Category Archives: Department of Justice

Intelligence chairman: Justice report shows no evidence for Trump’s claims of wiretapping during campaign

The Washington Post reports: The Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday that new documents provided to Congress by the Justice Department provided no proof to support President Trump’s claim that his predecessor had ordered wiretaps of Trump Tower.

“Was there a physical wiretap of Trump Tower? No, but there never was, and the information we got on Friday continues to lead us in that direction,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

He added, “There was no FISA warrant that I’m aware of to tap Trump Tower” — a reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a federal law that governs the issuance of search warrants in U.S. intelligence gathering. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Allegations from the United States that British spy agency GCHQ snooped on Donald Trump during his election campaign are “arrant nonsense”, the deputy head of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) said in an interview on Saturday.

President Trump has stood by unproven claims that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 White House race. On Thursday his spokesman cited a media report that Britain’s GCHQ was behind the surveillance.

Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told BBC News the idea that Britain had a hand in spying on Trump was “just crazy”. [Continue reading…]

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What to ask about Russian hacking

Louise Mensch writes: On Monday, the House Intelligence Committee holds its first hearing on Russia’s hacking of the election. (No date has yet been set for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s parallel investigation.) The list of initial witnesses does not inspire confidence in the House committee’s effectiveness.

It should be relatively easy to get at the truth of whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia over the hacking. I have some relevant experience. When I was a member of Parliament in Britain, I took part in a select committee investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News Corporation. Today, as a New York-based journalist (who, in fact, now works at News Corp.), I have followed the Russian hacking story closely. In November, I broke the story that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court had issued a warrant that enabled the F.B.I. to examine communications between “U.S. persons” in the Trump campaign relating to Russia-linked banks.

So, I have some ideas for how the House committee members should proceed. If I were Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the committee, I would demand to see the following witnesses: Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Richard Burt, Erik Prince, Dan Scavino, Brad Parscale, Roger Stone, Corey Lewandowski, Boris Epshteyn, Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Michael Flynn Jr., Felix Sater, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Michael Cohen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Michael Anton, Julia Hahn and Stephen Miller, along with executives from Cambridge Analytica, Alfa Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and Spectrum Health.

There are many more who need to be called, but these would be a first step. As to lines of questioning, here are some suggestions. [Continue reading…]

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House Intelligence panel does not reveal whether documents substantiate Trump’s wiretap claim

The Washington Post reports: The House Intelligence Committee did not reveal on Friday night the answer to the question of whether Justice Department documents substantiate President Trump’s claim that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration.

The committee had asked for copies of any warrants, applications or court orders relating to a wiretap of Trump or his surrogates and affiliates in advance of a Monday hearing at which the directors of the FBI and the National Security Agency are expected to testify about alleged connections between the Trump team and Russian authorities.

Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) avoided the big question by releasing a statement late Friday that said his panel is “satisfied” that Justice “has fully complied” with its request related to “possible surveillance” of Trump and his associates.

Nunes said the CIA and FBI had not yet provided information that was requested “that is necessary to determine whether information collected on U.S. persons was mishandled and leaked.”

He added that the NSA had “partially met our request” and pledged to fully meet it by the end of next week. [Continue reading…]

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Republicans tell Trump to cut the BS with his ‘wiretap’ claims

The New York Times reports: In a striking repudiation, Republicans on Wednesday threatened subpoenas and vented openly about the lack of evidence behind President Trump’s tweet that President Barack Obama had wiretapped his phones in Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Devin Nunes of California, told reporters on Capitol Hill that “I don’t think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower” and that Mr. Trump, if taken literally, is simply “wrong.”

Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, said he had provided no information to Mr. Trump that might have formed the basis for the president’s claim.

And two Republican senators threatened to block Mr. Trump’s nominee for deputy attorney general until they get clarity from the F.B.I. about the accuracy of the president’s assertions. One of them vowed to issue subpoenas, if needed.

But Mr. Trump appeared defiant. In a Fox News interview, he hinted at a broader meaning to his Twitter messages and suggested that his online assertions would eventually be vindicated, saying that “wiretap covers a lot of different things.”

Mr. Trump added, “I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.” [Continue reading…]

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Yes, Trump is being held accountable

Jack Goldsmith writes: In the second month of a new presidency, several bodies in a Congress controlled by the president’s party are conducting high-profile, politically fraught and hard-to-control investigations that potentially implicate current and former administration officials and former campaign officials.

All of these actors and institutions are holding the Trump presidency to account. They are endeavoring to uncover the truth about the manifold Russian mysteries. And they can, if they see fit, take action with effects ranging from publicity and embarrassment to political damage with electoral consequences to criminal prosecution to impeachment if appropriate.

It’s true that the process of accountability is halting and frustratingly slow. But this is as it should be. The stakes could not be higher for our democracy. Ascertaining the truth is vital, and respect for the innocent is as important as identification of wrongdoing. It is thus crucial that the complex and elusive facts be sorted out in a fair and procedurally rigorous manner, and that the law be applied with deliberation and good judgment.

Justice seems elusive here because it is so plodding. But plodding justice is our best chance for a legitimate resolution to this mess. [Continue reading…]

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Sen. Grassley accuses Justice Department officials of lying about Trump-Russia investigation

The Washington Post reports: Tensions between congressional Republicans and the Trump administration are rising over Russia, as lawmakers probing alleged ties between the president’s team and the Kremlin accuse officials of trying to stymie their efforts.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), whose committee is one of several whose investigations are now fully underway, accused Justice Department officials Wednesday of lying outright when they promised to share information about ongoing department probes with lawmakers conducting oversight.

“Every time they come up here for their nomination hearing . . . I ask them: ‘Are you going to answer phone calls and our letters, and are you going to give us the documents we want?’ And every time we get a real positive ‘yes!’ And then they end up being liars!” Grassley said, screaming into the phone during an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s not if they’re treating us differently than another committee. It’s if they’re responding at all.”

Grassley, who spoke as he awaited a meeting with FBI Director James B. Comey to determine whether the bureau is investigating alleged Russia interference in last year’s presidential elections, threatened this week to block the nomination of Rod J. Rosenstein as the No. 2 man at the Justice Department until his full committee received an FBI briefing.

And he is not alone in voicing frustrations at how the administration is interacting with members trying to investigate allegations of links between the Trump team and Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Justice Department charges Russian spies and criminal hackers in Yahoo intrusion

The Washington Post reports: The Justice Department announced Wednesday the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers in connection with the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first U.S. criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials.

The indictments target two members of the Russian intelligence agency FSB, and two hackers hired by the Russians.

The charges include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage, according to officials. The indictments are part of the largest hacking case brought by the United States.

The charges are unrelated to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the move reflects the U.S. government’s increasing desire to hold foreign governments accountable for malicious acts in cyberspace. [Continue reading…]

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Republicans are threatening to expose Trump as the emperor with no clothes

Aaron Blake writes: It’s almost as though Republicans are tired of having President Trump’s evidence-free allegations laid at their feet. Almost.

Late Monday, a spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) threatened to subpoena the Trump administration to produce evidence of Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. The White House has declined to produce this evidence publicly, offering various excuses, including the Constitution’s separation of powers and — most recently on Monday — arguing that Trump wasn’t speaking literally when he made the claim.

The Justice Department missed Nunes’s deadline to provide evidence Monday, which drew Nunes’s subpoena threat.

“If the committee does not receive a response, the committee will ask for this information during the March 20 hearing and may resort to a compulsory process if our questions continue to go unanswered,” Nunes spokesman Jack Langer said.

Then, on Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) made his own threat. Last week, Graham — who is clearly skeptical of the wiretapping claim and chairs a subcommittee looking into it — asked the Justice Department and the FBI to provide copies of any warrants or court orders related to the alleged wiretapping. Having not received anything, Graham said Tuesday that he would announce his next steps Wednesday and may push for a special committee. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: A UK spy agency did not eavesdrop on Donald Trump during and after last year’s U.S. presidential election, a British security official said on Tuesday, denying an allegation by a U.S. television analyst.

The official, who is familiar with British government policy and security operations, told Reuters that the charge made on Tuesday by Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano, was “totally untrue and quite frankly absurd.” [Continue reading…]

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Preet Bharara shunned politics. His end was tinged by them

The New York Times reports: Ten days into his tenure as United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara saw his political and prosecutorial worlds collide.

He convened a meeting to discuss a sensitive investigation of a Democratic donor with ties to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. Mr. Bharara had been Mr. Schumer’s chief counsel, and Mr. Schumer had recommended Mr. Bharara for the prosecutorial post.

At the meeting, Mr. Bharara asked his prosecutors if there was enough evidence to make a case against the donor, Hassan Nemazee. One of the prosecutors, Daniel W. Levy, who is now in private practice, would recall years later that he had told Mr. Bharara that there had been a wide-reaching bank fraud.

“Then take him,” Mr. Bharara said.

That case — one of his very first as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan — foreshadowed a theme that Mr. Bharara harped on throughout his tenure pursuing a host of public corruption, terrorism, civil rights and Wall Street cases: Politics and prosecution do not mix. [Continue reading…]

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Russian espionage piggybacks on a cybercriminal’s hacking

The New York Times reports: To the F.B.I., Evgeniy M. Bogachev is the most wanted cybercriminal in the world. The bureau has announced a $3 million bounty for his capture, the most ever for computer crimes, and has been trying to track his movements in hopes of grabbing him if he strays outside his home turf in Russia.

He has been indicted in the United States, accused of creating a sprawling network of virus-infected computers to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from bank accounts around the world, targeting anyone with enough money worth stealing — from a pest control company in North Carolina to a police department in Massachusetts to a Native American tribe in Washington.

In December, the Obama administration announced sanctions against Mr. Bogachev and five others in response to intelligence agencies’ conclusions that Russia had meddled in the presidential election. Publicly, law enforcement officials said it was his criminal exploits that landed Mr. Bogachev on the sanctions list, not any specific role in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

But it is clear that for Russia, he is more than just a criminal. At one point, Mr. Bogachev had control over as many as a million computers in multiple countries, with possible access to everything from family vacation photographs and term papers to business proposals and highly confidential personal information. It is almost certain that computers belonging to government officials and contractors in a number of countries were among the infected devices. For Russia’s surveillance-obsessed intelligence community, Mr. Bogachev’s exploits may have created an irresistible opportunity for espionage. [Continue reading…]

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Preet Bharara said he wanted to be a U.S. attorney ‘forever.’ Well, he was just fired

The Washington Post reports: Days after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, he summoned Preet Bharara to Trump Tower. The president-elect wanted to talk to the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York about his future.

Afterward, Bharara — one of the most influential prosecutors in the country, best known for going after Wall Street as well as members of both political parties — told reporters he’d been asked whether he wanted to stay on.

“The President-elect asked, presumably because he’s a New Yorker and is aware of the great work that our office has done over the past seven years, asked to meet with me to discuss whether or not I’d be prepared to stay on as the United States attorney to do the work as we have done it, independently, without fear or favor, for the last seven years,” Bharara said in a brief statement to reporters after meeting with Trump.

Three months later, Bharara is suddenly out of a job, part of an ouster of 46 U.S. attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama.

Bharara was fired after he refused to tender his resignation.

It was an abrupt end to Bharara’s nearly-eight-year tenure prosecuting powerful people in finance and politics. [Continue reading…]

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Sessions ordered 46 U.S. attorneys to resign immediately but New York’s Preet Bharara has yet to do so

Harry Siegel writes: Preet Bharara, the crusading U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York who was asked to submit his resignation letter Friday, along with the 45 other U.S. Attorneys held over from the Obama administration, has yet to do so, a federal law enforcement official tells The Daily Beast.

Bharara — whose office is in the end stages of an investigation of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, about to begin the trials of two close allies of Governor Andrew Cuomo, and also appears to be investigating how Fox News structured settlements of sexual harassment and other claims brought by its employees — met with Donald Trump shortly after the election and was told that he would stay. Just this week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions assured him in a phone conversation that he’d remain atop the Southern District, according to the federal law enforcement official.

Since receiving the letter demanding his resignation Friday afternoon, Bharara has yet to speak to the press or to his full office. Friday evening, the law enforcement official said, Bharara told his section chiefs that he’d yet to submit the requested letter and may instead challenge Sessions to fire him.

The request for Bharara’s resignation came a week to the day after he’d started a personal Twitter feed where he’d Tweeted Monday: “This Senate hearing on political interference @ DOJ was 10 yrs ago today. Is that me in background? Boy I’ve aged.”

Bharara, then the chief counselor to Sen. Charles Schumer, helped lead the Senate’s probe into the midterm dismissals of eight U.S. Attorneys that in turn led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. [Continue reading…]

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FBI chief expected to testify in House Russia hearing

The Hill reports: FBI Director James Comey is expected to testify before the House Intelligence Committee in its March 20 hearing on Russian interference in the U.S. election, a senior bureau official tells The Hill.

“That’s the plan — we’re still working out the details and the ground rules with the committee, but we expect that we will be able to accommodate that date,” said Greg Brower, assistant director for the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs.

The hearing — just announced this week — is the first public hearing in the committee’s contentious probe.

It is unclear whether Comey will appear during the public component or in a closed-door session. A committee aide said that while there will probably be a closed component to the hearing, it likely won’t be on March 20. [Continue reading…]

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FBI Counterintelligence Division in charge of the Russia investigation

CNN reports: One source familiar with the Russia investigation resorted to a mathematical equation to divulge — sort of — the number of agents assigned to the matter.

It’s five to 10 fewer than were assigned to the Hillary Clinton email investigation, said the source, who is not authorized to speak publicly and did so on the condition of anonymity. There were about two dozen dedicated to that case, so that makes 15 to 20 on the Russia investigation.

The resources assigned to the Clinton investigation were in response to agents having to sort through a vast amount of electronic data in a finite period of time before the then-looming presidential election, the source said. With the Russia probe, there is no such time pressure and efforts are more focused on interviews with human sources.

The smaller number of agents assigned to the case should not be interpreted as a lack of interest, the source said. Developments in the case are sent up the chain to the highest levels on a regular basis.

Known simply as CD within the bureau, the Counterintelligence Division is responsible for protecting the secrets of the US intelligence community, the advanced technologies of American institutions both public and private, keeping weapons of mass destruction away from US enemies and countering the activities of foreign spies, including cyberintrusions. [Continue reading…]

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Trump is said to reject Comey assertion that wiretapping claim is false

The New York Times reports: President Trump does not accept the contention of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, that Mr. Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama had him wiretapped was false, a White House spokeswoman said on Monday.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that Mr. Comey had asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject Mr. Trump’s assertions. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is untrue and must be corrected, but the department has not released any such statement.

A White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked early Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America” whether Mr. Trump accepted Mr. Comey’s contention. “I don’t think he does,” she said.

“I think he firmly believes that this is a story line that has been reported pretty widely by quite a few outlets,” Ms. Sanders said. She went on to cite several news reports about the F.B.I.’s investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

George Stephanopoulos, the ABC News host interviewing Ms. Sanders, pointed out that the articles Ms. Sanders cited did not back up Mr. Trump’s claims that Mr. Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped the month before the election. [Continue reading…]

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It ain’t easy getting a FISA warrant: I was an FBI agent and should know

Asha Rangappa writes: In his latest round of twiplash, President Trump on Saturday leveled a very serious accusation: that President Obama had personally ordered the “tapping” of telephone lines in Trump Tower in the months leading up to the November 2016 election. His tweets (scarily) reveal more about what he believes the office of the President is capable of than the reality of what the law allows. As someone who obtained FISA warrants while conducting counterintelligence investigations for the FBI, I can attest to the fact that they not only don’t involve the White House, but the process includes too many layers of approval to be granted without strong evidence.

There are two ways to obtain a wiretap – also known as electronic surveillance – on U.S. persons (citizens and permanent residents), and both include the courts. For criminal investigations, the FBI can seek a warrant under Title III of the U.S. criminal code by showing a federal court that there is probable cause to believe the target has engaged, or is engaging in, criminal activity. This is a fairly high standard because of a strong presumption in favor of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy, and requires a showing that less intrusive means of obtaining the same information aren’t feasible.

The standard for electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes, though, is a little lower. This is because when it comes to national security, as opposed to criminal prosecutions, our Fourth Amendment rights are balanced against the government’s interest in protecting the country. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the FBI to get a warrant from a secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to conduct electronic surveillance on U.S. persons if they can show probable cause that the target is an “agent of a foreign power” who is “knowingly engag[ing]…in clandestine intelligence activities.” In other words, the government has to show that the target might be spying for a foreign government or organization. [Continue reading…]

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Comey asks Justice Dept. to reject Trump’s wiretapping claim

The New York Times reports: The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration. [Continue reading…]

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Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases far less serious than Sessions’s

Philip Lacovara and Lawrence Robbins write: Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a seemingly false statement under oath during his confirmation hearing. Admittedly, not every potential perjury case gets prosecuted, and Sessions may well have defenses to such a charge. But as lawyers at the Justice Department and attorneys in private practice who have represented individuals accused in such cases, we can state with assurance: Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases involving far more trivial misstatements and situations far less consequential than whether a nominee to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer misled fellow senators during his confirmation hearings.

Sessions’s problematic statement involves his response to a question by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) about what he would do as attorney general “if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign.” Sessions said he was unaware of any such activities, then volunteered, “I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.” In fact, then-Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Trump campaign adviser, met at least twice during the presidential campaign with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, The Post revealed.

As any number of witnesses have learned the hard way, it is a federal felony to lie to Congress. Under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Sections 1001 and 1621, perjury before Congress is punishable by up to five years imprisonment. To prove that offense, a prosecutor would have to establish that Sessions’s answer was false, that he knew it was false when made and that the subject matter of the answer was “material” to the congressional inquiry in which he was testifying.

Those elements all appear to be present. [Continue reading…]

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