First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Russia

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 29, 2018 9:57 pm

Just today: trump declined to impose new Russia sanctions, a top FBI official probing trump/Russia was forced out, and House Intel R's voted to release a classified memo that purports to undermine Russia probe. Also DOJ/FBI are officially under investigation by HPSCI R's.


Then there’s that bit about being promised shares in Russia’s largest oil company in exchange for cancelling sanctions.

Memos: CEO of Russia's state oil company offered Trump adviser, allies a cut of huge deal if sanctions were lifted
Natasha Bertrand Jan 27, 2017, 8:06 AM ET

A dossier with unverified claims about President Donald Trump's ties to Russia contained allegations that Igor Sechin, the CEO of Russia's state oil company, offered former Trump ally Carter Page and his associates the brokerage of a 19% stake in the company in exchange for the lifting of US sanctions on Russia.

The dossier says the offer was made in July, when Page was in Moscow giving a speech at the Higher Economic School. The claim was sourced to "a trusted compatriot and close associate" of Sechin, according to the dossier's author, former British spy Christopher Steele.

"Sechin's associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered Page and his associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft," the dossier said. "In return, Page had expressed interest and confirmed that were Trump elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted."

Four months before the intelligence community briefed Trump, then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and the nation's top lawmakers on the dossier's claims - most of which have not been independently verified but are being investigated by US intelligence agencies - a US intelligence source told Yahoo's Michael Isikoff that Sechin met with Page during Page's three-day trip to Moscow. Sechin, the source told Yahoo, raised the issue of the US lifting sanctions on Russia under Trump.

Page was an early foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign. He took a "leave of absence" in September after news broke of his July trip to Moscow, and the campaign later denied that he had ever worked with it.

Page, for his part, was "noncommittal" in his response to Sechin's requests that the US lift the sanctions, the dossier said. But he signaled that doing so would be Trump's intention if he won the election, and he expressed interest in Sechin's offer, according to the document.


In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump suggested the sanctions could be lifted if Moscow proved to be a useful ally. "If you get along and if Russia is really helping us," Trump asked, "why would anybody have sanctions if somebody's doing some really great things?"

Page has criticized the US sanctions on Russia as "sanctimonious expressions of moral superiority." He praised Sechin in a May 2014 blog post for his "accomplishments" in advancing US-Russia relations. A US official serving in Russia while Page worked at Merrill Lynch in Moscow told Isikoff that Page "was pretty much a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did."

Page is also believed to have met with senior Kremlin internal affairs official Igor Diveykin while he was in Moscow last July, according to Isikoff's intelligence sources. The dossier separately claimed that Diveykin - whom US officials believe was responsible for the intelligence collected by Russia about the US election - met with Page and hinted that the Kremlin possessed compromising information about Trump.

It is unclear whether Isikoff's reporting is related to the dossier, which has been circulating among top intelligence officials, lawmakers, and journalists since mid-2016.

A scramble for a foreign investor
After mid-October, the dossier said, Sechin predicted that it would no longer be possible for Trump to win the presidency, so he "put feelers out to other business and political contacts" to purchase a stake in Rosneft.

Rosneft then scrambled to find a foreign investor, holding talks with more than 30 potential buyers from Europe, the US, Asia, and the Middle East. The company signed a deal on December 7 to sell 19.5% of shares, or roughly $11 billion, to the multinational commodity trader Glencore Plc and Qatar's state-owned wealth fund. Qatar's sovereign wealth fund is Glencore's largest shareholder.


The "11th hour deal" was "so last minute," Reuters reported, "that it appeared it would not close in time to meet the government's deadline for booking money in the budget from the sale."

The purchase amounted to the biggest foreign investment in Russia since US sanctions took effect in 2014. It showed that "there are some forces in the world that are ready to help Russia to circumvent the [West's] sanction regime," said Lilia Shevtsova, an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House.

Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin attends a briefing dedicated to the signing of a contract between Rosneft and Essar Oil Ltd. companies in Ufa, Russia, July 8, 2015. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
Thomson Reuters
Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin at a briefing dedicated to the signing of a contract between Rosneft and Essar Oil Ltd.
"In Russia we have a marriage between power and business, and that is why all important economic deals need approval and the endorsement of the authorities," Shevtsova said. "This was a very serious commercial deal that hardly could have succeeded without the direct involvement of the Kremlin."

The privatization deal was funded by Gazprombank, whose parent company is the state-owned Russian energy giant Gazprom.

Page holds investments in Gazprom, though he claimed in a letter to FBI Director James Comey in September that he sold his stake in the company "at a loss." His website says he served as an adviser "on key transactions" for the state-owned energy giant before setting up his energy investment fund, Global Energy Capital, in 2008 with former Gazprom executive Sergei Yatsenko.


There is no evidence that Carter played any role in the Rosneft deal. But he was back in Moscow on December 8 - one day after the deal was signed - to "meet with some of the top managers" of Rosneft, he told reporters at the time. Page denied meeting with Sechin, Rosneft's CEO, during that trip but said it would have been "a great honor" if he had.

The Rosneft deal, Page added, was "a good example of how American private companies are unfortunately limited to a great degree due to the influence of sanctions." He said the US and Russia had entered "a new era" of relations but that it was still "too early" to discuss whether Trump would be easing or lifting sanctions on Moscow.

Page's extensive business ties to state-owned Russian companies were investigated by a counterintelligence task force set up last year by the CIA. The investigation, which is reportedly ongoing, has examined whether Russia was funneling money into Trump's presidential campaign - and, if it was, who was serving as the liaison between the Trump team and the Kremlin.

The dossier claims that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort asked Page to be the liaison. That claim has not been verified. Manafort served as a top adviser to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine from 2004 to 2012 and emerged as a central figure in both the dossier and the intelligence community's early inquiries into Trump's ties to Russia.

Editor's note: This article originally stated that Carter and his associates were offered a 19% stake in Rosneft. They were allegedly offered the brokerage of the 19% stake, whose purchase by the QIA and Glencore was ultimately facilitated by Gazprombank.



Big Lies, Law Enforcement, and the Defense of Rod Rosenstein

By Benjamin Wittes Monday, January 29, 2018, 4:51 PM


Attorney General Jeff Sessions administers the oath of office to Rod J. Rosenstein to be the Deputy Attorney General of the United States (Matthew T. Nichols for the Department of Justice)
The defense of democratic institutions, norms, values and culture does not always involve standing up for people who have acted heroically. Stories feel better, of course, when it does—when honor goes to those to whom people rally because they have behaved admirably; when the music swells in our minds and it all feels like a screenplay. But democracies don’t function like neatly-ending screenplays. The characters on whom democracies depend may perform erratically; citizens may not fully understand their conduct or motives; people may not trust them.

I have not held back from criticizing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein over the past few months. I called on him to resign for his role in enabling President Trump’s firing of James Comey as FBI director. I argued that he should resign in response to Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the Justice Department—and I questioned his honor when he didn’t respond loudly and clearly to the president’s attacks on federal law enforcement. More recently, I criticized his decision to throw two FBI employees to the wolves by allowing the public release of their text messages during a pending investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Jack Goldsmith has asked questions of his own, such as why Rosenstein has not recused himself from the Mueller investigation when his own involvement in Comey’s firing would seem to require it. Rosenstein’s behavior, to put it simply, has not inspired my admiration.

And yet: The defense of Rosenstein represents an imperative for everyone who is concerned about the Trump administration’s predations against the independence of law enforcement.

There will come a time to litigate the question of Rosenstein’s handling of the many bizarre questions he confronted in his role as deputy attorney general. Today is not that day. Today is a day to understand that apolitical law enforcement is stronger with him than without him, and that it would suffer a genuine blow if the president and the House Intelligence Committee chairman can lie the deputy attorney general out of government.

Let me explain: As I write this, on a plane with a spotty internet connection, NBC has reported that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe is stepping aside—weeks earlier than expected. Only days ago it was reported that FBI Director Chris Wray threatened to resign rather than remove McCabe before his scheduled retirement in March. What’s more, CBS reports that McCabe was forced out. I’ll have more to say on this as the story of McCabe’s departure becomes clearer.

The McCabe news also follows a flurry of reports, first from CNN and then from the Washington Post, that Trump was upset with Rosenstein and thinking of firing him over the “memo” being hawked by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. And it comes the same day the New York Times reported that that memo specifically targets Rosenstein for approving an FBI request to the FISA court to extend the monitoring of former Trump adviser Carter Page that began in the fall of 2016. Trump has previously voiced frustration with Rosenstein over the deputy attorney general’s appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel, and the Post writes that the president views the memo as an excuse to fire Rosenstein or ratchet up pressure on him to leave.

Let’s be clear about the significance of the current New York Times story—and about why the defense of Rosenstein has become so crucial. The Times story strips away the nonsense that L’Affaire Russe exists in some cloud of original sin owing to some origins in the dossier compiled by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele. The Times is reporting that what Trump calls “the Trump Justice Department”—for all the president’s lies about the FBI and law enforcement—believed in spring 2017 that there was still probable cause to conduct surveillance against Page.

In other words, to believe—as so many Trump defenders seem to—that there is something defective about the Mueller investigation, one has to believe not merely that the Obama administration conducted inappropriate surveillance against the Trump campaign based on laundered opposition research from the Democratic National Committee. You also have to believe that the Trump administration itself is still doing it. You have to believe—or have to choose to believe—that Rosenstein is a corrupt actor out to get the president.

That belief is a political choice. It is a political choice to accept a big lie that the president and his defenders have been peddling for months about federal law enforcement and intelligence.

Let me pause a moment to say that I hate Nazi comparisons. Unless there are literally bodies piling up, and even when there are, they are nearly always specious. So I’m not going to quote “Mein Kampf” to compare Trump to Adolf Hitler or to compare Trump’s defenders to Nazis. And to be crystal clear, I hereby disclaim any such comparison. I refer to “Mein Kampf” because Hitler was extremely insightful in a pure-evil kind of way on the subject of lies. I’m quoting him, in other words, not as an analogy but as an authority.

The “Big Lie” passage from “Mein Kampf” is one of the turgid tome’s most famous passages. It reads:

All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true in itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Donald Trump lies more blatantly and outrageously than any other American politician who has attained the presidency. As David Frum puts it in his excellent new book, “Trumpocracy,”

No American president in history—no national political figure of any kind since at least Senator Joe McCarthy—has trafficked more in untruths that Donald Trump. He owed the start of his political career to the Birther hoax. He falsely insisted that he lost the popular vote only because of somewhere between three and five million ballots cast by illegal aliens. He repeated false stories about New Jersey Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks. He recited false statistics about the majors of terrorists since 9/11 entering the United States from foreign countries. He falsely denied that his campaign communicated with Russia about hacking the Hillary Clinton campaign. He falsely boasted that he enacted more bills in his first one hundred days and first six months than any previous president. He even told a false anecdote about an imaginary friend named “Jim” who never visits Paris anymore because “Paris is no longer Paris.”

The Washington Post keeps a running tally of Trump’s lies since entering office. As of Monday, Jan. 19, it documents 2,140 false or misleading claims.

Not all of Trump’s lies are big lies. But some certainly are. And among the biggest, most audacious, most “colossal” or “grossly impudent” is the way he talks about federal law enforcement. To understand why the defense of Rosenstein has become so critical, let’s take a step back and consider this big lie. And let’s consider it beyond the almost-comical point that Rosenstein, a lifelong Republican appointed to Senate-confirmed positions by two Republican administrations, is being tarred as a “Democrat from Baltimore” with a vendetta against the president.

Trump wants to politicize law enforcement. He announces this himself. He talks openly about the job of the attorney general as protecting him and going after his political enemies. He says he admires Eric Holder’s protection of Barack Obama—a supposed corruption that represents yet another conspiracy theory, but one that sheds enormous light on his thinking about how an attorney general should behave. Trump is many things, but on this point he is no hypocrite. He has said exactly what he thinks law enforcement should be: his political plaything, his tool for the crude form of justice Polemarchus describes in Plato’s Republic: “rewarding friends and punishing enemies.”

The trouble was that when Trump confronted the law enforcement apparatus of the United States, he discovered that it did not conform to his vision. He became aware, to his shock, that federal law enforcement actually had integrity. It included a set of institutions that did not work as simple arms of political power. There is no need to take my word for this: It was he who demanded loyalty of Comey. It was he who asked Comey to drop the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn and who has publicly expressed his anger at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation—as Sessions was certainly bound to do. It was Trump who has expressed surprise that he couldn’t order up an investigation of his political opponent. Trump started discovering quickly that the FBI and the intelligence communities are not the janissaries of the powerful. And he didn’t like it.

His response? First, try to change this reality quietly. Try to corrupt Comey and get a pledge of loyalty from him. Install an attorney general he expected to behave as he imagined Holder had for Obama. It was as that effort failed that the big lie emerged.

That big lie is the notion that federal law enforcement is already behaving as corruptly as the president aspires for it to. The wrinkle is that the big lie imagines that law enforcement is behaving corruptly not in support of the president but on behalf of his political enemies. Instead of saying the truth, which is that Trump wants a law enforcement apparatus that will act corruptly on his behalf, he created an audacious smear in which it is acting to protect Hillary Clinton and destroy him.

The purpose of this big lie is twofold: the lie discredits the investigation against Trump in the minds of a large swath of the public and, perhaps more importantly, tends to tear down the institutions responsible for such investigations in general, with an eye toward their reconstitution in the image of the lie itself. In other words, the goal is to use the lie of politicized law enforcement to effectuate the politicization of law enforcement. By falsely describing a set of corrupt institutions, even by complaining of them, it is possible to lower public expectations to the point of accepting their corruption. Indeed, the lie seeks not merely to destroy the current leadership and install leadership more apt to behave in the fashion the president wants; it also erodes public confidence in the premise that a different reality ever existed.

The classified memo prepared by Nunes is a critical part of this big lie. Specifically, it is the part where the lie metastasizes and breaks out from the world of Trump’s fulminations and becomes an extrinsic political reality of its own, propagated by an independent constitutional actor in a different branch of government.

Since word of the memo surfaced weeks ago, a group of House Republicans have been pushing aggressively for its public release, arguing that it contains evidence of surveillance abuses “worse than Watergate.” While the memo’s contents were initially shrouded in mystery, the New York Times has since reported that it concerns a request for a FISA warrant targeting Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign—alleging that the Justice Department and FBI misled the FISA judge about the extent to which the warrant request had been based on the Steele dossier.

The House Intelligence Committee majority is reportedly planning a vote, as soon as Monday, to make the memo public. But the process leading to this point has been plagued by irregularities that call the document’s reliability into serious question. Nunes prepared the memo without any input from Democrats on the committee, and the committee’s vice chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff, has criticized it as “rife with factual inaccuracies” and “meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI.” The memo summarizes intelligence to which only members of the Gang of Eight have access, meaning that the vast majority of Republican House members who have viewed Nunes’s summary have not seen the underlying intelligence itself. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr and Vice Chairman Mark Warner do have access to that intelligence—but Nunes refuses to share the memo with them. He has also withheld the document from both the FBI and the Justice Department. And while the Washington Post reports that Trump would probably give his approval to a House intelligence panel vote to make the memo public, the Justice Department has warned Nunes that release of the memo prior to departmental review would be “extraordinarily reckless.”

So here’s the question: What still stands against this big lie?

Rosenstein is, as I say, a highly imperfect answer to this question. But he is one critical component of the answer. He appointed Mueller. He has assiduously protected Mueller from Trump and from congressional pressures. Publicly there have been no signs that he has done anything other than supervise the investigation in a professional fashion. In other words, his forcible removal at this stage would be another step in the attempted dismantling of an apparatus of independent law enforcement that simply needs to hold. More fundamentally, the Nunes memo’s reported attack on him as a component of a corrupt law enforcement apparatus seeking to take down the president—the president whom Rosenstein, in fact, serves—is itself part of the big lie, and it needs to be energetically confronted and exposed.

As Donald Rumsfeld might say, you defend democratic institutions with the deputy attorney general you have, not the deputy attorney general you wish you had.
https://lawfareblog.com/big-lies-law-enforcement
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby Burnt Hill » Mon Jan 29, 2018 10:21 pm

seemslikeadream wrote:Just today: trump declined to impose new Russia sanctions,


If I were to suggest this info deserved its own thread, would I be accused of contributing to the hysteria?

Riddle me that.

:clown
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby BenDhyan » Mon Jan 29, 2018 11:42 pm

Pot...kettle...

Russia accuses US of election interference

By Morgan Gstalter - 01/29/18 03:36 PM EST

Russia is accusing the United States of interfering with its presidential election, saying a decision by the Treasury Department to issue a report naming companies and individuals to be sanctioned for working with blacklisted Russian entities would be “a direct and obvious attempt” to interfere.

"We do think that this is a direct and obvious attempt to time some sort of action to coincide with our elections in order to influence them," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday, according to CNN. "We disagree with this, and we are sure this will have no influence."

The individuals and companies to be named in the report may exist in a number of different companies.

The State Department delivered a list of names for the report in October. According to the Financial Times, the names could be publicly revealed or kept within a classified annex.

Trump reluctantly signed legislation in August backed by bipartisan majorities that approved new sanctions on Russia. The bill also included sanctions against North Korea and Iran.

President Vladimir Putin is up for reelection in Russian elections set for March 18.

In December, Moscow accused the State Department of “direct interference” when it criticized Russia for preventing an opposition leader from running against Putin.

Putin's most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, was arrested Sunday on his way to a protest in Moscow. According to The Associated Press, about 1,000 people gathered in central Moscow's Pushkin Square for the demonstration, meant to encourage Russian to boycott the country's election.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) tweeted that it was "inspiring" to see Russians standing up for their rights under a Putin "dictatorship."

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/371256-russia-accuses-us-of-election-interference

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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby dada » Tue Jan 30, 2018 1:59 am

"We do think that this is a direct and obvious attempt to time some sort of action to coincide with our elections in order to influence them," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday, according to CNN. "We disagree with this, and we are sure this will have no influence."

Actually sounds like they're accusing the Treasury Department of failing to interfere. Dismissive.

Love 'em or hate 'em, you gotta appreciate the Russian sense of humor. They insult us, and we don't even get it.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby Jerky » Tue Jan 30, 2018 2:09 am

Oh, I think most of us "got" it, Dada.

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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby dada » Tue Jan 30, 2018 3:14 am

Jerky » Tue Jan 30, 2018 1:09 am wrote:Oh, I think most of us "got" it, Dada.

J


Sounds contagious. We should all be wearing surgical masks.

Love ya, old pal!
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby BenDhyan » Tue Jan 30, 2018 7:14 am

Cheeky Russians....

Hannity Does Victory Dance - Stomping on Every Square Inch of RussiaHoax

There is very little this publication can add to what is being said in the pro-Trump media in the US about RussiaGate, so we'll keep this short.

This latest blast from Hannity is the sign of something however - a political shift as RussiaGate does in fact begin to devour its inventors - ahh the delicious irony - yet another staple of Russian thought.



Continues...

http://russia-insider.com/en/hannity-does-victory-dance-stomping-every-square-inch-russiahoax-video/ri22388?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 30, 2018 11:31 pm

Second Trump-Russia dossier being assessed by FBI

Exclusive: memo written by former journalist Cody Shearer independently sets out many of the allegations made by ex-spy Christopher Steele

Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Nick Hopkins
Tue 30 Jan 2018 11.25 EST First published on Tue 30 Jan 2018 10.44 EST


The FBI inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election has been given a second memo that independently set out many of the same allegations made in a dossier by Christopher Steele, the British former spy.

The second memo was written by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s.


Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with scepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organisations before the election.

However, the Guardian has been told the FBI investigation is still assessing details in the ‘Shearer memo’ and is pursuing intriguing leads.

One source with knowledge of the inquiry said the fact the FBI was still working on it suggested investigators had taken an aspect of it seriously.

It raises the possibility that parts of the Steele dossier, which has been derided by Trump’s supporters, may have been corroborated by Shearer’s research, or could still be.

The revelation comes at a moment when Donald Trump and some Republican lawmakers have been seeking to cast doubt on the credibility of the Mueller inquiry and the motivation of the FBI in examining Russian collusion, including unproven allegations that investigators had a bias in favour of Hillary Clinton when the investigation was initially launched before November.


Republicans on the House intelligence committee voted on Monday night to release a highly contentious memo, commissioned by the Republican chairman of the committee, Devin Nunes. The memo reportedly claims the FBI had an anti-Trump bias when it sought a warrant from the US foreign intelligence surveillance court to collect intelligence on Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign. The Fisa court is a secret court that examines law enforcement requests to surveil Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents.

The Republican memo reportedly alleges that the FBI relied on the Steele dossier, which was partly paid for using Democratic funds, in seeking the Carter Page warrant, according to the New York Times.

Democrats have said that the Republican allegations are misleading and based on selective use of classified materials. Justice department officials have said the release of the document, because of the classified elements, would be “extraordinarily reckless”.

Trump now has five days to decide whether the Nunes document should become public.

The Shearer memo was provided to the FBI in October 2016.

It was handed to them by Steele – who had been given it by an American contact – after the FBI requested the former MI6 agent provide any documents or evidence that could be useful in its investigation, according to multiple sources.

The Guardian was told Steele warned the FBI he could not vouch for the veracity of the Shearer memo, but that he was providing a copy because it corresponded with what he had separately heard from his own independent sources.

The Shearer memo cites an unnamed source within Russia’s FSB, the state security service. The Guardian cannot verify any of the claims.

Shearer is a controversial figure in Washington. Conservative outlets have accused him of being part of a “hatchet man” and member of a “secret spy ring” and within Clinton’s orbit. There is no evidence that the Clinton campaign was aware of the Shearer memo.

But other people who know Shearer say he is not just a Democratic party hack and there is no evidence that his memo was ever sought by Clinton campaign officials.

Sources say that while he lacks the precision and polish of a seasoned former spy like Steele, Shearer has also been described as having a large network of sources around the world and the independent financial means to pursue leads.

The White House has vigorously denied allegations that the US president was ever compromised and has rejected claims that campaign officials ever conspired with the Kremlin before the 2016 election.

Steele’s dossier, his motives for writing it and his decision to share it remain controversial among Republicans.

He says he approached the FBI about concerns he had about links between Russia and the Trump campaign after he was commissioned to investigate the matter by a private investigative firm called Fusion GPS on behalf of the firm’s clients.

Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, told congressional investigators that Steele approached the FBI out of a sense of duty and concern for US national security.

Republican supporters of Trump have derided it as “fake news”. Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa and ally of Trump, has called for an investigation into Steele amid unspecified allegations about the former spy’s conduct.

Democrats have said the campaign against Steele is part of an effort to seek to discredit him in order to shift attention away from allegations about Trump and Russia.

A spokesman for the US special counsel leading the criminal investigation into the Trump campaign declined to comment. Shearer did not return emails and calls for comment.

A federal criminal investigation into the Trump campaign has so far resulted in four indictments. Two former Trump campaign officials, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, have pleaded guilty to perjury and are cooperating with Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is leading the ongoing investigation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... earer-memo


NON-DENIAL
Devin Nunes Won’t Say if He Worked With White House on Anti-FBI Memo
The House intel committee GOP leader refused to answer behind closed doors if he coordinated with the president’s team on his report blasting Rosenstein, Comey, and McCabe.

BETSY WOODRUFF
SPENCER ACKERMAN
01.30.18 6:17 PM ET
The Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee refused to answer when a colleague asked him if he had coordinated his incendiary surveillance memo with the White House, The Daily Beast has learned.

During Monday’s contentious closed-door committee meeting, Rep. Mike Quigley, a Democrat, asked Nunes point-blank if his staffers had been talking with the White House as they compiled a four-page memo alleging FBI and Justice Department abuses over surveillance of President Trump’s allies in the Russia probe.

According to sources familiar with the exchange, Nunes made a few comments that didn’t answer the question before finally responding, “I’m not answering.”

Spokespeople for Nunes and for the White House did not immediately respond.

Now that the committee Republicans voted to release the memo, it has been reportedly delivered to the White House. Under Congressional rules, Trump has four more days to decide if he will assent to the memo’s public release.

Quigley’s question harkened back to Nunes’ history of surreptitiously working with the White House to deflect from the myriad inquiries into possible coordination between Trump’s associates and the Kremlin.


In March, a day after then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed the bureau was investigating that prospect, Nunes claimed he had seen alarming information indicating Trump advisers had been swept up in surveillance. Nunes said he had seen “dozens of reports” supporting his claim, which appeared to substantiate the president’s baseless claim that the Obama administration had wiretapped Trump Tower.

WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 09: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) attends a House Ways and Means Committee markup of the Republicans tax reform plan titled the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act., on Capitol Hill November 9, 2017 in Washington, DC.
FBI Hasn’t Even Seen the #ReleaseTheMemo Memo

GOP Uses FBI Investigation to Freeze Out FBI on Nunes Memo
But Nunes did not reveal that senior White House officials had provided him with the information when he made a late-night trip to the White House. Nunes then lied to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake to conceal the White House’s role.


Backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Nunes withstood Democratic demands for him to recuse himself from the committee’s Russia probe. Instead, he formally placed the inquiry in the hands of fellow committee Republicans Mike Conaway and Trey Gowdy while he underwent a House ethics committee investigation.

But Nunes remained in an influential position within the committee, using his chairman’s prerogative to unilaterally subpoena to Trump targets like the Fusion GPS firm. And now that Nunes is out from under the ethics committee’s scrutiny, he has intensified his moves to deflect blame from Trump.

His four-page surveillance memo has now far overshadowed the committee’s Russia investigation. As The Daily Beast first reported, it names Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former FBI Director James Comey, and retiring Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Every Democrat on the House intelligence committee has said Nunes’ memo manipulates the intelligence behind the surveillance request in order to exculpate Trump.

“A misleading set of talking points attacking the FBI...yet another desperate and flailing attempt to undermine Special Counsel Mueller and the FBI,” Democrats characterized it in a January 19 statement.

The New York Times reported this week that Rosenstein this spring signed off on renewing a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign aide Carter Page — who had previously passed documents to a Russian spy — indicating that even Trump appointees saw a sufficient basis for a counterintelligence investigation into Page.

But Rosenstein, who oversees Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s circle and Russia, is specifically named in Nunes’ memo — and has become a right-wing target of opportunity. After Nunes won a vote on Monday to declassify his memo, the Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro said on Sean Hannity’s show that the alleged abuses in the memo merit a special prosecutor, “not Rod Rosenstein, who right now is in the middle of all this.”

Democrats are warning that Pirro’s sentiment reflect the true purpose of Nunes’ memo: to provide a pretext for firing Mueller or his allies in the Justice Department and the FBI; or to have a ready-made narrative to undermine any legal move Mueller ultimately makes against Trump. Mueller is reportedly now seeking to interview Trump personally but it is unclear if Trump’s lawyers will assent.

Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, tweeted Wednesday that Nunes’ memo is “a partisan sham cooked up to undermine the FBI, DOJ, and the Mueller probe. House Republicans are playing a very dangerous game.”

It is also unclear if the House intelligence committee’s Russia investigation will go anywhere. It has not held an open hearing since November 1, and now Nunes has opened a murky investigation into the FBI and Justice Department itself — one that Nunes used on Monday to dismiss law enforcement concerns about releasing his memo.

Nunes’ Democratic counterpart, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, pledged Monday night that the Russia inquest would continue, and announced that Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, would testify on Wednesday. But since then, a Democratic staffer confirmed to The Daily Beast, Bannon’s appearance has been postponed.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/devin-nun ... i-fbi-memo


Trump Turns GOP Into a Conspiracy of Dunces

The cynical men in Washington and Moscow who are feeding the crazy-eyed, conspiratorial imaginings of the Republican Party base under Donald Trump know what they’re doing.

Secret societies, government agents of dubious loyalties, dark cabals who work from shadowy bureaucracies seeking to overthrow the president of the United States, sinister masterminds exercising fell powers to serve a diabolical conspiracy, occult powers that shift the levers of control in mysterious ways—no, it’s not X-Files fan fiction or some modern-day Lovecraft reboot. It’s today’s GOP.

The Republican Party’s head-first dive into breathless conspiratorial fantasies in defense of Donald Trump is a brand-defining moment as the Party of Lincoln morphs into the Party of LaRouche. Listening as members of Congress, the Fox News/talk-radio world and the constellation of batshit-crazy people drawn to Esoteric Trumpism adopt increasingly baroque theories to protect The Donald isn’t just depressing; it’s tragic. A diseased slurry of fake news, post-Truth Trumpism, and Russkie agitprop infects the Republican Party. It’s an ebola of wild-eyed MK-ULTRA paranoiac raving, spreading to every organ of the Republican body politic.

This loon-centric new world of crazy talk has dissolved the old ideological skeleton of the GOP and reduced it from the Conservative Party of Ideas to the Crackpot Party of Infowars. Covering up the connections among Donald Trump, his campaign officials, and family members with Russia, and this president’s efforts to obstruct justice and derail special counsel Robert Mueller will come at a still-untallied cost to our nation, our institutions, and the dignity and reputation of the GOP. It’s going to get worse as Mueller closes in.

Last week, the ridiculous memo crafted by Fredo Nunes (R-Clownshow) and his staffers (is that you, Ezra Cohen-Watnick?) was the subject of hyperventilating conspiracy headlines across right-wing media. While breathless Republicans like Matt Gaetz (R-The Narcissus of Fox News) raced for the cameras screaming that this is a “worse than Watergate” bombshell, this fetid, steaming shitheap of lies, cherry-picked outrage-bait for the Fox booboisie, and crayon-scribble was full of tells that it was all Trump, and little truth. As they voted Monday night to release their version, while denying the Democrats the chance to release their rebuttal, the scam was clear. The first clue is that the memo is being rolled out as part of a PR effort so clumsy, obvious, ham-fisted, and covered in its own drool that it could only appeal to the most deluded Deep State fantasists. Naturally, it has been in more or less constant rotation on Fox News and the fever swamp of pro-Trump fake-news sites.

The second problem with the memo is that Team Fredo broke the central rule of politics: Underpromise and over-deliver. If the Nunes Grimoire of Eldritch Deep State Perfidy was radioactive and contained evidence of an immediate and existential threat to our democracy posed by rogue FBI agents wielding bogus FISA applications, why won’t Nunes share it with his Senate counterparts? Why won’t he allow the Trump Justice Department to examine it? Why did he whip the intelligence committee to prevent the release of a rebuttal? It’s simple: There’s so little there that no serious person would blow out U.S. intelligence sources and methods to win a political point defending Donald Trump. No one, except Nunes, his cronies, and the House leadership who allow his continued depredations on the rule of law.

Make no mistake, Nunes and his co-conspirators don’t believe there’s an actual Deep State conspiracy at the FBI or the intelligence agencies. This boundlessly cynical plot is an attempt to shield Donald Trump not just from Bob Mueller’s Russia investigation, but from any form of accountability or oversight. I have to give them credit their brazen effort. The coordination between Fox News, the Trump Uber Alles caucus in the House, talk radio, and the online Cray Vortex is rather impressive. In the Best Supporting Hackers role, the Russians chimed in right on cue to amplify the GOP’s message. Call me old fashioned, but I remember when working hand-in-hand with a hostile foreign government to undermine American institutions was called “treason.” The story was falling apart even before the Moron Caucus beclowned themselves with the “Secret Society” theme, because the memo obviously hadn’t done enough to reduce the Republicans in stature and seriousness. Seizing on a single, obviously joking text message, Sen. Ron Johnson took to the microphones to describe the FBI’s alleged “Secret Society” as if he had watched Eyes Wide Shut enough times to memorize it. Fidelio, Ron. Fidelio.

When confronted with the risible absurdity of his claim, Johnson said “informants” had told them about the dark, satanic orgies of the FBI. Within hours, he denied all of it in an embarrassingly clumsy walk back. From the Trump-right obsession with “Q-Anon” as a source of Deep State gibberish to the uncritical acceptance of even the most outrageously absurd rumors, the GOP is becoming defined as a party of conspiracy. It’s is a bad look for a governing party, and it’s getting worse by the day.

When Sean Hannity’s Twitter account briefly went dark Friday night during what appears to be a routine Twitter bot-purge, the Trumpnet lost its collective mind. “Form Submission 1649” led to numerological kookspiracy speculation that would have made Louis Farrakhan proud. I kid you not, whackjobs were saying Hannity’s “1649” tweet was about the year when Charles the 1st was beheaded for treason by Cromwell. Uh huh. Sean Hannity knows about as much about Cromwell and Charles the 1st as he does about string theory.

That’s our world now—one where the real Julian Assange is slipping into the DMs of a parody Hannity account on Twitter, to offer up fresh dirt on Trump’s enemies. If you think Pizzagate was the nadir, take a drive through the online Bedlam of Infowars, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, or /r/The_Donald, and you won’t have to dig far to discover that Jeffrey Epstein’s time-travel jet took Bill back to 1962 to fake Obama’s birth certificate. You’ll learn that Hillary’s plan to have America invaded by Muslim-lizard mutant antifa supersoldiers is underway as we speak. Will anyone have the guts to finally reveal that Nancy Pelosi is enslaving teenage girls in an Illuminati mind-control temple under the Chrysler Building where George Soros presides over nightly human sacrifices and Hello Kitty cosplay?

Nunes, Meadows, Gaetz, et al. aren’t agents of Russia, though you can’t definitively say that of Dana Rohrabacher. They’re simply protecting Russia’s most precious asset, and are perfectly content to let Russia continue its slow-motion efforts to disrupt our government, our democracy, and our values. They’ll take all the help they can get from the Russians if it helps destroy any system of checks and balances that could trouble Trump. It’s an effort to make the firing of Mueller palatable to the nation, to give Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card on obstruction of justice, and to nudge us one step closer to having a strongman, not a president. If our national capacity for outrage wasn’t already spread painfully thin, there would be a run on pitchforks and torches.

This moment, for all its superficially ludicrous nature, is an effort to destroy the power of Congress in the execution of its duties as a co-equal branch of government. It’s Watergate’s Saturday Night Massacre, played in a slower tempo and with a more compliant Congress. Nunes and the Trump White House know their effort relies on an audience of people so thick, slow, and gullible that they’ll buy even the most fanciful conspiracy nonsense. Sadly, it’s working.

Two men could solve this problem. The first is Paul Ryan. The conspiracy cancer eating his caucus from the inside may originate with Devin Nunes and his merry band of Freedom Caucus allies, but Ryan can and should take action. Obviously, Ryan is trying to keep the White House happy by letting the Whackjob Caucus spread these absurd theories. However, as speaker of the House and as a man who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, Paul Ryan has a moral responsibility stop them. It takes one phone call and one moment of moral and political courage: “Devin. Cut this shit out. Now.”

The other person who could act is Rupert Murdoch. Nothing in the current political climate is more vital to Donald Trump’s immunity from political consequence than Fox News. The endless torrent of raw political sewage coming from Fox & Friends, Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson comprises the headwaters of a right-wing media ecosystem that feeds the beast. The straight-news folks at Fox are under constant siege, while the Mighty Wurlitzer of the rest of the network churns out story after story on that time Hillary personally ordered Seth Rich’s murder while the Awan Brothers gave her a pedicure. With one phone call, Murdoch could put the brakes on the elements in his organization that have configured themselves not to report, educate, enlighten, or inform but to proselytize for Donald Trump, no matter the cost to the nation.

The Fox News problem is rich with irony. It turns out Republicans don’t mind partisan, agenda-driven journalism. They just want it to be their partisan, agenda-driven journalism. The cynical men in Washington and Moscow who are feeding the crazy-eyed, conspiratorial imaginings of the Republican Party base under Donald Trump know what they’re doing. The cynical media outlets profiting from this campaign of disinformation and dishonesty also know what they’re doing. The men in the Kremlin backing up these efforts with an army of electronic warriors and legions of bots know exactly what they’re doing.

And the Republican base, fed on a diet of weapons-grade conspiracy theories, day-drinking rage, 8chan trolling, and blind defense of Trump? They know the truth, man. They’re woke. They know that all opposition to Trump comes from George Soros, the shape-shifting reptilians, the Deep State, the Illuminati, zombie Bin Laden, the Gnomes of Zurich, and the Freemasons. They know that Bob Mueller is an alien sent from the Sharia-compliant future to impose the New World Order by asking Donald Trump tough questions. Oh, and implanting them all with a brain chip to control their thoughts. #QAnon say so.

Duh.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-go ... itter_page
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 31, 2018 7:07 pm

Trump asked Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein if he's 'on my team' during December meeting on Russia probe

Donald Trump asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein if he was “on my team” during a December 2017 meeting centered around document requests from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, CNN reports.

Rosenstein “appeared surprised” by Trump’s questions, according to CNN.

“Of course, we’re all on your team, Mr. President,” Rosenstein reportedly replied.

Rosenstein was meeting with Trump in an effort to garner the president’s support to fight a request by Nunes to access sensitive documents from the Justice Department. Nunes was seeking the documents to bolster allegations of improper surveillance on behalf of the FBI and DOJ.

As CNN reports, Trump seemed to care more about the status of the ongoing special counsel investigation than he did about Nunes’ requests.

News of Trump’s request to Rosenstein follows reports the president asked former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe who he voted for in the 2016 presidential election. James Comey likewise testified Trump asked him for loyalty before he abruptly fired the former FBI Director in May 2017.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/trump- ... sia-probe/


Trump reportedly asked Mueller’s boss for personal loyalty

He is said to have asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein where the Russia investigation is going.

Andrew ProkopJan 31, 2018, 5:10pm EST
Mark Wilson/Getty
President Donald Trump just can’t seem to stop himself from making inappropriate comments to law enforcement officials involved with the Russia investigation — the latest being Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who’s overseeing Robert Mueller’s probe.

According to a new report from CNN’s Pamela Brown, Evan Perez and Laura Jarrett, when Rosenstein visited the White House in December, Trump asked Rosenstein where the Russia investigation was heading and whether the deputy attorney general was on his “team.” The CNN team cites “sources familiar with the meeting.”

The comments would be part of a pattern for Trump of demanding to know which side law enforcement officials are on, even when they’re supposed to be nonpartisan. He reportedly requested then-FBI Director James Comey’s “loyalty,” questioned the “loyalty” of Attorney General Jeff Sessions after his recusal from the Russia probe, and inquired about whom then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe voted for in 2016.

The Rosenstein comments, which reportedly happened just last month, make clear Trump hasn’t changed his stripes in this regard — he wants his top law enforcement officials to be personally loyal to him, and he can’t bring himself to simply let the Russia probe go forward without his interference.

The comments were reported as Trump’s lawyers are in discussions with Mueller’s team about a potential presidential interview, and while an effort from the White House to discredit Mueller’s probe — and perhaps even lay the groundwork for firing Rosenstein — is heating up.

The “Nunes memo,” a controversial document written by Republican House Intelligence Committee staffers and likely to be released soon, reportedly criticizes Rosenstein. According to the New York Times, the memo says that shortly after being sworn in as deputy attorney general last spring, Rosenstein re-approved an existing wiretap on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Though much focus has been on the question of whether President Trump will fire special counsel Robert Mueller, the fact is that Rosenstein is the only person who has the authority to do that. It is also Rosenstein who will determine what should be done with whatever Mueller finds. So if Trump manages to replace Rosenstein with a crony, he could dramatically undermine the Russia probe.

The other remarkable detail in the CNN piece is that, per one of their sources, Trump himself “suggested questions to members of Congress that they could ask Rosenstein” at a hearing — including about why Rosenstein appointed Mueller in the first place. This would mean the president was suggesting antagonistic questions to be aimed at one of his own appointees.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... eam-russia
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby BenDhyan » Wed Jan 31, 2018 8:15 pm

Hmmm?

BREAKING: Robert Mueller Requests Postponement of General Mike Flynn Sentencing

Posted on January 31, 2018

Special counsel Robert Mueller has requested the postponement of former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn’s sentencing.

“Due to the status of the Special Counsel’s investigation, the parties do not believe that this matter is ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing at this time,” the special counsel asked the court.

The court filing states a date to sentence Flynn could not be determined by the special counsel at this time and that 90-day extension is be required.

Image

After the 90 days elapses, the two parties will submit a joint status report on the status of the investigation.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/371722-mueller-flynn-legal-teams-not-ready-to-schedule-a-sentencing

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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 9:56 am

Mark Corallo plans to tell Mueller that Hope Hicks said during a conference call with Trump that Don Jr.’s emails about the Trump Tower meeting would “never get out.”

Image


Mueller Zeros In on Story Put Together About Trump Tower Meeting

By JO BECKER, MARK MAZZETTI, MATT APUZZO and MAGGIE HABERMAN
JAN. 31, 2018

Image
After President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, left Hamburg, Germany, on July 8, he helped draft a news release that has drawn the interest of the special counsel, according to people familiar with the episode. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Aboard Air Force One on a flight home from Europe last July, President Trump and his advisers raced to cobble together a news release about a mysterious meeting at Trump Tower the previous summer between Russians and top Trump campaign officials. Rather than acknowledge the meeting’s intended purpose — to obtain political dirt about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government — the statement instead described the meeting as being about an obscure Russian adoption policy.

The statement, released in response to questions from The New York Times about the meeting, has become a focus of the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller in recent months have questioned numerous White House officials about how the release came together — and about how directly Mr. Trump oversaw the process. Mr. Mueller’s team recently notified Mr. Trump’s lawyers that the Air Force One statement is one of about a dozen subjects that prosecutors want to discuss in a face-to-face interview of Mr. Trump that is still being negotiated.

The revelation of the meeting was striking: It placed the president’s son and his top campaign officials in direct contact with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information on Mrs. Clinton, and an email to the president’s son emerged saying that the information was part of Russia’s effort to help the Trump campaign. The special counsel is investigating how those revelations were handled in real time in part because the president was involved in his administration’s response.

Some lawyers and witnesses who have sat in or been briefed on the interviews have puzzled over Mr. Mueller’s interest in the episode. Lying to federal investigators is a crime; lying to the news media is not. For that reason, some of Mr. Trump’s advisers argue that Mr. Mueller has no grounds to ask the president about the statement and say he should refuse to discuss it.

What is already clear is that, as Mr. Trump’s aides and family members tried over 48 hours to manage one of the most consequential crises of the young administration, the situation quickly degenerated into something of a circular firing squad. They protected their own interests, shifted blame and potentially left themselves — and the president — legally vulnerable.



Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, was alongside the president as they drafted the statement. Doug Mills/The New York Times
The latest witness to be called for an interview about the episode was Mark Corallo, who served as a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team before resigning in July. Mr. Corallo received an interview request last week from the special counsel and has agreed to the interview, according to three people with knowledge of the request.

Mr. Corallo is planning to tell Mr. Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Mr. Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.

In a statement on Wednesday, a lawyer for Ms. Hicks strongly denied Mr. Corallo’s allegations.

“As most reporters know, it’s not my practice to comment in response to questions from the media. But this warrants a response,” said the lawyer, Robert P. Trout. “She never said that. And the idea that Hope Hicks ever suggested that emails or other documents would be concealed or destroyed is completely false.”

Competing Statements

Early on the morning of Friday, July 7, reporters from The Times approached White House officials and lawyers with questions about the Trump Tower meeting a year earlier. The reporters said The Times was preparing a story revealing that the meeting with the Russians had taken place, and asked the White House for more information about its purpose.

The president and senior White House officials were in Germany for the G-20 summit meeting and asked for more time to respond, citing the time difference and conflicting schedules. They scheduled a conference call with the reporters for early the next morning.

The call never happened, so the Times reporters submitted a list of 14 questions about the meeting to the White House and to the lawyers of the Trump campaign aides who attended the meeting. Among the questions: What was discussed, and what did the attendees think was going to be discussed?



Marc E. Kasowitz, left, the president’s personal lawyer, and Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team, during a news conference last June. Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
President Trump’s aides received the list midflight on Air Force One on the way back from the summit meeting and began writing a response. In the plane’s front cabin, Mr. Trump huddled with Ms. Hicks. During the meeting, according to people familiar with the episode, Ms. Hicks was sending frequent text messages to Donald Trump Jr., who was in New York. Alan Garten, a lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump who was also in New York, was also messaging with White House advisers aboard the plane.

Marc E. Kasowitz, the president’s personal lawyer, was not included in the discussion.

The president supervised the writing of the statement, according to three people familiar with the episode, with input from other White House aides. A fierce debate erupted over how much information the news release should include. Mr. Trump was insistent about including language that the meeting was about Russian adoptions, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion.

By early afternoon, The Times received a separate statement, from Jamie S. Gorelick, a lawyer at the time for Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. The statement said little about the meeting, except that Mr. Kushner had “briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr.”

It left nearly all of the questions unanswered — and seemed to put the onus on Donald Trump Jr. to answer them. Nearly four hours later, the statement that had been cobbled together aboard Air Force One was sent to The Times. The statement was in Donald Trump Jr.’s name and was issued by Mr. Garten.

“It was a short introductory meeting,” it read. “I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up.”

According to four people familiar with the discussions, Donald Trump Jr. had insisted that the word “primarily” be included in the statement.

The Times published its story about the Trump Tower meeting, with the statement, at 5 p.m. Not long after, the news site Circa published a different version, saying that the June 2016 meeting had been set up “to discuss a Russian policy.” Mr. Corallo, the spokesman for the legal team, said in that story that the Russians had “misrepresented who they were and who they worked for.” He, along with the rest of the president’s legal team, was not consulted about Donald Trump Jr.’s statement before it was released.

He suggested that the meeting might have been set up by Democratic operatives, connecting one of the Russians in the meeting, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, to the research firm that helped produce an unverified dossier that contained salacious allegations about Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.

White House Unease

The dueling statements, both of which withheld the true purpose of the meeting, created tension at the White House.

Accusations began flying that the botched response made an already bad situation worse. Ms. Hicks called Mr. Corallo, according to three people who relayed his version of events to The Times. She accused him of trafficking in conspiracy theories and drawing more attention to the story.

The conference call with the president, Mr. Corallo and Ms. Hicks took place the next morning, and what transpired on the call is a matter of dispute.

In Mr. Corallo’s account — which he provided contemporaneously to three colleagues who later gave it to The Times — he told both Mr. Trump and Ms. Hicks that the statement drafted aboard Air Force One would backfire because documents would eventually surface showing that the meeting had been set up for the Trump campaign to get political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians.



Donald Trump Jr. said in an email in 2016 that he was eager to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Tom Brenner/The New York Times
According to his account, Ms. Hicks responded that the emails “will never get out” because only a few people had access to them. Mr. Corallo, who worked as a Justice Department spokesman during the George W. Bush administration, told colleagues he was alarmed not only by what Ms. Hicks had said — either she was being naïve or was suggesting that the emails could be withheld from investigators — but also that she had said it in front of the president without a lawyer on the phone and that the conversation could not be protected by attorney-client privilege.

Contacted on Wednesday, Mr. Corallo said he did not dispute any of the account shared by his colleagues but declined to elaborate further.

Even if Mr. Corallo is correct and Ms. Hicks was hinting at an attempt to conceal the emails, doing so would have been nearly impossible. Congress had requested records from Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman; Mr. Kushner; and other Trump campaign officials about meetings with Russians. And lawyers had already copied and stamped the emails for delivery to Capitol Hill.

When the president began questioning Mr. Corallo about the nature of the documents, Mr. Corallo cut off the conversation and urged the president to continue the discussion with his lawyers.

Mr. Corallo told colleagues that he immediately notified the legal team of the conversation and jotted down notes to memorialize it. He also shared his concerns with Stephen K. Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist.

Mr. Corallo left the job shortly after the phone call. The recent book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff, which was met with angry denunciations by the president, linked Mr. Corallo’s resignation to concerns he had about obstruction, but provided no details.

In the days that followed the Air Force One statement, The Times revealed that the true purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to obtain damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, which was being offered as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for Mr. Trump. The younger Mr. Trump ultimately released the emails after being told The Times was about to publish them.

Within weeks, Mr. Mueller sent out grand jury subpoenas for documents and interviews about the June 2016 meeting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/us/p ... eller.html



Seth Abramson‏

BREAKING NEWS: Trump Spokesman Quit Because He Believed Criminal Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice Was Afoot

6:44 PM - 31 Jan 2018

2/ Here's my tweet on this from a month ago:Seth Abramson added,

BREAKING NEWS: Trump Spokesman Mark Corallo Quit in July 2017 Because He Believed Trump Committed a Crime—Obstruction of Justice—Aboard Air Force One https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/03/the-wil ... -fury.html

Seth Abramson Retweeted Seth Abramson
3/ ...and here's my thread on this from six months ago:Seth Abramson added,

(THREAD) Trump's legal spokesman's resignation raises, in hindsight, concerns Trump attended or knew of the infamous June 9, 2016 meeting.

4/ I said it six months ago and will say it again: it's not legal to write a false statement and sign it with the name of someone you know is a witness in a federal criminal investigation, as you're (a) tampering with testimony, and (b) falsifying evidence. Trump did both things.

5/ It's true "lying to the press" isn't a crime. It's also true one can commit a crime in the process of lying to the press—a subtle yet *critical* distinction. Trump knew his son was a witness in a pending criminal investigation and his actions in response thereto were criminal.

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 4792164354




THIS WAS KEPT SECRET FROM U.S. CITIZENS THE ONLY WAY WE FOUND OUT WAS FROM RUSSIAN MEDIA!


Democrats want to know why the Trump admin allowed two Russian spy chiefs met with Mike Pompeo.

Schumer says the timing of the meeting is suspicious because it came just days before the Trump admin decided not to issue new sanctions against Russians.



ПЕРЕГОВОРЫ
Russia’s Sanctioned Spy Chief Reportedly Met CIA Director in the U.S.

The head of Moscow’s foreign intel service, which masterminded 2016 election interference, supposedly talked to Mike Pompeo about working together on terrorism.

KATIE ZAVADSKI
SPENCER ACKERMAN
01.30.18 4:02 PM ET
Russia’s sanctioned spy chief recently visited the United States and reportedly met with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Russian state media reported Tuesday.

Sergey Naryshkin, director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, was spotted aboard a commercial Aeroflot flight to the United States, Russian state-owned news channel Rossiya-1 reported. The SVR is blamed by the U.S. government for a key role in the Kremlin’s interference with the 2016 election. A reporter for the network said Naryshkin landed in New York and met with the CIA director.

Representatives for the CIA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence declined comment to The Daily Beast about whether Pompeo or any other U.S. intelligence official recently met with with Naryshkin—who has been under U.S. sanctions for the past three years.

“While we do not discuss the schedules of U.S. intelligence leaders, rest assured that any interaction with foreign intelligence agencies would have been conducted in accordance with U.S. law and in consultation with appropriate Departments and agencies," a CIA spokesman told The Daily Beast.

"Sergey Yevgenievich was here. He arrived. He had meetings with his colleagues here,” Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov told Rossiya-1. It is unclear when the meeting took place.

Antonov said the meeting was about possible areas of cooperation between the U.S. and Russia.


"I want to tell you that in the most difficult times, the most difficult times, contact between the special services continued. Politics is politics, and work is work. There are political slogans, and then there's real work,” Antonov said, adding, “They of course discussed the question of joint fight against terrorism.”

Antonov suggested that ties between Russian and American intelligence services run deep, but out of sight for the casual observer.

“The work is continuing, it's just, probably correctly, not very visible to the viewer, the reader,” Antonov said. “But I think that work will continue in the future."

Naryshkin was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department over Russia’s conflict in Ukraine in 2014. At that time, he was chairman of Russia’s legislature, the Duma. He was appointed head of the SVR in September 2016.

In January 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report saying it had “high confidence” that Russian security services interfered in the 2016 presidential election. In particular, it singled out Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, which works closely with the SVR, as a main instigator of operations against the U.S.

While Pompeo has in the past acknowledged cooperating with Russia on counterterrorism operations, the CIA director told the BBC this week that he anticipates Moscow will continue to interfere in U.S. elections.

“I have every expectation that they will continue to try and do that, but I'm confident that America will be able to have a free and fair election [and] that we will push back in a way that is sufficiently robust that the impact they have on our election won't be great,” Pompeo said.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/russias-s ... -in-the-us


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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 02, 2018 10:19 am

Lawyer for Senior White House Official Predicts Robert Mueller Will Indict Trump Within Months

"Bet against the president."

By Tom Boggioni / Raw Story February 2, 2018, 4:59 AM GMT

According to two lawyers who have clients who have been swept up in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Donald Trump administration, they believe that the president may be indicted for obstruction of justice within the next few months.

In an interview with Politico, the lawyers — who asked to remain anonymous to protect their clients — said that don’t exactly what Mueller’s plans are, but the line of questioning indicates that he is going hard at Trump for blocking the inquiry.

According to one attorney, his interactions with the special counsel’s team while representing his client in interviews have focused on “whether Trump tried to derail the probe into his campaign’s Russia ties.”

“If I were a betting man, I’d bet against the president,” one attorney said, while the other — who represents a high-ranking Trump official — added that he fully expects the indictment to be forthcoming for no other reason than to get Congress to take the matter seriously.

“It’s entirely possible that Mueller may go that route on the theory that, as an open question, it should be for the courts to decide,” the attorney explained. “Even if the indictment is dismissed, it puts maximum pressure on Congress to treat this with the independence and intellectual honesty that it will never, ever get.”

The attorney who made the betting comment said he expects an indictment earlier rather than later, saying Mueller may not want to drop the bombshell just prior to to the 2018 midterms.

“If he’s going to do it, I think he’ll do it in the spring,” the attorney said. “I don’t think he wants to be accused of trying to influence the election that dramatically.”

The attorneys acknowledged that there is a question whether a sitting president can be indicted, but that Mueller’s team is willing to let the courts settle that issue while Congress wrestles with what to do with the embattled president.

Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, is betting the president can’t be indicted, saying, “president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer” under the Constitution.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... dict-trump






Russia probe lawyers think Mueller could indict Trump

Many legal scholars doubt a U.S. vs. Trump case is possible, but two attorneys who have dealt with special counsel Robert Mueller's team disagree. One expects Mueller to move as early as this spring.

DARREN SAMUELSOHN

02/02/2018 05:00 AM EST

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation has gathered enough steam that some lawyers representing key Donald Trump associates are considering the possibility of a historic first: an indictment against a sitting president.

While many legal experts contend that Mueller lacks the standing to bring criminal charges against Trump, at least two attorneys working with clients swept up in the Russia probe told POLITICO they consider it possible that Mueller could indict the president for obstruction of justice.

Neither attorney claimed to have specific knowledge of Mueller’s plans. Both based their opinions on their understanding of the law; one also cited his interactions with the special counsel’s team, whose interviews have recently examined whether Trump tried to derail the probe into his campaign’s Russia ties.

“If I were a betting man, I’d bet against the president,” said one of the lawyers.

The second attorney, who represents a senior Trump official, speculated that Mueller could try to bring an indictment against Trump even if he expects the move to draw fierce procedural challenges from the president’s lawyers – if only to demonstrate the gravity of his findings.

“It’s entirely possible that Mueller may go that route on the theory that, as an open question, it should be for the courts to decide,” the attorney said. “Even if the indictment is dismissed, it puts maximum pressure on Congress to treat this with the independence and intellectual honesty that it will never, ever get."

The lawyers’ assessments hardly resolve the public debate about whether a federal prosecutor can indict a sitting president — one that several attorneys involved in the Russia probe said they are closely tracking through online op-eds and Twitter dustups. (“It’s so much fun!” said one.)

Several legal scholars say an effort by Mueller to initiate a case titled U.S. vs. Trump would, at a minimum, likely move quickly to the Supreme Court. There is no legal precedent for an indictment of a president — only a pair of Justice Department legal opinions, from 1973 and 2000 — saying it is not a viable option.

The 2000 opinion concluded that the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president “would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”

The memo was written by an assistant attorney general nearly two years after the House impeached President Bill Clinton for lying under oath and obstructing justice about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr never tried to indict Clinton. But Starr, who filed a damning report to Congress in 1998, considered the option — and even tasked his lawyers with preparing draft indictments, as well as a legal opinion asserting his power to charge Clinton.

“It is proper, constitutional, and legal for a federal grand jury to indict a sitting President for serious criminal acts that are not part of, and are contrary to, the President’s official duties,” Starr’s legal adviser, Ronald Rotunda, concluded in a 1998 memo first made public last summer through an open records request by the New York Times.

“In this country, no one, even President Clinton, is above the law,” the memo said.

Despite that assertion, Rotunda said in an interview that Mueller cannot indict Trump because he has a different legal standing than Starr enjoyed. Starr’s powers were defined by an independent counsel statute that expired in 1999. Rotunda said Mueller, by contrast, effectively has the powers of a U.S. attorney and must follow all DOJ “rules, regulations, procedures, practices and policies.”

That would mean Mueller is bound by the Clinton Justice Department’s 2000 memo, he said, as well as another Justice Department opinion written in 1973.

“If we know anything about Mueller, we think we know that he follows the rules—all of them,” Paul Rosenzweig, another former Starr deputy, wrote Tuesday in the Atlantic. “Mueller will not indict Trump for obstruction of justice or for any crime. Period. Full stop. End of story. Speculations to the contrary are just fantasy.”

The 1973 Justice Department memo was used to shield President Richard Nixon from a possible indictment by Watergate prosecutors, who believed they had the power to bring one. That debate was unresolved after the special prosecutor decided to share his work with the House Judiciary Committee, which was preparing to launch impeachment proceedings against Nixon.

The Justice Department regulations that govern Mueller’s work offer no clear endgame for the public to follow his investigation.

They do stipulate that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, has oversight of and final say on all major decisions by Mueller — specifically including any indictments. Rosenstein is also required to submit a report to Congress on the grounds for closing the investigation.

Mueller’s office and the Justice Department both declined comment, as did attorneys for Trump and the White House.

In a December interview with Axios, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd argued that the “president cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer" under the Constitution.

Some Republicans warn that Mueller would be playing with fire should he pursue an indictment of Trump.

"It would create a constitutional crisis," said Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), a former federal prosecutor and district attorney.

Buck said Mueller would be on especially dangerous ground were he to base an obstruction of justice case on Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey: “Assessing the motives" of a president who decides to dismiss executive branch personnel would be "unique in the history of the country,” he said.

Signs that Mueller is closing in on Trump have been growing for months. Mueller has indicted former top Trump campaign aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates — both have pleaded not guilty — and obtained guilty pleas from former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI.

Witnesses and attorneys who have been interviewed by the special counsel’s team say the special counsel is focusing on a potential obstruction of justice case based on several well-documented events, including Trump’s firing of Comey and his efforts to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal from the Justice Department’s Russia probe.

The lawyer who said he would “bet” against Trump said he thinks Mueller could wrap up his case soon, potentially with an indictment, to avoid acting too close to this fall’s midterm elections.

“If he’s going to do it, I think he’ll do it in the spring,” the attorney said. “I don’t think he wants to be accused of trying to influence the election that dramatically.”

On Capitol Hill, several Democrats said they believe Mueller has the authority to file charges against Trump but questioned whether he actually would.

"I think that it’s far more likely if the special counsel finds evidence of criminality... that it’s presented in a report to Congress," said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Schiff said Mueller would likely have steep reservations about the notion that "12 jurors in some part of the country should decide the fate of the republic."

In addition, Schiff said a federal judge might stay any criminal proceedings until after Trump’s presidency.

That was the assumption of the Nixon-era Justice Department memo, which suggested such an outcome could be disastrous.

“Given the realities of modern politics and mass media, and the delicacy of the political relationships which surround the Presidency both foreign and domestic, there would be a Russian roulette aspect to the course of indicting the President but postponing trial, hoping in the meantime that the power to govern could survive,” wrote Robert G. Dixon Jr., then an assistant attorney general and head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Rosenstein could also deny any attempt by Mueller to indict Trump. Justice Department rules would require such a denial to be transmitted to the House and Senate Judiciary committee leaders at the conclusion of Mueller’s work.

That scenario “would allow everybody involved — Mueller, Rosenstein — to play the thing strictly by the book and still get Mueller’s conclusion, if there is one, that the president committed a crime, into the hands of the only people to whom it really matters, which is Congress,” said Frank Bowman, a former Justice Department trial attorney and University of Missouri law professor.

Philip Allen Lacovara, who served as a top counsel to the two Watergate special prosecutors, said he believes Mueller could seek an indictment against Trump, but only if the facts suggest a “slam dunk” case against the president.

Lacovara dismissed the Clinton Justice Department memo’s contention that an indictment would interfere with the president’s official duties.

“When an incumbent president, whether it’s Bush or Obama or Trump, spends an enormous amount of time on the golf course, it’s a little bit fanciful to say the president can’t be called to account for alleged criminality because he’s got to be available 24 hours-a-day to be president,” he said.

One of the Russia defense attorneys also suggested what he called a “jujitsu move”: naming Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in a larger obstruction of justice case that targets one or more associates.

Whatever Mueller and his deputies have planned, the attorney said, it is not likely to be anticlimactic.

“There’s a sense of confidence I feel when I’m with them,” said the same lawyer. “Their level of confidence has grown, and that’s a body language thing.”

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/ ... obe-384969



SOMETHING HUGE IS ABOUT TO DROP.......and #releasethememo proves it

....follow the diversions
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby Grizzly » Mon Feb 05, 2018 1:54 pm

Just passing this along as I can't bare to listen to these fucks for even twenty minutes. But thought, some of you guys/gals might be interested in...


Remarks from Robert Mueller III


Didn't we have a vomit emoji at one time?
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 05, 2018 1:59 pm

and you love listening to trump?

so you're down with a criminal in the WH?

what's the point of sharing?

Who's gonna take down the Criminal in Chief and his grifter family? Donald Duck?

I am no fan of the FBI but who else has the authority to keep the Grifter in Chief in check?

Is trump the king of the U.S.?

or is he just a strong man want to be threatening to arrest Mueller?

Are we not supposed to have checks and balances in this democracy any longer?


EPISODE 70: What makes the Russian investigation different? – with special guest Marcy Wheeler (@EmptyWheel)
http://www.eclectablog.com/2018/02/epis ... wheel.html



This is the Putin (dictators) handbook

Attack/dismantle media
Attack DOJ/FBI publicly
Attack State rinse and repeat

This comes from the Dictator’s Playbook... The White House has a Kremlin political warfare assistance team.” :barf: :barf: :barf: :barf:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
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Re: First Charges Filed in U.S. Special Counsel Mueller's Ru

Postby Grizzly » Mon Feb 05, 2018 2:32 pm

I have never once listened to Trump. Don't give a fuck to be honest.

Sure. I’m down with a criminal in the White House. Has there been one that's wasn't? In out life times?

The point of sharing was that 'somebunal like lectures and talks'. I happened upon it, and thought I'd share it.

I personally can't stand to listen to any of these fucks Robert Mueller III, John Owen Brennan, Clapper, - or any of these pompous but powerful murderous villains, masquerading as visionaries and statesmen. I could give a fuck less about his their idea(s) of jurisprudence. The whole lot of them are Treasonous Jackals.

Go ahead and pretend that the system isn't rotten to the core. Your free to believe whatever they tell ya ...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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