The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[RoseMorninStar]

Among the evangelicals I know, some of whom sent their children to Liberty University &/or are involved with the University, believe Trump is a Messiah, a Savior sent from god. An answer to their prayers. He can do no wrong that they cannot justify. I don't get it.

[N.E. Brigand]

Durham's office responded in a court filing to Sussmann today. In an earlier filing, Sussmann's lawyers had noted that Baker in 2019 and 2020 interviews described his 2016 meeting with Sussmann in a way that is exculpatory for Sussmann. Durham says those interviews happened too long after the incident to be reliable.

Instead, Durham says that it's Baker "now-clear recollection" as given in interviews from 2021, after the supposedly unreliable interviews and after he was presented with earlier notes about the 2016 meeting (notes that I believe were written by others), that should count.

(Also, even though Sussmann was indicted 10 weeks ago, Durham only turned over the apparently exculpatory statements to Sussmann a week ago.)

A while ago, Marcy Wheeler made the interesting point that Durham's theory of the case seems to be that Democrats deliberately laundered false and defamatory information about Donald Trump to the the FBI. The evidence we've seen so far does not support such a theory (the tech researchers who discovered the weird Alfa Bank activity were never sure what to make of it, but their texts and emails show that they took seriously the implication that the communications could represent a possibly illicit connection between Trump and Russia; one of them wrote of the Alfa internet traffic with astonishment, just days after news broke about Russia hacking the Democrats: "am I really seeing evidence of espionage on behalf of a presidential candidate?"). Also, as Wheeler observes, feeding false information to the FBI to hurt a political campaign is precisely what Republicans seem to have done with the bogus Clinton Foundation and Uranium One claims -- and no Republican operatives were ever prosecuted for that.

As Wheeler has lately observed, Durham, who as Wheeler notes flew to Italy with William Barr to gather intelligence already in the possession of the FBI, this week claimed in a public filing, requesting more time to provide discovery to Sussmann, partly on the grounds that Durham had only just learned that the Dept. of Justice Office of Inspector General has for four years been in possession of two phones belong to Baker, who is Durham's only witness. (That ignorance of this rather relevant evidence has all sorts of implications for the integrity of Durham's fact-finding.)

But tonight, as Wheeler has not yet observed (because it's still pre-dawn in Ireland where she now lives), Durham filed this correction in which he notes that the I.G.'s office, upon seeing Durham's filing this week, reminded Durham that they had in fact discussed those phones with him.

Four years ago.

I myself am just amused to note that there's a typo on the first page of Durham's new filing.

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't think that there will be ANY prosecutions of ANY Trump administration officials by the Biden/Garland Justice Department.

This may prove to be correct. But the manager of Trump's inaugural committee, Tom Barrack, today was indicted for being an unregistered foreign agent.

Edited to add: Barrack allegedly was acting as an agent of the United Arab Emirates. The indictment apparently doesn't mention this, but per the New York Times, Barrack's firm was paid $1.5 billion by that nation from 2016 to 2019. I wonder if that investment paid off.

According to this piece at CNBC, Barrack may attempt to "graymail" the government in order to avoid prosecution.

Graymail is a kind of legal blackmail that defendants can use in cases involving secret information. Basically the defendant argues that a full understanding of his case relies on sensitive material that will have to come out in court. And the government decides that more harm would come from the public exposure of that material than from the defendant getting away with his crimes.

However, prosecutors likely have anticipated Barrack using this tactic. One sign suggesting this, according to the article, is that the indictment describes activities only in 2016 and 2017, charging that Barrack and his alleged co-conspirators tried at that time to improperly affect U.S. policy to benefit the UAE. But the indictment never discusses the defendants' subsequent activities or whether they succeeded in doing so. A prosecution that covered later events would risk revealing state secrets (particularly if the U.S. did in fact change its stance in the Middle East due to Barrack's efforts).

In a filing today, Tom Barrack's lawyers complain that the Dept. of Justice already had all the evidence it used to bring these charges more than two years ago (when Barrack's friend Donald Trump was president) but chose not to proceed then, so it's not fair for the government to charge him now. Barrack's team also notes that:

"the government has not produced, or perhaps not even searched for, internal memoranda or communications in government offices such as the White House or the intelligence agencies that were in the possession of key individuals in the campaign and Administration with whom Mr. Barrack about the matters alleged in the indictment. Moreover, it is doubtful that texts and emails once in the possession of such witnesses can now be reasonably obtained, especially with the change of administration."

In other words, Barack claims that when he was pushing the U.S. to adopt positions more friendly to the United Arab Emirates in exchange $1.5 billion, he was acting with the permission of Trump and Jared Kushner, who by now will have destroyed the evidence.

[N.E. Brigand]

Trump Aide Connected to 2006 Overseas Attack on U.S. Marines

In 2006, the U.S. sent a contingent of 113 Marines in Crimea as an advance team for a NATO task force scheduled to conduct a joint exercise with Ukraine (and also to do some feel-good construction work: to "build a new soccer field [and] children’s play area," according to one Marine). Immediately upon their arrival, they were set up on by violent protesters: "We had rocks thrown at us. Rocks hit Marines. Buses were rocked back and forth. We were just trying to get to our base." They didn't make it to the base, and spent the next few weeks barricaded "in a local sanatorium" before giving up and returning to the U.S. The NATO exercises were cancelled and so was a scheduled visit to Ukraine by President George W. Bush.

And according to that article, Paul Manafort, who later would be a top advisor to presidential candidate Donald Trump, was being paid millions by the pro-Russian group that organized the protest, and "some former U.S. diplomats . . . are convinced that Manafort knew about, and possibly helped plan, the anti-American protests."

But here's what's most interesting to me now: that article in Task & Purpose, an online publication whose focus is American armed forces, was published in August 2017. I'd never heard about either the 2006 events or Manafort's connection before today. I searched the forums and it wasn't mentioned by anyone else here either. I don't have a point to make other than to note there's always a lot more going on than anyone can keep up with.

(Amusingly, there was one result here for "Manafort"+"2006": a post by River to the 2008 U.S. presidential election thread about interactions that Manafort's business partner, Paul Davis, had with then-presidential candidate Senator John McCain and with Freddie Mac, the federal housing mortgage corporation, in light of the housing crisis then rocking the financial markets.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Thanks to FOIA requests by Buzzfeed, a bit more of the Mueller report was unredacted today, and it reveals that Mueller's team considered whether or not to charge Donald Trump Jr. for the crime of unlawfully accessing a website because he used a password provided to him by Wikileaks to view information on a third party's site. We did previously know that Don Jr. did this, but not that Mueller's team had examined whether or not what he did was criminal. It turns out that they determined that Don Jr.'s actions did constitute the elements of a misdemeanor violation, but not a felony, and they declined to charge him.

To me, that appears to have been the right decision for that particular crime. (I still have a lot of trouble with failing to charge Don Jr. for his role in the Trump Tower meeting, where the decision largely rested on his not being smart enough to know he was breaking the law by agreeing to accept foreign assistance to help win the 2016 election.) Some observers wonder whether this decision should have been redacted in the first place, and suggest that it might have been kept secret in order to help Trump's public image.

The newly unredacted material also reveals that Mueller's team felt they couldn't prove that Roger Stone "participated in the hacking conspiracy" with Russia. That's not really surprising. it's always appeared that Stone's involvement with Russia -- and I do think he was involved -- came after the hacking. There have been a few hints in other documents (like the Senate Intelligence report) that Mueller seriously considered whether Stone was involved with Russia's efforts earlier than that; this report confirms that there must have been some evidence suggesting that, even if it wasn't conclusive.

This is probably the most surprising revelation from today's report: "the evidence did not establish that J.D. Gordon was acting at the direction of Russia when he arranged a change in the 2016 Republican Party platform pertaining to assistance to Ukraine."

While the change in the Republican platform regarding Ukraine, and Gordon's role in making the change, has long been known, I had not previously understood that anyone thought Gordon himself may have been following orders from Russia. The general belief was that Gordon did so because Trump told him to, and that Trump told him to because he wanted to please Putin -- but we've known since 2019 that Mueller was unable to prove that, and since the initial release of Mueller's report this change seemed like a mere red herring. Apparently Mueller took it more seriously (although some commentators today suggest the problem really goes back to Mueller's apparent decision not to dig into Donald Trump's finances or to try harder to force Trump to answer questions in person, i.e., that Gordon may have been ordered to make the change by Trump and understood that Trump himself was asking that at Russia's request).

[N.E. Brigand]

A new filing John Durham made in the Sussmann case yesterday has led to much crowing from right-wing media about how Donald Trump was correct to claim in 2017 that Democrats spied on him; it's also led Trump himself to suggest last night that some analysis conducted by some internet researchers is "punishable by death."

Suffice it to say this is all nonsense. Among other things, the activity in question dates from 2013 to 2017, which means that these researchers were "spying" on Barack Obama more than they were "spying" on Trump. (They weren't spying at all.)

[N.E. Brigand]

In a court filing made as part of its ongoing lawsuit against the Trump Organization, the New York attorney general's office today submitted a copy of a letter that Mazars, which has been the accounting firm used by the Trump Org. for years, sent to Trump's company on Feb. 9 notifying them that:

(1) the financial statements Mazars prepared for the Trump Org. for the years 2011-2020 should no longer be considered reliable;

(2) that determination was made based on information emerging from the New York lawsuit
(2)(a) as well as an internal investigation by Mazars and other "information received from internal and external sources"; and

(3) Mazars stands by its own work (i.e., they're claiming that any errors are due to incorrect information provided by the Trump Org.); and also

(4) because of the information above plus "the totality of the circumstances," Mazars has a "non-waivable conflict of interest" which means
(4)(a) Mazars can't be the Trump Org. accounting firm any more, so

(5) the Trump Org. will need to file any outstanding tax returns without Mazars' help, and by the way
(5)(a) those include the personal tax returns for Donald Trump and Melania Trump, which
(5)(b) have to be filed by Feb. 15 (tomorrow, or six days after the letter was sent); and finally

(6) only one thing prevented those returns from being filed already:
(6)(a) the Trump Org. has failed to provide Mazars with information about the "Matt Calimari Jr. apartment."

Edited to add: The New York Times reports that the Trump Org. statements are "compiled" but not "audited" by Mazars.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I was going to post about this yesterday when I saw it, but I knew you would do a better job.

It's hard to know what to really make of the ramifications of this. In any normal world, there would be no question that Trump would be facing severe consequences, including criminal charges. But I've given up expecting normal rule to apply to him. It just doesn't seem to happen. He should have been charged in Mueller probe, but he wasn't. His son absolutely should have been charged, and somehow he wasn't either. Trump (and Giuliani) should long since have been charged by the Fulton County D.A., but he hasn't and likely won't. He should have been indicted on campaign finance violations at the same time that Michael Cohen was, but he wasn't. He should have been convicted in both impeachments, and it wasn't even close. Shit, he should have long since been indicted on a raft of sexual assault charges. It just doesn't seem to happen.

[RoseMorninStar]

^ This ^ Agreed Voronwë. It's frustrating.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new filing John Durham made in the Sussmann case yesterday has led to much crowing from right-wing media about how Donald Trump was correct to claim in 2017 that Democrats spied on him; it's also led Trump himself to suggest last night that some analysis conducted by some internet researchers is "punishable by death."

Suffice it to say this is all nonsense. Among other things, the activity in question dates from 2013 to 2017, which means that these researchers were "spying" on Barack Obama more than they were "spying" on Trump. (They weren't spying at all.)

How deeply has Durham's nonsensical filing on Saturday penetrated Republican minds in the past few days?

So deeply that someone with whom I once corresponded about political subjects via PMs on another (non-Tolkien and non-political) special interest forum, with whom I haven't interacted since I stopped participating there in the summer of 2020, reached out to me today by submitting a form through the contact portal on my employer's website to send me an email at work that opens with "Russia! Russia! Russia!" and proclaims that the latest news shows that he was right and I was wrong about Donald Trump.

Actually I'm rather pleased he reached out. I was sorry we'd fallen out of touch. But I think the timing shows that many conservatives have been bowled over by Durham's claims.

(By the way, it may be worth noting that Durham's filing was entirely performative. The information about the supposed spying on Trump were delivered entirely as an aside to what should have been a very routine notice that there had been a conflict review, which had already been resolved, regarding Sussmann's lawyers.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Trump lawyers fight to block subpoena seeking his testimony

We should know the answer later today (though of course if it goes against Trump he will inevitably appeal to draw it out as long as possible).

A judge said he plans to make a decision Thursday afternoon in President Donald Trump’s fight to avoid being questioned under oath in a New York investigation into his business practices.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking to enforce subpoenas her office issued in December to Trump and his two eldest children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr.

James, a Democrat, said her civil investigation has uncovered evidence Trump’s company used “fraudulent or misleading” valuations of assets like golf clubs and skyscrapers to get loans and tax benefits.

Trump’s lawyers told Judge Arthur Engoron during the hearing that having him sit for a civil deposition now, while his company is also the subject of a parallel criminal investigation, is an improper attempt to get around a state law barring prosecutors from calling someone to testify before a criminal grand jury without giving them immunity.

The same judge previously ordered Eric Trump to appear for his deposition within 14 days when he abruptly cancelled his deposition.

(Wow, I just went to the court site, and the amount of information about the Trump Organization's activities that the AG's office has filed is truly staggering.)

ETA: When I say that Trump will appeal if the judge rules against him, that is a shorthand for saying that he will try to file some kind of writ to stay the decision. I'm not sure how successful that could be.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This is rich.

Trump said in court he had no 'knowledge' of his company's finances a day before he issued an 1,100-word statement defending his company's finances

Former President Donald Trump said in a court filing Monday that he "denies knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth" about his company's finances.

A day later, he issued a blistering 1,100-word statement in response to his longtime accounting firm Mazars USA dropping the Trump Organization as a client and claiming it could no longer stand by a decade's worth of tax documents. Trump waxed lyrical about his company's "fantastic assets" and said prosecutors should give consider giving Hillary Clinton the death penalty instead of investigating the Trump Organization's finances.

"My company has among the best real estate and other assets anywhere in the world, has significant amounts of cash, and has relatively very little debt, which is totally current," Trump said in the statement Tuesday.

The discrepancy was pointed out in a court filing Wednesday from the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James. Her office is set to face off against Trump in court Thursday and ask a judge to enforce a subpoena that would force him to sit for a deposition.

"It is not unusual for parties to a legal proceeding to disagree about the facts," wrote Austin Thompson, a lawyer for James's office. "But it is truly rare for a party to publicly disagree with statements submitted by his own attorneys in a signed pleading — let alone one day after the pleading was filed. That is what Mr. Trump has done here."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Judge Engoron has ruled in favor of AG James, ordering that Trump provide the requested documents within 14 days and that Trump, Ivanka and Donald Jr. all appear for their depositions within 21 days. The Trumps attorneys have already said that they will appeal.

[N.E. Brigand]

This is rich.

Trump said in court he had no 'knowledge' of his company's finances a day before he issued an 1,100-word statement defending his company's finances

And Trump even included specific financial numbers in that statement.

I see that judge in today's ruling (requiring the Trumps to testify) used (in dicta) the terms "Orwellian" and "Humpty Dumpty" to describe claims by the Trump Organization that the Mazar's letter that was made public earlier this week proves that there's nothing for New York to investigate!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And Trump's attorneys tried to suggest that James should be going after Hillary Clinton for "spying" on Trump rather than investigating Trump. Too bizarre.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And then there is this part:

Engoron also excoriated the Trump Organization for claiming that James’ investigation is now moot because the former President’s longtime accounting firm, MazarsUSA, recently determined that the last 10 years of financial statements it prepared were unreliable.

“The idea that an accounting firm’s announcement that no one should rely on a decade’s worth of financial statements it issued based on the numbers submitted by an entity somehow exonerates that entity and renders an investigation into its past practices as moot is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll (‘When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said … it means just what I chose it to mean – neither more nor less’); George Orwell (‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’): and ‘alternative facts,’” Engoron wrote.

“To proclaim that that Mazars’ red-flag warning that the Trump financial statements are unreliable suddenly renders the OAG’s longstanding investigation moot is as audacious as it is preposterous,” the judge added.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new filing John Durham made in the Sussmann case yesterday has led to much crowing from right-wing media about how Donald Trump was correct to claim in 2017 that Democrats spied on him; it's also led Trump himself to suggest last night that some analysis conducted by some internet researchers is "punishable by death."

Suffice it to say this is all nonsense. Among other things, the activity in question dates from 2013 to 2017, which means that these researchers were "spying" on Barack Obama more than they were "spying" on Trump. (They weren't spying at all.)

Donald Trump: The FBI investigation into me should itself be investigated!

William Barr appoints John Durham to investigate the FBI investigation.

. . . three years pass . . .

John Durham: Some researchers had access to data from the White House. [It was The Obama White House, but I'm glossing over that point.]

Donald Trump: What those researchers did is the kind of thing that deserves the death penalty!

John Durham: I'm not responsible for threats made by "third parties" in response to the [misleading] information I file in court.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This just blows my mind. How are these people allowed to practice law.

A law clerk repeatedly had to tell Trump's lawyer to stop interrupting the judge while she ranted about political bias and right-wing conspiracy theories

[N.E. Brigand]

I do think it's reasonably likely that some of Danchenko's sub-sources were working for Oleg Deripaska (and thus ultimately for Vladimir Putin, although I also think there should be a deeper look into Deripaska's possible connection to Mitch McConnell) and feeding him disinformation in order to undermine Steele's work. That said, within weeks of Steele's dossier being made public, it was reported that Steele himself was clear-eyed about the "raw" nature of the information he provided and that he estimated only 75% of it would prove to be correct.

As for whether Danchenko lied to the FBI, it's not clear to me one way or the other from Durham's indictment (a fair portion of which has little to do directly with him but seems intended to cast innuendo on the Russia investigation as a whole). Four of the five charges concern Danchenko saying that he received a call in July 2016 from someone purporting to be Sergei Millian, the Trump-connected president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, making allegations about Trump's business in Russia. It appears that someone really did call Danchenko making those allegations, but that it wasn't actually Millian, and that Danchenko came to realize that by August 2016. So it may comes down to when exactly Danchenko knew that he had been duped and how he conveyed that to the FBI.

At the risk of citing the same journalist twice in one day, I'm going to note what Marcy Wheeler says here.

As mentioned in my November post quoted above, a key witness in the false statements charges against Igor Danchenko (one of just three people that Special Counsel John Durham's investigation has managed to indict in three years) is Sergei Millian. In FBI interviews in 2017, Danchenko told agents that in July 2016, when he was gathering information for Christopher Steele, someone claiming to be Millian had called him, but by August 2016, Danchenko realized that this person, who had claimed to have information about Donald Trump's relationship with Russia, was not Millian. Durham claims that Danchenko knew all along that Millian never called him.

However, Durham's indictment against Danchenko does not cite any phone records, and according to the Mueller report, Millian left the U.S. in 2017 before the FBI could interview him and hasn't returned, so the only real evidence Durham provides in support of this particular charge are claims that Millian subsequently made on Twitter in which he said he never called Danchenko. (Millian also tweeted shortly before the Danchenko indictment that some of "my enemies are going to jail very soon". Assuming that someone on Durham's staff didn't leak that news to Millian, which I think is unlikely, then the likeliest way that Millian could have known Danchenko's indictment was coming would be that Durham's team interviewed him (outside of the U.S., I guess). In which case, why didn't Durham cite that interview in the indictment?) Wheeler has previously noted there is or was a counter-intelligence investigation into Millian, and that gives Danchenko one of many opportunties to demand that Durham's team provide him with discovery of very sensitive information that the FBI are unlikely to want to share. Also, the fact that the FBI believed strongly enough that Millian might be a spy that they opened up an investigation into him gives Danchenko grounds to claim that Millian's claims on Twitter aren't reliable. (Additionally, Durham claims that Danchenko's lies (if they even were lies) were material because they affected the FBI's decisions about whether to seek four FISA warrants for Trump associate Carter Page's communications -- but as Wheeler has noted, not only is that highly dubious, but in 2020, a judge ordered that because of other problems with those warrants, anything obtained from them could only be used for very limited purposes, and those purposes don't appear to include Durham's investigation.)

But that's all old news. What's new today is Wheeler's observation that Sergei Millian was the very first person last week to publicly claim (again on Twitter), in light of Durham's misleading filing in the Michael Sussmann case, that "They were spying on the White House, folks!!!"

"They" (the internet researchers whose findings Sussmann shared with the FBI and the CIA) were not, in fact, spying on the White House.

And Millian's tweet could matter because Durham two days ago wrote this in a court filing in the Sussmann case:

"If third parties or members of the media have overstated, understated, or otherwise misinterpreted facts contained in the Government’s Motion, that does not in any way undermine the valid reasons for the Government’s inclusion of this information."

In other words, John Durham has effectively described Sergei Millian, a key witness in his case against Danchenko, as an unreliable third party.

What's more, Millian followed up this week on Twitter by claiming that "FYI. I had direct line into the White House. I called the White House direct and told them who was working against them, folks!"

As Wheeler notes, this now allows Danchenko (and probably Sussmann) to demand that Durham produce White House phone records.

[RoseMorninStar]

Glenn Kirchner has a YouTube channel, under his name, the topic being 'Justice Matters' which has currently been dealing with many of the aspects of the Trump legal happenings. For those of you interested in law it is likely too basic, a '101' for the average viewer. Have any of you seen it? Thoughts?