The Russian Connection 3: Mueller is Coming

[fraurosena]

Jennifer Rubin's latest op-ed on Adam Schiff and the Nunes debacle.

Schiff goes on offense

Quote

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is in the right job at the right time. His calm demeanor and his exacting eye for detail provide Democrats with a vivid contrast to the semi-hysterical and fact-free tirades you get from anti-FBI Republicans.

On Sunday he went after Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) for releasing a cherry-picked document without reading the underlying materials, which is mind-blowing. If you haven’t seen a complete 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a mountain, you can’t pull out a handful of pieces and credibly declare it’s picture of puppies. Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week”:

Now, the chairman also hasn’t read the underlying materials. … But the whole point here is not to be accurate, the point is to be misleading.

The Democrats didn’t even get to read the memo until minutes before it was voted out to the House. If [Republicans] were truly interested in getting to the truth, that’s not the process that they would use. Instead, they used a vehicle that has never been used before in the history of the House to release this very one-sided memorandum.

In terms of Andy McCabe, like the memorandum itself, they cherry-pick selectively in what he said. Now, while I can’t go into the specifics of his testimony, I can tell what he said was that you have to look at a FISA application as a cohesive whole. All the parts are important. And the suggestion that the chairman makes there and others on the committee have made also, that the entire dossier was included in this is just plain false.

He and other Democrats would do well to elevate the debate and educate voters about the damage being done. “There’s a compact between our committee and the intelligence community,” Schiff said. “You give us your deepest-held secrets, we will hold them in good confidence, we won’t abuse them. They’re going to share a lot less with us now and other sources of information are going to decide not to share with the FBI because they can’t rely on our committee not to be partisan in the handling of that information, and that’s a deep disservice which ultimately makes the country less safe.” That critical point needs to be made over and over again.

Monday could prove an interesting test for Republicans. CNN reports, “Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are expected to push for a vote at a Monday committee meeting to release their memo rebutting allegations of FBI surveillance abuses in a memo by their GOP counterparts, a move that could put the issue back on President Donald Trump’s desk this week.” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote to Trump, demanding release of the Democratic memo. “I strongly urge you to sanction the public release of Ranking Member Adam Schiff’s memorandum that was recently made available to all members of the House of Representatives as soon as possible, “he wrote. “I believe it is a matter of fundamental fairness that the American people be allowed to see both sides of the argument and make their own judgements.” He argued, “A refusal to release the Schiff memo in light of the fact that Chairman Devin Nunes’ memo was released and is based on the same underlying documents will confirm the American people’s worst fears that the release of Chairman Nunes’ memo was only intended to undermine Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation.”

Indeed, Republicans are now in a bit of a bind. Keep the Democrats’ memo hidden, showing Nunes’s escapade is essentially another attempt to obstruct the investigation, or release it and expose just how dishonest and unreliable are both Trump and Nunes. Maybe Republicans should have thought this through before their lemming-like trek over the political cliff with Nunes.

I wonder what the Repugs will do with the Dem memo. If they are smart (and I have my doubts about that) then they will throw Nunes under the bus and release it. But who knows nowadays wat the Repugs will do?

[fraurosena]

I'm not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it's a smart move to show what kind of damage the Nunes memo has wreaked, among other things opening up these kinds of possibilities. On the other hand, what kind of damage is this request by the NYT doing to the intelligence community?

The Times Asks Court to Unseal Documents on Surveillance of Carter Page

Quote

The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Trump campaign adviser at the center of a disputed memo written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee.

The motion is unusual. No such wiretapping application materials apparently have become public since Congress first enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. That law regulates electronic spying on domestic soil — the interception of phone calls and emails — undertaken in the name of monitoring suspected spies and terrorists, as opposed to wiretapping for investigating ordinary criminal suspects.

Normally, even the existence of such material is a closely guarded secret. While applications for criminal wiretaps often eventually become public, the government has refused to disclose the contents of applications for intelligence wiretaps — even to defendants who are later prosecuted on the basis of information derived from them.

But President Trump lowered the shield of secrecy surrounding such materials on Friday by declassifying the Republican memo about Mr. Page, after finding that the public interest in disclosing its contents outweighed any need to protect the information. Because Mr. Trump did so, the Times argues, there is no longer a justification “for the Page warrant orders and application materials to be withheld in their entirety,” and “disclosure would serve the public interest.”

The Republican memo acknowledged that the intelligence court had approved surveillance targeting Mr. Page in October 2016 and later approved three applications for 90-day extensions, meaning he was observed for at least a year under the warrant. The memo named the officials who signed off on the applications and described purported claims and purported omissions in those materials.

The central claim of the Republican memo, which was drafted under the direction of Representative Devin Nunes of California, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, is that law enforcement officials running the early stages of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible links to the Trump campaign abused their surveillance authorities and misled the court.

The memo contends that the application used material gathered by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, without disclosing to the court that the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign financed his work as opposition research. The implication is that judges who approved the wiretapping did not know it might be biased and were thus misled about its credibility.

But the credibility of the accusations in the memo are themselves the subject of intense dispute. Democrats who have seen the underlying materials say the Republican memo contains serious material inaccuracies and omissions, such as failing to include unrelated evidence about Mr. Page and Russia that the court also saw and mischaracterizing other facts.

For example, Democrats say that the FISA judges were, in fact, told that the financing of Mr. Steele’s research was politically motivated, even if the funders were not identified by name.

They have produced their own, still-classified rebuttal memo, but the Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee voted against making it public. Democrats are still pushing to make its contents public, but it is not clear whether the Republican-controlled Congress and Mr. Trump will permit that to happen.

“Given the overwhelming public interest in assessing the accuracy of the Nunes memorandum and knowing the actual basis for the Page surveillance orders,” the Times’s motion says, the court should direct the publication of its orders and the application materials "with only such limited redactions as may be essential to preserve information that remains properly classified notwithstanding the declassification and dissemination of the Nunes memorandum."

The Times sent the motion and related documents to the Justice Department on Monday to commence the action. It also submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Justice Department on Friday asking the executive branch to disclose, following a declassification review, the same materials about the wiretapping of Mr. Page, who had left the Trump campaign a month before the government applied to wiretap him.

That request is not yet ripe for litigation. Separately, A USA Today reporter and the James Madison Project, an anti-secrecy organization, are pursuing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed last spring, asking the executive branch to disclose any FISA wiretap orders or applications targeting the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign, Mr. Trump or people associated with him.

In the motion asking the intelligence court to unseal the Page materials, The Times is being represented in part by the Yale Law School Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic.

 

[Howl]

Tuesday morning: George Stephanopoulos is interviewing Carter Page on ABC.  Carter Page claims his 1st Amendment rights have been trampled on, he's a victim, nothing to see here, move along, move along. 

[fraurosena]

19 minutes ago, Howl said:

Tuesday morning: George Stephanopoulos is interviewing Carter Page on ABC.  Carter Page claims his 1st Amendment rights have been trampled on, he's a victim, nothing to see here, move along, move along. 

We really need an eye-roll upvote option... 

Was the interviewer actually asking any really pertinent questions, or was he just giving Page airtime?

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Five minutes later... posts merge. Darn it.

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Holy Rufus rampaging through the terrestrial planes!

Waiting with bated breath for the promised thread.... 

[formergothardite]

Quote

He has been in communication with an undercover FBI informant for well over 2 years.

This is why Trump and his people are working so make the info gathered on Carter Page go away. Page doesn't appear to be the brightest light in the harbor and if they have been focusing on him for two years he has almost certainly spilled everything and anything he knows. 

[fraurosena]

Here's the thread. I'm going to read it now and get back to you all after.

 

[fraurosena]

Well, I've read the thread. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The Krassenstein brothers point out to a lot of coincidences, that might lead one to suspect that Carter Page was/is indeed an FBI counterspy. However, their explanation of why the FBI would issue a FISA warrant against their own spy is rather lame, in my opinion.

It could be true what they claim about Carter Page, but It could also just be a rather wild theory based on coincidences. So,   although I would very much like it to be true, I'm still on the fence about this one for now. 

[apple1]

1 minute ago, fraurosena said:

Well, I've read the thread. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The Krassenstein brothers point out to a lot of coincidences, that might lead one to suspect that Carter Page was/is indeed an FBI counterspy. However, their explanation of why the FBI would issue a FISA warrant against their own spy is rather lame, in my opinion.

It could be true what they claim about Carter Page, but It could also just be a rather wild theory based on coincidences. So,   although I would very much like it to be true, I'm still on the fence about this one for now. 

Same opinion here. Needs some corroboration before I buy it completely.

[AmazonGrace]

I'm just wondering if there might be some confusion about whether a person who "works for the FBI" is an actual Mulder and Scully type of secret agent purposefully on the payroll as a career choice or more like an informant who got recruited due to circumstances putting him in the middle of a case and being told that it would be in his best interests to be labeled a cooperating witness rather than a person of interest.

(that sentence is a bit too short but I can't think of anything to add)

Carter Page doesn't strike me the least bit like a secret agent in his TV interviews but that's why it's a brilliant disguise lol

[formergothardite]

5 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Carter Page doesn't strike me the least bit like a secret agent in his TV interviews but that's why it's a brilliant disguise lol

If he is a secret agent he is doing a brilliant job of appearing to be a bumbling fool Trump supporter. 

[Howl]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

We really need an eye-roll upvote option... 

Was the interviewer actually asking any really pertinent questions, or was he just giving Page airtime?

George Stephanopoulos was hard balling the interview, and asking extremely on-point questions, based on what is known about Page currently, how long he's been under surveillance, Page's own reference to himself as an informal adviser to the Kremlin and so on.  Page basically laughed it all off as being silly.  Who, him? A Russian agent? hahahahahha. 

And yes, with all the hoo-hah over #ReleaseTheMemo, people are finally wondering about Page, the actual subject of the FISA warrant.  My personal sense is that Page laid a massive egg during the particular FISA warrant period under review,  that the Republicans desperately want suppressed. 

Also, Trey Gowdy --- I don't know about that guy.  A day or two ago he was on one of the cable news shows, and the longer I listened carefully to him, I realized he was saying two very contradictory things about FISA and #ReleaseTheMemo, while sounding perfectly reasonable, but somehow making the opposite point.  Very lawyerly.  

[GreyhoundFan]

I think we should start calling Nunes by the first name Dmitri. Oh, and fuck you, Dmitri: "Nunes: Actually, Clinton was the real colluder"

Spoiler

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program on Monday evening. That’s a sentence that, for an impartial observer, is like being told that there’s a Category 5 hurricane about to make landfall directly over your house. You know what’s coming, and all you can do is hunker down and ride it out.

Hannity had spent a decent amount of time at the top of his show discussing another memo, released by Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). That memo was a fleshed-out (but still redacted) version of a request the pair made public last month, referring Christopher Steele to the Justice Department for investigation into a possible criminal violation. Steele, as you likely know, is the former British intelligence official whose research into Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign became part of a dossier of information that has emerged as central to Republican defenses of Trump — and allegations of misbehavior against the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration.

The Grassley-Graham memo appears to suggest that Steele may have lied to the FBI about if or when he contacted media outlets. The memo is heavily redacted, so it’s hard to say. But this isn’t the direction Hannity took the subject in his conversation with Nunes.

Here’s the question he posed.

“If we look at the memo that came out of Chuck Grassley’s committee today, Steele gathered much of his information from Russian government sources inside of Russia. So if I put the two memos together — the new one tonight, yours from Friday — Hillary Clinton paid for Russian propaganda, turned out to be lies, not verified, then used for a FISA warrant, and I’m, like, not only was it paid for to manipulate and lie to the American people but then to spy on an opposition party candidate. Sir, are there crimes committed here?”

Before we get to Nunes’s answer, let’s parse what Hannity asked.

He refers to this sentence in the Grassley-Graham memo: “On the face of the dossier, it appears that Mr. Steele gathered much of his information from Russian government sources inside Russia.”

There are two ways to read that sentence. One way is that Steele talked to people who worked for the government who shared information they weren’t supposed to, in the way that a media outlet might talk to a source in the White House who talks under the cover of anonymity. The other way it can be read is that government officials were using Steele to spread misinformation deliberately.

Having read the public elements of the dossier, it seems unlikely that the latter is the case. It’s made up of 17 individual reports, many of which detail internal struggles within the Kremlin, including the firing of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff. When Russia wanted to get information out in 2016, they apparently (according to American intelligence agencies) passed it to WikiLeaks in some way to see it distributed widely. They didn’t tell a guy under the cloak of anonymity; much less a guy who worked for a firm (Fusion GPS) who was hired by a law firm (Perkins Coie), which was working for Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. (If they even knew about that chain of connections.) There’s certainly evidence to think that if they wanted to share information with a 2016 campaign, they used intermediaries to do things like email campaign staffers directly.

Hannity, though, depicts Steele’s conversations with people within the Russian government as “Russian propaganda.” He flatly declares Steele’s findings to be “lies, not verified,” the latter of which is a better description for most of the dossier’s contents than the former.

How does Nunes respond? With a measured evaluation of the assumptions that Hannity made?

He does not.

“Well, you can’t really make this up,” he said.

“I hope the listeners understood what you just said. We have a clear link to Russia. You have a campaign who hired a law firm who hired Fusion GPS who hired a foreign agent who went and got information from the Russians on the other campaign. It seems like the counterintelligence investigation should have been opened up against the Hillary campaign when they got a hold of the dossier.”

Nunes’s clear link to Russia is just a few steps shy of the clear link that exists between any Hollywood actor and Kevin Bacon.

Again, there are multiple examples of Russian agents or individuals making direct outreach to people working with the Trump campaign. Pop star Emin Agalarov being connected to Donald Trump Jr. Multiple attempts to connect the campaign to a man named Alexander Torshin. A meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer at Trump Tower. Discussions between campaign advisers and Russian allies or members of government, including one in which an adviser is told that the Russians have secret dirt on Clinton. One or two steps removed — not four or more steps removed from someone who may not be acting on behalf of the Russian government.

Notice, too, Nunes’s choice of words. Steele, a former British intelligence officer, is “a foreign agent,” casting him in the shadowy light of a Cold-War-era bad guy. His contacts in the Russian government provided “information from the Russians” — a phrasing that implies the information came with the blessing of the government.

Hannity is in a weird position. He has, for not the first time in Trump’s presidency, gone way out on a limb on a theory that implies that the Clinton campaign and the Democrats acted unethically or illegally in 2016 and then covered it up. He’s at the leading edge of the fight that Fox News is facing in a shifting media environment: Republicans and Democrats increasingly see each other as a threat to the country, and Trump supporters in particular are willing to seize on extreme or false news outlets and stories that paint the opposition in a negative light. If you’re Hannity, the furthest-right point on the sharply right Fox spectrum, the tug of demand from the base could keep pulling you further and further. Has kept pulling you.

Nunes, though, goes along. A longtime Trump defender whose defenses have in the past been shown to be hollow, he owns the memo alleging misbehavior by the Justice Department and has little choice but to keep pressing that point.

The interview wrapped up in a telling fashion.

HANNITY: I believe you’ve done a great service. I believe it’s the right thing to do. The American people need to know about all of this because fundamentally we had an effort to undermine our election and then undermine an incoming president. Is that a fair statement?

NUNES: Yeah, I mean, look. I think there’s clear evidence of collusion that the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign colluded with the Russians. You don’t get to hire lawyers and pretend that that didn’t happen. What they accuse you of is what they actually were doing.

Trump has made this argument before, too, that there’s collusion between the Democrats and the Russians, on the basis of people in the Russian government talking to Steele, someone who’s been researching Russian business and political actors for years. In this case, Nunes makes that claim after having pointed out that the “collusion” requires three other parties:  the law firm, Fusion GPS and Steele. That is to collusion what a Super Bowl party is to a romantic date.

But this! What they accuse you of is what they actually were doing.

Nunes and Hannity are accusing Clinton of colluding with Russia, with seeking dirt from Russia on their political enemies and having a clear link to agents of the country.

 

[fraurosena]

I think we can safely assume that of anything that comes out of the mouths of the presidunce, or any of his sycophants, the absolute opposite is true.

[hoipolloi]

This is a good read ("Robert Mueller's Investigation is Larger -- and Further Along -- Than You Think.")

Boy oh boy! Sure hope it's right!

Quote

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP CLAIMED in a tweet over the weekend that the controversial Nunes memo “totally vindicates” him, clearing him of the cloud of the Russia investigation that has hung over his administration for a year now.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, if anything, the Mueller investigation appears to have been picking up steam in the past three weeks—and homing in on a series of targets....We speak about the “Mueller probe” as a single entity, but it’s important to understand that there are no fewer than five (known) separate investigations under the broad umbrella of the special counsel’s office—some threads of these investigations may overlap or intersect, some may be completely free-standing, and some potential targets may be part of multiple threads. But it’s important to understand the different “buckets” of Mueller’s probe.

 

 

[fraurosena]

Who does he think he is? Steve Bannon?

[onekidanddone]

18 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Who does he think he is? Steve Bannon?

What does that thug have to hide?

[Howl]

On 2/6/2018 at 1:28 PM, Howl said:

Also, Trey Gowdy --- I don't know about that guy.  A day or two ago he was on one of the cable news shows, and the longer I listened carefully to him, I realized he was saying two very contradictory things about FISA and #ReleaseTheMemo, while sounding perfectly reasonable, but somehow making the opposite point.  Very lawyerly.  

Yeah, I'm quoting myself because I want to continue on about Mr. Gowdy.  For one brief shining moment last week, he seemed like a sudden voice of Republican sanity, standing up for the Mueller investigation, but he's well and truly back to his turd stirring self, trying to insert a Clinton! associate! angle (Sidney Blumenthal!) into the Steele dossier on the Official Trump State TV station, Fux news, with this OMG headline:  Gowdy hints Sidney Blumenthal leaked info to dossier author Steele

All this posturing, #ReleaseTheMemo bullshit has to do ultimately with continuing to delegitimize the Steele dossier by whatever means possible, while inoculating Fux viewers/Breitbart binge readers/alt-right keyboard warriors/OMG Deep State! against any element of the truth to come from the Steele dossier and the entire Mueller investigation.  This closed feedback system between Fux - Trump - Congress - social media amplified by Russian bots has been successful so far, so there is zero reason to stop doing what they are doing.  Zero. 

In addition, implications are being made that OMG! Democrats created a minority response memo that requires redactions, so the Dems could claim that the WH deliberately redacted evidence that the public needs to see, which would make it look like Trump is trying to hide something.  The WTFery continues unabated. 

So back to my main point.  Gowdy has his sticky little fingers in a lot of pies; put on your skepticism glasses every times he opens his mouth.  He's trying to position himself as a voice of reason, thinking that people will then tend to believe his outrageous statements outright lies and other bombshells. 

[Cartmann99]

40 minutes ago, Howl said:

So back to my main point.  Gowdy has his sticky little fingers in a lot of pies; put on your skepticism glasses every times he opens his mouth.  He's trying to position himself as a voice of reason, thinking that people will then tend to believe his outrageous statements outright lies and other bombshells.

He reminds me of Joe "Deadbeat Dad" Walsh.  Joe will tweet out some reasonable stuff, and then he goes all crazy again:

[onekidanddone]

36 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

He reminds me of Joe "Deadbeat Dad" Walsh.  Joe will tweet out some reasonable stuff, and then he goes all crazy again:

Grab your musket? So he is calling upon his people to shoot us?

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

Grab your musket? So he is calling upon his people to shoot us?

It's a political movement he's trying to start. Sounds like more of the same old faux libertarian/socially conservative stuff to me.

Quote

Are you ready to take your country back? Are you ready to grow up? Then, please join our Grow Up and Be Free movement by signing the form below. You will be joining with thousands across America who want to reverse this hopeless slide towards big government dependency and begin to get back to the principles America was founded upon — freedom, limited government, and individual responsibility.

It must begin with us. Let’s tell our politicians that we’re ready to grow up and be free. It’s the only way to save America for future generations. Democrats don’t believe in the America we were given and Republicans won’t fight for it. It’s time to start something new.

Join us and sign the pledge. Share it with your friends and neighbors. Spread it around. The bigger our movement, the more powerful we’ll be. It’s time to ignite the Revolution to get our country back. You in?

I AM READY TO GROW UP AND BE FREE

I want to be free to live my life as I choose and be responsible for myself, my family and my community.

Therefore, I will only support candidates for public office who will agree to:

1. Defend our God-given rights, including the right to life, religious liberty and the right to carry a firearm.

2. Diminish the influence of government over our lives and our businesses.

3. Eliminate this government debt that is bankrupting future generations.

4. Cut our taxes…it’s our money, we have the right to keep it.

5. Agree to be a citizen-legislator and not a professional politician. Term-limit yourself.

Sign the pledge below:

 I'm no Bible scholar, is there a parable I missed about concealed versus open carry? I just don't seem to recall a lot of talk about firearms.

* thinks for a moment* Oh hell, we've been robbed, and are missing missing vital information!

The fact that the MAGA hashtag is proceeding a link to a page where the words "personal responsibly" are not being used ironically, is just too precious for words. The Whiner-in-Chief never takes responsibility for his many failings! 

[fraurosena]

There are subpoena's in the air from the House Intelligence Committee for Bannon and Lewandowsky.

 

[onekidanddone]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

There are subpoena's in the air from the House Intelligence Committee for Bannon and Lewandowsky.

 

Can anybody with a legal background tell me if Bannon can be forced to answer questions? Trump has him gaged from answering most questions, but is that obstruction? Is it witness tampering?

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting analysis: "What happens if Trump is subpoenaed by Robert Mueller?"

Spoiler

As a rule, defense attorneys aren’t eager to have their clients speak with law enforcement. There’s very little upside and a huge downside in the best of scenarios. Testifying under oath immediately means that you’re risking perjury charges; talking to authorities at all means (as the Miranda saying goes) that your words can be used against you.

And that’s for a normal person. When you scale this scenario up to the president of the United States and his interlocutor to a person specifically assigned his position to uncover wrongdoing on the president’s part, the stakes are incalculably high. So it’s no surprise that President Trump’s lawyers aren’t champing at the bit to have him provide testimony to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. If Mueller wants to find out what Trump knows, he may have to do something that has  been rare in U.S. history: subpoena a sitting president.

For a layperson, being served with a subpoena to testify largely ties your hands. You can reject or ignore it, but then you face contempt of court charges and possible prison time. For Trump, the question takes on a number of other unique dimensions — and the consequences of a refusal to respect a subpoena could lead to nothing short of a question about the nature of America itself.

But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. Let’s build up to that by considering the steps that might unfold beginning at the moment Mueller decides he wants to hear Trump’s testimony.

I spoke with two constitutional law experts, Lisa Kern Griffin, professor of law at Duke University, and Louis Seidman, Carmack Waterhouse professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University.

Step 1: Mueller decides to hear from Trump

It’s not a foregone conclusion that Mueller will seek testimony from Trump — at least right now. As will become very clear shortly, reluctance by the president to comply with Mueller could lead to a significant legal fight, which doesn’t necessarily do Mueller much good over the short term.

“There are reasons why he might not want to get into a power struggle with the White House,” Griffin said. “It will prolong and delay his investigation,” and litigation “may not be the most productive thing for him to be focused on at this juncture in his investigation.”

It has been reported that Mueller and Trump’s attorneys may be trying to find a middle ground, reaching a consensus on ways in which Trump could provide answers to Mueller’s questions short of live testimony in front of a grand jury. When Bill Clinton was deposed in a sexual harassment lawsuit in 1998, it took place at his attorneys’ office in Washington. The ground rules, methodology and time constraints are subject to negotiation and bounded largely by whatever Mueller feels is appropriate.

But again: Any testimony at all could be problematic for Trump. (Particularly given his track record in depositions.) If Trump’s attorneys can’t negotiate a way to testify that satisfies their concerns and to which Mueller will agree, and if Mueller decides that he wants to press the issue, he can issue a subpoena.

Step 2: Trump doesn’t short-circuit the process

Before we get to the question at hand, there’s an important subject to consider.

Mueller serves at the pleasure of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein who, last May, appointed the former FBI director as special counsel. (Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself in March because of his involvement in the Trump campaign.) For Mueller to take significant steps in his investigation, Rosenstein needs to sign off — including, Seidman told me, issuing a subpoena to the president.

You can see the problem here. If Rosenstein were suddenly sympathetic to Trump, he could decline to issue the subpoena. Or, if Trump wanted to, he could simply replace Rosenstein with someone who was sympathetic to the president’s concerns.

Trump can’t fire Mueller directly, but he can fire Rosenstein and in recent days has declined to deny that he might do so. If Trump fires Rosenstein, authority over Mueller gets kicked down the chain of command at the Justice Department — unless Trump replaces Rosenstein quickly. Rosenstein was appointed by Trump last year and confirmed by the Senate, but according to the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998, Trump could potentially fill the deputy attorney general spot with any other already-confirmed appointee he wishes. (Whether the VRA applies if the vacancy is created through someone being fired is unclear.)

The example that Seidman used was moving EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt over to serve as DAG.

“You would slide somebody over, and that person would then say, ‘You can’t subpoena the president, and, what’s more, you can’t investigate his financial holdings,’ ” Seidman said. “Just a whole bunch of limitations.”

Mueller would effectively be neutered, and the question that would then arise is whether Mueller would resign — and, if he did, what would happen next.

But that’s a different theoretical. Let’s assume that Trump doesn’t take this step, that Mueller remains able to issue a subpoena and that Rosenstein remains able to approve it. It gets to the White House.

Step 3: Trump decides to fight the subpoena

This is where the Supreme Court would probably need to get involved.

“If the president does not respond to the subpoena or moves to quash the subpoena,” Griffin said, “there will be litigation in court about the constitutionality of subpoenaing a sitting president. That litigation will probably be governed by the Nixon case, which was functionally about the same issue, although it was tapes and not testimony that was in play.”

The “Nixon case” to which she refers is United States v. Nixon. In 1974, the White House was subpoenaed for tape recordings and documentation of meetings between then-president Richard M. Nixon and individuals who had already been indicted by a grand jury. Nixon partially complied but fought the full release of the material. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled unanimously that Nixon and the White House had to turn over the subpoenaed records. About two weeks later, Nixon resigned.

“Typically the law is that, before you can contest a subpoena you have to go to contempt,” Seidman said. “If Trump were an ordinary person, he couldn’t just appeal the subpoena. He would have to refuse to comply, be held in contempt and then appeal the contempt citation. But in the Nixon case, the court made an exception and it allowed an appeal without Nixon actually going to contempt.”

Should the Trump White House decline to provide Trump’s testimony, then, his attorneys would probably quickly find themselves arguing their case before the country’s highest court.

What would their argument be?

“Trump will make a bunch of legal arguments, who knows what they are, but I could imagine him saying that the special counsel is illegal, that he’s exceeded his jurisdiction, that under Clinton v. Jones the president is entitled to a certain accommodations that he’s refused to grant,” Seidman said. “He’ll just make something up, and so then it will go to court.”

Where the court would land in that fight isn’t entirely clear, but both Seidman and Griffin said they assumed that Trump would lose.

“I think that the precedent set by the Nixon case is unfavorable to the president’s claim that he is somehow above the law and cannot have his testimony compelled before the grand jury,” Griffin said. She noted that Trump does have the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination — but that is politically problematic.

Step 4: Trump decides to ignore the court

At this point, Trump will have been instructed to provide testimony to Mueller’s team. This could mean that his attorneys work with Mueller to figure out how and when that happens. Or it could mean that Trump simply ignores the court’s decision.

What then?

“Then it becomes a standoff between the court’s authority and the authority of the White House and the executive branch,” Griffin said, “because the court will be functionally issuing an order that the president has to appear and answer questions.”

“At that point,” Seidman said, “what would have to happen is that some court would have to hold the president in either civil or criminal contempt. There is no case law about that. No president has ever been held in contempt. Nobody’s ever tried to hold a president in contempt, and it’s anybody’s guess what a court would say about that.

“One of the means of enforcing a contempt judgment — either civil or criminal — is to incarcerate the person,” he continued. “In a case of civil contempt, it’s until the person relents. For criminal contempt, a sentence is imposed. In either event, the president would be locked up, and nobody thinks that’s plausible.

“The other alternative for civil contempt would be a fine that he would have to pay every day,” Seidman  said. “At this point, this gets pretty ridiculous, right? I mean, the president — maybe doesn’t have as much money as he claims, but he has a lot of money, and I don’t know that that would be very effective or very seemly.”

That bizarre scenario, though, obscures the bigger issue.

“The specter of someone hauling him into court is exaggerated,” Griffin said of Trump. “But if he refuses to accommodate the special counsel’s questions in any way, shape or form, then there will be a constitutional crisis. There will be literally a debate between two branches of our government as to whose authority is paramount, and that is unprecedented.”

Perhaps at that point Trump is impeached by Republicans in Congress. Perhaps, though, the issue is unresolved, and Trump holds out.

Were the situation not to be resolved, Seidman said, “we would wake up the next morning or a week later in a very different country than the country we live in now.”

Or maybe Trump would simply reach an agreement to answer Mueller’s questions. We’ll just have to wait and see.

 

[fraurosena]

Well, they're finally admitting it.

Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems, top U.S. official says

Quote

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated."

Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, "2016 was a wake-up call and now it's incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again."

[video]

"We were able to determine that the scanning and probing of voter registration databases was coming from the Russian government."

NBC News reported in Sept. 2016 that more than 20 states had been targeted by the Russians.

There is no evidence that any of the registration rolls were altered in any fashion, according to U.S. officials.

In a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, 79 percent of the respondents said they were somewhat or very concerned that the country's voting system might be vulnerable to computer hackers.

In January 2017, just weeks before leaving his post, Johnson declared the nation's electoral systems part of the nation's federally protected "critical infrastructure," a designation that applies to entities like the power grid that could be attacked. It made protecting the electoral systems an official duty of DHS.

[video]

But Johnson told NBC News he is now worried that since the 2016 election a lot of states have done little to nothing "to actually harden their cybersecurity."

Manfra said she didn't agree with Johnson's assessment. "I would say they have all taken it seriously."

NBC News reached out to the 21 states that were targeted. Five states, including Texas and California, said they were never attacked.

Manfra said she stands by the list, but also called it a "snapshot in time with the visibility that the department had at that time."

Many of the states complained the federal government did not provide specific threat details, saying that information was classified and state officials did not have proper clearances. Manfra told us those clearances are now being processed.

Other states that NBC contacted said they were still waiting for cybersecurity help from the federal government. Manfra said there was no waiting list and that DHS will get to everyone.

Some state officials had opposed Johnson's designation of electoral systems as critical infrastructure, viewing it a federal intrusion. Johnson said that any state officials who don't believe the federal government should be providing help are being "naïve" and "irresponsible to the people that [they're] supposed to serve."

[video]

 

[Howl]

From @fraurosena's NBC link:

But Johnson told NBC News he is now worried that since the 2016 election a lot of states have done little to nothing "to actually harden their cybersecurity."

1. Manfra said she didn't agree with Johnson's assessment. "I would say they have all taken it seriously."  (Don't worry! Nothing to see here, move along!)
2. Many of the states complained the federal government did not provide specific threat details, saying that information was classified and state officials did not have proper clearances. Manfra told us those clearances are now being processed.  (Don't worry! Nothing to see here, move along!)
3. Other states that NBC contacted said they were still waiting for cybersecurity help from the federal government. Manfra said there was no waiting list and that DHS will get to everyone.  (Don't worry! Nothing to see here, move along!)

We are so f**ked.  And  the states pouting about Federal oversight or assistance with a hacking thread to their voter rolls and processes?  And might they all be Republicans?  Epic facepalm.