Category Archives: Department of Justice

White House was unaware top adviser testified before grand jury

ABC News reports: The White House first learned one of its senior staffers met with the grand jury hearing the case presented by the special counsel into alleged Russian meddling into the 2016 election not from the staffer but from media reports, sources with knowledge of the investigation tell ABC News.

Former Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis recently testified before that grand jury into his role on President Donald Trump’s campaign. Clovis currently serves as the senior White House adviser to the Department of Agriculture.

Clovis’ testimony comes on the heels of another Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities. As part of Papadopoulos’ admission of guilt, details of emails were disclosed that showed him describing to top Trump campaign officials communications he had with contacts in Russia. [Continue reading…]

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A note of caution for Robert Mueller: The attacks on the special counsel are working

Mieke Eoyang, Ben Freeman, and Benjamin Wittes write: The announcement that three Trump campaign-connected figures have been prosecuted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller have captivated the D.C. press corps and elites. “Capitol Hill is Reeling,” reads a CNN headline. An NPR headline called it “A Day of Legal Shock and Awe.”

But over the very weekend that generated this frenzy, we generated some data that should be of concern to the special prosecutor and those of us who want an objective investigation into Russian interference. As part of an ongoing polling project, from Oct. 25-31 we asked six public opinion questions concerning Mueller and foreign influence in U.S. politics using Google Surveys. The bottom line? The general public actually doesn’t trust Mueller all that much. The continuing attacks on him by the President’s allies and conservative media outlets seem to be taking a toll. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. prosecutors consider charging Russian officials in DNC hacking case

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Justice Department has identified more than six members of the Russian government involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and swiping sensitive information that became public during the 2016 presidential election, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Prosecutors and agents have assembled evidence to charge the Russian officials and could bring a case next year, these people said. Discussions about the case are in the early stages, they said.

If filed, the case would provide the clearest picture yet of the actors behind the DNC intrusion. U.S. intelligence agencies have attributed the attack to Russian intelligence services, but haven’t provided detailed information about how they concluded those services were responsible, or any details about the individuals allegedly involved. [Continue reading…]

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Michael Flynn followed Russian troll accounts, pushed their messages in days before election

The Daily Beast reports: Former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn followed five Twitter accounts based out of the Russian-backed “troll factory” in St. Petersburg—and pushed their messages at least three times in the month before the 2016 election.

Over 2,750 troll accounts based out of the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency were made public by House investigators on Wednesday. The accounts, some of which had previously been identified by The Daily Beast as Russian-generated, were pulled from Twitter due to their ties to the troll factory over the past three months.

The Daily Beast had previously discovered Flynn, Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, and Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale retweeted Ten_GOP several times in the month before the election.

The news that Flynn also pushed Russian propaganda comes at an unwelcome time for the former three-star general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn is one of the people under investigation by Robert Mueller’s widespread probe into Russian influence in the 2016 campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Is civil war breaking out in the Wall Street Journal over the editorial board’s coverage of Mueller?

Joe Pompeo writes: The editorial page has been doing crazy shit for a long time,” a former long-serving Wall Street Journal editor told me this week. This person was referencing the time-honored divide in most journalistic organizations between the newsroom and the opinion desk. At the Journal, that divide can be particularly fraught. While the paper has long been a leading bastion of conservative thinking, its editorial writers are known to take positions that are more extreme than many of their colleagues in the newsroom can stomach.

The friction is, in some ways, a hallmark of the institution. A decade ago, an editorial-page columnist attacked a 2006 Journal series about the practice of backdating stock-option awards that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The page also once defended billionaire junk-bond king Michael Milken, who got a 10-year sentence for securities fraud in 1990 based in part on exposés by Journal reporters. Nevertheless, several Journal veterans I spoke with described the current rift as among the more fractious they’ve witnessed. “It does feel like this is a different level of crazy,” the veteran editor said. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the West Wing, Trump is apoplectic as allies fear impeachment

Gabriel Sherman writes: Until now, Robert Mueller has haunted Donald Trump’s White House as a hovering, mostly unseen menace. But by securing indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and a surprise guilty plea from foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, Mueller announced loudly that the Russia investigation poses an existential threat to the president. “Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.”

The first charges in the Mueller probe have kindled talk of what the endgame for Trump looks like, according to conversations with a half-dozen advisers and friends of the president. For the first time since the investigation began, the prospect of impeachment is being considered as a realistic outcome and not just a liberal fever dream. According to a source, advisers in the West Wing are on edge and doing whatever they can not to be ensnared. One person close to Dina Powell and Gary Cohn said they’re making sure to leave rooms if the subject of Russia comes up.

The consensus among the advisers I spoke to is that Trump faces few good options to thwart Mueller. For one, firing Mueller would cross a red line, analogous to Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox during Watergate, pushing establishment Republicans to entertain the possibility of impeachment. “His options are limited, and his instinct is to come out swinging, which won’t help things,” said a prominent Republican close to the White House. [Continue reading…]

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Leader of pro-Trump super PAC had mortgage on Paul Manafort property

The Guardian reports: The leader of a pro-Trump Super Pac once held a mortgage on one of the properties owned by Paul Manafort which federal prosecutors are trying to seize.

Tom Barrack, a close friend of Donald Trump’s who leads the Rebuilding America Now Super Pac, made a secured loan tied to Manafort’s house in the Hamptons in July 2004.

The loan – to Manafort’s wife Kathleen, who was listed as the owner of the house – consolidated $1.76m in previous loans and also included a loan of $382,002.98 with the property as collateral, according to records in the Suffolk County clerk’s office.

The county clerk records a satisfaction of mortgage or full repayment of the loan on 8 March 2006.

A spokesman for Manafort declined to comment on the loan while a spokesman for Barrack simply told the Guardian “the loan was repaid in accordance with the terms” and declined to comment further.

The property, located at 174 Jobs Lane, Water Mill, New York, is one of four owned by Manafort listed in the indictment that federal government seeks to have forfeited as “derived from proceeds traceable to the offense(s) of conviction”. [Continue reading…]

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Why a judge ruled Paul Manafort isn’t entitled to attorney-client privilege

Dahlia Lithwick and Scott Pilutik write: It’s not an overstatement to characterize the attorney-client privilege as the cornerstone of criminal law, an inviolable right that can and must withstand all manner of legal aggression. It’s also one of the small handful of criminal procedural notions sewn directly into our pop culture fabric. Even if all your legal knowledge comes from watching Law & Order, you’re still likely aware of your Miranda rights; that law enforcement needs probable cause to search your apartment and maybe (but maybe not) your car; and most especially that when you meet with your lawyer, you can tell her the whole ugly story because she can’t be forced to testify against you or even to divulge what you’ve discussed to anyone. Period. Right?

Well … mostly right. On Monday, Politico reported that Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had agreed to allow Robert Mueller to use something called the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege to compel testimony from an attorney who formerly represented Paul Manafort and Manafort’s onetime employee Rick Gates. Although that development got lost in the blizzard of Robert Mueller news, Howell’s willingness to pierce attorney-client privilege, as well as her frank description of falsehoods as falsehoods, was in some sense the big news of the day. It was an astonishing win for the special counsel, one that reveals both Mueller’s willingness to use tough tactics and the ways in which the judicial branch may be willing to treat the cover-ups that emerge from the Trump probe. In a way, the decision revealed that the courts may be as tired of houses built of deception as the rest of us are. [Continue reading…]

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Papadopoulos claimed Trump campaign approved Russia meeting

Bloomberg reports: Former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos made a significant claim in an email: Top Trump campaign officials agreed to a pre-election meeting with representatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The message, if true, would bolster claims that Trump’s campaign attempted to collude with Russian interests. But it’s unclear whether Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was merely boasting when he sent the July 14, 2016, email to a Kremlin-linked contact. There’s also no indication such a meeting ever occurred.

The email is cited in an FBI agent’s affidavit supporting criminal charges against Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy volunteer on Trump’s campaign. But it’s not included in court documents that detailed his secret guilty plea and his cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. [Continue reading…]

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Manafort has 3 passports, traveled to China with phone registered under fake name

CNN reports: How rich are Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and where did they travel?

That question lingered over the pair’s court hearing on Monday after both faced the first indictments from Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Because both men appeared to be globe-trotting multi-millionaires and faced charges for serious crimes related to their work abroad, the government said they should be held under house arrest. A judge agreed Monday.

A new court filing Tuesday showed exactly what Manafort and Gates told banks and investigators about their net worths and travel histories over the past few years.

Among the highlights:

* Manafort currently has three US passports, each under a different number. He has submitted 10 passport applications in roughly as many years, prosecutors said.
* This year, Manafort traveled to Mexico, China and Ecuador with a phone and email account registered under a fake name. (The name was not disclosed in the filings.) [Continue reading…]

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For ‘low level volunteer,’ Papadopoulos sought high profile as Trump adviser

The Washington Post reports: President Trump on Tuesday belittled former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty this week to lying to federal agents investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, tweeting that “few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.”

But interviews and documents show that Papadopoulos was in regular contact with the Trump campaign’s most senior officials and held himself out as a Trump surrogate as he traveled the world to meet with foreign officials and reporters.

Papadopoulos sat at the elbow of one of Trump’s top campaign advisers, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, during a dinner for campaign advisers weeks before the Republican National Convention, according to an individual who attended the meeting.

He met in London in September 2016 with a mid-level representative of the British Foreign Office, where he said he had contacts at the senior level of the Russian government.

And he conferred at one point with the foreign minister of Greece at a meeting in New York. [Continue reading…]

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Clovis said to be ‘cooperative witness’ in Senate Russia probe

Politico reports: Sam Clovis, President Donald Trump’s controversial nominee to be the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist, has been “a fully cooperative witness” in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts told POLITICO.

Clovis, a former co-chair and policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, knew that another campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, was talking to Russians, according to documents released Monday as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and campaign and administration officials.

Papadopoulos was arrested in late July and pleaded guilty to a charge that he made false statements to the FBI about his contact with a professor who has ties to the Kremlin and promised thousands of pages of emails related to Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, NBC News reported Tuesday that Clovis has been questioned by Mueller’s team and has testified before Mueller’s grand jury. [Continue reading…]

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The Republican Party is gearing up for war on the rule of law

Jonathan Chait writes: The Republican Party has sent mixed signals for months about how it plans to respond to Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Russia scandal — President Trump’s ragetweets have been alternating with silence, and his Congressional allies have mostly urged patience. But in the days leading up to the first arrests, beginning today with former campaign manager Paul Manafort, the signals have changed, and the dashboard is now flashing red. The party apparatus is gearing up for a frontal attack on Mueller in particular, and the idea that a president can be held legally accountable in general.

The Republican Congress is using its investigative apparatus not to discover the extent of Russian interference in the election, but instead to lash out at Trump’s political opponents. The Republicans have developed a bizarre theory of alt-collusion, which holds that the real interference was Russia feeding false allegations against Donald Trump to private investigator Christopher Steele. Since the FBI investigated Steele’s charges, the FBI is the agency that colluded. And since Robert Mueller is close with the FBI, Mueller, too, is tainted.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been serving as a barely filtered outlet for this line of attack from Republicans in Congress. The page has called for Mueller to resign, and other Republican media outlets spent the weekend amplifying this message. [Continue reading…]

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Washington’s legions of lobbyists see danger in special counsel’s indictment of Manafort

BuzzFeed reports: The threat of serving hard time for failing to disclose foreign lobbying work is rattling Washington’s multi-billion dollar influence industry following Monday’s 12-count indictment against Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates.

And although the charges have largely been seen as a blow to the White House, Monday’s actions by special prosecutor Robert Mueller also sent shivers down the spines of Washington’s lobbyists, both Democrats and Repulicans.

“It’s a swampy place, and the swampy stink knows no partisan allegiance,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide.

Manafort and Gates, who allegedly failed to disclose the full extent of their work on behalf of the pro-Russian Ukrainian Party of Regions, are now being charged under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a 1930s era law aimed at curbing the influence of pro-German propaganda ahead of World War II.

In the last half century, the Justice Department has brought only a handful of enforcement actions against lobbyists for violations of FARA. That lack of prosecution resulted in a proliferation of under-the-radar lobbying. Now Washington’s cottage industry of consultants and public affairs specialists are nervously wondering if that era is coming to an end. [Continue reading…]

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Top campaign officials knew of Trump adviser’s outreach to Russia

The Washington Post reports: Several weeks after Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination, his national campaign co-chairman urged a foreign policy adviser to meet with Russian officials to foster ties with that country’s government.

“Make the trip, if it is feasible,” Sam Clovis wrote in an August email to George Papadopoulos.

The email, included in court papers unsealed Monday, shows how an otherwise low-profile adviser has become a focus of the federal probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Papadopoulos was in contact with several senior Trump campaign aides about his efforts to broker a relationship between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the court papers show. In addition to Clovis, who now serves as senior White House adviser to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Papadopoulos wrote to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the newly released documents show. [Continue reading…]

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Trump campaign got early word Russia had Democrats’ emails

The New York Times reports: The guilty plea of a 30-year-old campaign aide — so green that he listed Model United Nations in his qualifications — shifted the narrative on Monday of the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russia: Court documents revealed that Russian officials alerted the campaign, through an intermediary in April 2016, that they possessed thousands of Democratic emails and other “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

That was two months before the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was publicly revealed and the stolen emails began to appear online. The new court filings provided the first clear evidence that Trump campaign aides had early knowledge that Russia had stolen confidential documents on Mrs. Clinton and the committee, a tempting trove in a close presidential contest.

By the time of a crucial meeting in June of last year, when Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump campaign officials met with a Russian lawyer offering damaging information on Mrs. Clinton, some may have known for weeks that Russia had material likely obtained by illegal hacking, the new documents suggested. The disclosures added to the evidence pointing to attempts at collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but they appeared to fall short of proof that they conspired in the hacking or other illegal acts. [Continue reading…]

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The party of ‘law and order’ has a disregard for law and order

Eli Lake writes: the Washington Post reported last week that a Clinton campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, paid the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. Some of that information came from Russian officials speaking to a former British spy, Christopher Steele.

So, Trump supporters would seem justified in asking, why is it permissible for Russians to help Democrats and not permissible for Russians to help Republicans?

There are two answers here. The first is obvious. The Russians tried to sow chaos in the election by trolling both the left and the right on social media with fake news. But when Russian hackers distributed stolen emails on the internet, they came from only one party: the Democrats. If Mueller finds evidence that this was coordinated with Trump or his associates, it would be like finding out G. Gordon Liddy subcontracted the Watergate burglary to the KGB.

The other answer is more subtle. Adav Noti, who served as a Federal Election Commission lawyer between 2007 and 2017, told me that all of this goes back to the ban on contributions and donations from foreign governments or foreign nationals in federal elections. The law has been on the books since the 1970s, and he said it applies to promises of deleted emails and other kinds of opposition research.

“There is a real meaningful distinction,” said Noti, who is now senior director of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan group that monitors election law. “The Clinton campaign, based on what has been reported, paid for opposition research, which included paying people to dig up dirt in foreign countries.” Unsavory? Perhaps. But not illegal.

Compare that to what we know about George Papadopoulos, a low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser, who has pled guilty to lying to the FBI. The plea agreement, released Monday by Mueller, says Papadopoulos emailed a Russian professor and another Russian contact who promised to turn over Clinton’s emails free of charge.

Or consider the meeting in the summer of 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian nationals who reportedly offered to hand over dirt on Clinton. Noti said that if the Trump officials solicited the information, “the act itself was unlawful.”

Noti cannot be dismissed as a partisan. Last week, his law center filed a formal complaint with the FEC against the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee for filing misleading federal reports that hid the contract with Fusion GPS. [Continue reading…]

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Podesta Group, Mercury said to be companies ‘A’ and ‘B’ in indictment

NBC News reports: The lobbying firms the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs are the unnamed companies in the grand jury indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, according to three sources with knowledge of the investigation.

The indictment, unsealed Monday, refers to “Company A” and “Company B” as the firms Manafort and Gates solicited in 2012 to lobby on behalf of the Ukranian government. Company A is Mercury Public Affairs and Company B is the Podesta Group, the sources said.

The revelation of the companies’ identities points to more details about the players involved in the high-stakes venture run by Manafort and Gates to push the interest of a pro-Russia Ukranian political party inside the United States. It also provides a glimpse into the material special counsel Robert Mueller has corroborated on both companies and the potential legal repercussions both groups could face. [Continue reading…]

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