The Impeachment of President Donald J Trump

[seemslikeadream]

Jed Shugerman
‏

Crime of the day:
Misprision, 18 USC 4:
One, having "knowledge of the actual commission of a felony, conceals and does not as soon as possible make [it] known...to some authority."
Especially for public officials.
Cc: @SecPompeo, Barr.

My 2017 explainer:

Pence and Obstruction of Justice

On Friday, news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had obtained a draft letter written by President Trump and advisor Stephen Miller explaining Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director Jim Comey. They wrote the letter over the weekend of May 5-7, and then on May 8th, Trump distributed and read the letter to senior officials, including White House Counsel Don McGahn and Vice President Mike Pence. Then the letter was edited, and Trump fired Comey the next day. On Friday, I suggested on Lawrence O’Donnell’s “The Last Word” on MSNBC that the most significant development was Pence’s potential criminal liability for his role in obstruction of justice (and I emphasize “potential,” because all we have at this stage are allegations in media reports and a lot more questions about the contents of the letter and Pence’s role in revising or editing it).

I have explained in other posts why Trump’s firing of Comey constitutes obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2), and arguably Sections 1503 and 1505. “(c)Whoever corruptly- (2)… obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.” 18 USC 1515 defines “official proceeding,” and includes Congress and authorized government agencies. The 2d and 5th Circuits have held that an FBI investigation is an official proceeding (but a 9th Circuit case raises questions about that interpretation). But keep in mind that 1) Congress had already started its investigation (including having Comey testify about the Russia probe), and 2) prosecutors had already obtained grand jury subpoenas in the Flynn case. These official proceedings had already begun, particularly in the Flynn investigation, which had been the focus of Trump’s questions to Comey in January through April. Firing Comey would impede those official proceedings, and Trump himself more or less confessed to trying to influence and impede the Russia investigation by firing Comey: first on national TV to NBC’s Lester Holt, then in the Oval Office to Kislyak and Lavrov on an official transcript.

In this new post, I explain Vice President Pence’s potential criminal jeopardy for conspiring to obstruct justice, aiding the obstruction of justice, and “misprision of a felony” in concealing the obstruction of justice.

First, I offer an extended quotation from The New York Times describing the events:

The letter, drafted in May, was met with opposition from Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, who believed that its angry, meandering tone was problematic, according to interviews with a dozen administration officials and others briefed on the matter. Among Mr. McGahn’s concerns were references to private conversations the president had with Mr. Comey, including times when the F.B.I. director told Mr. Trump he was not under investigation in the F.B.I.’s continuing Russia inquiry.

Mr. McGahn successfully blocked the president from sending the letter — which Mr. Trump had composed with Stephen Miller, one of the president’s top political advisers — to Mr. Comey. But a copy was given to the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who then drafted his own letter. Mr. Rosenstein’s letter was ultimately used as the Trump administration’s public rationale for Mr. Comey’s firing, which was that Mr. Comey had mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server….

The New York Times has not seen a copy of Mr. Trump’s letter — which was drafted at the urging of Mr. Trump during a pivotal weekend in May at the president’s private golf club in Bedminster, N. J. — and it is unclear how much of the letter’s rationale focuses on the Russia investigation…

Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Miller to draft a letter, and dictated his unfettered thoughts. Several people who saw Mr. Miller’s multi-page draft described it as a “screed.”

Mr. Trump was back in Washington on Monday, May 8, when copies of the letter were handed out in the Oval Office to senior officials, including Mr. McGahn and Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Trump announced that he had decided to fire Mr. Comey, and read aloud from Mr. Miller’s memo.

Some present at the meeting, including Mr. McGahn, were alarmed that the president had decided to fire the F.B.I. director after consulting only Ms. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Miller. Mr. McGahn began an effort to stop the letter or at least pare it back…

Mr. Rosenstein’s memo arrived at the White House the next day. The lengthy diatribe Mr. Miller had written had been replaced by a simpler rationale — that Mr. Comey should be dismissed because of his handling of the Clinton email investigation. Unlike Mr. Trump’s letter, it made no mention of the times Mr. Comey had told the president he was not under investigation.

Mr. Rosenstein’s memo became the foundation for the terse termination letter that Mr. Trump had an aide attempt to deliver late on the afternoon of May 9 to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The White House made one significant revision, adding a point that was personally important to Mr. Trump: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau,” the letter said.

With those reports in mind, I address Pence’s potential criminal liability for obstruction of justice in terms of conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and misprision of a felony (18 U.S.C. 4).

Conspiracy to obstruct justice and aiding obstruction of justice: If the New York Times account is correct, then Pence read the first draft of the letter, and the letter indeed had conveyed that Trump was focused on the Russia investigation. Pence is a lawyer, so he would be held to a higher standard for understanding the basics of obstruction of justice. And Don McGahn apparently raised his own legal concerns, so there is a strong basis for establishing Pence’s awareness that Trump’s letter may have established Trump’s “corrupt intent” to impede the Russia investigation. If Pence helped to edit and revise the letter, and supported the firing of Comey despite knowing Trump’s intent to obstruct, then he conspired to obstruct justice himself and aided in the obstruction. Conspiracy is covered by 18 USC 371, and aiding and abetting is covered by 18 USC 2. A helpful and concise article on federal conspiracy law, with a discussion of its relation to aiding and abetting is here.
The 9th Circuit has helpfully explained the basics of conspiracy and its relationship to aiding and abetting:

The difference between the classic common law elements of aiding and abetting and a criminal conspiracy underscores this material distinction, although at first blush the two appear similar. Aiding and abetting the commission of a specific crime, we have held, includes four elements: (1) that the accused had the specific intent to facilitate the commission of a crime by another, (2) that the accused had the requisite intent to commit the underlying substantive offense, (3) that the accused assisted or participated in the commission of the underlying substantive offense, and (4) that the principal committed the underlying offense. As Lopez emphasized, the accused generally must associate[ ] himself with the venture … participate[ ] in it as something he wish[es] to bring about, and [sought by] his action to make it succeed. By contrast, a classic criminal conspiracy as charged in 18 U.S.C. § 371 is broader. The government need only prove (1) an agreement to engage in criminal activity, (2) one or more overt acts taken to implement the agreement, and (3) the requisite intent to commit the substantive crime. Indeed, a drug conspiracy does not even require commission of an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. Two distinctions become readily apparent after a more careful comparison. First, the substantive offense which may be the object in a § 371 conspiracy need not be completed. Second, the emphasis in a § 371 conspiracy is on whether one or more overt acts was undertaken. This language necessarily is couched in passive voice for it matters only that a co-conspirator commit the overt act, not necessarily that the accused herself does so. In an aiding and abetting case, not only must the underlying substantive offense actually be completed by someone, but the accused must take some action, a substantial step, toward associating herself with the criminal venture. United States v. Hernandez-Orellana, 539 F.3d 994, 1006-1007 (9th Cir. 2008)(emphasis in the original).

Misprision of a felony
“Misprision of a felony” is found in 18 U.S.C. 4, right after the “aiding and abetting” and “accessory after the fact” statutes:

Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

Misprision sounds overly broad and seems to create a risk of criminalizing too many omissions. The statutes originated from England in an era without police forces or even public prosecutors, so law and order depended upon the public reporting crimes. The Supreme Court explained in 1980:

Concealment of crime has been condemned throughout our history. . . . Although the term “misprision of felony” now has an archaic ring, gross indifference to the duty to report known criminal behavior remains a badge of irresponsible citizenship. This deeply rooted social obligation is not diminished when the witness to crime is involved in illicit activities himself. Unless his silence is protected by the privilege against self-incrimination . . . the criminal defendant no less than any other citizen is obliged to assist the authorities. See Roberts v. U.S., 445 U.S. 552, 557-58 (1980)

But one should also read Justice Marshall’s dissent concerns about the breadth of misprision and the danger of its aggressive use. In our modern era, as this need for the public’s participation has lessened and as our concerns for civil liberties have grown, courts have rightly limited the scope of misprision in two important ways:

1) to require active steps, either concrete or verbal, to conceal; and

2) to hold public officials to a higher standard than private individuals.

Misprision convictions are appropriately rare. Prosecutors often rely on conspiracy, aiding or abetting, and/or being an accessory after the fact. But as part of a compromise in a plea bargain, prosecutors will sometimes drop those charges in exchange for a defendant to plead guilty to misprision. Nevertheless, misprision remains in use, and its elements may apply to Pence’s conduct, though we need to know more about his actions and the contents of the first letter.

For this discussion, I chiefly rely on Christopher Mark Cureton’s recent article, “The Past, Present, and Future of 18 U.S.C. Section 4: An Exploration of the Federal Misprision Statute,” 55 Ala. L. Rev. 183 (2003).

The elements of American misprision of felony are that: “(1) the principal committed and completed the felony alleged; (2) the defendant had knowledge of the fact; (3) the defendant failed to notify the authorities; and (4) the defendant took affirmative steps to conceal the crime of the principal.” United States v. Goldberg, 862 F.2d 101, 104 (6th Cir. 1988).

Cureton explains that active concealment can be physical or verbal. Courts “almost uniformly” treat physical acts of concealment as sufficient for misprision. Verbal concealment is harder to prove. Mere silence is insufficient to support a conviction for misprision. At the other extreme, knowingly providing the police with completely false information will constitute concealment. In United States v. Hodges, the underlying offense was a kidnapping in which the defendant misrepresented to FBI agents that he had never seen the kidnapping victim. The court held that lying to authorities about a crime is an act sufficient to constitute concealment. In contrast, making truthful but incomplete statements may not amount to concealment. The Ninth Circuit’s rationale for this is that a partial, truthful disclosure does “not result in any greater concealment of the crime than would” result if the defendant said nothing at all. (citing United States v. Hodges, 566 F.2d 674, 675 (9th Cir. 1977); United States v. Pittman, 527 F.2d 444, 444-45 (4th Cir. 1975); United States v. Ciambrone, 750 F.2d 1416, 1418 (9th Cir. 1984).

In 1996, prosecutors charged a corporation with misprision of felony for the first time. Daiwa Bank, Ltd. executives had discovered that one of their traders “had lost over $1.1 billion through unauthorized trading in United States government securities” and that the trader then sold other customers’ securities to cover the losses. Daiwa avoided reporting the crime, and instead:

committed numerous crimes in its effort to hide these losses. In particular, DAIWA made extensive false entries in its books and records, prepared and sent false account statements, filed a false report with the Federal Reserve, explored plans to hide the loss permanently by moving it off-shore, secretly replaced the missing $377 million of customer securities, and engaged in a fictitious transfer of $600 million worth of nonexistent securities. (Press Release, U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York, Announcement of Daiwa Guilty Plea and Sentence (Feb. 28, 1996) (WL 1248 PLI/Corp 197, 245)).

Daiwa pled guilty to misprision of a felony, as well as fifteen other federal felonies, and paid a $340 million dollar fine, the largest ever paid in a criminal case at that time. (Curenton at p. 190).

In this case, if Pence heard the letter, (and perhaps heard McGahn’s concerns), and provided any feedback to editing and revision to conceal the obstructive purpose, and/or provided support for the decision to fire Comey, he provided an affirmative act as part of crime. (These acts could also be part of conspiracy and aiding obstruction).

Moreover, we already know that, on May 10, a day after Trump fired Comey, Pence publicly denied that the Russia investigation factored into the decision (full video here):

Question: “But did the President fire Comey to impede the Russia investigation?”

Pence first answered by saying the Trump “is not under investigation.”

A reporter followed up, “But intelligence officials have said there is an investigation into potential ties between campaign officials and Russia…

Pence: “That was not what this is about.”

A different reporter asked, “What about the president’s dissatisfaction with the Russia probe. Did that play into this, sir?”

“Let me be very clear that the President’s decision to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney general and the attorney general to remove Director Comey as the head of the FBI was based solely and exclusively on his commitment to the best interest of the American people and to ensuring that the FBI has the trust and confidence of the people of this nation.”

If Pence had read Trump’s letter, and if the letter’s “screed” in fact focused on the Russia investigation, Pence’s answers would be a combination of lies, misrepresentation, and concealment. If the allegations are true, then the combination of Pence’s participation in the letter revision and his lies afterward would constitute the affirmative acts necessary for misprision.

Public officials are held to a higher duty
Historically, courts have held public officials to a higher duty for misprision. Blackstone himself seemed to indicate that English statutes placed higher duties on public officials, relative to private individuals, to report crimes. Blackstone, Commentaries, Vol II, P. 85 See Carl Wilson Mullis III, Misprision of Felony: A Reappraisal, 23 Emory L.J. 1095, 1113-14 (1974); P.R. Glazebrook, Misprision of Felony: Shadow or Phantom?, 8 Am. J. Legal Hist. 189, 194 (1964). See also Curenton at 191-92.

In fact, in my own research, I have found that federal officials already have a duty under federal regulation to report crimes they have observed. The Code of Federal Regulations includes a section on “Basic Obligations of Public Service”: with a specific duty to disclose not only crimes, but also abuse and corruption: “Employees shall disclose waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption to appropriate authorities.”

Curenton also suggests that, when the defendant is a public official, misprision should not require even an affirmative act of concealment (Curenton at 191-92):

A better alternative would be to remove the requirement of an affirmative act of concealment when dealing with people in positions of trust, such as government officials. In these situations, requiring an affirmative act makes little sense because such officers are usually already under an affirmative duty to report illegal activities.This change would be consistent with the common law tradition of misprision because the term misprision itself was thought to have been “especially appropriate to the misconduct of public officers.” Further, such an alteration may be advisable because “(p)ublic officers voluntarily seek this special position of trust, and expecting them to report crimes does not place an onerous burden upon them.” Thus, it may be appropriate to not only maintain the current misprision of felony statute that requires affirmative acts of concealment as well as a failure to report, but also to develop a second version that punishes a public figure’s mere failure to report. This same approach could also be used in the corporate realm, where disclosure is an expected and (increasingly) recommended business practice. Curenton at 191-92 (citing Carl Wilson Mullis III, Misprision of Felony: A Reappraisal, 23 Emory L.J. 1095, 1113-14 (1974); P.R. Glazebrook, Misprision of Felony: Shadow or Phantom?, 8 Am. J. Legal Hist. 189, 194 (1964).

Even if one does not go as far as Cureton’s proposal, the established law and precedents on misprision would put Pence in legal jeopardy for his combination of affirmative acts of concealment before and after the firing, plus his higher duties of reporting crimes as a public official.

The bottom line:

If the reports are correct that Pence heard Trump read his draft letter, a “screed” emphasizing Comey’s handling of the Russia probe, that he may have participated in feedback or revision to conceal that intent, then Pence is in legal jeopardy for obstruction of justice, either as conspiracy, aiding and abetting, or misprision of a felony.
https://shugerblog.com/2017/09/04/pence ... f-justice/

6:20 AM - 2 Oct 2019

2/
Roberts v US, 445 US 552 (1980):
"Concealment of crime has been condemned throughout our history. Although the term 'misprision of felony' now has an archaic ring, gross indifference to the duty to report known criminal behavior remains a badge of irresponsible citizenship..."

3/ "This deeply rooted social obligation is not diminished when the witness to crime is involved in illicit activities. Unless his silence is protected by the privilege against self-incrim, the criminal defendant no less than any other citizen is obliged to assist authorities."

4/ Modern courts have limited the scope of misprision:

1) requiring active steps (either concrete or verbal) to conceal
2) holding public officials to a higher standard.

Misprision charges are rare.
But @SecPompeo, Barr, and probably others seem to meet both requirements.

https://twitter.com/jedshug/status/1179385556519796743

[seemslikeadream]

NEW: Top State officials drafted statement in Aug for Ukrainian pres Zelensky to release that committed to investigating HBiden linked company and '16roots. Latest evidence of Trump’s Ukrainian fixation driving diplos to bend policy to his political agenda
https://twitter.com/nytmike?ref_src=tws ... r%5Eauthor

Trump Envoys Pushed Ukraine to Commit to Investigations
Oct. 3, 2019, 7:02 p.m. ET
Kurt D. Volker on Thursday on Capitol Hill.
Kurt D. Volker on Thursday on Capitol Hill.Zach Gibson/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Two of President Trump’s top envoys to Ukraine drafted a statement for the country’s new president in August that would have committed Ukraine to pursuing investigations sought by Mr. Trump into his political rivals, three people briefed on the effort said.

The drafting of the statement marks new evidence of how Mr. Trump’s fixation with Ukraine began driving senior diplomats to bend American foreign policy to the president’s political agenda in the weeks after the July 25 call between the two leaders.

The statement was drafted by Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, then the State Department’s envoy to Ukraine, according to the three people who have been briefed on it.

Mr. Volker spent Thursday on Capitol Hill being questioned by House investigators as Democrats pursued their impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump’s actions. He disclosed a set of texts in September in which the top American diplomat in Ukraine, alluding to Mr. Trump’s decision earlier in the summer to freeze a military aid package to the country, told Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

After speaking with Mr. Trump, Mr. Sondland texted back that there was no quid pro quo, adding, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”

It was not clear if the statement drafted in August by Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker came up in the closed-door session on Capitol Hill.

The statement was written with the awareness of a top aide to the Ukrainian president, as well as Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and the de facto leader of a shadow campaign to push the Ukrainians to press ahead with investigations that could be of political benefit to Mr. Trump, according to one of the people briefed on it.

The statement would have committed Ukraine to investigating the energy company Burisma, which had employed Hunter Biden, the younger son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And it would have called for the Ukrainian government to look into what Mr. Trump and his allies believe was interference by Ukrainians in the 2016 election in the United States to benefit Hillary Clinton.

The idea behind the statement was to break the Ukrainians of their habit of promising American diplomats and leaders behind closed doors that they would look into matters and never follow through.

It is unclear if the statement was delivered to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, but no statement was released publicly under his name. Around that time, the Ukrainian officials indicated to the Americans that they wanted to avoid becoming more deeply enmeshed in American politics.

The drafting of the statement, which came in the weeks after the July 25 phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, was an effort to pacify Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani and normalize relations between the two countries as Ukraine faced continuing conflict with Russia. Mr. Sondland and Mr. Volker believed that Mr. Giuliani was “poisoning” Mr. Trump’s mind about Ukraine and that eliciting a public commitment from Mr. Zelensky to pursue the investigations would induce Mr. Trump to more fully support the new Ukrainian government, according to the people familiar with it.

Mr. Giuliani said he was aware of the statement but that it was not written at his behest. He said the statement would include a commitment to investigations of Burisma and the circumstances around the 2016 election.

Nicholas Fandos and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
http://archive.is/UAfgS

[seemslikeadream]

TRUMP IS BEING IMPEACHED FOR HARMING AMERICA TO EXTORT CAMPAIGN HELP

October 3, 2019/112 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Impeachment /by emptywheel
There’s a narrative solidifying among journalists that Democrats are conducting an impeachment inquiry (at least as it pertains to Ukraine) into whether Trump solicited foreign help for an election.

Even setting aside that on the call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump first asked Ukraine’s president to provide “evidence” backing Russian disinformation about the last election, foreign election assistance is not (all) Trump is being impeached for. Trump is being impeached for pursuing US policies that serve to coerce his foreign partners into helping him win the 2020 election.

His demand that China start an investigation into the Bidens was separated from his assertion that “if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power” by less than 30 seconds.

We’re looking at a lot of things. China’s coming in next week. We’re going to have a meeting with them. We’ll see. But we’re doing very well. Some of the, uh, numbers are being affected by all of the nonsense, all of the politics going on in this country, but the Democrats, I call them the do-nothing Democrats because they do nothing for this country. They don’t care about this country. But, uh, the numbers really are looking very good going into the future. So we’ll see. I have a lot of options on China. But if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power.

[comment on how he wants Zelensky to investigate the Bidens]

And by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens. Because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with uh, with Ukraine.

And a key part of the whistleblower’s complaint is that,

On 18 July, an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official informed Departments and Agencies that the President “earlier that month” had issued instructions to suspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine. Neither OMB nor the NSC staff knew why this instruction had been issued. During interagency meetings on 23 July and 26 July, OMB officials again stated explicitly that the instruction to suspend this assistance had come directly from the President, but they still were unaware of a policy rationale. As of early August, I heard from U.S. officials that some Ukrainian officials were aware that U.S. aid might be in jeopardy, but I do not know how or when they learned of it.

Trump held up the money, which had been appropriated by Congress, overruling John Bolton’s and some other national security advisors’ counsel (which may be why Bolton was excluded from the call), as well as that of some Republican Senators. At least some of the Ukrainians in the loop claimed to be blindsided by the freeze and talked about how the freeze made Ukraine more vulnerable vis a vis Russia. Trump restored the aid only after Congress forced him to, even as the whistleblower complaint was breaking.

In short, Trump was defying Congress’ orders, and his excuses (that he was trying to get Ukraine to work on corruption) don’t hold up.

Trump has a lot of leeway to set the foreign policy of the US (but not in defiance of Congressional budgetary guidance). But he has come very close to suggesting that he is setting the foreign policy priorities of the country in such a way as to get leverage over other countries to help him politically.

And DOJ, when receiving this whistleblower complaint, did not review whether this amounts to extortion or bribery, the latter of which is specifically enumerated as an offense demanding impeachment in the Constitution.

This is what impeachment is about: Trump is considering inflicting more damage on farmers and manufacturers and this summer helped an adversary (admittedly the one who helped him get elected the last time), all in an effort to coerce help from foreign leaders.

Update: Fox just obtained encrypted texts showing that temporary Ambassador to Ukraine William Brockenbrough Taylor Jr. said “it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” which would appear to make the intent clear.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/10/03/t ... aign-help/

Donald Trump’s whistleblower reference to “Crowdstrike” is the key to unraveling the entire Trump-Russia scandal
TR Kenneth
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows Trump & Co. are corrupt to the core. We now have the memo of the call between Trump and the Ukraine President Zelensky, and it’s clear Trump was seeking dirt on Biden. But the thing to really look at in the memo is Trump’s first words that focus on Crowdstrike. It’s a bombshell.

Crowdstrike is the cyber security firm that discovered the Russian hack into the DNC server. Of course, Trump was rambling incoherently, and even Crowdstrike says they were confused by the reference to themselves. But we believe it has to do with Trump trying to fulfill a request by Putin.

Trump says “. . . that whole (Crowdstrike) nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.“ This is referencing Russia’s interference in our election which Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate. “The server, they say Ukraine has it.” This reference to the server in Trump’s ramblings has sent journalists running to the Hillary Clinton private email server scandal, but we believe Trump is talking about something else here.

Trump is stupid and doesn’t know how things work, so if he’s referencing a server, he probably thinks somehow if he takes physical domain over the server equipment, he’ll have domain over all its information. In his mind, perhaps he wants to take over the server in Ukraine which Putin used to throw the election in order to hide evidence. Or perhaps he’s simply referencing the fact that a lot of Russian interference originated out of servers in Ukraine.

The thing to see here is that Trump is giving Zelensky a warning. He even warns Zelensky that he is surrounding himself with the same people, meaning those people who might leak information and sell Trump out when Putin interferes in our election again. Trump is trying to squelch any Ukrainian information on the next Russian interference in our election. If we have no evidence on Putin’s interference, then Trump will take his next win on the face of it and claim he was elected freely.

This entire exchange is chilling and will only get worse the more information comes out. If the memo is any indication of how Trump speaks to leaders on the record, then what he’s said to Putin in his private conversations must be hair-raising. Remember Trump’s last words to Zelensky with which he ended his first exchange on Crowdstrike: “Whatever you can do. It’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.” He’s not referencing dirt on Biden, he’s referencing shutting down any information coming out of Ukraine on Russia’s next meddling in our election. Trump is pressuring Zelensky to cover for Putin in 2020.

[RocketMan]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/04 ... CEE7vaacn8

Impeachment, Brought to You by the CIA

Despite occasional warm gas passed in a leftish direction, establishment Democrats never had any intention of allowing a left political program to move forward. After four decades of asserting that they ‘believe’ climate science, the moment has arrived when the only political path forward is to take on their donors. Whatever your assessment of their motives, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have no intention of doing this.

Following the electoral fiasco of 2016, the DNC defended itself in court by arguing that it has no obligation to provide a fair and open primary. In fact, the DNC ran a disinformation campaign against Bernie Sanders, used Superdelegates to overturn primary results, miscounted and misplaced ballots in crucial state primaries and violated its own charter in the allocation of funds to the candidates. In other words, they stole the primary election.

If you get your news from NPR or the New York Times, Joe Biden’s threat to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine until Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, fired the prosecutor who was investigating Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma Holdings, was ‘looked into’ and no wrongdoing was found. Of course, the U.S.— the Obama administration, controlled the government that found no wrongdoing. Even still, the charge that the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was ‘corrupt’ was later retracted in private.

Rather than questioning why the Obama administration chose to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine to install a puppet government hostile to Russia, American liberals simply accepted the Cold War mindset as it was handed to them. The official reason given, that Viktor Yanukovych was corrupt, was premised on the fact that he owned a hot tub. But how ‘corrupt’ was it for Mr. Obama to overthrow a democratically elected president in the first place?

In other words, if elections grant legitimacy to political leaders and a political order, how is it legitimate for a foreign power— in this case the U.S., with advance logistics provided by the CIA, to simply charge in and install a new government that answers to it, and not the electorate? In fact, with CIA agents planted in the White House, this seems remarkably like what the CIA is attempting to do against the Trump administration.

This is where Russiagate / impeachment stands today: national security and surveillance state liberals have joined with a not-so-bright left to oust a not-neocon / not-CIA insurgent (Trump) from power. In other words, Mr. Trump may be everything that the not-so-bright left claims he is, but that has nothing to do with why he is being ousted from power. Impeachment is to bring Joe Biden to power to go after Russia.

The CIA’s overthrow formula can be found in Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men. Step 1: pose an unimaginably horrific boogeyman— let’s call it communism; and align the leader / government to be ousted with it. Step 2: overthrow said leader / government while marching paid operatives playing communists in front of the American press. Step 3: install a puppet government sympathetic to American interests, declare a victory for freedom, and call it a day.

[seemslikeadream]

Oligarchs Weaponized Cyprus Branch of Ukraine’s Largest Bank to Send $5.5 Billion Abroad
by Graham Stack 19 April 2019
Credit: Edin Pasovic/OCCRP
The former chairwoman of Ukraine’s central bank dubbed it one of the biggest financial scandals of the 21st century.

Valeria Hontareva was describing the alleged theft of US$5.5 billion from PrivatBank, once the country’s largest commercial lender. The suspected masterminds are the bank’s two oligarch owners: Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholiubov, who stand accused of absconding with an amount roughly equal to 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. According to court records, both men are said to have recently been living in Switzerland, though Kolomoisky appears to be spending time in Israel.

“Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,” Hontareva said in March 2018. “This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.”

Now, for the first time, OCCRP has traced the mechanism that appears to have allowed Kolomoisky and Boholiubov to funnel such vast wealth out of Ukraine: The money was moved through a PrivatBank subsidiary in Cyprus.

The arrangement helped hide the fact that cash was disappearing because the National Bank of Ukraine treated the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank the same as it would domestic branches. This designation meant officials never detected that cash transferred to Cyprus was leaving Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Cypriot regulators either failed to detect that the various bank transfers totalling $5.5 billion were backed by bogus contracts, or didn’t take the necessary action to stop them.

The system allowed billions of dollars to be pumped through the PrivatBank accounts, which were held in Cyprus by offshore companies.

This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report, which is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP, also reveals that there was little distinction between Kolomoisky and Boholiubov’s corporate and personal accounts.

The data also revealed how Kolomoisky’s Ukrainian gas station empire may have played a crucial role in the scheme. Click here for more.
Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank in December 2016, saddling taxpayers with a $5.9 billion bailout. The nationalization was widely supported by the international community, including the IMF, the European Union, and the United States, which called it a “milestone in economic reform and the fight against corruption.”

Kolomoisky has said he wants $2 billion in PrivatBank capital returned to him. And on April 19, a Kyiv court ruled PrivatBank’s nationalization unlawful, deciding in favor of the oligarch and setting the stage for a prolonged legal battle.

In a letter circulated to the media by Kolomoisky’s Swiss office, the oligarch refuted allegations by the National Bank of Ukraine that Privatbank had engaged in fraudulent lending practices.

“I categorically deny the allegations made by the National Bank of Ukraine,” Kolomoisky said, adding that regulators had all the access they needed to monitor his bank’s activities. He painted the authorities’ nationalization of his lending business as an asset grab.

“Management of the [Ukrainian central bank] had as its main purpose not the support of the country’s largest bank, but its nationalization and the expropriation of the assets provided as security, together with the persecution and pressuring of the former shareholders,” Kolomoisky said.

Boholiubov declined to speak on the record.

The new revelations about how the scheme worked emerge just as Kolomoisky stands to increase his already considerable influence in Ukraine through the country’s presidential election. A candidate favoured by the oligarch — Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comedian who appears on his television channel 1+1 — won the first round of the election, which may determine whether the country continues its already shaky course of anti-corruption reforms. Zelenskiy will now face off against President Poroshenko in the final round.

An independent analysis funded by the Council of Europe and published Feb. 18 shows that Kolomoisky’s 1+1 channel overwhelmingly favors Zelenskiy in its news coverage. On March 30, the day before the first round of the elections — which by law should be free of campaigning — the channel was scheduled to broadcast 7.5 hours of Zelenskiy’s programs.

The candidate has disputed that he owes Kolomoisky anything.

“He is my business partner, not my boss,” Zelenskiy said in an interview.

People queue outside a branch of PrivatBank in Borispol, Ukraine, shortly after the bank's forced nationalization in December 2016. Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo

Accounting Tricks

Privatbank launched its Cyprus operation in the late 1990s. No other Ukrainian lender is known ever to have received permission from the National Bank of Ukraine to open an overseas branch.

The head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Yakiv Smolii, said PrivatBank’s Cyprus office didn’t materially differ from the lender’s branches in Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv or Lutsk, so cash being funnelled there didn’t trigger any regulatory action. Ukrainian officials did nothing to stop the money from leaving the country. (Smolii spoke to OCCRP in his capacity as co-author of the book “Private Story: The Rise and Fall of Ukraine’s Largest Private Bank.”)

Once the funds reached Cyprus, they were transferred to various offshore companies using SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The network lets financial institutions worldwide send and receive money safely. (The system was not required to move money from Ukraine to PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch.)

Because Cypriot regulators viewed the PrivatBank branch in their country as a separate legal entity from the parent in Ukraine, they never flagged the money flows to Ukrainian authorities.

“This was what allowed the abuse, the concealing of transactions from regulators, tax and customs authorities,” Smolii said.

Two years have passed since the PrivatBank scandal forced regulators to nationalize the financial institution in a significant economic blow to the already strapped country. Ukraine has the lowest per capita GDP in Europe, and the fourth lowest of the 15 former Soviet countries, according to the IMF.

Now hopes are fading that any of the stolen money will be recovered. By the time regulators took over PrivatBank, the $5.5 billion had already been transferred to banks in Austria, Luxembourg, and Latvia. From there, the trail goes cold.

How the Money Disappeared

The central mechanism in the scheme was a series of insider loans to companies Kolomoisky and Boholiubov controlled. In most instances, financial records show Ukrainian shell companies borrowed money from PrivatBank in Ukraine, then transferred it to Cyprus branch accounts held by offshore businesses, many of which were registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI).

These companies’ formal owners are hidden, but the Kroll report says they were all effectively run out of PrivatBank headquarters in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine. There, a “bank within the bank” orchestrated a sort of pyramid scheme in which loans were made to shell companies and offshores that in turn used the funds to pay bogus contracts with other companies. This second set of companies then used the money to repay loans taken from PrivatBank. In this way, money continued to cycle through the bank, making it look like loans were being repaid when in reality the institution was at substantial financial risk.

The pattern of payments was so complex that a computer algorithm probably generated it, according to financial experts cited in a London court case.

Meanwhile, the billions of dollars that had arrived from Ukraine churned through accounts at PrivatBank Cyprus that were held by offshore companies. The amounts were massive. In the eight years before PrivatBank was nationalized, $8 billion passed through Grizal Enterprises, $14.9 billion through Hangli International Holdings, and $12 billion through Claresholm Marketing (all registered in the BVI). Another $11.2 billion passed through Divot Enterprises, registered in St. Kitts and Nevis, and $6.5 billion through Pointex Sale in the UK.

According to testimony given in a London court case by PrivatBank’s lawyers after its nationalization, the activity had all the hallmarks of a money-laundering operation designed to obscure the origin and ultimate destination of cash.

Money also cycled between Kolomoisky and Boholiubov’s personal accounts and the businesses they steered, suggesting that no clear boundaries existed between the oligarchs’ corporations and their own finances.

For instance, Grizal Enterprises paid about $40 million to Boholiubov’s personal account in Cyprus between 2013 and 2016. He sent $83 million back to Grizal. And the pattern repeated over and over: Between 2013 and 2016, Trival Ltd. paid about $360 million into Kolomoisky’s personal account, Ditton Holdings paid about $133 million, and other related parties paid another $150 million. Kolomoisky returned almost all the funds to Trival and Ditton.

The transactions make no sense for a legally acting business.

Kateryna Rozhkova, first deputy head of the National Bank of Ukraine, bluntly refers to the Cyprus branch as “a money laundromat, nothing else.”

Suspicions Arise

In comments to OCCRP, the Central Bank of Cyprus said that it conducted two onsite examinations of PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch in 2015, leading it to inform authorities in Cyprus, Ukraine, and other countries that money was flowing out of Ukraine. The regulator also imposed a 1.5 million euro fine on the bank on Oct. 31, 2016, only weeks before Ukrainian authorities nationalized PrivatBank.

According to a senior central bank official in Cyprus, regulators placed restrictions on the license of PrivatBank’s local branch in December of 2016, barring it from conducting further transactions. The lender is set to close once outstanding legal procedures are resolved.

“What we looked for during our inspection were … the transactions carried out between various companies,” said a senior former Cypriot central bank official who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing banking secrecy laws. “That is where we noted that those complicated schemes were developing that allowed funds to move from one company to another and disappear.”

Once the money had left Cyprus, the official said, it wound up in various companies that have since been identified as being connected to Kolomoisky and Boholiubov.

Cyprus’ Financial Intelligence Unit, MOKAS, said it was aware of the allegations against the PrivatBank shareholders but declined to comment.

Meanwhile, in the runup to PrivatBank’s nationalization in December 2016, billions of dollars held in its Cyprus branch were moved to other European jurisdictions, out of reach of Ukrainian authorities.

Kolomoisky personally transferred at least $40 million from his Cyprus account to personal Swiss accounts at UBS, Union Bancaire Privee, and Credit Suisse in 2014-2015. This sum was dwarfed by the billions of dollars moved out of corporate accounts to banks in Luxembourg and Austria.

One of the offshores, Claresholm Marketing, sent about $2 billion to an account at Luxembourg’s East-West United Bank in 2015. Another, Pointex Sale LLP, also moved billions to accounts at Bank Winter in Austria and East-West United in Luxembourg, two small banks that once serviced trade between the West and the Soviet bloc.

In April 2016, Hontareva, then head of the National Bank of Ukraine, banned all Ukrainian banks from holding correspondent accounts at those institutions and sent a letter to Ukrainian banks warning of Bank Winter and East-West United’s “connections to risky financial operations.”

“The problem of capital outflow from these infamous transit banks has been fully removed,” Hontareva said. But the action came too late for Ukrainian authorities to retrieve the billions already shuttled out of the country.

Bank Winter and East-West United declined to comment on their involvement with PrivatBank.

The main office of PrivatBank Latvia. Credit: Daryna Shevchenko

Off to a Troubled Latvian Lender

Another route the Ukrainian funds took via Cyprus led to Latvia.

Most of the largest account holders at PrivatBank Cyprus had accounts at its Latvian office as well. In fact, Boholiubov himself had a personal account at PrivatBank Latvia.

The subsidiary has a history of money laundering: In 2015, Moldovan regulators named it as one of two Latvian lenders involved in laundering over $1 billion in fraudulent loans stolen from three Moldovan banks, including a state bank. None of this money has been recovered.

PrivatBank Latvia was also one of the largest recipients of funds from the Russian Laundromat, an immense financial fraud scheme uncovered by OCCRP in 2014 that enabled vast sums to be pumped out of Russia, laundered, and moved into Europe. PrivatBank Latvia laundered $2 billion of dirty money from Russia over a four-year period, OCCRP found.

In addition, the Kroll findings on PrivatBank Ukraine suggest that PrivatBank Latvia received millions that originated from the IMF.

In May 2014, the IMF paid Ukraine the first installment of a $17 billion fiscal life raft intended to stabilize the nation’s economy in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Ukraine’s National Bank loaned about $220 million of this money to PrivatBank to stabilize the institution’s finances. But PrivatBank Ukraine moved most of the sum to Cyprus, where it became part of the loan recycling scheme. And at least $130 million of the IMF money was immediately sent from Cyprus to accounts at PrivatBank Latvia, according to Kroll.

In March 2016, less than nine months before PrivatBank Ukraine was nationalized, it reduced its stake in PrivatBank Latvia to 46.5 percent. The move meant that after the nationalization, neither PrivatBank nor Ukrainian state regulators would be able to access the former subsidiary, making it difficult to trace the missing funds. Currently, Kolomoisky and Boholiubov retain at least a blocking stake in PrivatBank Latvia.

In August, Italian authorities closed the local branch of PrivatBank Latvia, alleging “serious violations of money-laundering regulations with the risk the irregularities could be repeated.” Italy’s financial intelligence unit identified 110 million euros that had been laundered through the tiny branch, snuggled under the Vatican walls in Rome.

The closure came only months after PrivatBank Latvia boasted in its 2015 annual report that deposits at the Rome branch had jumped 82 percent. PrivatBank Latvia says the sum laundered by its Rome branch was 23 million euros, not the 110 Italian authorities allege.

Olegs Cernysevs, the former head of PrivatBank Latvia’s Italian branch, said he wasn’t authorized to answer questions on the bank’s activities.

On the last working day before its nationalization on Dec. 18, 2016, PrivatBank Ukraine lost another $450 million in a scheme that involved PrivatBank Latvia. The episode is now under criminal investigation in Ukraine.

The lender had put the money in correspondent accounts in Latvia as collateral for letters of credit issued by PrivatBank Latvia to international commodities traders. On Dec. 16, 2016, PrivatBank instructed PrivatBank Latvia to write off the collateral, effectively leaving the funds in a deposit account at the Latvian bank.

PrivatBank Latvia didn’t respond to inquiries when contacted by email, mobile phone, and WhatsApp.

Additional reporting by Stelios Orphanides and Karina Shedrofsky.
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations ... ion-abroad

[seemslikeadream]

TRUMP SPECIFICALLY ENSURED REPUBLICANS WOULDN’T KNOW ABOUT HIS EXTORTION

October 4, 2019/1 Comment/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2020 Presidential Election, Impeachment /by emptywheel
Kurt Volker’s prepared testimony from yesterday has been released. It is very unconvincing in several places, particularly read in conjunction with his texts that makes it clear there was a quid pro quo tied to security assistance and aid. Most charitably, it reads like the narrative of someone whose intentions were good, but in denial about his actions in service of an ultimate outcome — the continued provision of aid to Ukraine.

As is well documented, I had long supported lifting the ban on lethal defensive assistance to Ukraine, advocated for the supply of javelin anti-tank systems, advocated for an increase in U.S. assistance, and urged other nations to provide more assistance as well.

The issue of a hold placed on security assistance to Ukraine also came up during this same time I was connecting Mr. Yermak and Mayor Giuliani. I did not perceive these issues to be linked in any way.

On July 18, I was informed that at an interagency (sub-PCC) meeting, OMB had said that there was a hold being placed on Congressional Notifications about security assistance to Ukraine. No reason was given.

A higher level interagency meeting (PCC) was then scheduled to take place to discuss the issue on July 23. I met in advance with the individual who would represent the State Department at that meeting, Assistant Secretary of State for Pol-Mil Affairs, R. Clarke Cooper. I stressed how important it was to keep the security assistance moving – for Ukraine’s self-defense, deterrence of further Russian aggression, as a symbol of our bilateral support for Ukraine, and as part of having a strong position going into any negotiations with Russia. He fully agreed and intended to represent that position at the PCC meeting. I also had separate conversations with the Pentagon and NSC staff to reiterate the same position.

I was told later that there was no outcome from the PCC meeting. That said, I was not overly concerned about the development because I believed the decision would ultimately be reversed. Everything from the force of law to the unanimous position of the House, Senate, Pentagon, State Department, and NSC staff argued for going forward, and I knew it would just be a matter of time.

As well, Volker avoids admitting this was partly about inventing dirt on Joe Biden by treating the possibility of election interference as credible, without any basis (and it’s clear he conducted this projection repeatedly in real time).

Concerning the allegations, I stressed that no one in the new team governing Ukraine had anything to do with anything that may have happened in 2016 or before – they were making TV shows at the time. Mr. Lutsenko, however, would remain in place until a new government was seated in a month or more. It was important to reach out and provide strong U.S. support for President-elect Zelenskyy.

I also said at that July 19 meeting that it is not credible to me that former Vice President Biden would have been influenced in anyway by financial or personal motives in carrying out his duties as Vice President. A different issue is whether some individual Ukrainians may have attempted to influence the 2016 election or thought they could buy influence: that is at least plausible, given Ukraine’s reputation for corruption. But the accusation that Vice President Biden acted inappropriately did not seem at all credible to me.

But the key new detail in Volker’s statement, beyond what we already knew, is confirmation that not only did OMB freeze assistance to Ukraine, but it also froze notifications about security assistance to Congress, effectively hiding the fact that Trump was using the aid authorized by Congress to extort election assistance from Ukraine.

On July 18, I was informed that at an interagency (sub-PCC) meeting, OMB had said that there was a hold being placed on Congressional Notifications about security assistance to Ukraine. No reason was given.

Withholding the aid is something Republicans were on the record opposing. Indeed, Mitch McConnell claims (credibly or not) that even he was not informed that Trump was withholding the aid to extort campaign assistance.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he was not provided an explanation for why the Trump administration held up aid to Ukraine when he pressed senior officials on the matter over the summer.

“I was not given an explanation,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday as the congressional furor grew over President Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

McConnell said he spoke to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo twice about the matter without receiving clarification for the delay in $391 million in aid to Ukraine.

“I was very actively involved in advocating [for] the aid. I talked to the secretary of Defense, the secretary of State once,” he said.

“The good news was it finally happened,” he added, noting the administration finally released the aid. “I have no idea what precipitated the delay.”

Whatever other story Republicans want to tell to excuse this behavior (and, as I said, McConnell’s claim here reads like CYA), Republicans should be furious that, first, Trump ignored the stated will of Congress on something they all claimed to care about and, second, that Trump’s OMB very specifically froze them out of notice they were entitled to have, as Congress.

Again, this scandal is not just about Trump demanding that other countries help him get reelected. It’s also about Trump defying the will of Congress to obtain leverage to extort that aid. Now we know that he even deliberately kept Congress in the dark about what he was doing.

Republicans surely will continue to excuse this behavior. But by doing so, they are utterly emasculating the prerogatives of Congress to do so.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/10/04/t ... extortion/

[seemslikeadream]

btw it's CIA officer. Not agent. Big difference.


CIA General Counsel has referred Donald Trump for criminal charges

CIA's top lawyer made 'criminal referral' on whistleblower's complaint


Oct. 4, 2019, 3:31 PM CDT / Updated Oct. 4, 2019, 4:47 PM CDT
WASHINGTON — Weeks before the whistleblower's complaint became public, the CIA's top lawyer made what she considered to be a criminal referral to the Justice Department about the whistleblower's allegations that President Donald Trump abused his office in pressuring the Ukrainian president, U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell NBC News.

The move by the CIA's general counsel, Trump appointee Courtney Simmons Elwood, meant she and other senior officials had concluded a potential crime had been committed, raising more questions about why the Justice Department later declined to open an investigation.

The phone call that Elwood considered to be a criminal referral is in addition to the referral later received as a letter from the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community regarding the whistleblower complaint.

Justice Department officials said they were unclear whether Elwood was making a criminal referral and followed up with her later to seek clarification but she remained vague.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the impeachment inquiry

In the days since an anonymous whistleblower complaint was made public accusing him of wrongdoing, Trump has lashed out at his accuser and other insiders who provided the accuser with information, suggesting they were improperly spying on what was a "perfect" call between him and the Ukrainian president.

But a timeline provided by U.S. officials familiar with the matter shows that multiple senior government officials appointed by Trump found the whistleblower's complaints credible, troubling and worthy of further inquiry starting soon after the president's July phone call.


While that timeline and the CIA general counsel's contact with the DOJ has been previously disclosed, it has not been reported that the CIA's top lawyer intended her call to be a criminal referral about the president's conduct, acting under rules set forth in a memo governing how intelligence agencies should report allegations of federal crimes.

The fact that she and other top Trump administration political appointees saw potential misconduct in the whistleblower's early account of alleged presidential abuses puts a new spotlight on the Justice Department's later decision to decline to open a criminal investigation — a decision that the Justice Department said publicly was based purely on an analysis of whether the president committed a campaign finance law violation.

"They didn't do any of the sort of bread-and-butter type investigatory steps that would flush out what potential crimes may have been committed," said Berit Berger, a former federal prosecutor who heads the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School. "I don't understand the rationale for that and it's just so contrary to how normal prosecutors work. We have started investigations on far less."

Elwood, the CIA's general counsel, first learned about the matter because the complainant, a CIA officer, passed his concerns about the president on to her through a colleague. On Aug. 14, she participated in a conference call with the top national security lawyer at the White House and the chief of the Justice Department's National Security Division.

On that call, Elwood and John Eisenberg, the top legal adviser to the White House National Security Council, told the top Justice Department national security lawyer, John Demers, that the allegations merited examination by the DOJ, officials said.

According to the officials, Elwood was acting under rules that a report must occur if there is a reasonable basis to the allegations, defined as "facts and circumstances…that would cause a person of reasonable caution to believe that a crime has been, is being, or will be committed."

A Justice Department official said Attorney General William Barr was made aware of the conversation with Elwood and Eisenberg, and their concerns about the president's behavior, in the days that followed.

Justice Department officials now say they didn't consider the phone conversation a formal criminal referral because it was not in written form. A separate criminal referral came later from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was based solely on the whistleblower's official written complaint.


When Elwood and Eisenberg spoke with Justice Department, no one on the phone had seen the whistleblower's formal complaint to the inspector general of the intelligence community, which had been submitted two days before the call and was still a secret. The issue of campaign finance law was not part of their deliberations, the officials said.

A 'thing of value'

It is illegal for Americans to solicit foreign contributions to political campaigns. Justice Department officials said they decided there was no criminal case after determining that Trump didn't violate campaign finance law by asking the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rival, because such a request did not meet the test for a "thing of value" under the law.

Justice Department officials have said they only investigated the president's Ukraine call for violations of campaign finance law because it was the only statute mentioned in the whistleblower's complaint. Former federal prosecutors contend that the conduct could have fit other criminal statutes, including those involving extortion, bribery, conflict of interest or fraud, that might apply to the president or those close to him.

The decision not to open an investigation meant there was no FBI examination of documents or interviews of witnesses to the phone call, participants in the White House decision to withhold military funding from Ukraine, the president's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Ukrainian officials who were the target of Trump and Giuliani's entreaties.

Text messages turned over to Congress on Thursday night, in which diplomats appear to suggest there was a linkage between aid and Ukraine's willingness to investigate a case involving Joe Biden, were not examined as part of the Justice Department's review, officials said, adding that they conducted purely a legal analysis.

Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec told NBC News that the decision not to open an investigation was made by the head of the criminal division, Brian Benczkowski, in consultation with career lawyers at the public integrity section. She and other officials declined to say whether anyone dissented.

Attorney General William Barr.Jacquelyn Martin / AP
The operative Justice Department standard that the president can't be indicted while in office was not a factor, she said. Barr has said he believes the president can be investigated and prosecutors can make a determination whether he committed criminal conduct.

"Relying on established procedures set forth in the Justice Manual, the Department's Criminal Division reviewed the official record of the call and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted," Kupec said.

Kupec declined to comment on whether the Justice Department was investigating any other aspect of the Ukraine matter. There has been no public indication, however, of any such investigation.

Some legal experts are puzzled by Justice Department's narrow approach.

"They are not by any stretch of the imagination limited to the referral," said Chuck Rosenberg, an NBC News contributor and former U.S. attorney. "They have the authority — in fact, they have the obligation — to look more deeply and more broadly and bring whatever charges are appropriate."

Berger added, "When you get a criminal referral, you don't go into it saying, 'This is the criminal violation and now I'm going to see if the facts prove it.' You start with the facts and the evidence and then you see what potential crimes those facts support. It seems backwards to say, 'We are going to look at this just as a campaign finance violation and oops, we don't see it — case closed.'"

In a case in which a government official is allegedly using his office for personal gain, and pressuring someone to extract a favor, the bribery and extortion statutes are usually considered, Berger said. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribery of foreign officials, may also have been implicated, she said.

'I have received information'

In his written complaint, the CIA officer who became the whistleblower framed his allegations this way: "I have received information from multiple U.S. government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election."

But when he first passed on his concerns, they were not so specific, officials said. He first complained at his own agency, sending word through a colleague to a CIA lawyer. The complaint eventually reached the spy agency's top lawyer, Elwood, officials said.

She was told there were concerns about the president's conduct on a call with a foreign leader, but not which leader, officials said.

She also was told that others at the National Security Council shared the concerns, so she called Eisenberg, the top NSC lawyer, officials said. He was already aware that people inside his agency believed something improper had occurred on the July 25 call with the Ukrainian president, officials said.

After consulting with others at their respective agencies and learning more details about the complaint, Elwood and Eisenberg alerted the Justice Department's Demers, during the Aug. 14 phone call, in what Elwood considered to be a criminal referral. Demers read the transcript of the July 25 call, officials said, on Aug. 15.

What the Justice Department did next is not entirely clear. A DOJ official said it was the department's perspective that a phone call did not constitute a formal criminal referral that allowed them to consider an investigation, and that a referral needed to be in writing.

The whistleblower was already taking separate action. On Aug. 12, he filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, after consulting with a staff member on the House Intelligence Committee, officials said.

At the end of August, the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, sent the Justice Department his own criminal referral based on the whistleblower complaint, he has confirmed.

Kupec says career prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section, which works on corruption cases, were involved in deciding how to proceed, as was the national security division and the Office of Legal Counsel.


A senior DOJ lawyer who briefed reporters said the department had no basis on which to open a criminal investigation because Trump's request of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate a case involving his political opponent couldn't amount to a quantifiable "thing of value" under campaign finance law.

Justice Department officials said they focused on campaign finance law because that was how the allegations were framed in the whistleblower complaint.

"All relevant components of the department agreed with this legal conclusion," the DOJ's Kupec said.

Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, is among those questioning even the narrow campaign finance analysis. Common Cause has filed a complaint with the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission accusing Trump of violating campaign law.

It wouldn't have been difficult for the government to determine how much money Ukraine would have spent in an investigation of Joe Biden and his son, he said,

"That would give them a dollar amount to show that Trump solicited 'something of value,'" Ryan said.

Ken Dilanian is a correspondent covering intelligence and national security for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump- ... t-n1062481

Nicole Perlroth
‏

BREAKING: The candidate Iranian hackers targeted? Microsoft will not say but sources confirm it was @realDonaldTrump's.


Iranian hackers dispatched hundreds of attacks against one U.S. Presidential campaign, current and former U.S. officials and journalists, according 2 Microsoft. Other security firms confirmed they are witnessing cyberattacks on candidates on both aisles.
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/stat ... 7908711424

[seemslikeadream]

A second intel official who was alarmed by Trump's Ukraine dealings is weighing whether to file his own formal whistleblower complaint and testify to Congress.

The official has more direct info about events than the first whistleblower.

I almost forgot. Those texts between Trump diplomats seeking dirt from Ukraine? They were sent not on State Dept email but on WhatsApp.

How a $1 million donor to Trump’s inauguration (with no other qualifications) seized control of US-Ukraine relations with the blessing of Trump himself.

“Newly released texts exchanged by Sondland, Volker and other U.S. officials during this period read like a government-sanctioned shakedown.”

This article is a devastating account of what appears to be a “multipronged political conspiracy” by Trump and his allies to use official arms of the US govt to squeeze Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden. Devastating.
https://twitter.com/LincolnsBible?ref_s ... r%5Eauthor

2nd Official Is Weighing Whether to Blow the Whistle on Trump’s Ukraine Dealings
The New York Times
Oct. 4, 2019, 8:37 p.m. ET
President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during a phone call.
President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during a phone call.Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
Additionally, a reconstructed transcript of a July call between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky released by the White House also showed Mr. Trump pressuring Ukraine.
Because the second official has met with Mr. Atkinson’s office, it was unclear whether he needs to file a complaint to gain the legal protections offered to intelligence community whistle-blowers. Witnesses who speak with inspectors general are protected by federal law that outlaws reprisals against officials who cooperate with an inspector general.

Whistle-blowers have created a new threat for Mr. Trump. Though the White House has stonewalled Democrats in Congress investigating allegations raised in the special counsel’s report that Mr. Trump obstructed justice, the president has little similar ability to stymie whistle-blowers from speaking to Congress.

The Trump administration had blocked Mr. Atkinson from sharing the whistle-blower complaint with lawmakers but later relented.

Mr. Trump and his allies have taken aim at the credibility of the original whistle-blower by noting that he had secondhand knowledge. The president has also singled out his sources, saying that they were “close to a spy.”
“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistle-blower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Mr. Trump told staffers at the United States mission to the United Nations. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Mr. Atkinson has identified some indications of “arguable political bias” that the whistle-blower had in favor of a rival candidate. But the inspector general said that the existence of that bias did not alter his conclusion that the complaint was credible.

Still, testimony from someone with more direct knowledge of Mr. Trump’s efforts to use American foreign policy for potential political gain would most likely undermine conservatives’ attacks on the C.I.A. officer’s credibility.
http://archive.is/HeTF0

Here's a list of Republicans whose clear will Trump was ignoring in holding up security assistance to Ukraine, per the Political story Yermak sent to Volker. Each should be asked how they feel about Trump defying their will to extort campaign help.

Trump holds up Ukraine military aid meant to confront Russia

By CAITLIN EMMA and CONNOR O’BRIEN08/29/2019 03:40 PM EDT
Pro-Russia soldiers
Pro-Russia separatist soldiers celebrate in Lugansk, Ukraine, in 2014. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The Trump administration is slow-walking $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, annoying lawmakers and advocates who argue the funding is critical to keeping Russia at bay.

President Donald Trump asked his national security team to review the funding program, known as the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, in order to ensure the money is being used in the best interest of the United States, a senior administration official told POLITICO on Wednesday.

But the delays come amid questions over Trump’s approach to Russia, after a weekend in which the president repeatedly seemed to downplay Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine and pushed for Russia to be reinstated into the Group of Seven, an annual gathering of the world’s largest advanced economies. The review is also occurring amid a broader internal debate over whether to halt or cut billions of dollars in foreign aid.

United States military aid to Ukraine has long been seen as a litmus test for how strongly the American government is pushing back against Moscow.

The Trump administration in 2017 approved lethal arms sales to Ukraine, taking a step the Obama administration had never done. The move was seen as a sign that Trump’s government was taking a hard-line approach to a revanchist Vladimir Putin despite the president’s public rhetoric flattering the Russian leader. Scaling back that assistance could expose Trump to allegations that his policies are favoring Moscow.

For the 2019 fiscal year, lawmakers allocated $250 million in security aid to Ukraine, including money for weapons, training, equipment and intelligence support. Specifically, Congress set aside $50 million for weaponry.

Now, that funding is being called into question. The senior administration official, who asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss internal matters, said the president wants to ensure U.S. interests are being prioritized when it comes to foreign assistance, and is seeking assurances that other countries are “paying their fair share.”

Defense Secretary Mark Esper and national security adviser John Bolton are among the officials who were asked to review the Ukraine security funding.

A senior Defense Department official told POLITICO that “the department has reviewed the foreign assistance package and supports it.”

But the White House explanation that Trump wants to ensure the money is being spent properly isn’t sitting well with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, where members of both parties have pushed to increase military assistance to Ukraine and U.S. military efforts to deter Russia in Eastern Europe.

There is "an at least temporary effect," said Rep. Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "The bigger problem is that Trump is once again showing himself to be an asset to Russia.”

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, vowed that the administration’s move “will be met with fierce opposition in Congress.”

“Enough is enough,” he said in a statement. “President Trump should stop worrying about disappointing Vladimir Putin and stand up for U.S. national security priorities.”

The funds for Ukraine can’t be spent while they’re under review and the money expires at the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. The account was originally created by defense policy legislation enacted in late 2015 to help Ukraine battle pro-Russian separatists in Crimea after Moscow annexed the region in 2014.

“We are aware of an [Office of Management and Budget] hold on funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative,” House Appropriations Committee spokesperson Evan Hollander said in a statement. “We have serious concerns about a freeze on these important appropriated funds, and we are urgently inquiring with the administration about why they are holding up these resources.”

The House Armed Services Committee "is aware of the restriction, but have requested additional information about what it means and is applied to," an aide told POLITICO.

In a POLITICO op-ed in April, Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) called for boosting funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and argued that a bigger portion of the money “should go to support defensive lethal aid that will make Ukraine a more difficult target for Putin's aggression.“

Trump is scheduled to meet this weekend in Warsaw, Poland, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Trump administration’s broader push to freeze or slash foreign aid that White House officials contend is wasteful has sparked intense bipartisan backlash, with lawmakers warning of a deteriorating relationship with the White House when it comes to the use of appropriated funds.

The administration dropped a plan last week amid congressional fury that would have cut more than $4 billion across 10 areas of foreign assistance, including funds for international peacekeeping operations, narcotics control and global health efforts. The administration also backed off a similar plan last year.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), ranking member of the House Committee that oversees funding for the State Department, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Appropriations committees, both warned Trump against the package of funding cuts.

Top Republicans and Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee also sounded the alarm.

Daniel Fried, a career diplomat who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations and was most recently the State Department coordinator for sanctions policy, said the review sends the wrong message to a Democratic ally under intense pressure from Moscow's aggressive behavior.

“If the Administration has a good reason for a sudden cut to security assistance to Ukraine, they should share it," Fried told POLITICO. "Ukraine’s new leaders, in office through free and fair elections, have earned and deserve America’s support, not mixed signals.”

Trump has also withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Central America and sought to shuffle around federal funds in order to bolster Trump’s immigration enforcement priorities.

For example, the administration plans to divert $271 million from various Department of Homeland Security accounts — including $155 million in federal disaster aid — to beef up funding for its immigration enforcement effort.

“It is of great concern that during the course of this administration, there has been a growing disconnect between the will of Congress … and the department’s immigration enforcement proceedings, which often lack justification,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), who chairs the House subcommittee that funds DHS, said in a recent letter to acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

In a statement on Wednesday, a FEMA spokesperson said the move won’t affect long-term recovery efforts underway in states and territories ravaged by hurricanes, wildfires and flooding.

Natasha Bertrand contributed to this report.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/ ... ia-1689531

Chairmen Schiff, Engel, and Cummings have sent a letter requesting key Ukraine documents from Vice President Mike Pence as part of the House's impeachment inquiry

Mike Pence just set himself on fire
Bill Palmer
Earlier today, the House impeachment inquiry sent Mike Pence a letter requesting that he turn over documents regarding his role in Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal. It was a clear sign that Democrats looking at impeaching and ousting Pence as well. Just now Mike Pence responded to the letter, and he did it in such a bizarrely idiotic manner, it’s clear that Pence’s vice presidency and life are going down the drain.

Mike Pence’s office has released this statement to the media: “Given the scope, it does not appear to be a serious request but just another attempt by the Do Nothing Democrats to call attention to their partisan impeachment.” No really, he said this. Pence just responded to a document request in an impeachment inquiry by thumbing his nose at it in juvenile fashion. What’s he doing?

Not only did Mike Pence just make a fool of himself and put more impeachment heat on himself, he also just responded in bad faith – which means that even if he fights this in court, the judge is going to look at his assholish response and rule against him. Not only did Pence just cost himself any slim shot at inheriting the presidency, he also all but ensured that he’ll go to prison once this is over.

This tells us that Mike Pence is more afraid of whatever Donald Trump might do to him than he is of going to prison. Trump must have the kind of dirt on Pence that would shatter him so badly, Pence would rather risk ending up behind bars for several years. Mike Pence just set himself on fire. House Democrats should be celebrating, because the guy just royally screwed himself.
https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/m ... ire/21542/

Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified’
Josh Dawsey
President Trump speaks with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto by phone in 2018 as he announces the United States has reached an agreement with Mexico to enter a new trade deal. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
President Trump speaks with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto by phone in 2018 as he announces the United States has reached an agreement with Mexico to enter a new trade deal. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In one of his first calls with a head of state, President Trump fawned over Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling the man who ordered interference in America’s 2016 election that he was a great leader and apologizing profusely for not calling him sooner.

He pledged to Saudi officials in another call that he would help the monarchy enter the elite Group of Seven, an alliance of the world’s leading democratic economies.

He promised the president of Peru that he would deliver to his country a C-130 military cargo plane overnight, a logistical nightmare that set off a herculean scramble in the West Wing and Pentagon.

And in a later call with Putin, Trump asked the former KGB officer for his guidance in forging a friendship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — a fellow authoritarian hostile to the United States.

Starting long before revelations about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president rocked Washington, Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders were an anxiety-ridden set of events for his aides and members of the administration, according to former and current officials. They worried that Trump would make promises he shouldn’t keep, endorse policies the United States long opposed, commit a diplomatic blunder that jeopardized a critical alliance, or simply pressure a counterpart for a personal favor.

“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” said one former White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”

But Trump’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went beyond whether the leader of the free world had committed a faux pas, and into grave concerns he had engaged in a possible crime or impeachable offense. The release last week of a whistleblower complaint alleging Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals as well as the release of a rough transcript of the July call led to House Democrats launching an impeachment inquiry against Trump.

The latest on the impeachment inquiry into President Trump

The Ukraine controversy has put a renewed focus on Trump’s un­or­tho­dox way of interacting with fellow world leaders in diplomatic calls.

Critics, including some former administration officials, contend that Trump’s behavior on calls with foreign leaders has at times created unneeded tensions with allies and sent troubling signals to adversaries or authoritarians that the United States supports or at least does not care about human rights or their aggressive behavior elsewhere in the world.

Joel Willett, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Security Council from 2014 to 2015, said he was concerned both by the descriptions of a president winging it, and the realization that the president’s behavior disturbs and frightens career civil servants.

“What a burden it must be to be stuck between your position of trust in the White House and another obligation you may feel to the American people to say something,” he said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment Thursday or Friday.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the president speaks his mind and diverges from other presidents who follow protocol. Graham said he saw nothing distressing in the president’s July 25 call with Zelensky and said he expected it to be worse, partially given his own experience with Trump on the phone.

“If you take half of my phone calls with him, it wouldn’t read as cleanly and nicely,” he said, adding that the president sounded like a “normal person.”

This story is based on interviews with 12 former or current officials with knowledge of the president’s foreign calls. These officials had direct involvement in the calls, were briefed on them or read the transcripts afterward. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s private conversations with world leaders.

The first call Trump made that set off alarm bells came less than two weeks after his inauguration. On Jan. 28, Trump called Putin for what should have been a routine formality: accepting a foreign leader’s congratulations. Former White House officials described Trump as “obsequious” and “fawning,” but said he also rambled off into different topics without any clear point, while Putin appeared to stick to formal talking points for a first official exchange.

“He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my people didn’t tell me you wanted to talk to me,’ ” said one person with direct knowledge of the call.

Trump has been consistently cozy with authoritarian leaders, sparking anxiety among aides about the solicitous tones he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President ­Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin.

“We couldn’t figure out early on why he was being so nice to Russia,” one former senior administration official said. H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, launched an internal campaign to get Trump to be more skeptical of the Russians. Officials expressed surprise in both of his early Putin calls at why he was so friendly.

In another call, in April 2017, Trump told Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who had overseen a brutal campaign that has resulted in the extrajudicial killings of thousands of suspected drug dealers, that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem.”

Trump’s personal goals seeped into calls. He pestered Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for help in recommending him for a Nobel Prize, according to an official familiar with the call.

“People who could do things for him — he was nice to,” said one former security official. “Leaders with trade deficits, strong female leaders, members of NATO — those tended to go badly.”

Aides bristled at the dismissive way he sometimes addressed longtime U.S. allies, especially women.

In a summer 2018 call with Prime Minister Theresa May, Trump harangued the British leader about her country’s contribution to NATO. He then disputed her intelligence community’s conclusion that Putin’s government had orchestrated the attempted murder and poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.

“Trump was totally bought into the idea there was credible doubt about the poisoning,” said one person briefed on the call. “A solid 10 minutes of the conversation is spent with May saying it’s highly likely and him saying he’s not sure.”

Trump would sometimes make commitments to foreign leaders that flew in the face of U.S. policy and international agreements, as when he told a Saudi royal that he would support their country’s entry into the G-7.

“The G-7 is supposed to be the allies with whom we share the most common values and the deepest commitment to upholding the rules-based order,” the former official said.

Russia was kicked out of the group in 2014 for violating international law when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. Trump has publicly advocated for Russia to be allowed back in. Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and has a record of human rights abuses, wasn’t a fit candidate for membership, the former official said.

Saudi Arabia was not admitted to the group.

Calls with foreign leaders have often been highly orchestrated events in past administrations.

“When I was at the White House, there was a very deliberative process of the president absorbing information from people who had deep substantive knowledge of the countries and relationships with these leaders. Preparation for these calls was taken very seriously,” Willett said. “It appears to be freestyle and ad-libbed now.”

Trump has rejected much of the protocol and preparation associated with foreign calls, even as his national security team tried to establish goals for each conversation.

Instead, Trump often sought to use calls as a way to befriend whoever he was talking to, one current senior administration official said, defending the president. “So he might say something that sounds terrible to the outside, but in his mind, he’s trying to build a relationship with that person and sees flattery as the way to do it.”

The president resisted long briefings before calls or reading in preparation, several former officials said. McMaster, who preferred providing the president with information he could use to make decisions, resigned himself to giving Trump small notecards with bulleted highlights and talking points.

“You had two to three minutes max,” said one former senior administration official. “And then he was still usually going to say whatever he wanted to say.”

As a result, staff fretted that Trump came across ill-informed in some calls, and even oafish. In a conversation with China’s Xi, Trump repeated numerous times how much he liked a kind of chocolate cake, one former official said. The president publicly described the dessert the two had in April 2017 when Trump and Xi met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you have ever seen.”

Trump preferred to make calls from the residence, which frustrated some NSC staff and West Wing aides who wanted to be on hand to give the president real-time advice. If he held the call in the Oval Office, aides would gather around the desk and pass him notes to try to keep the calls on point. On a few occasions, then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly muted the call to try to get the president back on track, two officials said.

Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and critic, said the calls fit Trump’s style as a business leader.

“When he had to get on calls with investors on a publicly traded company, they had to worry that he would break securities laws and lie about the company’s profits,” O’Brien said. “When he would go and meet with regulators with the casino control commission, his lawyers were always worried under oath, in a public setting, that he would say something that would be legally damaging.”

Though calls with foreign leaders are routinely planned in advance, Trump a few times called Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron unannounced, as if they were friends, a former administration official said.

After some early summaries of Trump calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia leaked to the press in 2017, the White House tightened restrictions on who could access the transcripts and kept better track of who had custody of copies. For example, Vice President Pence still received a courtesy copy of any foreign-leader call, but his staff now had to sign off when they transported it to his office and also sign off when they returned or destroyed the document.

Some former officials said that over time staff became used to the oddity of some calls even if they still found them troubling.

“People had gotten really numb to him blurting out something he shouldn’t have,” one former national security staffer remarked.

But officials who had served in the White House through the end of 2018 were still shocked by the whistleblower complaint about the effort to “lock down” records of Trump’s July 25 call. The complaint said White House officials ordered the transcript moved into a highly secure computer system, known as NICE, which is normally reserved only for information about the most sensitive code-word-level intelligence programs.

“Unheard of,” said one former official who handled foreign calls. “That just blew me away.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

[seemslikeadream]

Heath Mayo
‏

Reviewed the materials released by the House Committees’ from Amb. Volker testimony and, on a close read, they are more devastating for the White House than even the reporting suggests.

Let’s walk through both Volker’s testimony & then the corroborating texts...

5:02 PM - 4 Oct 2019

First: who is Volker? He’s the former US Rep for Ukraine Negotiations & he resigned a week ago after news of the July 25 call btw Trump & Zelenskyy broke.

These are his words—and he immediately rebukes the whole Deep State nonsense right out of the gate. No “spies” or “treason”.


He then frames the entire affair as his dogged effort to “fix a problem as best he could.” He also goes out of his way to highlight that *he* was focused on US national security interests. It’s almost like he thinks the evidence might lead us to question that fact.


So what problem was Volker fixing? “A negative narrative about Ukraine, fueled by assertions made by” Lutsenko, that reached the President and “impeded our ability to support” Ukraine.

This is an admission that Trump’s belief in conspiracies & Biden charges influenced US policy.


Then, Volker moves into CYA mode. He disavows knowledge of anything related to Biden—but the revealed text messages suggest otherwise. Indeed, “Burisma” which was clearly code for “Biden” appears routinely throughout, as we’ll see.

Read this! Volker clearly knows this smelled.


Finally—Volker goes to great pains to make it clear that he actively opposed withholding aid to Ukraine, along with the rest of practically the entire US national security and foreign policy apparatus.

Trump injured American interests to pressure Ukraine into doing his bidding.


The entire Giuliani section makes it clear that he & Trump were undermining the judgment of State officials on Ukraine. And Biden was all over this thing. Burisma clearly equaled investigating Biden throughout.

Oh, also—Volker says claims against Biden are bogus.


Listen to Volker’s own assessment of Trump’s inability to even grasp the impact of changing circumstances in Ukraine after the election.

This is scary, folks. The President is just dense. He doesn’t understand things and thinks other countries are “trying to take him down.”


Then, in the section of testimony about the Rudy/Yermak tango, Volker discusses negotiations over an official statement that Trump/Rudy wanted Zelenskyy to deliver re: investigating “Burisma & 2016,” presumably to create bad press for Biden. Rudy made repeated demands. Shameful.


Now — let’s move to the smoking guns: the text messages between various players in this shakedown.

These are really the nail in the coffin—Volker’s testimony just reinforces how bad this thing was for US interests in Ukraine & his damning feelings & guilt over what occurred.


Thankfully—some of these are so bad, we can cut right to the chase: Here’s Volker advising Yermak about the quid pro quo. Zelenskyy had to convince Trump he would investigate in order to secure a meeting with Trump. This was BEFORE the call.

Quid. Quo. It’s all there.


Need more evidence? Try this from Ambassador Bill Taylor who made clear that’s exactly what he was gathering from the situation. Sondland — who plays the role of yes-man in all this—won’t put things in text.

He knows he can’t memorialize the truth.


Bill Taylor doesn’t give in. He’s pissed. Why? Because withholding the aid is playing right into the Russian’s hands.

The move was un-American—and they knew it.


Finally—this kicker closes things out. Bill Taylor is furious that aid was withheld and progress in Ukraine stalled “for help with a political campaign.” Sondland unmoved. Notice, after Taylor speaks truth, Sondland takes 5 hrs to compile a legal treatise denying the suggestion.

This was just the *first* witness. This new evidence, combined w/ the July 25 call summary & the WB complaint, makes it abundantly clear that it was common knowledge for officials that a quid pro quo existed whereby Z would agree to investigate Biden for US aid & access. Period.
https://twitter.com/HeathMayo/status/11 ... 2643032064

[seemslikeadream]

"If you can help me with ‘X,’ we’ll help you achieve ‘Y.’ This is what partnerships do.”
-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

That's an excellent description of both international diplomacy and organized crime, depending upon the "X."


It’s now clear to me why John Boehner broke down crying, quit his job and started selling pot

Attorney representing whistleblower who sounded the alarm on Pres. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine tells ABC News he is now representing a second whistleblower who has first-hand knowledge of events.


What’s the age difference between Mitch McConnell and his communist-state controlled father-in-law, who bailed Mitch out with millions in 2008?
Anybody know?

What Putin Got From the Trump-Zelensky Phone Call

The biggest beneficiary of the Ukraine scandal is, sure enough, the Kremlin.

By MOLLY K. MCKEWOctober 06, 2019
Vladimir Putin
Adam Berry/Getty Images
Molly K. McKew is a writer and lecturer on Russian influence and information warfare. She advised the Georgian president and national security council from 2009 to 2013 and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat in 2014 and 2015.

A year ago, I was in Kiev when a young Ukrainian soldier was killed. Olesya Baklanova, 19, enlisted in the Ukrainian Armed Forces as soon as she was eligible and fought to be assigned a combat post. Deployed to the front lines of her country’s war against Russia, she was killed during the night while manning an observation post, shot by a sniper stationed among the Russian and proxy forces dug in a few hundred meters way. She was one of four Ukrainian soldiers killed at their post that night — one of the estimated 13,000 soldiers, fighters and civilians killed in eastern Ukraine in the past five years.

Her story was a concise reminder of the realities of Ukraine’s forgotten war. Russian forces seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014; weeks later, Russia formally annexed the territory. This was an important strategic goal for President Vladimir Putin. To ensure that no one had time to do anything about it — and to further destabilize Ukraine — Russia then launched a war in eastern Ukraine, in the Donbas region, using nominal separatists with Russian backing.

Five years on, it’s still a hot war, with Russia constantly pushing forward the line of occupation. Some 1.5 million people have been displaced. The shifting mass of regular and irregular Russian troops in eastern Ukraine — soldiers and mercenaries; “separatist” proxies and militias; a lot of guys with pseudonyms using advanced Russian weaponry that Russia claims must have been bought at the local corner shop (note: it is supplied from Russia) — constantly test and adapt new capabilities, especially electronic warfare capabilities, on the battlefield.

Ukrainian forces, with Western support, have steadily developed new measures to counter whatever is thrown at them. The Ukrainian war effort is defined both by this ingenuity and by sacrifice. The army, left gutted by former President Viktor Yanukovych, was rebuilt entirely in wartime. New units are rotated through areas of heavy fighting to increase their combat experience — a wartime readiness strategy that contributes to spikes in casualties, but which has been enormously successful. The average age of Ukrainian recruits is officially around 36, though anecdotally it’s over 40 at the front, as the generation that remembers life before independence now leads the fight to keep it.

The dirty, confusing, irregular conflict in Ukraine is part of a broader political war waged by the Kremlin. In countless ways, this is the inevitable evolution of Russia’s aggression against its neighbors after Putin paid so little price for invading Georgia in 2008. I worked as an adviser to the Georgian government in the years after that war, and we watched as almost everyone normalized Putin’s behavior, emboldening him to press forward. Now, Russia’s army sniper school has been transferred to the Ukrainian front, training the next generation of elite Russian marksmen by having them pick off Ukrainian soldiers. Soldiers like Baklanova.

This is the necessary context in which Americans should understand the gravity of President Donald Trump’s attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into becoming a subsidiary of his re-election campaign. In one gesture, Trump reduced the survival of Ukraine to a bargaining chip in an utterly petty pursuit; embroiled Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in scandal and undercut his ability to defend the interests of his nation; and weakened the clout of U.S. leadership on Ukraine, the region and beyond.

The biggest beneficiary of this latest Trump-derived scandal is the Kremlin. This isn’t some theoretical future calculus. It has an immediate impact on U.S. security and our strategic outlook. And it enhances the ability of the Kremlin to keep stirring chaos inside the United States.

Trump is bargaining away U.S. security for conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the Bidens that he hopes will not only strengthen his position for his re-election, but will also erase the evidence that Kremlin intervention helped to elect him president. It’s actually hard to know which part of all this makes the Kremlin most happy.

***

Since the annexation of Crimea, there has been a lot of speculation about Putin’s long-term goals for Ukraine and the region, be it rebuilding a kind of Russian empire or disrupting what he views as another empire moving toward his borders. But in the near term, Putin knows that pushing for a pro-Kremlin alignment in Ukrainian politics — especially with the war still on — is a waste of effort. Far better to hope for what has succeeded elsewhere along the Russian rim, and in Europe, and in the United States: the sense that it would be nice to get along better with Russia, because it’s exhausting to live under a constant existential threat.

The caveat to this is that Russia doesn’t actually want to get along. Putin needed Crimea, as he detailed in a March 2014 speech marking its annexation, because it was where Prince Vladimir, ruler of the medieval federation known as the Kievan Rus, was baptized into Orthodox Christianity more than a thousand years ago — the starting point of the arc of Russian history that has culminated in Vladimir Putin. Annexing Crimea into Russia did away with the inconvenient fact that the Russian empire was born in Ukraine. Putin spent years telling people that Crimea was Russia. And then, suddenly, it was.

A lot of what Putin has done since 2014 is about keeping Crimea. An important component of achieving that is ensuring that Ukraine remains a nation governed by a fractious elite awash in Russian money and highly subject to Kremlin manipulations. This helps keep Ukraine in limbo between Russia and the West.

Because if Russia can’t have Ukraine, neither can anyone else. Right now, the Kremlin’s de facto veto on Ukraine’s westward integration is the war. In the simplest terms, a country not in control of its own territory isn’t an ideal alliance partner — it’s the same card the Kremlin played to keep Georgia out of NATO. The ongoing conflict can also be used to disrupt the politics, society and economy of Ukraine. In exchange for agreeing to end the war, the Kremlin wants a new form of the veto — a permanent “special status” guarantee for Ukraine’s eastern provinces, which will allow the Kremlin to maintain political control over territories within Ukraine through local Russian proxies. It would be the end of Ukraine’s post-independence geopolitical aspirations, preventing it from ever integrating fully into NATO or the European Union.

The Kremlin wants you to believe Ukraine has only two choices: Ukrainians can keep fighting and dying to defend their sovereignty, or they can accept a proxy occupation designed to disrupt their governance and national unity. The only chance for a third option is unwavering Western support — which requires unwavering American support — for the Ukrainian people’s desire to live in a reformed, secure, democratic nation at peace within its recognized borders and working toward integration into Western institutions. The Kremlin’s propaganda works to make Americans believe that this third option is just some unicorn dream — that a corrupt, divided, Nazi-infested Ukraine is utterly unsupported by the distracted, feckless, immoral West (that’s Kremlin terminology, not my own).

Since 2014, the propaganda on this has become pretty stale and formulaic. The Trump-Zelensky spectacle — a play about American fecklessness and Ukrainian corruption in one “perfect” act — was a gift to the Kremlin to refresh the tired themes.

***

This whole tent revival is a spin-off of a longer play, the script of which is ribboned with conspiracy narrative actively hawked and amped by the Kremlin’s disinformation machinery. In this drama, of course, poor Russia — despite documentation of their operations by U.S. and Dutch intelligence; financial records, personnel and travel records; lists of accounts and content archived from social media; high-level sources inside the Kremlin; and more — is a blameless bystander in the 2016 attacks on American election systems and the aggressive information operations that targeted and polarized American society. And the actual villain, totally conveniently, happens to be Ukraine, the nation the Kremlin has been working to smear and dismantle since 2013.

It is a tedious and clunky story that weaves in and out of other bonkers, far-right disinformation conspiracies — Seth Rich, QAnon, everything a secret plot and ANY DAY NOW the real truth is gonna come out — that has been amply documented as false by very smart and patient researchers and journalists. But the once-respected Rudy Giuliani has become a well-oiled cog in the machine nonetheless. You can spend time trying to unravel his 52-dimensional chess explanations of how he has uncovered a Clinton/Soros/Ukraine plot, but honestly, don’t. It’s unclear if he actually understands that virtually all of it is made up by malign actors who are just here to watch it all burn. But listening to his self-narrative about being the hero of the story is a sign that he’s an easy mark for anyone who understands how to work this psychology.

The waters were so heavily chummed for sharks like Giuliani — how could he not take the bait and run after the irresistible story that solves all problems?

Maybe Giuliani explained the story to Trump in a way that made sense: It could exonerate Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, muddle the narrative, febreze away the stink of the Mueller report from Trump himself forever. Or maybe the sales pitch was all about the Biden thing. Regardless, Trump unleashed Giuliani, apparently with the support of U.S. diplomats, to undercut U.S. interests and policy — because, again, Trump just doesn’t care if Ukraine, a nation of 44 million people is sentenced to purgatory because of his actions. It is a crippling indictment of his judgment, his leadership, his fitness for office and his grasp on reality.

False equivalencies are the lifeblood of Russian propaganda, an easy tool to exploit bias and distort perception. They are also a tactic that Trump deploys nearly instinctually. “Fake Ukraine collusion 2020” as the new “fake Russia collusion 2016” is an extraordinarily powerful false equivalency — to minimize the significance of the support the Kremlin levied to help get Trump elected, to erase the importance of the Mueller investigation, and to create problems for the new Ukrainian president and his country.

By embroiling Ukraine in scandal, by politicizing support of Ukraine among the American audience, by linking Ukraine to the conspiracy nexus that underlies all thinking in Trumpworld — and by minimizing the existential threat that Ukraine and Ukrainians face every day from the Russian assault on their nation — Trump is advancing core Kremlin objectives. He has made the president of Ukraine an accomplice in that effort, or maybe just a companion in the same trap.

***

And this isn’t just about Ukraine. There is a systematic Russian effort to gain similar concessions on Moldova and Georgia — to force acceptance of a Russian veto of those countries' determination to be nations aligned with western values. The United States should be leading a political and diplomatic effort to expose what Russia is doing and explain what those Russian efforts mean. We should be leading to counter the advance of illiberal ideals in the world.

Instead we look inward at the circus. Faith in who we are and what defines us is eroding, while the geostrategic landscape of the world is remade around us — and not by anyone who believes that the will of the people is going to be a thing that matters in the future.

Trump has sent clear signals that Ukraine might not have his support — go ahead, make your own deal with Putin #shrug. Diplomatic resources that should have been focused on crafting a policy to counter Russian aggression were diverted to chase down rumors and personal vendettas instead.

It’s easy to ignore the details of Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s easy to get lost in the smoke-and-mirrors fiction that what the Kremlin is doing isn’t actually what it is doing — a dance at which the West has become quite adept since Russia’s cyberattack on Estonia in 2007 and invasion of Georgia in 2008.

We watch what the Kremlin does to its neighbors, to us, to Europe, to the Middle East, to Afghanistan — and we blink. Hackers, cyberattacks, disinformation, invasion, annexation, devastation, mercenaries, terrorists, giant arms expos — and we blink.

Ukraine is now the frontline, the place where we have the best chance to act, and to stop ignoring the reality of what we face.

There’s a reason Congress has consistently, and in a bipartisan fashion, approved military assistance for Ukraine so it can defend itself against Russian invasion and aggression. With limited but targeted resources and support, America and other NATO allies have quietly done a lot to bolster Ukraine. It’s a vast, sweeping success story. A story that almost no one talks about for fear that the president will interfere.

We don’t offer this support on some fantastical whim anchored in Cold War nostalgia, but because it is in our vital contemporary interest, in countless respects, to limit the further expansion of Russia’s hold on the Black Sea region, which the Kremlin uses to stage its war in Syria and to project power into the Middle East and Africa, across the Mediterranean on up to the western Arctic, and beyond. It is a pattern of activity that has degraded the security environment in which we and our alliances operate, and it has contributed to the sense of political instability and unrest, of churn and upheaval, that has plagued Europe since the financial crisis, the migration crisis, and Brexit, and that has defined the Middle East since the Islamic State and Bashar al-Assad became twin pillars of decay.

Using the Black Sea as an operational base, the Kremlin works against the United States and our interests, consistently choosing confrontation over cooperation. Russian forces attack U.S. ships, troops and planes with electronic warfare, mercenaries, and air assets, toeing the line about what is defined as activity “below the line of conflict.” They have not pivoted from a zero-sum view of relations with the United States. And not seeing how far the line has moved since 2008 — we now accept borders being changed by force, and the deployment of Russian forces to new ports and bases, and the fact that Russia arms the Taliban as they target American soldiers in Afghanistan, and ongoing, overt political interference in our domestic politics — is still a crazy, blind weakness of the West.

This is why remembering Olysea Baklanova is so important. America might be looking inward, waving our arms about whatever horrific violation Trump has tweeted that day — but we can’t define what Trump did to Ukraine from the perspective of our sad, fleabag circus.

Every time Trump guts an institution, diverts money to his personality projects, labels an internal enemy, violates a norm, secures a job for a corrupt and unqualified appointee, ignores the law, asks a foreign leader to “do him a favor” — every time he breaks a rule and pays no price, he provides illustration for Putin’s expanding primer on “the hoax” of democracy and “the people.”

Putin believes that all democracy is farce, and he has worked tirelessly to make sure that Western democracies believe this too. His propaganda machinery has supported Trump and the Brexiteers, faux-democrats like Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, because their self-dealing motivations amplify the firehose of cynicism that now spreads anti-democratic derision across the West.

Ukrainians have bled during a five-plus year war that they haven’t lost to Russia. They fight this war at the border of Europe to defend their democracy and the right to pursue a future of their choosing. They fight this war because they know that someone has to, and because they know what it will cost them if they don’t.

It will cost us, too. Trump recently called Ukraine “a big, wide, beautiful wall” between Russia and Europe. In reality, it is the thinnest of shields. For Ukrainians, that shield holds the line between the future they want and the past they won’t go back to. For Americans, in more than a symbolic way, the thin shield of Ukraine stands between the America we think we are, and the America we might actually be, in a world where the terms are dictated by autocrats and our power is greatly diminished.

Ukrainians deserve American support — far less cynical American support — not because we decide this-or-that president or prime minister is a guy we like, but because the people of Ukraine have died to have what we have, and to become equal members of alliances that are the architecture of American prosperity, security and power in the world. Trump talks constantly about how none of our allies are paying enough for security. Well, the Ukrainians have paid. They’ve paid a lot. Their commitment, and vibrancy, and innovative spirit will help reinforce and reinvigorate our alliances. It is of material benefit to the United States of America to have a thriving, secure, democratic Ukraine — and Georgia, and Moldova — integrated into that architecture.

And maybe if we can help them get there, it will begin to counter the corrosion of that architecture that has occurred under President Trump.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... all-229243

"Multiple whistleblowers" emerge in Trump-Ukraine case, lawyers say
October 6, 2019 / 9:59 AM
By Stefan Becket

Washington — The attorneys representing the whistleblower who filed a complaint about President Trump's dealings with Ukraine said they are representing "multiple whistleblowers" in connection to the case, including one with "first hand knowledge" of events.

"I can confirm that my firm and my team represent multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General," attorney Andrew Bakaj tweeted Sunday. "No further comment at this time."

Mark Zaid, another member of the first whistleblower's legal team, also said the team is representing a second official with first-hand knowledge of events, as first reported by ABC News. The original whistleblower had not heard or seen a transcript of the phone call between Mr. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the center of the August 12 complaint.

"I can confirm this report of a second #whistleblower being represented by our legal team," Zaid tweeted. "They also made a protected disclosure under the law and cannot be retaliated against. This WBer has first hand knowledge."

On Friday, the New York Times reported a second official was considering coming forward. It's unclear whether that official is the same person Zaid was referencing, or how many others may have formally filed complaints.

The first whistleblower's complaint raised concerns about a phone call between Mr. Trump and Zelensky on July 25, in which the president urged the Ukrainian leader to open investigations into the origins of the counterintelligence probe that became the Mueller investigation, as well as a Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter Biden, the former vice president's son.

Trump
President Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the United Nations General Assembly, Wednesday, September 25, 2019, in New York. Evan Vucci / AP
The whistleblower first consulted with staff from the House Intelligence Committee, who urged the person to obtain counsel and approach the intelligence community inspector general. The individual filed a nine-page complaint on August 12, saying he or she had learned from "multiple U.S. government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election."

The inspector general, Michael Atkinson, deemed the complaint credible and said it constituted an "urgent concern," forwarding the complaint and his assessment to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire on August 26. After consulting with the White House counsel and Department of Justice, Maguire decided against providing it to Congress.

During congressional testimony, Maguire strongly defended his decision, saying he acted in good faith and was simply delaying transferring the complaint to Congress because of its "unprecedented" nature.

Atkinson would write to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to inform him of Maguire's decision, and Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint on September 13, revealing its existence publicly for the first time.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/multiple-w ... -zaid-say/

[seemslikeadream]

Seth Abramson
‏

1/ THE NEW YORKER: Trump didn't grant Poroshenko a 2017 visit due to being "convinced an unproven conspiracy that had circulated on FNC and other conservative media outlets was true: Ukraine—under Poroshenko—had intervened against him in the '16 campaign."


2/ In 2017, Ukraine wanted a full White House visit. Trump was in a JDA with Manafort's legal team and was talking to Manafort. Per the NYRB, Trump's and Manafort's legal team were lobbying Ukraine on Manafort. And then Ukraine asked for Javenlin missiles.


3/ Ukraine froze probes of Manafort in April 2018, right as the first Javelin sales were being finalized. The White House had raised "corruption" with Ukraine on every 2017/2018 call/meeting. Ukraine knew what it had to do to please Trump and get a visit.


4/ Poroshenko never got the full WH visit he craved—presumably because, after April 2018, he wasn't *also* able to give Trump a reopening of the Burisma case (so he got Javelins only). Zelensky entered office planning to *not* make Poroshenko's error of failing to please Trump.

5/ Trump has been shaking down Ukraine since he entered office. He successfully shook down Poroshenko in 2018 for a freezing of the Manafort probes—doing so via direct meetings, meetings by agents, public statements by his administration, Manafort's attorneys' lobbying, and more.

6/ The *only* evidence missing is the transcript of the 2017 and 2018 Trump-Poroshenko calls that—as we understand it—were likely *also* illegally placed in the same NSC archive the Trump administration used to hide the Trump-Zelensky call. We need those transcripts right now.

7/ Statements by Ukraine in 2018 that they weren't being shaken down are meaningless—Ukraine literally can't say otherwise. But they're also irrelevant, as we know from THE NEW YORKER, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS and others what was going on in 2017 and 2018.

8/ Trump's claim he was pursuing corruption in Ukraine is of course false—he's never pursued the fight against corruption for its own sake. But we also have *proof* it wasn't about corruption: because he had previously shaken down Ukraine to *stop* a corruption probe of Manafort.

9/ When THE NEW YORKER says Trump withheld a White House visit from Poroshenko due to an "unproven conspiracy [theory] that...Ukraine, under Poroshenko, had intervened against him in the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign," it refers to the August 2016 revelations about *Manafort*.

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 1251896321

[seemslikeadream]

There are so many articles America needs to go back and read—like this one from Natasha Bertrand when she was at THE ATLANTIC in September '18. Folks, this scandal is about to explode in size and scope and tie *directly* into the Mueller Report—stay tuned.

How Trump and Manafort Are Helping Each Other in the Russia Investigation

The two have a joint-defense agreement, which allows their legal teams to share information—and could help the president’s former campaign chairman angle for a pardon.

Natasha Bertrand
Sep 13, 2018


Paul Manafort at the 2016 Republican National ConventionJ. Scott Applewhite / AP
President Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, insisting that Manafort only worked for him for a very short time and that his recent convictions on tax- and bank-fraud charges have nothing to do with the campaign. But Trump’s and Manafort’s legal interests may be more aligned than either of them have let on.

According to Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, Manafort and Trump are part of a joint-defense agreement that allows them to share confidential information about the Russia investigation under the protection of attorney-client privilege. “All during the investigation we have an open communication with them,” Giuliani recently told Politico. “Defense lawyers talk to each other all the time, where, as long as our clients authorize it, therefore we have a better idea of what’s going to happen. That’s very common.”

Former federal prosecutors turned defense attorneys told me that such agreements are indeed common in multi-defendant cases like Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which has embroiled dozens of White House staffers, Trump-campaign advisers, and associates of the president. Essentially, they said, these agreements allow defendants to get their stories straight—and could help Manafort if he’s looking for an eventual pardon.

Paul Manafort is photographed smiling as he leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House after being charged on October 30, 2017

“These types of agreements are very common in mob and street-gang cases,” said Elie Honig, a former assistant U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted more than 100 members and associates of La Cosa Nostra. “I’ve seen some joint-defense agreements with 20 participants … It enables and facilitates all defendants to get together and say, ‘Let’s get our ducks in a row.’ And, strategically, it enables all the different defendants and targets in a case to get together, work out what they’re going to say, and get on the same page so as not to implicate each other.”

Manafort’s legal exposure is not limited to his bank records and foreign lobbying, two matters for which charges have already been brought against him. He ran the Trump campaign for nearly five months at the height of the election, and he attended a meeting in June 2016 with Russian nationals offering dirt on Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. That meeting is of particular interest to Mueller, who has been investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to undermine Clinton’s candidacy. Trump’s story about the meeting has changed several times already, and WikiLeaks dumped Democratic National Committee emails that had been stolen by Russia just over one month later. Manafort also appeared to offer the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska private briefings about the campaign in exchange for debt relief, and he received emails from the Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos offering to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

The recently revealed agreement “is an indication by both Trump and Manafort that their interests are aligned,” explained the former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer. It may also give Manafort “another way to demonstrate his loyalty to Team Trump,” said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that convicted the Gambino crime boss John Gotti. It “suggests that Manafort may be signaling to the Trump team that he wants to still be thought of as one of them, and so is willing to share the evidence he gets to see as he prepares for his trials.”

Trump’s and Manafort’s lawyers can share as much or as little as they’d like under the agreement, which can be either written or unwritten, lawyers told me. Trump, whose deal with Manafort may make him more privy to evidence in the Russia investigation than was previously known, has repeatedly called for the probe to be shut down and has praised Manafort for refusing to cooperate with Mueller. (A spokesman for Manafort did not return a request for comment.)

According to the journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, Manafort is not alone in having a deal with Trump. Thirty-seven witnesses who have been called to testify so far in the Mueller inquiry are part of a joint-defense agreement with the president, which allows them to share details about what they told the special counsel. Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney and fixer, also had an agreement with Trump, but he backed out earlier this summer when he decided to cooperate with New York prosecutors.

So far, Manafort is the only American charged by Mueller who has chosen to go to trial rather than cooperate, and he’s already facing years in prison as a result of his conviction in Alexandria, Virginia, last month. He’s preparing for yet another trial in Washington, D.C., next week on multiple charges, including failure to register as a foreign agent, witness tampering, and money laundering.

His agreement with Trump wouldn’t prevent him from seeking a plea deal in that case, or even flipping on the president in exchange for a lighter sentence, legal experts told me—it would simply limit what he could say about Trump’s legal strategy. Manafort is still resisting pressure to help federal prosecutors, according to ABC News, and is angling for a deal that would lessen his sentence but not require him to turn on Trump. That’s not an uncommon request, Honig said, but a good prosecutor would reject it. “Federal cooperation, with very narrow exceptions, is not selective,” he said. “Generally, it’s all or nothing.”

Manafort may be looking beyond a plea deal, however, to a full pardon from Trump (or, even further down the road, to a commutation). Honig was skeptical that Trump’s lawyers would use the agreement to dangle a pardon in exchange for Manafort’s silence: Doing so could constitute obstruction of justice, and therefore be subject to the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege. “They have to be somewhat guarded, because they know Manafort, or anyone else in a joint-defense agreement, could choose to flip at any time,” Honig said.

Even so, Cotter noted, the agreement provides Manafort a valuable channel into Trumpworld, one that could help him angle for a pardon if that’s what he’s looking for. In the end, “that’s not a bad roll of the dice,” Cramer said. “As we’ve seen from Trump’s past pardons, Manafort won’t need to wait on career prosecutors or the [White House’s] pardon office to make a recommendation. It’s really just about waiting on the president’s whim.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... er/570187/

Paul Manafort
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40370&p=669658&hilit=Paul+Manafort#p669658

[Belligerent Savant]

.

I realize this is a futile exercise, since the 'curator' of this thread is not interested in discourse, but rather, prefers to flood this space with their preferred propaganda and will therefore ignore this post [and/or bury it in due course with reams of additional copy/pasted party-line content, perhaps after offering some dismissive/snide comment] but I'll add a final contribution here, regardless.

The impeachment of Trump, if it happens, will offer no substantive change to National and Global state of affairs. The Machine will continue unabated. The DNC is part of the problem, not the solution. SLAD frequently shares content here that references a "criminal enterprise" and/or "mob" while wholly ignoring the criminal enterprise on full display every day on TV and Google News feeds, with players on 'both sides' of the 'aisle'.

Continued focus on TRUMP -- or rather, the limited mainstream framing of Trump's crimes, while ignoring the over-arching systemic connections that span across Party and Country lines -- is futile, if indeed the TRUE OBJECTIVE here is to unmask criminal activity, corruption and fraud.

Otherwise, as repeatedly stated, you're simply amplifying and promoting State propaganda.

Moot point, however.

[seemslikeadream]

This guy feels quite differently than Glenn and Matt about the authenticity of the whistleblower.

John Dean: When I was a whistleblower, the Justice Department protected me
Opinion by John Dean
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/10/02/opin ... ssion=true

[Iamwhomiam]

What’s the age difference between Mitch McConnell and his communist-state controlled father-in-law, who bailed Mitch out with millions in 2008?
Anybody know?

15 years

Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr.

February 20, 1942 (age 77)

Chao Si-Cheng

December 29, 1927 (age 91)