsed.

Mr. Papadopoulos had no experience on Russia issues. But during his job interview with Sam Clovis, a top early campaign aide, he saw an opening. He was told that improving relations with Russia was one of Mr. Trump’s top foreign policy goals, according to court papers, an account Mr. Clovis has denied.

Traveling in Italy that March, Mr. Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor at a now-defunct London academy who had valuable contacts with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr. Mifsud showed little interest in Mr. Papadopoulos at first.

But when he found out he was a Trump campaign adviser, he latched onto him, according to court records and emails obtained by The New York Times. Their joint goal was to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow, or between their respective aides.

In response to questions, Mr. Papadopoulos’s lawyers declined to provide a statement.

Before the end of the month, Mr. Mifsud had arranged a meeting at a London cafe between Mr. Papadopoulos and Olga Polonskaya, a young woman from St. Petersburg whom he falsely described as Mr. Putin’s niece. Although Ms. Polonskaya told The Times in a text message that her English skills are poor, her emails to Mr. Papadopoulos were largely fluent. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” Ms. Polonskaya wrote in one message.

More important, Mr. Mifsud connected Mr. Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, a program director for the prestigious Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of academics that meets annually with Mr. Putin. The two men corresponded for months about how to connect the Russian government and the campaign. Records suggest that Mr. Timofeev, who has been described by Mr. Mueller’s team as an intermediary for the Russian Foreign Ministry, discussed the matter with the ministry’s former leader, Igor S. Ivanov, who is widely viewed in the United States as one of Russia’s elder statesmen.

When Mr. Trump’s foreign policy team gathered for the first time at the end of March in Washington, Mr. Papadopoulos said he had the contacts to set up a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump listened intently but apparently deferred to Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama and head of the campaign’s foreign policy team, according to participants in the meeting.

Mr. Sessions, now the attorney general, initially did not reveal that discussion to Congress, because, he has said, he did not recall it. More recently, he said he pushed back against Mr. Papadopoulos’s proposal, at least partly because he did not want someone so unqualified to represent the campaign on such a sensitive matter.

If the campaign wanted Mr. Papadopoulos to stand down, previously undisclosed emails obtained by The Times show that he either did not get the message or failed to heed it. He continued for months to try to arrange some kind of meeting with Russian representatives, keeping senior campaign advisers abreast of his efforts. Mr. Clovis ultimately encouraged him and another foreign policy adviser to travel to Moscow, but neither went because the campaign would not cover the cost.

Mr. Papadopoulos was trusted enough to edit the outline of Mr. Trump’s first major foreign policy speech on April 27, an address in which the candidate said it was possible to improve relations with Russia. Mr. Papadopoulos flagged the speech to his newfound Russia contacts, telling Mr. Timofeev that it should be taken as “the signal to meet.”

“That is a statesman speech,” Mr. Mifsud agreed. Ms. Polonskaya wrote that she was pleased that Mr. Trump’s “position toward Russia is much softer” than that of other candidates.

Stephen Miller, then a senior policy adviser to the campaign and now a top White House aide, was eager for Mr. Papadopoulos to serve as a surrogate, someone who could publicize Mr. Trump’s foreign policy views without officially speaking for the campaign. But Mr. Papadopoulos’s first public attempt to do so was a disaster.

In a May 4, 2016, interview with The Times of London, Mr. Papadopoulos called on Prime Minister David Cameron to apologize to Mr. Trump for criticizing his remarks on Muslims as “stupid” and divisive. “Say sorry to Trump or risk special relationship, Cameron told,” the headline read. Mr. Clovis, the national campaign co-chairman, severely reprimanded Mr. Papadopoulos for failing to clear his explosive comments with the campaign in advance.

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From then on, Mr. Papadopoulos was more careful with the press — though he never regained the full trust of Mr. Clovis or several other campaign officials.

Mr. Mifsud proposed to Mr. Papadopoulos that he, too, serve as a campaign surrogate. He could write op-eds under the guise of a “neutral” observer, he wrote in a previously undisclosed email, and follow Mr. Trump to his rallies as an accredited journalist while receiving briefings from the inside the campaign.

In late April, at a London hotel, Mr. Mifsud told Mr. Papadopoulos that he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to court documents. Although Russian hackers had been mining data from the Democratic National Committee’s computers for months, that information was not yet public. Even the committee itself did not know.

Whether Mr. Papadopoulos shared that information with anyone else in the campaign is one of many unanswered questions. He was mostly in contact with the campaign over emails. The day after Mr. Mifsud’s revelation about the hacked emails, he told Mr. Miller in an email only that he had “interesting messages coming in from Moscow” about a possible trip. The emails obtained by The Times show no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos discussed the stolen messages with the campaign.

Not long after, however, he opened up to Mr. Downer, the Australian diplomat, about his contacts with the Russians. It is unclear whether Mr. Downer was fishing for that information that night in May 2016. The meeting at the bar came about because of a series of connections, beginning with an Israeli Embassy official who introduced Mr. Papadopoulos to another Australian diplomat in London.

It is also not clear why, after getting the information in May, the Australian government waited two months to pass it to the F.B.I. In a statement, the Australian Embassy in Washington declined to provide details about the meeting or confirm that it occurred.

“As a matter of principle and practice, the Australian government does not comment on matters relevant to active investigations,” the statement said. The F.B.I. declined to comment.

Photo

A House Judiciary Committee session last month at which Attorney General Jeff Sessions testified. Mr. Sessions was head of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy team. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

A Secretive Investigation

Once the information Mr. Papadopoulos had disclosed to the Australian diplomat reached the F.B.I., the bureau opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.

Besides the information from the Australians, the investigation was also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British and Dutch. A trip to Moscow by another adviser, Carter Page, also raised concerns at the F.B.I.

With so many strands coming in — about Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. Page, the hackers and more — F.B.I. agents debated how aggressively to investigate the campaign’s Russia ties, according to current and former officials familiar with the debate. Issuing subpoenas or questioning people, for example, could cause the investigation to burst into public view in the final months of a presidential campaign.

It could also tip off the Russian government, which might try to cover its tracks. Some officials argued against taking such disruptive steps, especially since the F.B.I. would not be able to unravel the case before the election.

Others believed that the possibility of a compromised presidential campaign was so serious that it warranted the most thorough, aggressive tactics. Even if the odds against a Trump presidency were long, these agents argued, it was prudent to take every precaution.

That included questioning Christopher Steele, the former British spy who was compiling the dossier alleging a far-ranging Russian conspiracy to elect Mr. Trump. A team of F.B.I. agents traveled to Europe to interview Mr. Steele in early October 2016. Mr. Steele had shown some of his findings to an F.B.I. agent in Rome three months earlier, but that information was not part of the justification to start an counterintelligence inquiry, American officials said.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. and Justice Department decided to keep the investigation quiet, a decision that Democrats in particular have criticized. And agents did not interview Mr. Papadopoulos until late January.

Opening Doors, to the Top

He was hardly central to the daily running of the Trump campaign, yet Mr. Papadopoulos continuously found ways to make himself useful to senior Trump advisers. In September 2016, with the United Nations General Assembly approaching and stories circulating that Mrs. Clinton was going to meet with Mr. Sisi, the Egyptian president, Mr. Papadopoulos sent a message to Stephen K. Bannon, the campaign’s chief executive, offering to broker a similar meeting for Mr. Trump.

After days of scheduling discussions, the meeting was set and Mr. Papadopoulos sent a list of talking points to Mr. Bannon, according to people familiar with those interactions. Asked about his contacts with Mr. Papadopoulos, Mr. Bannon declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s improbable victory raised Mr. Papadopoulos’s hopes that he might ascend to a top White House job. The election win also prompted a business proposal from Sergei Millian, a naturalized American citizen born in Belarus. After he had contacted Mr. Papadopoulos out of the blue over LinkedIn during the summer of 2016, the two met repeatedly in Manhattan.

Mr. Millian has bragged of his ties to Mr. Trump — boasts that the president’s advisers have said are overstated. He headed an obscure organization called the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, some of whose board members and clients are difficult to confirm. Congress is investigating where he fits into the swirl of contacts with the Trump campaign, although he has said he is unfairly being scrutinized only because of his support for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Millian proposed that he and Mr. Papadopoulos form an energy-related business that would be financed by Russian billionaires “who are not under sanctions” and would “open all doors for us” at “any level all the way to the top.”

One billionaire, he said, wanted to explore the idea of opening a Trump-branded hotel in Moscow. “I know the president will distance himself from business, but his children might be interested,” he wrote.

Nothing came of his proposals, partly because Mr. Papadopoulos was hoping that Michael T. Flynn, then Mr. Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, might give him the energy portfolio at the National Security Council.

The pair exchanged New Year’s greetings in the final hours of 2016. “Happy New Year, sir,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote.

“Thank you and same to you, George. Happy New Year!” Mr. Flynn responded, ahead of a year that seemed to hold great promise.

But 2017 did not unfold that way. Within months, Mr. Flynn was fired, and both men were charged with lying to the F.B.I. And both became important witnesses in the investigation Mr. Papadopoulos had played a critical role in starting.

 

 

[fraurosena]

There is an explosive NYT article about Papadapoulos out now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html

I’m on my phone so I can’t quote, but Seth Abramson has a Mega-thread about it.

 

[AmazonGrace]

The whole article is quoted under the spoiler in the don't drink and spy post

[fraurosena]

Mike Pence, Donald Trump Jr. could be next in Mueller’s probe

Quote

Amid Republican cries for his job, the main question surrounding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election as the country turns to 2018 is: Who or what’s next?

Based on reports, it’s possible the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and Vice President Mike Pence could be engulfed in Mueller’s investigation in the New Year.

To date, four former members of President Donald Trump’s campaign have already been claimed by Mueller's probe. Former campaign manager Paul Manafort and campaign official Rick Gates were handed a 12-count indictment and a potential trial looms next year, while ex-campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn each pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contact with Russians.

Flynn is now cooperating with Mueller’s team. That means what Trump administration officials, including Pence, knew about his lies and misdeeds could be the special counsel’s next step.

The former Indiana governor recently gave a far different statement about whether he knew Flynn had lied to him about meetings with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. "What I can tell you is I knew that he lied to me," Pence told CBS News during a trip to Afghanistan earlier this month, "and I know the president made the right decision with regard to him."

During the transition last year, Flynn reportedly spoke to Kislyak about sanctions put in place by former President Barack Obama as punishment for Russia’s meddling in the election. Senior U.S. officials believed Flynn could have made it appear as if the incoming Trump administration would lift those sanctions, according to The Washington Post. The sanctions included kicking out Russian diplomats and closing two diplomatic compounds, one in New York and one in Maryland, believed to be headquarters for espionage.

Pence’s admission of knowing Flynn lied to him appeared to contradict what he said on national television in January just five days before Trump was inaugurated. Pence stated Flynn had not discussed removing the sanctions with Kislyak and instead offered best holiday wishes and condolences after a Russian military plane crashed, killing all 92 people aboard. 

"He had sent a text to the Russian ambassador to express not only Christmas wishes but sympathy for the loss of life in the airplane crash that took place," Pence said during a January 15 interview on Face The Nation. "It was strictly coincidental that they had a conversation. They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States' decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia."

Pence added then: "What I can confirm, having spoken to him about it, is that those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions."

When asked if other conversations had occurred between Flynn and the Russian ambassador, Pence responded: "I don't believe there were more conversations."

It remains unclear when Pence learned Flynn had lied to him. Trump entered office on January 20 and Flynn tendered his resignation on February 13.

Pence ran the transition team leading to the White House a year ago and his potential involvement in the Trump-Russia saga has been a topic before, even if much of the heat has been on Trump and his family.

“It is equally plausible that Pence is complicit in the lies propagated by the Trump administration and perhaps even involved in a cover-up of potentially impeachable transgressions,”  Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., wrote in June. “That's why he must be investigated thoroughly by the Congress and the FBI along with the president and other members of the Trump campaign team and administration.”

Trump's dismissal of former FBI Director James Comey in May has also faced scrutiny. Comey claimed in testimony this year that Trump had asked him, in private, to see if he could let the investigation into Flynn "go." Trump later stated in a television interview that he decided to fire Comey while he was thinking of "this Russia thing."

Pence’s knowledge, if any, of Comey’s firing, could be an avenue Mueller can explore. Comey’s dismissal has reportedly been a focus of the special counsel’s probe, and CNN reported earlier this month that Mueller could interview Pence.

With Flynn’s cooperation, Trump Jr. may be a target of Mueller’s, as well. He was heavily involved in the campaign, the transition and an infamous June 2016 meeting at the family’s New York tower involving a Russian lawyer with links to the Kremlin in an effort to gain political opposition research on his father's former political foe, Democrat Hillary Clinton. Manafort and current White House senior adviser and Trump Jr.'s brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, also attended the meeting.

Trump Jr. has already sat down with congressional investigators this year, and if what he said conflicts with Flynn’s story he could be in danger. He also admitted to exchanging messages with WikiLeaks, the government leaks site many have linked to Russia, during a behind closed doors session with the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.

“Because of Mr. Flynn’s role on the campaign as a trusted member of the inner circle, he may also have a great deal to say about topics like Mr. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with several Russians, Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner, or about the Trump scion’s contacts with WikiLeaks,” University of Minnesota law professor Richard Painter and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics chairman Norman Eisen wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times published this month. Both were former White House ethics lawyers.

They added: “If Mr. Flynn’s recollection is not the same as what Trump the Younger told Congress, Don Jr. is in serious trouble."

1

It's not really new, as we've been saying all of this on these threads already, but it's good to see them being reported on in the MSM as well.

[onekidanddone]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Mike Pence, Donald Trump Jr. could be next in Mueller’s probe

It's not really new, as we've been saying all of this on these threads already, but it's good to see them being reported on in the MSM as well.

Trump will support Pence for a bit and then start turning on him the way he did Sessions. Who will replace Mikey? I was going to say Don Jr, but maye not.  It could be somebody worse than Pence, like Cotton maybe.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Who will replace Mikey?

yeah, Dumpy will throw him under the bus in a heartbeat. I don't think he likes or trusts Pencey. So maybe he'd chose Gary Busey? Don King, oh, then he would be supporting blacks. Or Omarosa! Black people and women, see, he supports women and minorities. Then he drops dead and Omarosa is our President.

[Howl]

Yes, sadly we can be certain that a Pence replacement will be much, much worse. Magnitudes worse.  Exponentially worse!  Trump would deliberately select someone inept and inappropriate as a way to keep himself at the top of the heap.  We may talk about how stupid Trump is, BUT his utter immorality coupled with a visceral sense of how to play people off of each other to ensure his own survival has been successful so far. 

But Trump isn't the only scheming ass hole. Pence's role right now is to be well groomed and vice presidential looking, loyal, patient and kind, to seem competent but not threatening, and go to lunch with Mother.  And keep his more extreme religious beliefs under wraps.  If he continues to be very patient,  there may be an opening.  It could be that Pence assumes the presidency when Trump dies or has a heart attack/stroke in the saddle, becomes otherwise incapacitated.  Alternately, there could be a weird political twist that makes it obvious Pence should resign, but without losing face. At that point, Pence is free to begin campaigning for 2020.  

[GreyhoundFan]

Nunes is such a snake. "Devin Nunes, targeting Mueller and the FBI, alarms Democrats and some Republicans with his tactics"

Spoiler

Rep. Devin Nunes, once sidelined by an ethics inquiry from leading the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe, is reasserting the full authority of his position as chairman just as the GOP appears poised to challenge special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.

The California Republican was cleared in December of allegations he improperly disclosed classified information while accusing the Obama administration of exposing the identities of Trump affiliates on surveillance reports. Since clearing his name, Nunes has stepped up his attacks on Mueller’s team and the law enforcement agencies around it, including convening a group of Intelligence Committee Republicans to draft a likely report on “corruption” among the investigators working for the special counsel.

Though Nunes has not officially wrested his panel’s Russia probe back from the Republicans he deputized to run it, the chairman’s reemergence as a combative Trump loyalist has raised alarm among Democrats that the future of the investigation may be clipped short or otherwise undermined. Even some of Nunes’s GOP allies have expressed concern about his tactics, prompting rare public warnings that he should temper his attacks on federal law enforcement.

“I’m interested in getting access to the information and not the drama,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) said earlier this month, when Nunes began threatening contempt citations for FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein in the wake of revelations former Mueller team members had exchanged anti-Trump texts.

More recently, Gowdy said that his “heart would be broken” if Nunes follows through on reported plans to issue a corruption exposé about the FBI, citing concerns that issuing such a report outside the context of a comprehensive investigation of the Justice Department could prove damaging to law enforcement.

Gowdy, a member of the Intelligence panel who also chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, suggested that Nunes has taken some of these steps without the express blessing of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.),who has been involved in crafting the GOP’s multipronged approach to examining a string of allegations from Russian election interference to alleged mismanagement at the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.

A spokesman for Nunes declined to comment.

But Nunes’s moves coincide with what Democrats say is a coordinated GOP effort to shutter the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe, publicly absolve President Trump of the most serious allegations against him, and refocus the House’s resources against the law enforcement officials, such as Mueller, who continue to investigate Trump.

For months, Democrats have kept an unofficial count of the ways they say Nunes worked behind the scenes during the time he was under ethics investigation to slow or stymie the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe. Nunes never relinquished his sole, unchecked authority to sign off on subpoenas even as he handed the day-to-day operations to Reps. K. Michael Conaway (R-Texas), Gowdy and Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.). People familiar with the Intelligence committee’s work estimated Nunes’s effective veto cost Democrats dozens of requests for interviews and documents that were never sent out, despite repeated entreaties from the minority side.

This includes requests for subpoenas to obtain additional testimony from key figures in the probe who Democrats say were not forthcoming enough in interviews — among them Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. Democrats surmise they might have compelled them to return if not for Nunes’s resistance.

Republicans have dismissed such complaints as political posturing. Conaway said that he has received every subpoena approval he has requested from Nunes, while others pointed to the steady stream of witnesses who sat for interviews with the House Intelligence Committee — and challenged Democrats to name who they say is missing.

“Adam’s list is pretty much every character in any Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy novel,” Gowdy said, referring to the Intelligence panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California. “I get the intrigue and the mystery of these unusual-sounding names, but at some point you have to tie it back to what we’re looking at.”

“You can interview anybody that’s ever met a Russian in the government and it’s not going to get you any closer,” said Rooney. “Ten months, how many witnesses? I want to know, ask them how much longer they want to go. How many more witnesses do they need to hear, and specifically which witnesses, and why?”

But to Democrats, the march of witnesses in and out of the committee’s secure interview facility in the Capitol building basement has provided little assurance the probe is being run properly.

The packed schedule, sometimes featuring two or three overlapping interviews per day, has sparked complaints from Democrats that it is impossible to fully prepare for or monitor the investigation’s progress. Even when members are able to focus on one witness at a time, people familiar with the probe said, relevant requested documents often fail to materialize until after the interview has concluded — and the interviewees are hardly ever invited back.

The order of interviews has also been a point of ongoing dispute. While Senate Intelligence Committee leaders boast of a methodical process that starts with peripheral players and builds to key witnesses, the House Intelligence Committee’s order is comparatively haphazard and unstructured — almost designed, critics say, to give the probe a “veneer of respectability” while effectively giving investigators whiplash.

Nunes’s hand in such decisions was never direct, people familiar with the probe said. During the period he was under an Ethics Committee investigation, he never once attended a closed-door meeting at which the Russia probe was discussed — something both his allies and critics attest to. But at least one of his senior committee staffers was always present at such sessions to help update members, question witnesses and otherwise run the probe, multiple people said. Even Republicans acknowledge it was difficult to distinguish between staffers’ allegiance to the committee and their loyalties to Nunes.

“I don’t know where his staff ends and HPSCI” begins, Gowdy said, referring to the House Intelligence committee by its official acronym. “Some of them are apolitical nonpartisan members of his staff, and I’m not smart enough to know who’s what.”

Once the House Intelligence Committee concludes its investigation, it is unclear what precise role remains for Nunes in the House GOP’s continued push to investigate allegations of bias and other misconduct in law enforcement. The House Committee on Oversight and the Judiciary Committee have already launched an inquiry into the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe. And a joint investigation by Nunes and Gowdy into the Justice Department and FBI’s review of circumstances surrounding an Obama-era deal giving Russia a stake in the American uranium market seems to have lost its initial momentum.

If there is one aspect of the Russia probe that seems destined to outlast the House Intelligence Committee’s preferred timeline, it is Nunes’s investigation of Fusion GPS, the firm behind a dossier detailing Trump’s alleged connections to Russian officials, financiers and exploits in Moscow. Nunes’s subpoena of the firm’s bank records is caught up in a court battle, and the chairman’s staff is in touch with the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), according to the senator, who is also looking into reports that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party paid for research that ended up in the dossier’s pages.

The dossier continues to be a focus of the president’s in tweet storms seeking to discredit Mueller’s probe. Most recently, he blasted the FBI for focusing on the “Crooked Hillary pile of garbage” dossier “as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign.” In recent weeks, he has also tweeted encouragement of Nunes’s efforts to unearth information about the dossier from the “deep state.”

Nunes, meanwhile, appears to have made up his mind about the House Intelligence Committee probe into the allegations surrounding Trump and Russia, expressing his convictions in an interview with Fox News.

“We have no evidence of Russia collusion between the Trump campaign” and Russia, Nunes said.

Please, Rufus, let him be voted out of office in 2018. Congress would be a much better place without him.

[fraurosena]

10 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Please, Rufus, let him be voted out of office in 2018. Congress would be a much better place without him.

Nunes was part of the transition team. So as a matter of course, he's also part of the Russian conspiracy. It would be a good thing if he's voted out of office, but it's my sincere hope that when Mueller finally pounces, he'll be indicted along with all the others. 

[GrumpyGran]

15 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“You can interview anybody that’s ever met a Russian in the government and it’s not going to get you any closer,” said Rooney. “Ten months, how many witnesses? I want to know, ask them how much longer they want to go. How many more witnesses do they need to hear, and specifically which witnesses, and why?”

Let's use all of your endless investigations into Hillary Clinton as a template.

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Let's use all of your endless investigations into Hillary Clinton as a template.

No, let's not, please! Because if his investigations are anything to go by, it'll lead to nothing.

But as that's his only reference, I get his confusion. It must be hard to endure, to do your utmost to find something, anything, to leave no stone unturned (at least twice, but preferably thrice) just to get that ebil Hillary, and to come up with absolutely nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. And when he knows in his heart of hearts, that there is plenty to find in Mueller's investigation, it must really stick in his craw. 

[onekidanddone]

I'm having panic attacks about Nunes. 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

I'm having panic attacks about Nunes. 

But, my dear @onekidanddone, we have a Mueller...

Seriously though, I really believe that what the House and Senate committees do or not do, is not that important. With the Repugs in control of them, I don’t believe they could ever be impartial, or even lead to an impeachment procedure. So whatever Nunes does, it doesn’t really matter. 

 What Mueller is doing is very important though, as he is not only investigating political wrongdoing, but he is also very much looking at criminal activities. And I also believe he is collaborating with State AG’s, so that if the Repugs choose not to act upon his findings on a Federal level, the AG’s will be able to prosecute on a State level. So no matter what, anyone and everyone involved will eventually get their come-uppance, don’t you worry!