Tag Archives: Robert Mueller

Politics, US

Judge Napolitano: Can the President Lawfully Investigate His Investigators?

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This past weekend, President Donald Trump suggested that his presidential campaign may have been the victim of spies or moles who were FBI informants or undercover agents. He demanded an investigation to get to the bottom of the matter.

At the same time that the president was fuming over this, Republican congressional leaders were fuming about the reluctance of senior officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI to turn over documents that might reveal political origins of the current criminal investigation of the president by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Can the president intercede in a federal criminal investigation of which he himself is a subject? Can Congress intercede in a DOJ criminal investigation?

Here is the back story.

Mueller was named special counsel so he could investigate serious and demonstrable evidence of Russian government interference in the 2016 presidential election. Because the Trump campaign met with Russian intelligence officials offering campaign assistance, implicit in that investigation is an inquiry into whether the Trump campaign invited foreign interference and agreed to accept or facilitate it.

Mueller is seeking to determine whether there was an agreement between the Trump campaign and any foreign person, entity or government to receive anything of value for the campaign. Such an agreement plus a material step in furtherance of it taken by any of those who joined the agreement would itself constitute the crime of conspiracy, even if the agreed-upon thing of value never arrived.

In the course of examining evidence for the existence of this alleged conspiracy — which Trump has forcefully denied many times — Mueller’s prosecutors and FBI agents have come upon evidence of other crimes. They have obtained 19 indictments — some for financial crimes, some for lying to FBI agents and some for foreign interference in the election — and four guilty pleas for lying, in which those who pleaded guilty agreed to assist the government.

Nine of the indictments are against Russian intelligence agents, whom the president himself promptly sanctioned by barring their travel here and their use of American banks and commercial enterprises, even though he has called Mueller’s investigation a witch hunt.

Mueller has also come upon evidence of obstruction of justice by the president while in office and financial crimes prior to entering office, all of which Trump has denied. Obstruction of justice consists of interfering with a judicial proceeding — such as a grand jury’s hearing evidence — for a corrupt purpose.

Thus, if Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because he didn’t trust him or because he wanted his own person in that job, that was his presidential prerogative, but Trump’s purpose was corrupt if he fired Comey because Comey would not deny that the president was the subject of a criminal investigation — a basis for firing surprisingly offered publicly by one of the president’s own lawyers.

The potential financial crimes appear to be in the areas of bank fraud — making material misrepresentations to banks to obtain loans — and money laundering, or the passage of ill-gotten gains through numerous bank accounts so as to make the gains appear lawful. These, too, Trump has denied.

It seems that the deeper Mueller and his team dig the more they find. As lawyers and as federal prosecutors, Mueller’s team members have ethical obligations to uncover whatever evidence of crime they come upon and, when professionally feasible and legally appropriate, either prosecute or pass the evidence on to other federal prosecutors, as they did in the case of evidence of fraud against Michael Cohen, a former confidant and lawyer for Trump before he was president.

Now, back to Trump’s eruption about FBI spies or moles.

The president cannot interfere with criminal investigations against himself without running the risk of additional charges of obstruction of justice — interference with a judicial process (the gathering of evidence and its presentation to a grand jury) for a corrupt purpose (impeding his own prosecution or impeachment). Nor can members of Congress see whatever they want in the midst of a criminal investigation, particularly if they might share whatever they see with the person being investigated.

Prosecutors have a privilege to keep their files secret until they reach the time that the law provides for them to go public. Because Mueller is faced with the legal equivalent of assembling a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, he is not yet ready to show his cards. If his cards contain materials from confidential sources — people whose identities he promised not to reveal — or if his cards contain evidence he presented to a grand jury, he may not lawfully reveal what he has until it is time to exonerate the president, indict him or present a report to Mueller’s DOJ superiors that is intended for the House of Representatives.

Can the president investigate his investigators?

Yes — but not until the investigation of him is completed. That’s because no one can fruitfully examine the legitimacy of the origins of the case against Trump without knowing the evidence and the charges. Trump’s allegations are of extreme scandal — the use of FBI assets by the Obama administration to impede his presidential campaign. Yet if he is exonerated, those allegations will lose their sting. If he is charged with crimes or impeachable offenses that do not have their origins in politically charged spying, then his allegations will be moot.

But if he were to force the DOJ to turn over raw investigative files now to politicians who want to help him, he might very well be impeding the criminal case against him. That would be profoundly threatening to the rule of law, for it provides that no man can be the prosecutor or the judge in his own case. Even Trump’s lawyers acknowledge that he could not lawfully do that.

Opinion, US

Judge Napolitano: Prosecutors and the Rule of Law

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Late last week, a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, questioned the authority of special counsel Robert Mueller to seek an indictment and pursue the prosecution of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for alleged financial crimes that, according to the indictment, began and ended well before Donald Trump ran for president. Mueller was appointed special counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein because of allegations that Rosenstein accepted of a conspiracy by members of the Trump campaign to accept assistance from a foreign person, entity or government, which is a felony.

The application by Manafort’s lawyers before Judge T.S. Ellis III was actually a motion to dismiss the indictment against Manafort for want of jurisdiction. Stated differently, Manafort argued that Mueller exceeded the authority granted to him by the Department of Justice and thus he has no legal ability — jurisdiction — to prosecute Manafort. During the course of the oral argument on this motion, the judge opined that in his view, Mueller is only prosecuting Manafort for bank and tax fraud to squeeze him to testify against President Trump on matters that might be impeachable.

The judge’s comments as to Mueller’s motivation are dicta. Dicta are the unsolicited, unnecessary and often personal opinions of the court on matters not strictly before the court and not integral to the court’s ruling. Stated differently, there is an abundance of speculation in the media but zero evidence in the record before Judge Ellis — zero — on which he could base his opinion; and his opinion of the prosecutor’s motivation is irrelevant. It made national headlines because Trump supporters agree with it, and it is probably accurate — but it is legally meaningless.

Even if Judge Ellis were to dismiss the indictment against Manafort for want of Mueller’s jurisdiction, the dismissal would mean only that Mueller cannot prosecute Manafort, not that Manafort cannot be prosecuted on these charges.

If the present indictment were to be dismissed, the local federal prosecutors in Alexandria would present the Mueller-gathered evidence against Manafort to another grand jury and ask it to issue a new indictment that makes the identical charges as those now pending. Then they would prosecute Manafort on the same charges that Mueller originally brought. The financial crimes charged, though unrelated to Mueller’s initial duty of looking for a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and foreigners, are real, and no federal prosecutors with jurisdiction could ethically overlook them.

Judge Ellis’ actual ruling — clouded by the fog of his dicta — gave Mueller two weeks to demonstrate his lawful jurisdiction. He can easily do that with a letter from Rosenstein. The letter can even be retroactive. Thus, all this focus on Judge Ellis’ personal opinion of Mueller’s motivation is much ado about national politics and has little to do with the rule of law. Who cares what a judge thinks about the motivations of the prosecutors?

The practice of indicting a person for a matter utterly unrelated to the core of the government’s investigation in order to turn the indicted person into a government witness, though often repellant, is commonplace and has received approval by numerous Supreme Court opinions. Clearly, obtaining a guilty plea from retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, for lying to FBI agents about the existence of a lawful telephone conversation and obtaining a guilty plea from Rick Gates, Manafort’s former business partner and deputy Trump campaign manager, for lying about who said what at a lawful meeting are parts of a plan to get these folks to give evidence or testimony about the president that prosecutors want to hear.

I have characterized this prosecutorial behavior as extortion or bribery, but I am in a small minority in the legal and judicial communities. The courts have made clear that prosecutors can nullify prison exposure by reducing charges to induce the testimony they want from a witness. Yet if defense counsel gave the same witness so much as a lollipop to shade his testimony, both would be indicted for bribery.

All this leads to the question: How independent are these prosecutors? The modern, post-Nixon Department of Justice has a little bit of unaccountability intentionally built into it based on natural law principles of right and wrong and on fear of an imperial presidency. President Richard Nixon believed he could do as he pleased with his DOJ — and even boasted that if he did something, by definition it was not unlawful.

But prosecutors have ethical and moral obligations to prosecute crimes, and those duties transcend politics. Suppose President Trump told prosecutors not to prosecute his former friend Harvey Weinstein or his former lawyer Michael Cohen? I expect they would rightly ignore him.

I know this argument offends the belief of many of my colleagues that the Constitution gives the president sole and total command over all behavior in the executive branch of the federal government. But the natural law is superior to the Constitution and superior to the government.

The natural law teaches that through the exercise of reason, we know in our hearts what is right and what is wrong. Some things are right no matter what the government says, and some things are wrong no matter what the government says. The limited quasi-independence of the modern Department of Justice, born in the ashes of a presidency that publicly proclaimed that it could do no wrong, is a hallmark to these principles.

I offer these arguments because it now appears that the feared clash between President Trump and special counsel Mueller will soon come to a head, and one can only hope that the rule of law will prevail. But the rule of law is only a safeguard of our liberties when the people in whose hands we repose it for safekeeping are faithful to it though, in the motto of the DOJ, the heavens fall.

Opinion

Judge Napolitano: Troublesome Questions for President Trump

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In a startling revelation earlier this week, The New York Times published what it claims are 49 questions that special counsel Robert Mueller sent to lawyers for President Donald Trump. The questions are apparently a road map of inquiry that Mueller and his prosecutors and FBI agents plan to put to the president if the president agrees to sit down for an interview with them.

I have been arguing for months that the president should not agree to an interview with Mueller. My reasons are fairly boilerplate: It is nearly impossible to talk prosecutors who are determined to seek an indictment into changing their minds. As well, the person being interviewed cannot possibly know as much about the case as the team doing the interview, and he will be prone to error.

In the interview environment, one small lie can result in one big headache of an indictment, even if the lie is about an extraneous matter. When federal prosecutors question a potential defendant, who appears voluntarily and is not under oath, the questioners can lie to the person being interviewed, but he cannot lie to them without risk of indictment. Just ask Martha Stewart. This is exquisitely unfair, but it has been federal law for generations.

The Supreme Court has ruled that federal prosecutors and FBI agents can use trickery, deceptions and outright falsehoods — even disguises, verbal traps and fraud — to help them extract information from a witness or person they are investigating. Given the president’s well-known propensity to talk at length on many disjointed matters and to think both aloud and unfiltered — witness his 30-minute unannounced telephone interview on live cable television with my colleagues on “Fox & Friends” last week — there is a very serious danger that he would contradict himself and even contradict facts for which the special counsel has hard evidence.

Donald Trump is the subject of a criminal investigation. When prosecutors interview a person they are investigating, it is to help the investigation, not the subject of it.

As if all of this were not enough to dissuade a self-confident Trump from sitting down with an all-knowing Mueller and his crew, now come the 49 questions Mueller has told Trump’s lawyers he wants to ask the president. Though many of these at first blush appear not to challenge the president’s memory or command of facts, consider a deeper analysis.

There are two species of questions here. One set of questions is intended to get the president off on a disjointed monologue to see whether he — as he did on “Fox & Friends” — will admit to something without actually being accused or even asked about it. The others are questions to which Mueller already knows the answers and for which he has irrefutable hard evidence — and the quest is to see whether the president will be truthful.

As well, both types of questions are mere starting points — intended to lull Trump into a comfortable but false sense of security — which would then be followed with curveballs he would have great difficulty trying to hit.

One of Mueller’s questions is profound, and I have not seen anything like it in all the literature and legal arguments preceding the Times’ revelation this week: “What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?”

Prosecutors need a factual or good-faith basis to trigger their questions. This question goes to the heart of the so-called collusion issue. I say “so-called” because “collusion” is a media and a political word; it does not describe anything in the law. What Mueller is looking for is a conspiracy, which is the easiest crime for prosecutors to prove because the crime need not have been successful. The late Justice Robert Jackson, himself a former U.S. attorney general, famously called conspiracy prosecutors’ favorite crime.

The essence of conspiracy is an agreement — here, an agreement to accept campaign assistance from a foreign person, entity or government, which is illegal, even if the assistance never arrived. The essence of the crime is the agreement, not the receipt of something of value. The conspirators need not have met together or even be known to each other, providing at least one of them took at least one material step — such as a phone call or a meeting with Russians offering help — in furtherance of the agreement.

If there is truth underlying this question — if Mueller has hard evidence that the true answer is “yes” — it could only have come to Mueller from Rick Gates, Manafort’s former business partner and co-defendant and now Mueller’s star witness. Gates could have told Mueller in return for Mueller’s dropping charges against him that Manafort reached out to the Russians, in which case Mueller would want to test Trump’s knowledge, understanding and truthfulness on this white-hot issue.

If Trump were to answer “no” and Gates told the grand jury that Trump did know of this, Mueller could claim Trump lied and ask the same grand jury to indict Trump for that. If Trump were to answer “yes,” that would be the end of his presidency. If he were to give a rambling non-answer, Mueller would make the most of it.

Are prosecutors fair? Many are, but their common view is that they need not always be fair because they are after bad guys who don’t play by the rules. To the prosecutorial mind, it is for judges and juries to be fair.

What should Trump do? He should go about the business of being president. He should do what is most difficult for him: stay silent. Don’t trust a man who owns a grand jury. Don’t help him undo your presidency.

US

Judge Napolitano: What Is Robert Mueller Looking For?

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Robert Mueller is the special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 to probe the nature and extent of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The investigation began in October 2016 under President Barack Obama when the FBI took seriously the boast of Carter Page, one of candidate Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisers, that he had worked for the Kremlin.

The FBI also had transcripts of telephone conversations and copies of emails and text messages of Trump campaign personnel that had been supplied to it by British intelligence. Connecting the dots, the FBI persuaded a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a search warrant for the surveillance of Page, an American.

Page never registered as a foreign agent, and working for the Kremlin and not registering as a foreign agent is a crime for which the FBI should have investigated Page. Such an investigation would have included surveillance, but not from the FISA court. Surveillance in a criminal case requires a search warrant from a U.S. District Court based upon the constitutional requirement of probable cause of crime — meaning that it is more likely than not that the thing to be searched (internet and telephone communications) will produce evidence of criminal behavior.

But the FBI didn’t seek that. Instead, it sought a warrant to surveil Page’s communications based on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act standard, which is probable cause of communicating with a foreign power. This lower, easier-to-demonstrate and unconstitutional standard is the tool of choice these days for FBI agents because it requires less effort and is used in a court that grants 99.9 percent of search warrant applications.

[Also Watch: Reality Check: GOP Memo and FISA Problems]

The temptation to use the FISA court and its easy standard instead of a U.S. District Court and its privacy-recognizing constitutional standard to get a search warrant is often too much for the FBI to resist. This is a form of corruption because it presents a path for criminal investigators to invade the privacy of Americans that the Constitution protects.

Yet the FBI used whatever it learned from the surveillance of Page to get that surveillance extended. Even the Trump Department of Justice went to the FISA court to spy on Page. Lost in all this is the purpose of FISA — to prevent government surveillance of Americans and limit it to agents of foreign powers.

When Jeff Sessions became attorney general, he recognized that he himself would most likely be a witness in the Mueller investigation because of his involvement in the Trump campaign, so he removed himself from all matters pertaining to Russia, and his deputy, Rosenstein, appointed Mueller to run the investigation.

What is Mueller looking for?

When the feds are examining a potential crime committed by a group, their treasure-trove of evidence can often be a member of the group who reveals the criminal behavior of his former colleagues. That’s why the feds often indict people for crimes that appear to be irrelevant to the ones they are investigating — in this case, lying to the FBI and bank fraud allegedly committed before the 2016 election.

When such an indicted person can then be persuaded to turn on his former colleagues in return for a lesser charge or a lighter sentence, prosecutors can have a field day. This is a form of bribery — you tell us on the witness stand what we want to hear and we’ll go easy on you — that is permitted only to prosecutors; and the courts condone it. If defense counsel gave as much as a lollipop to a witness to shade his testimony, both would be indicted.

From the backgrounds of those whom Mueller’s grand juries have indicted and from the deals they have cut with him, it appears that Mueller is looking at three areas of potential criminal behavior. Mueller has already established as a base line the saturation of the 2016 presidential campaign by Russian intelligence agents. If his indictments of these Russians are accurate, they were here virtually and physically and they spent millions to help Trump. But the indicted Russians are not coming back to the U.S. for their trials.

Mueller is examining their potential American confederates for the crime of conspiracy — or, as my colleagues in the media call it, collusion. This would be an agreement by campaign officials to accept something of value from a foreign person, entity or government, even if the thing of value — for example, Hillary Clinton emails — was never actually delivered. The crime is the agreement, and it is prosecutable after at least one of those who agreed takes a material step in furtherance of the agreement.

Mueller’s second area of examination is possible obstruction of justice by President Trump himself. Obstruction is the interference with a judicial proceeding for a corrupt purpose. Was FBI Director James Comey fired because Trump couldn’t work with him or because he was hot on the president’s trail and Trump wanted to impede that? If it was the former, it would have been licit. If it was the latter, it could have been criminal.

The third of Mueller’s areas is financial dealings by the pre-presidential Trump. These bear little surface relationship to Russian involvement in the campaign, yet evidence of wrongdoing must have come to Mueller from his FBI agents or his cooperating witnesses, and he is following the money as prosecutors do.

Where will all this go? The president cannot seem to find an experienced criminal defense lawyer. Mueller has 16 experienced federal prosecutors and a few dozen FBI agents passionately at work. And he also has witnesses he legally bribed and a few hundred thousand documents from the White House and from Trump’s financial affairs that the president has not personally reviewed.

And now Mueller wants to interview the president. Who will have the upper hand if that happens?

Government Accountability, Opinion, Politics

Sam Nunberg: “Let Him Arrest Me!”

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Late Monday afternoon, we were treated to a series of bizarre interviews on nearly every major cable television channel except Fox when a colorful character named Sam Nunberg, a former personal and political aide to Donald Trump, took to the airwaves to denounce a grand jury subpoena he received compelling the production of documents and live testimony.

The grand jury is one of two summoned by special counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation of whether President Trump or his colleagues engaged in any criminal activity prior to or during the presidential campaign, or during his presidency.

At several points in the rambling and seemingly alcohol-infused rant, Nunberg insisted he would not comply with the subpoena, and he challenged Mueller to force him to do so, proclaiming at least three times, “Let him arrest me!” I can tell you from my years on the bench in New Jersey, this is not a good gauntlet to lay down; and it is one often addressed swiftly. Be careful what you ask for.

Here is the backstory:

Nunberg is a 36-year-old New York lawyer who has been involved in conservative politics since his teenage years. He was hired by Trump in 2011 for the purpose of burnishing Trump’s image as a political conservative. Like most people hired by Trump before his presidential candidacy, Nunberg signed a contract that provided for liquidated damages of $10 million should he publicly reveal any private matters he learned about Trump during his employment.

Trump did fire Nunberg in 2014 because of an unflattering op-ed that he believed Nunberg’s odd behavior had induced and sued Nunberg for $10 million. Nunberg counterclaimed that Trump was using corporate funds from the Trump Organization to fund his then-nascent presidential campaign, a potential felony. Soon, the litigation was dropped and Nunberg was rehired. And in 2015, he was fired again, in a very public and humiliating way by candidate Trump himself.

Last month, Nunberg agreed to be interviewed by Mueller’s prosecutors and FBI agents. After the five-hour interview, he told friends and media folks that he discerned from the questions that Mueller has “something bad” on Trump. Nunberg thought his involvement with the special prosecutor was over when he received a grand jury subpoena and then reacted in a most unlawyerly fashion.

For a few reasons, this is not good news for the president.

First, whatever Nunberg told the prosecutors and FBI agents who interviewed him last month, they revealed it to one of their grand juries; and they asked and received from the grand jury a subpoena compelling Nunberg to recount to the grand jury what he said in his interview. This is the same interview from which he claimed he learned that Mueller & Co. have “something bad” on Trump. The president’s lawyers would surely like to see whatever Mueller’s prosecutors told the grand jury Nunberg told them. So would we all.

Second, during his rants on Monday, he opined that the president is an “idiot” who no one hates “more than me,” and that Mueller had offered him immunity in return for his testimony. Immunity? That is the highest and best gift a prosecutor can give a witness or target. If done in accordance with the rules, it bars all prosecution of the immunized person no matter what he admits to in testimony, unless he lies under oath. If Mueller did offer Nunberg immunity, it can only mean that Mueller desperately needs Nunberg’s testimony against the president to be recounted to one of his grand juries, and that Nunberg has some criminal exposure.

At the end of his day of rage, Nunberg had a change of heart. I suspect it was induced by a compassionate on-camera plea to Nunberg by my Fox colleague Charles Gasparino, a friend of Nunberg who told him to talk to his lawyers and his doctors soon. After six hours of wild on-air gyrations and threats, Nunberg agreed to testify, Gasparino says.
Nunberg’s doctors must have calmed him down, and his lawyers must have reminded him that the remedy for the persistent willful failure to comply with a grand jury subpoena is incarceration. That would mean incarceration for the life of the grand jury, which now seems as though it will be sitting well into 2019. His lawyers no doubt also reminded him that it is insane to taunt an alligator before crossing the stream. The FBI does not like being provoked.

While all this was going on, the same grand jury subpoenaed all emails between or among Trump’s inner circle of 10 persons — including the president himself. Given the roles each has played in Trump’s recent life, it is clear that the president remains in Mueller’s legal crosshairs.

There are actually three sets of legal crosshairs, so to speak. One seeks to determine whether the Trump campaign received “anything of value” from any foreign national or foreign government, and whether Trump personally approved of it — a felony. Another inquiry seeks to determine whether the president himself attempted to obstruct the work of the Mueller grand juries by firing then-FBI Director James Comey for a corrupt reason, one that is self-serving and lacking a bona fide governmental purpose — also a felony.
The third inquiry seeks to examine whether Trump misused or misrepresented corporate funds or bank loans in his pre-presidential life — another felony. On this last point, he has already been accused by Nunberg; and the grand jury no doubt will hear about it.
It has often been argued that out of the mouths of babes and drunks comes the truth, as both lack a filter and any moral fear. Is Nunberg dumb like a fox? Did he impeach himself? Would you believe Sam Nunberg?

Foreign Policy, Government Accountability, International, Politics, US

Trump Praises Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Consolidation of Power

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Palm Beach, FL – During a private luncheon speech to Republican donors at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, President Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his recent moves to consolidate power and extend his political tenure.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. And he’s great,” Trump said, according to a recording obtained by CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

Trump’s comments followed an announcement from China’s Communist Party that it will be voting this week to alter the country’s constitution to abolish term limits — a move that would theoretically secure Xi as president indefinitely.

In a report for Vox, Carl Minzner, a professor at Fordham Law School, explained:

With the removal of these term limits in the constitution, that also sets up the likelihood — the extremely strong likelihood — that going forward, Xi Jinping is likely to serve in all three roles [head of state, general secretary of the Community Party, and head of the military] indefinitely into the future, which of course would be a significant reversal from recent practice since the beginning of China’s reform era.

CNN reported that during his speech, Trump appeared to reflect that he’d received unfair treatment regarding the ongoing Russian collusion investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in comparison to the lack of legal scrutiny opponent Hillary Clinton received for her activities.

“I’m telling you, it’s a rigged system, folks,” Trump said according to CNN. “I’ve been saying that for a long time. It’s a rigged system. And we don’t have the right people in there yet. We have a lot of great people, but certain things, we don’t have the right people.”

Trump was possibly referring to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was recently chastised byTrump for opening an OIG investigation into alleged FISA surveillance abuses rather than a criminal probe; Trump described the situation as “DISGRACEFUL” regarding Sessions’ continued refusal to launch a criminal investigation into other potentially criminal activities carried out by Clinton in regards to Uranium One and her private email server.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/968856971075051521

[RELATED: Reality Check: GOP Memo and FISA Problems]

Trump’s remarks, which CNN illustrated as “upbeat, lengthy, and peppered with jokes and laughter,” also questioned whether Clinton could be a “happy person” after her loss to Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

“Is Hillary a happy person? Do you think she’s happy?” Trump asked. “When she goes home at night, does she say, ‘What a great life?’ I don’t think so. You never know. I hope she’s happy.”

Trump also took aim at former President George W. Bush and the intelligence community that provided false intelligence indicating Iraq possessed WMD’s, labeling the invasion of Iraq “the single worst decision ever made” and likening it to “throwing a big fat brick into a hornet’s nest.”

“Here we are, like the dummies of the world, because we had bad politicians running our country for a long time,” Trump proclaimed. “That was Bush. Another real genius. That was Bush,” he continued sarcastically. “That turned out to be wonderful intelligence. Great intelligence agency there.”

Election, Government Accountability, International, Politics, US

New Yorker Reporter Downplays Competency, Effectiveness of Russian “Troll Farm”

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Washington, D.C.— Following Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three organizations allegedly behind a Russian “troll farm” accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a reporter from The New Yorker— who profiled the Internet Research Agency (IRA) “troll farm” in 2015— has largely refuted the indictment’s characterization of the operation.

Adrian Chen, staff writer for The New Yorker, was interviewed on MSNBC with Chris Hayes about the IRA troll farm, and likened the operation to a social media marketing campaign.

In an article for The New Yorker, Chen noted the amateurish nature of the IRA:

In the indictment, Mueller’s team reveals that the Agency didn’t discover the idea of targeting ‘purple states’ until June, 2016, when a Texas-based conservative activist introduced them to the term. Cambridge Analytica this is not.

Chen made clear that the operation was not a professionally-run covert operation as propagated in the media, but instead, noted the outfit was “inept and haphazard.”

In the Times Magazine article that supposedly made me an authority, I detailed some of the Agency’s disturbing activities, including its attempts to spread false reports of a terrorist attack in Louisiana and to smear me as a neo-Nazi sympathizer. But, if I could do it all over again, I would have highlighted just how inept and haphazard those attempts were. That the Agency is now widely seen as a savvy, efficient manipulator of American public opinion is, in no small part, the fault of experts. They may derive their authority from perceived neutrality, but in reality they—we—have interests, just like everyone else.

In a Twitter post, Chen wrote:

Tried to tamp down the troll farm panic on @chrislhayes show last night. It’s 90 people with a shaky grasp of English and a rudimentary understanding of U.S. politics shitposting on Facebook.

In a response to a tweet noting the IRA actually has 300 to 400 individuals, Chen wrote “that was the entire Internet Research Agency. The American department had ~90 people, according to the Russian journalists who did the most in-depth investigation.”

Chen then provided a link to a Washington Post profile of Russian journalists who had also investigated the troll farm, and reached a similar conclusion to Chen’s regarding the capability of the IRA troll farm.

Additionally, Rob Goldman, Facebook’s Vice President of Advertising, refuted the idea that the IRA was trying to get Trump elected, arguing on Twitter that due to the vast majority of Facebook ads being purchased after the election was over, the goal was likely not to elect Donald Trump, but “to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us.”

After suggesting that the underlying narrative was not to bolster a candidate, but to sow discord within the American polity, Goldman was apparently caught in the crosshairs, and according to Wired, Facebook VP of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan stated that “Nothing we found contradicts the Special Counsel’s indictments. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

Featured, International, US

Mueller in Hot Pursuit

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Last Friday, a federal grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C., indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian corporations for conspiracy and for using false instruments and computer hacking so as to influence the American presidential election in 2016. The indictment alleges a vast, organized and professional effort, funded by tens of millions of dollars, whereby Russian spies passed themselves off as Americans on the internet, on the telephone and even in person here in the U.S. to sow discord about Hillary Clinton and thereby assist in the election of Donald Trump.

Though an indictment is a charge only, it presumably relies on hard evidence of a wide and deep Russian project — so wide and so deep that it could only have been approved and paid for by the Kremlin. President Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, characterized the allegations in the indictment as “incontrovertible.” The New York Times reported over the weekend that its Russian sources have now revealed that more than 1,000 people in Russia were involved for over three years.

The project was run out of an office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, which also houses the Kremlin’s favorite caterer, a company owned by one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s close friends. The techniques outlined in the indictment include using false and fictitious names, bank accounts and websites; organizing rallies and marches in the U.S.; making thousands of phony web posts; and aggressively revealing embarrassing data about Clinton.

The Russian work even included the orchestration of a few pro-Clinton rallies so as to deflect suspicion away from all these new pro-Trump entities that appeared to have come out of nowhere.
Though Donald Trump told folks as far back as 2011 of his interest in running for president and though Clinton ran in the Democratic primaries in 2008 and 2016, as well as in the general election in 2016, the Russian scheme appears to have materialized at some point in 2014.

The dates are important because we know from the revelations of Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency, the federal government’s domestic spying apparatus, began its pursuit of capturing all electronic data on everyone in the U.S. in 2001 and succeeded in mastering the capture of all keystrokes, telephone calls and digital traffic by 2005. We also know that the NSA traffic proceeds through FBI computers and that the CIA keeps constant tabs on Russian spies in Russia and elsewhere.

Why didn’t the CIA or the NSA or the FBI pick this up?

That is the $64,000 question that the indictment does not address, and we may never know the answer to it. If the purpose of all the warrantless spying — in direct contravention of the Constitution, no less — is to keep the country safe from foreign assault, whether by bombs in a subway or by guns in an office building or by hacking into computers, why didn’t our 60,000 domestic, and God only knows how many foreign, spies catch this Russian interference?

One answer is information overload. By spying on everyone all the time, the spies have too much data through which to sift, and they miss the evidence of coming terror — just as they did with the killings in Orlando, in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, on a New York bike path and even recently at a school in Florida, all of which were preceded by internet chatter that would have tipped off a trained listener to the plans of the killers.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts to uncover the Russian interference are not a “hoax” or a “witch hunt” as President Trump has argued. They are serious and professional efforts that have now borne fruit. But Mueller was not appointed until after the election — after the Russians ran unchecked through our computer systems and the American marketplaces of ideas.

The joke in the D.C. legal community this week is, “We all want a front-row seat at the arraignments of the Russians.” That’s a joke because a defendant must be physically present at his arraignment, meaning — since the Kremlin will surely not send its indicted spies here — no arraignments will occur. And no trials will occur.
These folks the grand jury indicted could be lured to other countries and arrested or even kidnapped there, but that would be very dangerous and would most likely invite violent retaliation. Even if these defendants ended up in a federal courtroom by murky or illegal means, that would not impair their prosecution.

However, because the American intelligence community has done similar “disinformation” projects in foreign countries (though not on this scale), these defendants and these indictments will go nowhere.
That leaves a question: Why would Mueller seek indictments of folks he knows he cannot prosecute? He did so for a few reasons. One was to reveal the scope of the unlawful activity that he has found. The American people are entitled to know what went on under our noses and who knew about this and looked the other way. As well, this indictment gives credibility to Mueller’s work.

The other reason for the indictment is to smoke out any American collaborators. He has identified American collaborators, but not by proper name, and the Department of Justice has said — not in the indictment, in which case it would be bound by what it says, but in a press statement, which binds no one — that the American collaborators were unwitting dupes of the Russians. My guess is that Mueller’s American targets are under electronic and visual surveillance and that he is listening to their (premature) sighs of relief.
It is a felony for foreign nationals to participate in American federal elections, and it is a felony for any Americans knowingly to assist them.

This is not the end of these indictments related to the 2016 election. It is the beginning.

Government Accountability, Politics, US

Kim Dotcom: DNC Hack Was Leak From an “Insider With a Memory Stick”

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Washington, D.C.— Following a tweet by President Trump on February 18th, Kim Dotcom responded by adding further details to previous statements which implied that the DNC hack during the 2016 US presidential election was actually a leak, and specifically claimed that the information was leaked by an “insider with a memory stick.”

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965202556204003328

“Let me assure you, the DNC hack wasn’t even a hack. It was an insider with a memory stick. I know this because I know who did it and why,” Dotcom tweeted, alleging that “Special Counsel Mueller is not interested in my evidence. My lawyers wrote to him twice. He never replied. 360 pounds!” The 360 pounds is clearly a retort to Trump’s “400 pound genius” comment.

Dotcom’s claims of attempting to provide evidence to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who has allegedly failed to respond to Dotcom’s lawyers, may raise questions about the impartiality and veracity of the Mueller investigation.

[RELATED: Kim Dotcom Lawyers Appealing Extradition Decision]

The assertion that the DNC data was not hacked, but leaked from an insider with a memory stick, is reportedly supported by an analysis from a researcher going by the alias of the Forensicator, who determined that the 22.6 MB/s copy speed of the DNC files was “virtually impossible” to attain from overseas, but a typical speed for a transfer to a thumb drive. These results were supported in a July 2017 memo to President Trump from a group of intelligence veterans that includes former NSA intelligence official William Binney.

The local transfer theory, if proven, would lend credibility to the notion that the DNC data was not hacked, but instead, was leaked. Dotcom’s claims could also explain why the DNC refused to allow the FBI to inspect its servers, and instead, relied on the analysis of a private company, CrowdStrike.

Crowdstrike’s CTO and co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank with openly anti-Russian sentiments that is funded by Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who happened to donate at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. Furthermore, in 2013, the Atlantic Council awarded Hillary Clinton their Distinguished International Leadership Award, and in 2014, the Atlantic Council hosted an event with former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who took over after pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in early 2014.

On May 18, 2017, Dotcom tweeted that if the case of Seth Rich would be included in the Congressional probe of Russian collusion/election meddling, he would provide written testimony to Congress, including evidence that Seth Rich was WikiLeaks’ source of the DNC emails.

Then, two days later, Dotcom tweeted, “I knew Seth Rich. I know he was WikiLeaks’ source. I was involved.”

A few days later, Dotcom released a statement, saying “I KNOW THAT SETH RICH WAS INVOLVED IN THE DNC LEAK,” adding:

I have consulted with my lawyers. I accept that my full statement should be provided to the authorities and I am prepared to do that so that there can be a full investigation. My lawyers will speak with the authorities regarding the proper process.

If my evidence is required to be given in the United States I would be prepared to do so if appropriate arrangements are made. I would need a guarantee from Special Counsel Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the United States and back. In the coming days we will be communicating with the appropriate authorities to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, I will make no further comment.

Election, Government Accountability, Politics, US

Poll Finds Majority of Americans Believe Obama Administration “Improperly Surveilled” Trump Campaign

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Washington, D.C. – A new poll reveals that the majority of the American public believes the Obama administration’s national security apparatus “improperly surveilled” then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign staff, according to the latest Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll.

The public survey showed that more than half of those surveyed would also like to see a second special prosecutor appointed to investigate potential impropriety on the part of the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI in relation to spying on the Trump team.

The poll suggests that some Americans don’t necessarily believe the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, and instead, perceive Obama’s law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracy as potentially complicit in engaging in political espionage.

Respondents of the IBD/TIPP public opinion poll were asked:

“How closely are you following news stories about the role played by the FBI and the Department of Justice during the 2016 presidential election?”

Responses were only considered from the 72% of individuals that noted they were either “very closely” (39%) or “somewhat closely” (33%).

Of those respondents, 55% said they thought it was “likely” that the Obama administration “improperly surveilled the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.” There was clearly a partisan divide in the responses, with 87% of Republicans, but only 31% of Democrats, believing improper surveillance occurred— but interestingly, some 55% of independents believed the political spying allegations.

When asked whether it was necessary to appoint a second special counsel to “investigate whether the FBI and the Department of Justice improperly surveilled the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election,” a majority of respondents (54%) answered “yes,” – with 44% responding “no.” This time, 74% of Republicans, 50% of independents, and surprisingly, even 44% of Democrats thought appointing a second special counsel was necessary.

Public bipartisan agreement on appointing a second special counsel for a full investigation of Obama-era political espionage could potentially spell trouble for many high-ranking security officials, especially if the special counsel is afforded similar latitude to investigate as seen in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation.

The survey also asked whether individuals believed that “some senior career civil servants at the FBI and Department of Justice knowingly coordinated to frame the president with allegations of Russian collusion in order to cast a cloud over his presidency.”

The Investors Business Daily reports that 35% of respondents answered “yes” to this question – while 60% answered “no.” This question had the largest partisan divide – with 77% of Republicans saying yes, and only 11% of Democrats responding no.

Interestingly, only 30% of independents thought that elements within DOJ and FBI colluded to frame Trump for Russian collusion, which may be semi-surprising given the fact that 55 percent answered that it was “likely” that Obama-era officials “improperly surveilled the Trump campaign during the 2016 election” and 50 percent thought it necessary to appoint a second special counsel to “investigate whether the FBI and the Department of Justice improperly surveilled the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.

Of note, a recently-released Rasmussen poll revealed a full 50 percent of Americans “believe it’s at least somewhat likely senior federal law enforcement officials broke the law in an effort to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency,” while 40 percent disagreed.

The results of these polls indicate that a segment of the American public doesn’t believe the narrative that Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election, and would like a full investigation into whether or not political espionage was undertaken by elements of the Obama administration in an effort to handicap Trump’s presidential candidacy and presidency.

Government Accountability, International, Politics

FBI Informant: Russia Directed Millions to US to Ensure “Affirmative Decisions” on Uranium One

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Washington, D.C. — According to a written statement to three congressional committees, an FBI informant associated with the Uranium One deal alleged that the Russian government sent millions of dollars to the United States with the expectation the funds would bolster former president Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative, and that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would oversee a “reset” in the relationship between the U.S. and Russia.

The Hill reports that FBI informant Douglas Campbell told the committees that he had been informed by Russian nuclear executives that Russia had hired US lobbying firm APCO Worldwide due to their “position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically Hillary Clinton.”

Campbell said in the statement, which was obtained by The Hill, that Russian nuclear officials “told me at various times that they expected APCO to apply a portion of the $3 million annual lobbying fee it was receiving from the Russians to provide in-kind support for the Clintons’ Global Initiative.”

“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.”

An APCO official denied that there was any connection between its work for Russia and the Clinton Global Initiative, claiming that any assertions of misconduct were “false and unfounded.”

“APCO Worldwide’s activities involving client work on behalf of Tenex and The Clinton Global Initiative were totally separate and unconnected in any way,” APCO told The Hill in a statement. “All actions on these two unconnected activities were appropriate, publicly documented from the outset and consistent with regulations and the law. Any assertion otherwise is false and unfounded.”

[RELATED: Senate Memo Claims Clinton Allies Were “Feeding” Info to State Dept., Christopher Steele]

Democrats have turned Campbell’s testimony into a partisan affair, calling the FBI informant’s credibility into question, despite the bureau paying him $50,000 for his work with the agency.

Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton, dismissed Campbell’s testimony as a distraction from the special prosecutor’s “Russian collusion” investigation, which some have claimed began as a strategy formed by the Clinton campaign staff to explain Clinton’s stunning election loss to Trump.

“Just yesterday the committee made clear that this secret informant charade was just that, a charade. Along with the widely debunked text-message-gate and Nunes’ embarrassing memo episode, we have a trifecta of GOP-manufactured scandals designed to distract from their own President’s problems and the threat to democracy he poses,” Merrill said.

A Clinton campaign post-election tell-all, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, claimed that Clinton blamed Russian interference for her election loss to Donald Trump “within twenty-four hours of her concession speech”:

“That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”

Despite attempts from Democrats to call Campbell’s credibility into question, Republicans are now looking at expanding the investigation into Russian corruption, in relation to the Obama administration and the Uranium One deal, based partially on Campbell’s testimony.

“My FBI handlers praised my work. They told me on various occasions that details from the undercover probe had been briefed directly to FBI top officials. On two occasions my handlers were particularly excited, claiming that my undercover work had been briefed to President Obama as part of his daily presidential briefing,” Campbell wrote.

According to reporting from The Hill:

“Campbell, whose work as an informant was first disclosed in a series of stories published last fall by The Hill, helped the FBI gather evidence as early as 2009 that the Russian nuclear industry was engaged in a kickback, bribery and racketeering scheme on U.S. soil. The criminal scheme, among other things, compromised the U.S. trucking firm that had the sensitive job of transporting uranium around America, Campbell testified.

Campbell says he provided the FBI the evidence of wrongdoing months before the Obama administration approved a series of favorable decisions that enriched Rosatom, including the CFIUS decision. 

The Hill’s stories last fall prompted the Justice Department to take the rare step of freeing Campbell from his nondisclosure agreement as an intelligence asset so he could testify to Congress about what he witnessed inside Russia’s nuclear industry.

Campbell gave the congressional committees documents he said he provided to his FBI handlers in 2010 showing that the Russian and American executives implicated in the Tenex bribery scheme specifically asked him to try to help get the Uranium One deal approved by the Obama administration.”

Campbell’s testimony is of interest to congressional Republicans focused on potential indiscretion in the Obama administration’s approval of the Uranium One deal. The agreement gave Russian mining giant Rosatom control of nearly 20 percent of America’s uranium mining capacity, despite the fact that the United States imports more than 90 percent of the uranium used in its nuclear reactors, according to U.S. government figures from 2016.

Government Accountability, Politics, Privacy, US

WATCH: Senator Rand Paul Calls Out Government Surveillance Power on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

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New York City — On Wednesday night’s airing of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, host Steven Colbert asked Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) if he thought the FISA memo, which allegedly details the FBI using opposition research — funded by a major donor of GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio, and subsequently paid for by the Clinton campaign — to manipulate the FISA court into allowing surveillance of President Trump’s campaign staff, should be released to the public.

“You said the Bob Mueller investigation was a witch hunt, and you think it is a distraction of Congress’s time,” Colbert said.

“Do you think it should be ended- do you think he should be gotten out of there? Do you think they should get rid of Rosenstein and release the memo, and just blow the whole thing up and forget it ever happened?” Colbert asked.

Paul then took the opportunity to express his concerns, while enlightening Colbert on the danger in allowing secretive intelligence agencies to monitor the private communications of every American — without a warrant signed by a judge — in light of “bias” in the intelligence community, clearly referring to the FBI and DOJ, as allegedly implicated in the now-released FISA memo.

[RELATED: Nunes Memo Released]

“I’m concerned. My biggest concern is over something that Madison said at the beginning of our country, he said that ‘men are not angels’ and that’s why we need more oversight of government,” Paul said.

“Our intelligence community has the authority to listen to every phone call. Everyone’s phone calls could be listened to if they wanted to. Everyone in your e-mails can be tracked, every one of your phone… who you call and how long you speak can be tracked, every bank transaction can be tracked,” Paul explained.

Paul went on to note that human nature can lead to potential “bias” in the “intelligence community,” and pointed out the critical need for “checks and balances” in the form of “a judge and a warrant.”

“I think because men are not angels and women aren’t either, that there can be bias that can enter into the intelligence community, so we have to be very, very careful that someone gives them a check and balance and that check and a balance should be a judge and a warrant, so one of the things, you know, I fought with over this collection of FISA data, we should go to a judge to get to that,” Paul stated.

Paul then explained that he was “concerned” that Mueller had gone beyond a “Russia Collusion” investigation. The Senator, who has previously called the investigation a “witchhunt” – invoked the indictment of former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, which was not for colluding with Russians, but for not being truthful about “what was recorded on the phone call.”

“I’m concerned that we give too much power to a prosecutor who was supposed to be going after Russian collusion,” the Senator cautioned.

“So far he’s gotten somewhat over. He recorded General Flynn and then got him to say something inconsistent with what was recorded on the phone call,” Paul reasoned.

“Think about it from a personal perspective, if I have a thousand phone calls of Stephen Colbert, what I could learn? And then I can interview you, and if you say anything inconsistent with what you said on your private phone calls, I could put you in jail.” Paul explained.

Following the recent release of the memo, Paul issued the following statement on Friday:

“While I applaud the release of this memo, I also call for Congress to take immediate action to help prevent such behavior in the future. It is imperative it start by listening to Americans who have expressed outrage over its disregard for the Fourth Amendment and reexamining the powers it reauthorized right before we learned of the memo. Continuing to ignore the Constitution will only guarantee that others fall victim to government abusing its domestic surveillance powers.”

Watch Sen. Paul explain the dangers of an intelligence apparatus given vast power to spy on Americans beginning at 15:10 in the video below.