‘This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.' - A Yellow Wall Nightmare

[Athos_131]

The hard lesson of the Donald Trump Jr. subpoena for the GOP

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared “case closed” on President Trump and the Russia investigation. On Wednesday, we learned that one of his powerful Senate GOP colleagues disagrees.

As Axios first reported, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. in recent weeks. In doing so, Burr injected a rather unhelpful subplot into an investigation on which his fellow Republicans are trying to turn the page. While it’s easy to dismiss House Democrats’ nascent subpoena battles with the White House as partisan politics, the fact that a Republican chairman isn’t finished either makes it much more difficult to argue that it’s time to move on.

We don’t know what specifically Burr is interested in hearing from Trump Jr. — just that it pertains to contacts with Russians. Trump Jr. has told Congress (including Burr’s committee in previous testimony) that he didn’t inform President Trump of his meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. But the Mueller report shows Michael Cohen has called this into question; Democrats have suggested Trump Jr. might have committed perjury. Burr suggested in an interview with The Washington Post this week that this isn’t his focus.

But whatever the underlying issues, the use of a subpoena ratchets this up. It suggests Trump Jr. is resisting a second date, but Burr is insisting. (And judging by the Trump Jr. team’s anonymous attacks on Burr and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s complaints, this is a source of real tension.)

Burr’s move also reinforces a long-standing pattern among Senate Republicans: When they have the power and latitude to run afoul of Trump, they often do — even as their less-potent colleagues have been corralled by Trump and his base.

Burr is the chairman of a committee that prides itself on bipartisanship, and his actions haven’t always toed the party line. He has also said he won’t seek reelection when he’s up in 2022, meaning he need not mind the base quite so much. (His North Carolina colleague, Sen. Thom Tillis (R), by contrast, recently flip-flopped on his past opposition to Trump’s border wall national emergency amid GOP pushback. Tillis faces reelection in 2020.)

The majority of Trump’s most vocal Republican critics in the Senate have chosen to forgo reelection: Jeff Flake, of Arizona, offered his most direct Trump criticisms after announcing he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2018. Tennessee’s Bob Corker was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he began airing complaints about Trump and the White House. Corker later tempered his criticisms, but also opted not to seek reelection. And John McCain traded on his stature as the senior senator from Arizona and the party’s 2008 presidential nominee to offer an occasional check on Trump before his death last year.

We see this to a lesser extent with some current top-ranking Senate Republicans. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) is currently pressuring Trump to relax his trade war and even presented him with an ultimatum. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) is clashing with Mulvaney over a disaster aid bill. McConnell has even allowed some significant votes rebuking the Trump administration on Saudi Arabia and the president’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border.

None of these has been a knock-down-drag-out fight between Trump and his own party, but the fact that these situations regularly boil over reinforces the very real concerns within the Senate GOP about how Trump has conducted himself as president. The ones who have the actual power to assert themselves and/or aren’t so terrified of their base have stepped forward on some major issues.

The others, not so much. But it suggests they might, too, if they didn’t feel so powerless and weren’t terrified of the kind of blowback Tillis, Flake, Corker and McCain have received. We may never know the real level of concern that exists within the highest levels of the GOP, but the fact that those who can speak out often do suggests there’s much more beneath the surface.

Burr’s move may be one of the most significant to date. And he’s apparently in for some real pushback from a party base that has largely been convinced the Russia investigation was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” from Day One. We’ll see how he responds to the pressure.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

How the Mueller report revelations are complicating the lives of Richard Burr and other GOP senators

A place you don’t want to be in Washington is in the pages of Mueller report. Aside from the obvious subjects of the special counsel’s report, there are a number of Senate Republicans who don’t come off looking so good.

And this week, allegations in the report that Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) fed the White House information about secret investigations is adding fuel to his critics as he tries to finish his own investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Burr is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating Russian interference alongside special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. This week, Burr’s committee subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. to force the president’s son to come back to testify to the committee. This show of force from a Republican-led committee was entirely dissonant with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) declaration days earlier that Trump and Russia was “case closed.”

Before the Mueller report, Burr’s subpoena might have seemed like a bipartisan move to seek the facts. But the subpoena is seen in a different light now that we know Mueller thinks Burr fed the White House information about the Russia probe.

According to Mueller, Burr got a briefing by the then-FBI director, James B. Comey, in early 2017 — before Mueller was on the job — about whom the FBI was investigating in its Russia-Trump probe.

Mueller cites notes from a top White House aide that Burr told White House officials there were four to five “targets” of the investigation and outlined who they were. This was right around the time Trump was documented by a White House aide as being “in panic/chaos” about the Russia investigation, and aides appeared pressured to get him information. A spokeswoman for Burr told The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian that the senator doesn’t remember this conversation taking place.

UPDATE: In an interview this week with Demirjian, Burr seemed to remember the conversation. But he said he was referencing people who were of interest to his committee’s investigations. He has shied away from most White House contact since that meeting in 2017 to avoid more appearances of conflict of interest.

When the Mueller report was released, Burr’s credibility took a hit within his committee, which had avoided most of the partisan fighting that sent a parallel House investigation up in flames. “Given evidence from the Mueller report, the committee must take steps to ensure its investigations do not leak to the executive branch,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said when the Mueller report was released.

Is Burr trying to make amends by agreeing to do something that would upset the president? Burr’s conservative critics, including some Republicans senators, have started asking, along with legal and national security experts like Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel now at New York University.

(It’s also worth noting that Burr is not running for reelection in three years, so he has more freedom than the average Republican senator to confront Trump. Other Democrats on the committee told Demirjian they’re okay letting bygones be bygones for the sake of the investigation and that to date and that they trust Burr’s leadership. )

Burr isn’t the only Republican senator who is suddenly seen differently because of the Mueller report’s revelations.

Mueller spends several pages on how a then-aide for Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) was trying to find the emails that Hillary Clinton scrubbed from her private server — you know, the ones candidate Donald Trump asked Russians to find. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, started asking around for people to try to find them. That’s when he came upon Barbara Leeden, a Grassley aide who had already gone on an operation of her own to search for them, according to the Mueller report.

Mueller writes that Ledeen began her efforts to obtain the Clinton emails before Flynn’s request, as early as December 2015. She claimed she found thousands of emails from the “dark web,” though they never materialized.

After the Mueller report came out, Grassley played down her involvement in his office, according to the Sioux City Journal: “We found out about it late in 2016, and as far as I know she was working on her own time,” Grassley said. “She was a part-time employee working with our staff of people that do nominations.”

Then there’s Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.). He is not in the Mueller report. But his election is wrapped up in it. Scott successfully unseated Democratic senator Bill Nelson in 2018. During that closely fought campaign, Nelson at the time warned that he had classified information that Russians might have hacked into Florida’s election system. As The Washington Post’s Fact Checker pointed out at the time, Nelson kept repeating this claim without evidence, as federal election officials were denying Russians hacked Florida.

But the Mueller report said the FBI believed Russians successfully “gain[ed] access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”

There is no evidence that Russian hackers changed any votes, but Nelson’s backers at the liberal Daily Kos blog point out that Nelson lost by 0.1 percent. In an election as close as that, there are always going to be questions about what tipped it to the winner, and allegations about Russian hacking is like rocket fuel.

And, finally, there is McConnell. The Senate majority leader had been insistent throughout Mueller’s investigation that there was no need to pass a bill protecting Mueller from being fired. “This is a piece of legislation that’s not necessary, in my judgment,” McConnell said, even after the New York Times reported Trump tried to get his aides to fire Mueller and then lie about it. But McConnell refused to bring up a bill supported by Republican senators, offering vague assurances from the White House that Mueller’s job was safe.

It turns out the very opposite was true. According to testimony from Trump’s former White House counsel, Donald McGahn, Trump twice spoke to McGahn about “knocking out Mueller,” which he took as an order to get Mueller fired.

McConnell took a risk, I wrote last year, by not protecting Mueller even as it seemed clear Trump desperately wanted to fire the special counsel. Technically, the risk paid off. But, thanks to the Mueller report, we know now just how risky this was.

The Mueller report is complicating the lives of all these senators.

Maybe next time they shouldn't help cover up criminal conduct.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

‘There was no attempted coup’: FBI’s former top lawyer defends Russia probe

Former top FBI lawyer James Baker offered a robust defense Friday of the bureau’s investigation into President Trump and his 2016 campaign, taking aim at Trump’s allegation that the inquiry was tantamount to a coup and describing how he sought to ensure agents’ work was on solid legal footing.

“There was no attempted coup,” Baker said bluntly. “There was no way in hell that I was going to allow some coup or coup attempt to take place on my watch.”

The comments, which came at a taping of the Lawfare podcast in front of a live audience at the Brookings Institution, were Baker’s first public remarks on the investigation that would eventually be taken over by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Baker had addressed questions about the probe previously only in private sessions with congressional committees, though transcripts of those comments were later released.

Baker, who was interviewed by Lawfare editor in chief Ben Wittes, said he was motivated to talk because he “just became sick of all the BS that is said about the origins of the investigation,” and he wanted to “reassure the American people that it was done for lawful, legitimate reason.”

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating the handling of various aspects of the Russia case, and Attorney General William P. Barr has said he will conduct a separate review. Barr recently alleged that government “spying” occurred on the Trump campaign, and while he has insisted he did not mean to imply wrongdoing, critics note that his language mirrors the president’s attacks on the bureau and its investigation. Baker was the FBI’s general counsel when the Russia probe was initiated and when Mueller took over. He was reassigned from the top legal post in December 2017 after he got caught up in an FBI leak probe, and he confirmed Friday the case is ongoing.

He said he talked with investigators for “many hours,” though those conversations happened a year and a half ago.

“I’m confident,” he said, “that I did nothing wrong.”

Friday’s interview was wide-ranging, focusing on Baker’s response to criticism the bureau has faced in recent months, as well as specific steps it took in investigating Trump. At times, it was also personal. Baker described how it was “extremely unnerving and weird” to be attacked by Trump on Twitter, and said that, after he left the FBI in 2018 and began searching for a job at a law firm or corporation, the tweets had a real impact.

A “couple” potential employers, Baker said, told him, “Jim, we like you. We’d be very interested in having you. You’re too controversial.” He said he ultimately got a job at the R Street Institute, a think tank.

Wittes and Baker also discussed the threat from Russia, irrespective of Trump or his campaign. Baker said the Kremlin is more interested in causing havoc in the United States than in helping any particular person and that the investigation of Russia’s activities has no end date.

“You shouldn’t assume they’re going to support Donald Trump the next time,” Baker said.

Baker said the investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began with a tip that was impossible to ignore. In summer 2016, he said, Australian officials relayed that George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, had boasted of having “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent, in the form of “thousands of emails.” Baker said that while the bureau is constantly investigating Russian activities in the United States, it had not — at least to his knowledge — been examining any Trump campaign advisers before that tip about Papadopoulos.

“That was the nugget of information that got everything going,” he said, adding later, “It would have been a dereliction of our duty not to investigate this information.”

Other top-level bureau officials from the time, including former director James B. Comey and former deputy director Andrew McCabe, have offered a similar account of events. As they have, Baker insisted the initial investigation was “not predicated” in any way on the controversial dossier — a collection of intelligence reports from a former British agent that the Hillary Clinton campaign hired through an opposition research firm to investigate Trump.

Conservatives have asserted that the dossier, which included a number of unconfirmed and, in some cases, salacious allegations about the president, infected the bureau’s work with politics and was used inappropriately to advance the investigation, especially when it was cited in applications to surreptitiously monitor Carter Page, another former Trump campaign adviser.

People familiar with the matter have said the inspector general is especially interested in those applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and whether the bureau adequately documented credibility questions about the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, when it cited his work as reason the bureau should be allowed to monitor Page. Barr has said the inspector general’s probe could be finished in May or June.

Baker insisted the bureau was aware of Steele’s motives but still had to check out his tip. He said he asked to review the application to monitor Page and was “comfortable” with it.

Baker similarly defended the FBI’s decisions in May 2017, when agents began investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice in the wake of Comey’s firing. That probe was ultimately taken over by Mueller, who declined to say whether he believed Trump had obstructed justice but detailed episodes that hundreds of former federal prosecutors have asserted probably would have resulted in charges for anyone but the president.

Baker said he viewed Mueller’s findings as showing “a pattern of corruption.”

“Even if it’s not criminal, it should be unacceptable in America today,” he said.

Baker said he is unsure what the inspector general will ultimately conclude about the bureau’s work, though he asserted, “I’m sure they will find things that I didn’t know about at the time.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Deep State strikes back: Former FBI leaders rebut questions about the Russia investigation

Attorney General William P. Barr’s March 24 letter describing the results of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election had an immediate effect on the President Trump’s defenders.

For months, as other media outlets worked in parallel with Mueller’s investigators to uncover links between Trump’s campaign staff and Russia, conservative legislators, commentators and media outlets built a volatile countervailing narrative, one in which the investigation was the work of rogue anti-Trump FBI officials who had been trying to take down Trump’s campaign even before he was the Republican Party’s nominee. Barr’s letter put a match to that kerosene, suggesting that the leading view of Trump’s relationship with Russia was necessarily wrong, and therefore, it seemed, that theirs was likely correct.

In the weeks since, even as we’ve learned that Barr’s presentation of Mueller’s findings was at best incomplete, this argument has taken hold. That Mueller didn’t prove that Trump and his team had illegally conspired with the Russian government meant, some claimed, that the investigation was biased and founded illegally. The new mantra became “investigate the investigators”: Probe the FBI and the team at the Justice Department that had the temerity to look at Trump in the first place.

This week, two prominent members of the FBI team that oversaw the launch of the probe into possible Russian efforts to infiltrate the Trump campaign discussed key elements of the probe in interviews. Former FBI director James B. Comey was interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday night, and former FBI general counsel James Baker spoke with the Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes on Friday. Between the two of them, they offered a number of arguments in favor of the launch of the investigation and defenses of how it progressed.

The start of the probe
According to a number of reports, the initial investigation into possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russia was launched on July 31, 2016. That was about a week after WikiLeaks began releasing information stolen from the Democratic National Committee — information that was already believed to have been stolen by Russian hackers. At some point after that, perhaps at about the same time that Trump held a news conference in which he asked Russia to release emails it may have stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, Australian authorities contacted the FBI. A Trump campaign adviser named George Papadopoulos had informed one of their diplomats over drinks in May that Russia had emails incriminating Clinton — information that Papadopoulos learned from a professor linked to Russia.

Comey and Baker offered similar rationales for launching an investigation at that point.

“We knew the Russians were engaged in a massive effort to attack our democracy, and then we learn from an allied ambassador that one of President-elect Trump’s — or candidate Trump’s advisers had been talking to a Russian representative long before that about dirt they had on Hillary Clinton that the Russians wanted to make available,” Comey said. “We all should have been fired if when we learned that we didn’t investigate to figure out, is there a connection between any Americans and this Russian effort?”

“It would have been a dereliction of our duty not to investigate this information,” Baker said, also pointing to the Papadopoulos revelation. “Again, given the fact that we’ve been focused on the Russians as threat actors for a long, long time. Given what was going on with respect to email dumps and hacking and the connection with those to the Russians in that summer, and then this thing drops. I think it would have been malpractice, dereliction of duty, whatever you want to say, but it would have been highly, highly inappropriate for us not to pursue it and pursue it aggressively.”

Detractors of the investigation argue that the probe into coordination began much earlier. Baker, asked if there were other similar investigations already underway, replied, “Not to my knowledge."

“This incident, the Papadopoulos information, is what triggered us going down this path,” he added. But he made a pointed distinction: They weren’t simply trying to take down Papadopoulos or Trump.

“The case was about Russia,” he said. “It was about Russia. Period. Full stop. That was the focus of the investigation. . . . We have groups of people that constantly, their job is to focus on nothing but Russia. As we’re staring at the Russian problem, to the extent that other people, third-country nationals, or Americans or anybody else comes across our radar screen and has a connection to the Russians in some way that looks nefarious to us and falls within the scope of the attorney general guidelines that authorize us to conduct investigations — if that comes across our radar screens, then we go and investigate that and run it down wherever it goes."

“Spying”
In testimony before Congress last month, Barr used a phrase that’s been used regularly by Trump and his supporters in articulating skepticism about the investigation. The government, he said, had “spied” on Trump’s campaign. (Trump reportedly began using the word “spy” to describe the investigation because it sounded more nefarious.)

“The FBI doesn’t spy to begin with,” Comey told Cooper. “The FBI investigates.”

So why did Barr use the phrase?

“The only explanation I can think of is he used it because the president uses it, which is really disappointing,” Comey said. “He knows better than that and knows that the FBI conducts electronic surveillance by going to federal judges and getting warrants based on probable cause.”

Baker was more guarded.

“I don’t know, the inspector general has been doing reviews for a long period of time,” he said, referring to an ongoing probe of the investigation. “Has he found something? I don’t know. I mean, I’m eager to find out what both the attorney general and the inspector general know. . . . I honestly don’t know what he’s referring to, if he has other information available to him that somehow hasn’t been made public yet, I’m eager to hear it, but I don’t understand it.”

The Steele dossier and the FISA warrant
One of the centerpieces of the theory that the investigation was predicated on bias and an effort to undermine Trump was a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant the government obtained against a Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page in October 2016. The application for that warrant, which was approved by the FISA Court after Page had left the campaign, included references to information contained in a dossier of reports written by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele. The dossier, The Washington Post reported last year, was funded by a law firm working for the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign.

That most of the information in the dossier hasn’t been corroborated and that some has been generally debunked has led to a theory that the FBI improperly used the information it contained as the primary rationale for getting a warrant on Page, while obscuring who paid for it.

“Look,” Baker told Wittes, “the investigation was not predicated on the basis of the information that Christopher Steele gave to us in form of the dossier. That is just not, was not my understanding at the time and has never been my understanding. So just to say that flat-out.”

He noted that Steele had worked with the FBI and that his information had been useful in the past.

“We’re not stupid, right? The FBI. We’re not stupid,” he said. “People come in to give us information all the time for all kinds of different angles. . . . People come to us for lots of different reasons, and so the FBI has an obligation to both take that seriously and be highly skeptical of the information as well. Because people come to us with agendas.”

So they “vet the hell out of the information that comes from these sources,” he said.

Comey noted how it worked in this case.

“The bureau began an effort after we got the Steele dossier to try and see how much of it we could replicate,” he said. “That work was ongoing when I was fired. Some of it was consistent with our other intelligence, the most important part. The Steele dossier said the Russians are coming for the American election. It’s a huge effort. It has multiple goals . . . And that was true."

“There were a lot of spokes off of that that we didn’t know whether they were true or false, and we were trying to figure out what we could make of it,” he added.

Baker, recognizing the sensitivity of the warrant, made a pointed effort to ensure that he felt comfortable with the application for it.

“My recollection, at the time, is that when I read it, I asked questions about it, but nevertheless, I was comfortable that the application that we were submitting to the FISA Court was consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States, and was consistent with the requirements of the FISA statute and lawful,” he said. “And it was. There was probable cause that was, in my mind, sufficient to pass muster and to pass review and that would be approved by the FISA Court."

Baker also noted that the disclosure about the funding source for the dossier — identified in a lengthy footnote — was sufficient.

“My assessment was that the information set forth in that gigantic footnote was consistent with the type of information and the way we would phrase things to basically, effectively be the red light on top of a document like, ‘Hey, court, pay attention to this, there are issues here. We think you need to know about these things,'” he said. “I thought this was sufficient to put the court on notice, and I don’t know what else to say.”

The “coup”
At times, Trump and his allies have elevated their allegations about misbehavior on the part of government officials to rise to the level of an attempted “coup.”

There are two incidents included in this allegation. The first is a series of exchanges between then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in which they at times disparage Trump and, at other points, trade messages that have been interpreted to be suggesting an attempt to undermine Trump. The other incident followed the firing of Comey two years ago, when then-Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed whether Trump could be removed from office under the provisions of the 25th Amendment.

Comey described the Strzok-Page interactions in stark terms.

“It was important that it be investigated and important that there be discipline that follows it, but, yeah, it made us all look bad,” he said. “Peter Strzok is a very talented agent. It’s a personal tragedy for him. But as much as I care about individuals, I care about the institution more. It hurt the institution.”

Baker, asked specifically about the word “coup,” didn’t mince words.

“There was no attempted coup,” he said. “There was no coup, there was no attempted coup, there was no conspiracy to commit a coup, there was nothing having to do with a coup.”

“There was no way in hell that I was going to allow some coup or coup attempt to take place on my watch or any conspiracy to do anything unlawful,” he added later. “No way.”

When Wittes and Baker began their conversation, Wittes pointed out that the two had been friends for some time and that both were wary of crossing lines of propriety in having a frank conversation about the events of 2016 and 2017.

Baker explained why he wanted to speak, despite those concerns.

“Honestly,” he said, “there was a point in time relatively recently where I just became sick of all the BS that is said about the origins of the investigation and I just got fed up with it.”

So he pushed back.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The big unanswered question at the core of Trump’s corruption

Why?

In recent days, the unanimous message that has blared forth from President Trump, his media propagandists and his Republican allies in Congress on the Mueller report is that it is now “case closed” on this whole story, as Mitch McConnell put it.

Countless Republicans have uttered the same talking point in every conceivable forum: No collusion, no obstruction. This is an entirely settled matter — total exoneration.

Yet at the same time, the full force of the administration’s legal resources — backed up by the Senate majority leader and virtually all congressional Republicans — has been marshaled against further fact-finding of any and all kinds, on just about every single remaining front where outstanding unknowns remain.

Why? Why is this massive effort to close down every last remaining line of inquiry necessary, if Trump has been totally exonerated?

Let’s survey the big picture:

The refusal to release the full Mueller materials. The New York Times reports an intriguing nugget on Trump’s internal deliberations over the fate of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s full, unredacted report:

He has asked some confidants why they should not just reveal everything in the 448-page Mueller report, the vast majority of which has already been made public.

The Times reports that according to people close to Trump, this impulse has “contradicted” his “lawyers’ advice.” That’s suggestive: Trump’s lawyers apparently think it will be bad for him if all those materials come out.

Judiciary Democrats argue that they are entitled to the unredacted report and underlying evidence to independently evaluate Mueller’s conclusions as a matter of basic oversight, and to determine whether other legislative steps are merited, such as fortifying election security, institutional reforms in response to the extensive presidential obstruction of justice that Mueller documented, or possibly impeachment.

This is inarguably within Congress’ authority. But why do Trump’s lawyers think the disclosure of the information itself would be bad for him, if this is a closed matter? Doesn’t that undermine Trump’s stated rationale for exerting executive privilege to block this release — that it’s about defending against a Democratic “abuse of power”?

It’s possible, of course, that Trump’s lawyers fear the materials will give Democrats more grounds for an impeachment inquiry. But if so, that also undercuts the idea that Trump has been totally exonerated, as well as undermining the oft-stated notion that Trump thinks impeachment would be good for him.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons for exerting executive privilege. But Trump is mobilizing to use it, while threatening to defy “all” subpoenas, in a blanket fashion that is highly corrupt, including to stop former White House counsel Donald McGahn, who witnessed extensive obstruction, from testifying, as well as to keep the full Mueller findings secret. Why is all this happening?

The blockade on counterintelligence materials. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is demanding that the Justice Department brief his Intelligence Committee on the findings of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, which isn’t documented in the Mueller report, unlike those from the criminal probe.

As Schiff told Rachel Maddow, such materials could shed more light on contacts between Trumpworld figures and Russians, and on additional findings that raise counterintelligence but not criminal concerns.

“We still don’t know what the counterintelligence findings are,” Schiff said, adding that the committee is legally entitled to that information, and that the Justice Department has ignored his requests for it.

Ryan Goodman notes that such information might further illuminate collusion-like behavior that didn’t rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, or reasons for believing that Americans were witting or unwitting Russian assets or were subject to Russian leverage.

Why hasn’t this information been forthcoming? Who is blocking it? Schiff thinks Attorney General William P. Barr and the White House are. All this merits further journalistic scrutiny. And why the blockade, if Mueller found “no collusion” and proved Trump was right all along about the Russian “hoax"?

The subpoena of Donald Trump Jr. The Senate Intelligence Committee — which is chaired by Republican Richard Burr — has subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. for another appearance. Senators may want to determine whether he previously misled Congress about who knew of the infamous Trump Tower meeting to get dirt from Russia on Hillary Clinton, and whether he may have told Trump about it.

Incredibly, this has resulted in Republicans attacking a fellow Republican member of Congress (Burr), which is producing mind-boggling absurdities. Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), for instance, first said that the subpoena “smacks of politics,” and then buffoonishly clarified that he isn’t accusing Burr in particular of playing politics.

In the background is the question of why Republicans are criticizing one of their own for exercising basic oversight responsibilities, all to defend Trump. Why is this necessary, if the Mueller findings prove “no collusion” and that the Trump Tower meeting was a big nothingburger?

Much of the ongoing discussion of the escalating battles between the administration and congressional Democrats over their oversight efforts strays into political debates — over, say, whether Trump is cleverly trying to bait Democrats into impeaching him.

Less discussed is the bigger question of why Trumpworld has embarked on this maximal resistance strategy in the first place. This perceived imperative has led to a posture that is saturated with ludicrous and disingenuous rationales for rebuffing oversight, and comically ridiculous political contortions from Republicans who are all in on the strategy.

The sum total of all the absurdity here itself underscores the original point. Why go to such enormous lengths to choke off further inquiry in a matter that has been conclusively settled in Trump’s favor?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

#Resist

[Athos_131]

McGahn refused request by White House to say Trump did not obstruct justice after Mueller report’s release

President Trump sought to have former White House counsel Donald McGahn issue a public statement last month that he did not believe the president had engaged in criminal conduct when he sought to exert control over the Russia investigation — a request McGahn declined, according to people familiar with the episode.

McGahn had told the special counsel’s office that he did not think Trump’s actions rose to the level of obstruction of justice, two people familiar with his interviews said.

But Mueller’s report concluded that there was substantial evidence the president had engaged in obstruction of justice when he pushed McGahn to help oust special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. McGahn’s view was not disclosed in the report.

As Trump’s attorneys prepared for the public release of Mueller’s report last month, the White House sought for McGahn to issue a statement making public what he had told Mueller’s team, according to people familiar with the discussions, who, like others commenting for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Emmet Flood, a White House lawyer handling the response to the Mueller investigation, contacted McGahn lawyer William Burck on Trump’s behalf, asking him to consider a statement when the report was released, they said.

But Burck declined on McGahn’s behalf, the people said, because Attorney General William P. Barr had already concluded there was insufficient evidence to accuse the president of criminal obstruction. Burck also concluded that there was no reason for McGahn as a witness to weigh in.

In a statement Friday night, Burck declined to elaborate on his discussions with Flood but said the request from the White House was not improper.

“We did not perceive it as any kind of threat or something sinister,” Burck said. “It was a request, professionally and cordially made.”

White House officials declined to comment.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the request to McGahn.

McGahn’s refusal to make a public statement appeared to annoy the president and some of his aides, who believed McGahn was being unnecessarily uncooperative, the people said.

After the report’s release, Trump attacked McGahn on Twitter, and Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani began raising questions about McGahn’s credibility and version of events. He told The Washington Post that McGahn would have left the White House if he thought Trump had engaged in a crime.

In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Giuliani said McGahn was “wrong” about what Trump asked him and “hopelessly confused.”

Amid Giuliani’s public assault on McGahn, Burck contacted the White House to complain that such claims were unwise, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

The public fight was playing out at the same time that the House Judiciary Committee was subpoenaing McGahn for his records and testimony and threatening to hold him in contempt if he did not comply.

Senior White House officials said they believe Trump will assert executive privilege to block the former White House counsel from testifying on Capitol Hill.

Mueller did not accuse Trump of a crime in his final report, saying he could not charge a sitting president and chose instead to lay out the evidence he had gathered. In several cases, the special counsel wrote, there was substantial evidence that the president sought to obstruct the probe, including in his interactions with McGahn.

In June 2017, McGahn told investigators, Trump called him twice at home, pressuring him to call Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and urge him to remove Mueller because of conflicts of interest. McGahn prepared to resign at one point rather than carry out Trump’s instructions.

In February 2018, Trump pressured McGahn to deny a news report that the president had pressured him to help oust Mueller. Trump said he never said the word “fire,” which McGahn agreed was true, but McGahn said he strongly believed the president’s intentions and actions indicated he wanted Mueller removed.

I'd have to imagine if McGahn wants to be in any reputable law firm after this shitshow he'll be testifying.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Former defense secretary Gates says it’s not ‘case closed’ on Russian interference

Former defense secretary Robert Gates on Sunday pushed back against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s call for the country to move on from Robert S. Mueller III’s report, arguing that Russian interference in U.S. elections remains an urgent issue.

McConnell (R-Ky.) last week declared “case closed” on Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. But in a wide-ranging interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Gates said the United States has “not reacted nearly strongly enough” to Russia’s “blatant interference in 2016.”

“The piece of the Mueller report about Russian interference is not ‘case closed,’” said Gates, a Republican who was defense secretary under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “And, frankly, I think elected officials who depend on honest elections to get elected ought to place as a very high priority measures to protect the American electoral system against interference by foreigners.”

In a phone call with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin earlier this month, Trump discussed the end of the Mueller investigation but did not raise concerns about the possibility of Russian interference in the 2020 campaign.

Gates said Sunday that was “a mistake.”

“I think he should’ve said, ‘We’ve had this discussion, the evidence is in and don’t ever do this again or there will be consequences for Russia,’ ” he told host Margaret Brennan. “I think he very much should have raised it with him.”

Gates’s comments come on the same day that Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging him to press Putin on the issue during their scheduled meeting this week in Sochi, Russia.

“During your meeting with Vladimir Putin, it is critical that you warn him that any action to interfere in our elections will be met with an immediate and robust response,” Schumer said in the letter. “President Trump’s approach to dealing with President Putin, especially on this vital issue, must change. I urge you to make absolutely clear to President Putin that interference in U.S. elections will not be tolerated.”

Trump has repeatedly given mixed messages on U.S. policy toward Russia, including during a Fox Business Network interview this month in which he suggested that it was a “rumor” that Russia had persuaded embattled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro not to flee the country — contradicting Pompeo’s statement on the matter.

Gates, who is chancellor of the College of William & Mary, speculated that Trump may be hesitant to confront Russia because of a “peculiar relationship with Putin” or because he “feels like any acknowledgment of Russian involvement in the 2016 elections somehow delegitimizes his being elected president.”

“I don’t know what the mix of motives are,” Gates said. “But the interesting thing is everybody around the president actually has a much more realistic view of the Russians, and that includes up on the Hill.”

He argued that in addition to sanctions, the Trump administration should consider “using some of our own capabilities to go back into Russia and, let’s say, inform the Russian people of the magnitude of corruption of Putin.”

“I think we can create more problems for him — we have the capabilities to do that,” Gates said.

Gates also criticized Trump’s handling of relations with Tehran, arguing that the president had erred in scrapping the Iran nuclear deal “in part because it ended up isolating us as well as the Iranians.”

“I believe the original agreement had some very deep flaws,” Gates said. “But once it was signed, I think it was a mistake to walk away from it. We should have then used various other pressures to address these other issues.”

Trump declared last week that former secretary of state John F. Kerry “should be prosecuted” for meeting with Iranian officials after leaving office in 2017. Gates dismissed that possibility on Sunday, telling Brennan, “Yeah, I mean this is not going to happen.”

“American politicians and former leaders talk to other leaders all the time,” he said.

Gates did, however, say that it would be “a mistake in judgment” to try to negotiate with a foreign government over policy issues after leaving office.

“I think trying to hold a negotiation, if you will, with a foreign leader when you’re out of power is a mistake . . . There’s only one president at a time,” he said.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump takes aim at McGahn, says he ‘had a much better chance of being fired than Mueller’

President Trump on Saturday took a swipe at Donald McGahn, saying the former White House counsel “had a much better chance of being fired” than special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Trump’s remarks, made in an evening tweet, came after reports that McGahn had declined a request by the president last month to issue a public statement that he did not believe Trump had engaged in criminal conduct when he sought to exert control over the special counsel’s Russia investigation.

“I was NOT going to fire Bob Mueller, and did not fire Bob Mueller,” Trump said in the tweet. “In fact, he was allowed to finish his Report with unprecedented help from the Trump Administration. Actually, lawyer Don McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than Mueller. Never a big fan!”

McGahn had told the special counsel’s office that he did not think Trump’s actions rose to the level of obstruction of justice, two people familiar with his interviews told The Washington Post.

According to people familiar with the discussions, the White House contacted an attorney for McGahn requesting a statement making public what McGahn had told Mueller’s team.

But the lawyer declined on McGahn’s behalf, in part because Attorney General William P. Barr had already concluded that there was insufficient evidence to accuse Trump of criminal obstruction.

Donnie is getting very bad advice.

I approve.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

What the Mueller report reveals about the media

More than three weeks after the release of the report of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, there’s a lot of chatter about President Trump’s various obstructive acts; about how Attorney General William P. Barr skewed initial coverage with his misleading summary letter of March 24 and other antics; and about the possibility of impeachment.

No one, though, is talking about Footnote 1233 on page 169 of the report’s first volume, which contextualizes an important event of late December 2016: In retaliation for Russia’s interference in the presidential election, the Obama administration imposed new sanctions on Russia. The move by the outgoing president was a matter of great concern to the Trump transition team, and particularly to Michael Flynn, who would soon embark on a short tenure as Trump’s national security adviser.

The footnote chronicles the events of Dec. 29, 2016: “At 2:07 p.m., a Transition Team member texted Flynn a link to a New York Times article about the sanctions.”

The article in question may well have been this one, by New York Times reporter David E. Sanger: “Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking.” It details the expulsion of 35 “suspected Russian intelligence operatives” and the closure of two properties allegedly used for Russian intelligence purposes. The nitty-gritty of those moves mattered a great deal to Flynn, who handled Russia matters during the presidential transition. Just weeks into the Trump presidency, Flynn would be fired for how he lied to his peers regarding his discussions about the sanctions with Sergey Kislyak, who was the Russian ambassador at the time.

Good thing Flynn had the New York Times piece handy. Because when you’re about to lie about something, you’d better have your facts straight. In this case, the facts came from an organization routinely slandered by Flynn’s boss. “Trump calls us the 'Failing New York Times and ‘fake news,’ but the reality is that inside, they get very angry at us — but they take us very seriously,” says the Times’s Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller during an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog.

That our country’s leaders rely on U.S. news outlets while conspiring to discredit them is but one of the important media lessons stemming from the special counsel’s report. The hundreds of pages in the report furnish many, many others. Among them: Reporting on Russia’s interference during the 2016 election was strong, though clearly not as detailed and convincing as the document put together by a team of federal prosecutors; reporting on Mueller’s investigation itself as well as its emphases — the question of Russian collusion/conspiracy and obstruction of justice — was accurate in the main, with some very notable exceptions (those will be addressed in the second post); and President Trump — no surprise here — was routinely rattled by coverage of his administration, in large part because it was true.

At a time when the country is obsessed with the media, the Mueller report is the perfect document. Take footnote 562 of the report’s Vol. II: “CNN, for example, began running a chyron at 6:55 p.m. that stated: ‘WASH POST: MUELLER INVESTIGATING TRUMP FOR OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE.’"

Why would the Mueller report note a CNN chyron? Because Trump watches a lot of cable news, and the Mueller team was trying to capture his reactions to news events in the section on obstruction of justice (Vol. II) — where the intent behind the president’s various misdeeds is a critical legal consideration. The report makes this point explicit:

This section summarizes and cites various news stories not for the truth of the information contained in the stories, but rather to place candidate Trump’s response to those stories in context. Volume I of this report analyzes the underlying facts of several relevant events that were reported on by the media during the campaign.

Emphasis was added to highlight a moment of Muellerian officiousness: With one sweeping statement, the special counsel freed himself of responsibility for the factual integrity of more than 200 stories by outlets ranging from Fox News, to the New York Daily News, to the now-defunct Circa News. Very lawyerly.

Yet something interesting happens in the minutiae: The sources consulted by outlets such as The Post, the New York Times, CNN and others end up agreeing with the sources consulted by the Mueller team. One key example is this Times story from Jan. 25, 2018: “Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit.” The meat of the story: “President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel [Donald McGahn] threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.”

Not long after that story broke, Trump challenged it. “Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story,” he said while attending an economic conference in Davos, Switzerland. One section of the Mueller report said that "the president publicly disputed these accounts, and privately told McGahn that he had simply wanted McGahn to bring conflicts of interest to the Department of Justice’s attention.” Such denialism lives to the present day, in fact. In a Senate appearance on May 1, the attorney general tried to suggest that Trump didn’t have a firing in mind: “McGahn’s version [. . .] is that the instruction said ‘go to [Deputy Attorney General Rod J.] Rosenstein, raise the issue of conflict of interest, and Mueller has to go because of this issue of conflict of interest.’”

No way, says the Mueller report: “Substantial evidence, however, supports the conclusion that the President went further and in fact directed McGahn to call Rosenstein to have the Special Counsel removed.” In other words, the Times story was confirmed.

Another example stems from The Post’s report in June 2017 that the president himself was now under investigation for obstruction of justice. “This was the first public report that the President himself was under investigation by the Special Counsel’ s Office . . .” Again, confirmed.

Also confirmed or credited: Reporting by The Post and the Daily Beast about some strange goings-on in the Seychelles during the presidential transition involving “Trumpworld associate” and Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian fund manager; reporting by The Post about a change to the Republican Party platform regarding Ukraine; reporting by CNN on how U.S. intelligence chiefs had briefed Trump on the Steele dossier during the presidential transition; the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on an effort to track down Hillary Clinton’s missing emails; BuzzFeed’s investigation of the Trump Tower Moscow project; reporting by The Post and the New York Times on the lies told by Michael Flynn; an account by the Smoking Gun of the hacking of the Republican National Committee; a report in The Post about a German hacker with close ties to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange; reporting by the New York Times on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation; reporting by the New York Times on the extensive cooperation of McGahn with the Mueller investigation, as well as the centrality of Trump’s tweets to the obstruction inquiry; reporting by the New York Times and The Post on the Comey memos, and the president’s dictating of a misleading memo about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, not to mention the original scoop on that meeting.

The Post and the New York Times dominate the mentions in the Mueller report, accounting for about 100 of the 260-odd media citations. The bylines on the credited stories explain the ubiquity of these two outlets: They have strong staffing both at the White House and on the national security/federal law enforcement front, the very nexus of most of the scoops regarding the Trump-Mueller clash. Citations in the Mueller report, to be sure, are an approximate and by no means perfect stand-in for journalistic enterprise; they omit much good work and, in some cases, merely serve to detail what the media was talking about on a given day.

Whatever the implications, TV networks struggled for a foothold in the fine print. CNN scored 21 credits, for unspectacular items but also for significant exclusives such as the January 2017 blockbuster on how intelligence chiefs had briefed Trump on the Russian dossier. NBC News had a similar haul, one fattened by the much-discussed interview by “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt with President Trump in May 2017. Both CNN and NBC — with a team of 40 staffers in an investigative unit launched in 2017 — deployed substantial reporting teams to report the ins and outs of the investigation.

ABC News earned some scattered mentions. CBS News, with one citation, is eclipsed by the Kyiv Post, with two citations.

Fox News merits its own discussion (see below).

Why the disparity between newspapers and TV networks? Some thoughts: Newspapers place a premium on deeply reported stories, in part because they tend to impress Pulitzer juries. TV people have to spend a great deal of time on logistics — standing around for live shots, getting equipment into place, sitting for makeup and doing panel discussions all day long about something that happened that morning. Visuals rule. Take, for instance, CNN’s stunning footage of FBI agents pooling around the home of Roger Stone upon his arrest during these proceedings. That was an example of visual enterprise — one that fixated the news-consuming public, especially Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. It was not, however, the sort of work credited by the Mueller report.

“I think we’re increasingly in the same space, we’re certainly increasingly in the same goal of trying to uncover the next big thing in this ongoing story, but the nature of TV and the nature of a media organization like The Post tends to be different. . . . We have more resources to put out and they have more needs that come from just being a TV station, so that tends to adjust priorities a little bit,” says Steven Ginsberg, national editor of The Post.

Where’s Fox News?
With about $2.7 billion in operating revenue, Fox News is equipped to invest in investigative journalism, immersion journalism, breaking-news journalism — every sort of journalism.

But, apparently, there’s little demand for such material. The Mueller report credits not a single piece of investigative work among the 16 Fox News and Fox Business Network pieces cited in the report’s footnotes. Many of the hits are interviews conducted by the hosts of "Fox & Friends and by Sean Hannity, perhaps the country’s foremost cheerleader for Trump. Several others stem from interviews with Trump and then-incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus by Chris Wallace, the no-nonsense host of “Fox News Sunday,” during the presidential transition.

Pause the argument to praise Wallace, who makes news all the time because he asks good, precise questions and insists upon getting answers. “Chris Wallace does a better interview of Trump than the New York Times,” says Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist who runs EmptyWheel. And even Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” despite their stupendous efforts to propagandize for the president, can’t keep him from ad-libbing incriminating statements. Other high points for the most watched cable-news network include the steady and fact-heavy reports of chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, along with some noted work on Justice Department maneuvers.

Still: Interviews are what Fox News is bringing to the Mueller table. Rather than engage in investigative journalism, the network prefers to diminish its practice by others. “The Mueller report is probably the single most humiliating thing that has ever happened to the White House Press Corps in the history of this country,” said Carlson. “So how did reporters in Washington respond today when it finally came out? Well, they did what they do best. They celebrated themselves.”

That sentiment was by no means a conceptual scoop. Following the release of Barr’s letter delivering the top-line findings of the Mueller report — Barr claims it wasn’t a “summary” — Federalist co-founder Sean Davis wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story, from its birth during the presidential campaign to its final breath Sunday — and they never stopped congratulating themselves for it."

What did other conservative media contribute? For one, a lot of opinionating, like the stuff above. “I think it would be great to have a conservative media that holds this president to account on profligate spending, on ethics and America’s standing in the world. And I would love to see a conservative press that did that with reporting and not just with opinion,” says Noah Shachtman, editor in chief of the Daily Beast.

To judge from the footnotes, Mueller didn’t find much of value among the chin-stroking, right-wing archives. There’s a citation for a National Review opinion story, for example, as well as one for the Washington Examiner, and for Circa News, a now-defunct property of Sinclair Broadcast Group. “The conservative press, to the extent they did any reporting at all, was mostly focused on the pushback [against the investigation], mostly focused on Lisa Page and Peter Strzok,” says Shachtman, noting that holding high-level FBI officials to account is a “real story.”

Just how real? An upcoming investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, who has been assessing the propriety of investigative techniques in the Russia probe, should provide a verdict.

Perhaps Horowitz’s report will draw on the work of Chuck Ross, a Daily Caller reporter who took it upon himself to vet the Steele dossier and its origin story, among other Russia-Trump strands. In contrast to all the opinionators in his media niche, Ross mined sources and court documents to chip away at this carefully circumscribed beat. “There are lots of parts of investigation that you would have missed or gotten late if you hadn’t been reading Chuck Ross,” says Wheeler.

In line with Shachtman’s assessment, Ross’s investigative output skewed toward Trump’s exoneration, rather than Trump’s accountability. Asked about that judgment, Ross told the Erik Wemple Blog: “I would have been more than willing or happy to publish stories that added to the idea that there may have been collusion if I came across the information,” says Ross. As it happened, though, Ross found enough information challenging that premise to keep him “occupied."

Indeed: A year ago, Ross played a key role in the outing of FBI source Stefan Halper, whom the reporter described as a “foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.” Halper contacted Trump advisers during the 2016 campaign, a revelation that prompted chatter about the government’s alleged “spying” on the MAGA enterprise — and thus, eventually #Spygate. Washington Monthly wrote:

Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller has been the point man in the conservative media for exposing former Washington Monthly book reviewer Stefan Halper as a confidential FBI source. He has collected or received the information about Halper and then transformed it into a narrative form for right-wing audiences. Much of his information has been reported accurately, and he can take credit for breaking a story that is now significant enough that the president of the United States is calling it #SpyGate.

In January 2017, Ross highlighted the denial of Guccifer 2.0 that it was tied to Russian hacking of Democratic entities. The story contained a disclosure that the "hackers also provided exclusives of hacked documents to reporters, including to The Daily Caller.” After the Daily Beast in March 2018 reported that Guccifer 2.0 was, in fact, a Russian intelligence officer, critics pressed Ross for details, prompting this tweeted reply: “everybody. Guccifer 2.0 and his buddies Guccifer 3.0 and Guccifer 3.0s came to the office and sat in on the editorial meeting. we drank vodka and talked hacking, and [s---]. good times.”

Tim Graham, the executive editor of mainstream-media-tracking site NewsBusters, scoffed at the Erik Wemple Blog upon fielding the question of whether the conservative media could be expected to investigate Trump: “To what degree did Brian Williams hold Barack Obama accountable?” he asks.

If nothing else, the Mueller report makes plain that there was plenty of material for media outlets of all orientations — conservative, liberal, mainstream, whatever. Just sample the table of contents for each volume: Between the Russian hackers/bots; the numerous contacts between Trumpites and Russians; the meetings; Trump Tower Moscow; George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Paul Manafort; and the various obstructive acts that overlay all of the above, it’s a wonder that Mueller wrapped his investigation in 22 months.

Oh, and we left out the case of Peter Smith. In a famous appearance on July 27, 2016, then-candidate Trump expressed his hope that Russia would “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Hillary Clinton’s much-discussed archives. Following that appeal — which Sean Spicer later tried to pass off as a joke — Flynn contacted people in a quest to track down the correspondence. Among those contacted by Flynn was Smith, an investment banker involved in Republican politics. The Mueller report documents the lengths to which Smith went on this front: “He created a company [named KLS Research], raised tens of thousands of dollars, and recruited security experts and business associates. Smith made claims to others involved in the effort (and those from whom he sought funding) that he was in contact with hackers with ‘ties and affiliations to Russia’ who had access to the emails, and that his efforts were coordinated with the Trump Campaign.”

Well, guess what? According to the report: “Smith drafted multiple emails stating or intimating that he was in contact with Russian hackers. For example, in one such email, Smith claimed that, in August 2016, KLS Research had organized meetings with parties who had access to the deleted Clinton emails, including parties with ‘ties and affiliations to Russia.’ The investigation did not identify evidence that any such meetings occurred.”

So there’s a false claim of collusion — not from the media, but from a Republican operative. Shane Harris, then with the Wall Street Journal but now a Post reporter, nailed this story in June 2017.

Hindsight makes it easy to trash the journalistic frenzy to plumb collusion. Mueller and his investigators, after all, didn’t establish any conspiracy, leaving obstruction as the scandal to emerge from all this sleuthing. The end result, however, doesn’t vacate the righteousness of the quest. Editors and reporters, however, needn’t make this point, because it’s laid out in the Mueller report itself:

Finally, although the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several U.S. persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress. This Office has therefore charged some of those individuals with making false statements and obstructing justice.

That’s a sophisticated way of saying there was a lot of smoke in the collusion room. “Not only was there a lot of curious behavior, but on top of that, they lied about it over and over and over again. . . . There was no way we were going to sit back and not go after that story as hard as we could,” says New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt.]More than three weeks after the release of the report of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, there’s a lot of chatter about President Trump’s various obstructive acts; about how Attorney General William P. Barr skewed initial coverage with his misleading summary letter of March 24 and other antics; and about the possibility of impeachment.

No one, though, is talking about Footnote 1233 on page 169 of the report’s first volume, which contextualizes an important event of late December 2016: In retaliation for Russia’s interference in the presidential election, the Obama administration imposed new sanctions on Russia. The move by the outgoing president was a matter of great concern to the Trump transition team, and particularly to Michael Flynn, who would soon embark on a short tenure as Trump’s national security adviser.

The footnote chronicles the events of Dec. 29, 2016: “At 2:07 p.m., a Transition Team member texted Flynn a link to a New York Times article about the sanctions.”

The article in question may well have been this one, by New York Times reporter David E. Sanger: “Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking.” It details the expulsion of 35 “suspected Russian intelligence operatives” and the closure of two properties allegedly used for Russian intelligence purposes. The nitty-gritty of those moves mattered a great deal to Flynn, who handled Russia matters during the presidential transition. Just weeks into the Trump presidency, Flynn would be fired for how he lied to his peers regarding his discussions about the sanctions with Sergey Kislyak, who was the Russian ambassador at the time.

Good thing Flynn had the New York Times piece handy. Because when you’re about to lie about something, you’d better have your facts straight. In this case, the facts came from an organization routinely slandered by Flynn’s boss. “Trump calls us the 'Failing New York Times and ‘fake news,’ but the reality is that inside, they get very angry at us — but they take us very seriously,” says the Times’s Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller during an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog.

That our country’s leaders rely on U.S. news outlets while conspiring to discredit them is but one of the important media lessons stemming from the special counsel’s report. The hundreds of pages in the report furnish many, many others. Among them: Reporting on Russia’s interference during the 2016 election was strong, though clearly not as detailed and convincing as the document put together by a team of federal prosecutors; reporting on Mueller’s investigation itself as well as its emphases — the question of Russian collusion/conspiracy and obstruction of justice — was accurate in the main, with some very notable exceptions (those will be addressed in the second post); and President Trump — no surprise here — was routinely rattled by coverage of his administration, in large part because it was true.

At a time when the country is obsessed with the media, the Mueller report is the perfect document. Take footnote 562 of the report’s Vol. II: “CNN, for example, began running a chyron at 6:55 p.m. that stated: ‘WASH POST: MUELLER INVESTIGATING TRUMP FOR OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE.’"

Why would the Mueller report note a CNN chyron? Because Trump watches a lot of cable news, and the Mueller team was trying to capture his reactions to news events in the section on obstruction of justice (Vol. II) — where the intent behind the president’s various misdeeds is a critical legal consideration. The report makes this point explicit:

This section summarizes and cites various news stories not for the truth of the information contained in the stories, but rather to place candidate Trump’s response to those stories in context. Volume I of this report analyzes the underlying facts of several relevant events that were reported on by the media during the campaign.

Emphasis was added to highlight a moment of Muellerian officiousness: With one sweeping statement, the special counsel freed himself of responsibility for the factual integrity of more than 200 stories by outlets ranging from Fox News, to the New York Daily News, to the now-defunct Circa News. Very lawyerly.

Yet something interesting happens in the minutiae: The sources consulted by outlets such as The Post, the New York Times, CNN and others end up agreeing with the sources consulted by the Mueller team. One key example is this Times story from Jan. 25, 2018: “Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit.” The meat of the story: “President Trump ordered the firing last June of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, according to four people told of the matter, but ultimately backed down after the White House counsel [Donald McGahn] threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.”

Not long after that story broke, Trump challenged it. “Fake news, folks. Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story,” he said while attending an economic conference in Davos, Switzerland. One section of the Mueller report said that "the president publicly disputed these accounts, and privately told McGahn that he had simply wanted McGahn to bring conflicts of interest to the Department of Justice’s attention.” Such denialism lives to the present day, in fact. In a Senate appearance on May 1, the attorney general tried to suggest that Trump didn’t have a firing in mind: “McGahn’s version [. . .] is that the instruction said ‘go to [Deputy Attorney General Rod J.] Rosenstein, raise the issue of conflict of interest, and Mueller has to go because of this issue of conflict of interest.’”

No way, says the Mueller report: “Substantial evidence, however, supports the conclusion that the President went further and in fact directed McGahn to call Rosenstein to have the Special Counsel removed.” In other words, the Times story was confirmed.

Another example stems from The Post’s report in June 2017 that the president himself was now under investigation for obstruction of justice. “This was the first public report that the President himself was under investigation by the Special Counsel’ s Office . . .” Again, confirmed.

Also confirmed or credited: Reporting by The Post and the Daily Beast about some strange goings-on in the Seychelles during the presidential transition involving “Trumpworld associate” and Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian fund manager; reporting by The Post about a change to the Republican Party platform regarding Ukraine; reporting by CNN on how U.S. intelligence chiefs had briefed Trump on the Steele dossier during the presidential transition; the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on an effort to track down Hillary Clinton’s missing emails; BuzzFeed’s investigation of the Trump Tower Moscow project; reporting by The Post and the New York Times on the lies told by Michael Flynn; an account by the Smoking Gun of the hacking of the Republican National Committee; a report in The Post about a German hacker with close ties to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange; reporting by the New York Times on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation; reporting by the New York Times on the extensive cooperation of McGahn with the Mueller investigation, as well as the centrality of Trump’s tweets to the obstruction inquiry; reporting by the New York Times and The Post on the Comey memos, and the president’s dictating of a misleading memo about the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, not to mention the original scoop on that meeting.

The Post and the New York Times dominate the mentions in the Mueller report, accounting for about 100 of the 260-odd media citations. The bylines on the credited stories explain the ubiquity of these two outlets: They have strong staffing both at the White House and on the national security/federal law enforcement front, the very nexus of most of the scoops regarding the Trump-Mueller clash. Citations in the Mueller report, to be sure, are an approximate and by no means perfect stand-in for journalistic enterprise; they omit much good work and, in some cases, merely serve to detail what the media was talking about on a given day.

Whatever the implications, TV networks struggled for a foothold in the fine print. CNN scored 21 credits, for unspectacular items but also for significant exclusives such as the January 2017 blockbuster on how intelligence chiefs had briefed Trump on the Russian dossier. NBC News had a similar haul, one fattened by the much-discussed interview by “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt with President Trump in May 2017. Both CNN and NBC — with a team of 40 staffers in an investigative unit launched in 2017 — deployed substantial reporting teams to report the ins and outs of the investigation.

ABC News earned some scattered mentions. CBS News, with one citation, is eclipsed by the Kyiv Post, with two citations.

Fox News merits its own discussion (see below).

Why the disparity between newspapers and TV networks? Some thoughts: Newspapers place a premium on deeply reported stories, in part because they tend to impress Pulitzer juries. TV people have to spend a great deal of time on logistics — standing around for live shots, getting equipment into place, sitting for makeup and doing panel discussions all day long about something that happened that morning. Visuals rule. Take, for instance, CNN’s stunning footage of FBI agents pooling around the home of Roger Stone upon his arrest during these proceedings. That was an example of visual enterprise — one that fixated the news-consuming public, especially Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. It was not, however, the sort of work credited by the Mueller report.

“I think we’re increasingly in the same space, we’re certainly increasingly in the same goal of trying to uncover the next big thing in this ongoing story, but the nature of TV and the nature of a media organization like The Post tends to be different. . . . We have more resources to put out and they have more needs that come from just being a TV station, so that tends to adjust priorities a little bit,” says Steven Ginsberg, national editor of The Post.

Where’s Fox News?
With about $2.7 billion in operating revenue, Fox News is equipped to invest in investigative journalism, immersion journalism, breaking-news journalism — every sort of journalism.

But, apparently, there’s little demand for such material. The Mueller report credits not a single piece of investigative work among the 16 Fox News and Fox Business Network pieces cited in the report’s footnotes. Many of the hits are interviews conducted by the hosts of "Fox & Friends and by Sean Hannity, perhaps the country’s foremost cheerleader for Trump. Several others stem from interviews with Trump and then-incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus by Chris Wallace, the no-nonsense host of “Fox News Sunday,” during the presidential transition.

Pause the argument to praise Wallace, who makes news all the time because he asks good, precise questions and insists upon getting answers. “Chris Wallace does a better interview of Trump than the New York Times,” says Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist who runs EmptyWheel. And even Hannity and “Fox & Friends,” despite their stupendous efforts to propagandize for the president, can’t keep him from ad-libbing incriminating statements. Other high points for the most watched cable-news network include the steady and fact-heavy reports of chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, along with some noted work on Justice Department maneuvers.

Still: Interviews are what Fox News is bringing to the Mueller table. Rather than engage in investigative journalism, the network prefers to diminish its practice by others. “The Mueller report is probably the single most humiliating thing that has ever happened to the White House Press Corps in the history of this country,” said Carlson. “So how did reporters in Washington respond today when it finally came out? Well, they did what they do best. They celebrated themselves.”

That sentiment was by no means a conceptual scoop. Following the release of Barr’s letter delivering the top-line findings of the Mueller report — Barr claims it wasn’t a “summary” — Federalist co-founder Sean Davis wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story, from its birth during the presidential campaign to its final breath Sunday — and they never stopped congratulating themselves for it."

What did other conservative media contribute? For one, a lot of opinionating, like the stuff above. “I think it would be great to have a conservative media that holds this president to account on profligate spending, on ethics and America’s standing in the world. And I would love to see a conservative press that did that with reporting and not just with opinion,” says Noah Shachtman, editor in chief of the Daily Beast.

To judge from the footnotes, Mueller didn’t find much of value among the chin-stroking, right-wing archives. There’s a citation for a National Review opinion story, for example, as well as one for the Washington Examiner, and for Circa News, a now-defunct property of Sinclair Broadcast Group. “The conservative press, to the extent they did any reporting at all, was mostly focused on the pushback [against the investigation], mostly focused on Lisa Page and Peter Strzok,” says Shachtman, noting that holding high-level FBI officials to account is a “real story.”

Just how real? An upcoming investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, who has been assessing the propriety of investigative techniques in the Russia probe, should provide a verdict.

Perhaps Horowitz’s report will draw on the work of Chuck Ross, a Daily Caller reporter who took it upon himself to vet the Steele dossier and its origin story, among other Russia-Trump strands. In contrast to all the opinionators in his media niche, Ross mined sources and court documents to chip away at this carefully circumscribed beat. “There are lots of parts of investigation that you would have missed or gotten late if you hadn’t been reading Chuck Ross,” says Wheeler.

In line with Shachtman’s assessment, Ross’s investigative output skewed toward Trump’s exoneration, rather than Trump’s accountability. Asked about that judgment, Ross told the Erik Wemple Blog: “I would have been more than willing or happy to publish stories that added to the idea that there may have been collusion if I came across the information,” says Ross. As it happened, though, Ross found enough information challenging that premise to keep him “occupied."

Indeed: A year ago, Ross played a key role in the outing of FBI source Stefan Halper, whom the reporter described as a “foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.” Halper contacted Trump advisers during the 2016 campaign, a revelation that prompted chatter about the government’s alleged “spying” on the MAGA enterprise — and thus, eventually #Spygate. Washington Monthly wrote:

Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller has been the point man in the conservative media for exposing former Washington Monthly book reviewer Stefan Halper as a confidential FBI source. He has collected or received the information about Halper and then transformed it into a narrative form for right-wing audiences. Much of his information has been reported accurately, and he can take credit for breaking a story that is now significant enough that the president of the United States is calling it #SpyGate.

In January 2017, Ross highlighted the denial of Guccifer 2.0 that it was tied to Russian hacking of Democratic entities. The story contained a disclosure that the "hackers also provided exclusives of hacked documents to reporters, including to The Daily Caller.” After the Daily Beast in March 2018 reported that Guccifer 2.0 was, in fact, a Russian intelligence officer, critics pressed Ross for details, prompting this tweeted reply: “everybody. Guccifer 2.0 and his buddies Guccifer 3.0 and Guccifer 3.0s came to the office and sat in on the editorial meeting. we drank vodka and talked hacking, and [s---]. good times.”

Tim Graham, the executive editor of mainstream-media-tracking site NewsBusters, scoffed at the Erik Wemple Blog upon fielding the question of whether the conservative media could be expected to investigate Trump: “To what degree did Brian Williams hold Barack Obama accountable?” he asks.

If nothing else, the Mueller report makes plain that there was plenty of material for media outlets of all orientations — conservative, liberal, mainstream, whatever. Just sample the table of contents for each volume: Between the Russian hackers/bots; the numerous contacts between Trumpites and Russians; the meetings; Trump Tower Moscow; George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Paul Manafort; and the various obstructive acts that overlay all of the above, it’s a wonder that Mueller wrapped his investigation in 22 months.

Oh, and we left out the case of Peter Smith. In a famous appearance on July 27, 2016, then-candidate Trump expressed his hope that Russia would “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Hillary Clinton’s much-discussed archives. Following that appeal — which Sean Spicer later tried to pass off as a joke — Flynn contacted people in a quest to track down the correspondence. Among those contacted by Flynn was Smith, an investment banker involved in Republican politics. The Mueller report documents the lengths to which Smith went on this front: “He created a company [named KLS Research], raised tens of thousands of dollars, and recruited security experts and business associates. Smith made claims to others involved in the effort (and those from whom he sought funding) that he was in contact with hackers with ‘ties and affiliations to Russia’ who had access to the emails, and that his efforts were coordinated with the Trump Campaign.”

Well, guess what? According to the report: “Smith drafted multiple emails stating or intimating that he was in contact with Russian hackers. For example, in one such email, Smith claimed that, in August 2016, KLS Research had organized meetings with parties who had access to the deleted Clinton emails, including parties with ‘ties and affiliations to Russia.’ The investigation did not identify evidence that any such meetings occurred.”

So there’s a false claim of collusion — not from the media, but from a Republican operative. Shane Harris, then with the Wall Street Journal but now a Post reporter, nailed this story in June 2017.

Hindsight makes it easy to trash the journalistic frenzy to plumb collusion. Mueller and his investigators, after all, didn’t establish any conspiracy, leaving obstruction as the scandal to emerge from all this sleuthing. The end result, however, doesn’t vacate the righteousness of the quest. Editors and reporters, however, needn’t make this point, because it’s laid out in the Mueller report itself:

Finally, although the evidence of contacts between Campaign officials and Russia affiliated individuals may not have been sufficient to establish or sustain criminal charges, several U.S. persons connected to the Campaign made false statements about those contacts and took other steps to obstruct the Office’s investigation and those of Congress. This Office has therefore charged some of those individuals with making false statements and obstructing justice.

That’s a sophisticated way of saying there was a lot of smoke in the collusion room. “Not only was there a lot of curious behavior, but on top of that, they lied about it over and over and over again. . . . There was no way we were going to sit back and not go after that story as hard as we could,” says New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Donald Trump Jr. agrees to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee again

Donald Trump Jr. has reached a deal with the Senate Intelligence Committee to appear for a second closed-door interview in June, according to people familiar with the matter, ending a tense standoff between the president’s son and the panel’s Republican chairman.

Under the terms of the deal, Trump Jr. will testify for up to four hours on a limited number of topics. The committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), and a representative for its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), declined to confirm or comment on the deal. Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., also declined to comment.

The agreement quells a simmering crisis for the GOP, after several Republican senators openly urged Trump Jr. either not to comply with a subpoena issued by the committee — or invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if he appeared.

Trump Jr. has been a focus of several probes — including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation — over his involvement in a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who allegedly had promised incriminating information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Congressional Democrats think that in his previous turns on Capitol Hill, Trump Jr. may have lied to investigators about that meeting and whether he alerted his father that the meeting would take place.

The deal between Trump Jr. and the Senate Intelligence Committee comes as the House Intelligence Committee is threatening to subpoena four lawyers for President Trump, his children and his businesses to determine whether they or others directed Michael Cohen to lie to lawmakers about the president’s efforts to build a tower in Russia during his presidential campaign.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) reached out to the lawyers in March, shortly after Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, told lawmakers during congressional hearings that the president’s lawyers had helped edit his 2017 testimony, in which he said the president relinquished his plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow months earlier than he did.

Cohen also told members of the House Intelligence Committee that he had discussed the possibility of a pardon with representatives of the president, including his lawyer, Jay Sekulow, who denied the assertion at the time.

Sekulow is one of the four lawyers who now faces the threat of a subpoena after failing to produce documents and schedule interviews with the Intelligence panel before last Friday, according to a committee aide — a deadline Schiff imposed in a letter sent to the lawyers’ representatives earlier this month.

The other lawyers whose records and testimony are being pursued are Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner; Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr.; and Alan Garten, who represents the Trump Organization.

The quartet of counsels pushed back against the committee’s request in an April letter, in which their attorneys claimed, among other things, that the committee’s request is without legislative merit and that their actions would be covered by attorney-client privilege.

The Washington Post obtained a copy of the correspondence, the existence of which was first reported by the New York Times.

On Tuesday, Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Sekulow, released a statement on behalf of the group, accusing Schiff of fomenting a “truly needless dispute.”

“Instead of addressing important intelligence needs, the House Intelligence Committee appears to seek a truly needless dispute — this one with private attorneys — that would force them to violate privileges and ethical rules,” Strawbridge wrote. “As committed defense lawyers, we will respect the constitution and defend the attorney-client privilege — one of the oldest and most sacred privileges in the law.”

Schiff defended the inquiry Tuesday, arguing that materials the Intelligence Committee has collected, as well as Cohen’s testimony to the panel and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III “raise serious, unresolved concerns about the obstruction of our Committee’s investigation that we would be negligent not to pursue.”

“The Mueller Report revealed a widespread, coordinated effort by the President and his surrogates to obstruct the Special Counsel’s investigation,” Schiff continued in a statement. “We must determine how expansive the obstruction effort was, and whether others were involved beyond those who were indicted.”

The standoff threatens to drag the Trump family’s lawyers into potential court battles with Congress as their clients are facing the same possibility. Several of the Democrat-run House committees investigating the president are preparing to enforce subpoenas with contempt resolutions, which leaders have indicated they want to bundle together into a package of measures before sending it to the House floor.

The House Judiciary Committee has already voted to hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt, and threatened to do the same for former White House counsel Donald McGahn, if he does not comply with a subpoena to testify before the panel next Tuesday.

Schiff’s request seeks information about the contacts between Cohen, Trump, representatives of the Trump organization and any Russians related to the Trump Tower Moscow project — including details about its timeline and any plans to have Trump, then a presidential candidate, travel to Russia to help it along.

It also seeks details on any discussion about any pardon or “pardon-related concept” that was discussed for Cohen or other affiliates of the president who testified to the House Intelligence Committee, as well as the edits made to Cohen’s testimony.

Cohen is presently serving a three-year prison sentence for lying to lawmakers, as well as financial crimes.

“The mob takes the Fifth.  If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”

-Donald Trump

#Resist

[Athos_131]

What happened to the Trump counterintelligence investigation? House investigators don’t know.

A few weeks before he was fired by President Trump in May 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Intelligence Committee. During that testimony, he confirmed something that had already been reported.

“I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” he said, “and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

To a layperson, this issue may seem to be resolved. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III completed his work in March, after all, finding insufficient evidence to establish that Trump and his campaign coordinated with the interference effort undertaken by the Russian government.

But, in fact, it isn’t. Mueller’s investigation into possible coordination was an offshoot of a broader probe into how or where members of Trump’s team — the candidate included — might have been working to aid Russian interests.

Where that investigation stands now, though, is a mystery — even to congressional leaders. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) spoke with The Washington Post by phone Tuesday and explained how he and his colleagues have been stymied in their efforts to learn how and if the probe is moving forward. The interview has been edited for clarity.

The Post: What, as you understand it, is the current status of that investigation into the president?

Schiff: The short answer is: We don’t know. Just as a reminder, this all began as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether people around then-candidate Trump were acting as witting or unwitting agents of a foreign power. So it began as a counterintelligence investigation, not as a criminal investigation. Now obviously a criminal case — many criminal cases — were spun off of this but we don’t know what happened to the counterintelligence investigation that James Comey opened.

We would get briefed, predominantly at a Gang of Eight level, up until Comey was fired. And, after that point, while we continued to get quarterly — although often they missed the quarterly nature of it — counterintelligence briefings, they excluded the most important counterintelligence investigation then going on, that involving Donald Trump.

The Post: Is there any reason to believe that the counterintelligence investigation has been closed?

Schiff: You know, I have not been able to get clarity on that. We have been seeking to get it, to get an answer from the Justice Department, from the counterintelligence division at the FBI, and we don’t have clarity, which is concerning.

There is a reference in the Mueller report to counterintelligence FBI personnel who were embedded in Mueller’s team [Volume One, p. 13] which then reports back to headquarters, although those reports may have dealt with counterintelligence issues that the special counsel felt were beyond his scope. But we don’t know whether the Mueller team itself or others in the Mueller team or others outside the Mueller team continued the counterintelligence investigation after the criminal probe was opened or whether at some point it was closed.

The Post: NBC News reported that there was supposed to have been an update on this shortly after the Mueller report came out. That just didn’t happen?

Schiff: We have had a number of discussions now with the Department of Justice and the FBI, but on this point, we still have not gotten clarity, and that does concern us. There is a statutory obligation by the department to keep us currently and presently informed of significant counterintelligence matters, and it’s hard to imagine one more significant than this. So I’m confident we will get an answer, but they’ve yet to be forthcoming on that point.

The Post: As you noted, there is some overlap between what the special counsel was looking at and some elements of the original counterintelligence investigation. What do you see as the important distinctions? What are the things that really stand out from the counterintelligence probe that wouldn’t have been covered under what Mueller was actually looking at?

Schiff: Well, that’s a very good question and really at the heart of why we want to get a briefing and the counterintelligence materials and findings, because we don’t know. Now, certainly some of what Bob Muller wrote about in this report, a great deal of Volume One is counterintelligence information.

The fact that the president, while concealing it from the country, was seeking to make money in Russia, building a massive tower in Moscow and was seeking the Kremlin’s help and then misleading the country and ultimately, through Michael Cohen, the Congress is a counterintelligence nightmare of the first order. Because the Russians, of course, were on the other end of that transaction and knew that when the president was denying any business dealings he was lying. And, interestingly, when, the year after Michael Cohen’s testimony, it became known that he had lied to our committee and that the transaction had gone on much longer than he had said, and, in fact, they had reached out directly to [spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin] Dmitry Peskov for help from the Kremlin. Someone very close to Putin, Peskov issued a statement denying that they had ever followed up on the inquiry. And Peskov was lying. So here you have the prospect of the Kremlin issuing its own false statements to help cover up for the president of the United States.

And so those are quintessential counterintelligence issues. It may not be a crime for a candidate for a president to seek to make money from a hostile foreign power during an election and mislead the country about it. Maybe it should be, and given [Trump attorney] Rudy Giuliani’s aborted trip to Ukraine, they clearly haven’t learned the lesson from 2016. But the counterintelligence concerns go beyond mere violation of criminal law. They’re at one time not necessarily a criminal activity and at the same time potentially far more serious than criminal activity because you have the capacity to warp U.S. policy owing to some form of compromise.

The Post: There has been a subpoena that’s been issued. I saw your interview with Axios on Friday in which you suggested that you might use inherent contempt power to try to fine people who weren’t being responsive to subpoenas broadly. How confident do you feel that you will get a response to the subpoena? How confident do you feel that you will be able to be effective in, if you choose to use the inherent contempt power, how confident you feel that that will actually be an effective tool?

Schiff: Well, I certainly think the president and his lawyer [Attorney General] Bill Barr are being fully obstructive and have adopted a maximalist position of no documents, no way, no how.

But, you know, we are having negotiations over the counterintelligence information that we hope will nonetheless bear fruit. I think the FBI and the intelligence community understand their statutory obligations but they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. While they have a good relationship with our committee and continue to work with us on a whole range of issues, I think that the position the president and Bill Barr have taken makes it very difficult for them to produce the materials they know they’re obligated to. We’re making every effort to achieve compliance without having to litigate the matter. But if necessary, we will.

The Post: The natural follow-up question, particularly given not only your having used the word “obstructive” there but given the recent developments is: How confident do you feel that if there is an ongoing counterintelligence investigation that it will be protected, that it will actually be able to carry to fruition?

Schiff: I think all of us have deep concerns with the attorney general’s conduct and, now, opening some form of investigation of the president’s rivals. The whole adoption of the “Deep State coup” theory, the “spying on the campaign” theory, promulgated by the president through his Twitter account, that is now apparently the policy of the attorney general of the United States, who sees nothing wrong with opening up investigations of rivals that are requested by the president.

And if that’s the case then, yes, it certainly ought to concern us that an attorney general who believes that the president at any time could shut down the special counsel’s investigation because he deemed it unfair could also shut down any counterintelligence investigation for the same reason.

The Post: Do you plan on subpoenaing anyone for testimony in regards to the investigation?

Schiff: That very well may be necessary. We’re talking to a number of witnesses that we’d like to come before our committee. We certainly have every expectation that Bob Mueller will come and testify and we hope that we can organize that without necessity of using any subpoena. I think Bob Mueller’s probably more than willing to testify. I think he understands the importance of it. May or may not look forward to it. I can certainly understand it’s going to be an arduous experience under the best of circumstances, but I think he understands just how important it is for the country to hear directly from him, particularly when the attorney general has so badly misled the public about his report and its conclusions.

There is a lot more at stake here than oversight of the Russia investigation or even oversight of Donald Trump. If Donald Trump, through release obstructionist tactics, can thwart congressional oversight, it means that every president who follows him can do the same. And that will fundamentally alter the balance of power in a way that will make it far more difficult to ferret out corruption and malfeasance of any future president.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Flynn told Mueller people tied to Trump and Congress tried to obstruct probe

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn told investigators that people linked to the Trump administration and Congress reached out to him in an effort to interfere in the Russia probe, according to newly-unredacted court papers filed Thursday.

The communications could have "affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation," special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in the court filings.

Flynn even provided a voicemail recording of one such communication, the court papers say. "In some instances, the (special counsel's office) was unaware of the outreach until being alerted to it by the defendant," Mueller wrote.

No other details were provided in the filing, but the Mueller report noted that President Donald Trump's personal lawyer left a voicemail message for Flynn in late November 2017 that addressed the possibility of him cooperating with the government.

"t wouldn't surprise me if you've gone on to make a deal with ... the government," the attorney said in the voicemail message, according to Mueller.

f... there's information that implicates the President, then we've got a national security issue, . . . so, you know, . . . we need some kind of heads up. Um, just for the sake of protecting all our interests if we can .... [R]emember what we've always said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains."

In a separate court filing, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered federal prosecutors to file a transcript of the voicemail message, as well as transcripts of any other recordings of Flynn including his conversations with Russian officials.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports

WASHINGTON — A pair of White House officials helped provide Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Republican and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, with the intelligence reports that showed that President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies.

The revelation on Thursday that White House officials disclosed the reports, which Mr. Nunes then discussed with Mr. Trump, is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the presidential election.

It is the latest twist of a bizarre Washington drama that began after dark on March 21, when Mr. Nunes got a call from a person he has described only as a source. The call came as he was riding across town in an Uber car, and he quickly diverted to the White House. The next day, Mr. Nunes gave a hastily arranged news conference before going to brief Mr. Trump on what he had learned the night before from — as it turns out — White House officials.

The chain of events — and who helped provide the intelligence to Mr. Nunes — was detailed to The New York Times by four American officials.

Since disclosing the existence of the intelligence reports, Mr. Nunes has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe going to the committee with sensitive information. In his public comments, he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.

That does not appear to be the case. Several current American officials identified the White House officials as Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and was previously counsel to Mr. Nunes’s committee. Though neither has been accused of breaking any laws, they do appear to have sought to use intelligence to advance the political goals of the Trump administration.

Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, refused to confirm or deny at his daily briefing that Mr. Ellis and Mr. Cohen-Watnick were Mr. Nunes’s sources. The administration’s concern was the substance of the intelligence reports, not how they ended up in Mr. Nunes’s hands, Mr. Spicer said.

The “obsession with who talked to whom, and when, is not the answer,” Mr. Spicer said. “It should be the substance.”

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Jack Langer, a spokesman for Mr. Nunes, said in a statement, “As he’s stated many times, Chairman Nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his source’s identity, and he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources.”

Mr. Cohen-Watnick, 30, is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who served on the Trump transition team and was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser.

He was nearly pushed out of his job this month by Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who replaced Mr. Flynn as national security adviser, but survived after the intervention of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist.

Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he accepted an invitation on Thursday to review the same materials that Mr. Nunes had seen.

The officials who detailed the newly disclosed White House role said that this month, shortly after Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that he was wiretapped during the campaign on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.

There were conflicting accounts of what prompted Mr. Cohen-Watnick to dig into the intelligence. One official with direct knowledge of the events said Mr. Cohen-Watnick began combing through intelligence reports this month in an effort to find evidence that would justify Mr. Trump’s Twitter posts about wiretapping.

But another person who was briefed on the events said Mr. Cohen-Watnick came upon the information as he was reviewing how widely intelligence reports on intercepts were shared within the American spy agencies. He then alerted the N.S.C. general counsel, but the official said Mr. Cohen-Watnick was not the person who showed the reports to Mr. Nunes.

That person and a third official said it was then Mr. Ellis who allowed Mr. Nunes to view the material.

The intelligence reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle before his inauguration, officials said.

The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the intelligence and to avoid angering Mr. Cohen-Watnick and Mr. Ellis. Officials say Mr. Cohen-Watnick has been reviewing the reports from his fourth-floor office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where the National Security Council is based.

The officials’ description of the intelligence is in line with Mr. Nunes’s characterization of the material, which he said was not related to the Russia investigations when he first disclosed its existence.

According to Mr. Nunes, who served on the Trump transition team, he met his source on the grounds of the White House. He said he needed a secure location where people with security clearances could legally view classified information, though such facilities could also be found in the Capitol building and at other locations across Washington.

The next day, Mr. Nunes gave a news briefing at the Capitol and then returned to the White House to brief Mr. Trump on the information before telling other committee members about what he had reviewed. His actions have fueled criticism that the committee, under his leadership, is unable to conduct a serious, independent investigation.

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On Thursday, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he needed clarification on whether White House officials had pursued “a circuitous route” to feed Mr. Nunes the materials so he could then hand them to Mr. Trump.

“If that was designed to hide the origin of the materials, that raises profound questions about just what the White House is doing that need to be answered,” he said. He later said he accepted an invitation on Thursday to review the same materials that Mr. Nunes had seen.

Yet even before Thursday, the view among Democrats and even some Republicans was that Mr. Nunes was given access to the intelligence reports to divert attention from the investigations into Russian meddling, and to bolster Mr. Trump’s debunked claims of having been wiretapped.

On both counts, Mr. Nunes appears to have succeeded: The House inquiry into Russian meddling that he is leading has descended into a sideshow since he disclosed the information, and the administration has portrayed his information as vindicating the president’s wiretapping claims.

Yet Mr. Nunes has dismissed Democratic calls to step aside. Instead, he has canceled all committee hearings for now, stalling his own investigation, which opened last week with a hearing during which James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., publicly disclosed that the bureau’s investigation into Russian meddling included an examination of any evidence that Trump associates had colluded in the effort.

The chaotic situation prompted the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is running its own investigation, to bluntly state on Wednesday that their work had nothing to do with the House inquiry. And television news programs have been dominated by arguments about whether the incidental intelligence gathering of Mr. Trump and his associates was the real issue, or simply a distraction from the Russia investigations.

Mr. Nunes has acknowledged that the incidental intelligence gathering on Trump associates last year was not necessarily unlawful, and that it was not specifically directed at Mr. Trump or people close to him. American intelligence agencies typically monitor foreign officials of allied and hostile countries, and they routinely sweep up communications linked to Americans who may be taking part in the conversation or are being spoken about.

The real issue, Mr. Nunes has said, was that he could figure out the identities of Trump associates from reading reports about intercepted communications that were shared among Obama administration officials with top security clearances.

He said some Trump associates were also identified by name in the reports. Normally, intelligence agencies mask the identities of American citizens who are incidentally present in intercepted communications, though knowledgeable readers can often figure out the identities in context.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

When General Flynn has been made whole in every way, I will be partially satisfied;

Why would an innocent man plead guilty?

Judge orders public release of what Michael Flynn said in call to Russian ambassador

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that prosecutors make public a transcript of a phone call that former national security adviser Michael Flynn tried hard to hide with a lie: his conversation with a Russian ambassador in late 2016.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington ordered the government also to provide a public transcript of a November 2017 voice mail involving Flynn. In that sensitive call, President Trump’s attorney left a message for Flynn’s attorney reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn at a time when Flynn was considering cooperating with federal investigators.

The transcripts, which the judge ordered be posted on a court website by May 31, would reveal conversations at the center of two major avenues of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. So far they have been disclosed to the public only in fragments in court filings and the Mueller report.

Sullivan also ordered that still-redacted portions of the Mueller report that relate to Flynn be given to the court and made public.

Sullivan’s orders came very shortly after government prosecutors agreed to release some sealed records in Flynn’s case. The release was in response to a motion filed with the court earlier this year by The Washington Post, which argued that the public deserved to know more about Flynn’s role in key events and cooperation with investigators.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to one felony count of making a false statement to FBI investigators about his contact with the ambassador and awaits sentencing.

The purpose of the phone calls, and the motives of the callers, have been hotly debated.

In the December 2016 call, Flynn urged that the Kremlin not get too riled up about U.S. sanctions that President Barack Obama had just announced against Russia and to give Trump time to take office. That conversation, intercepted by U.S. intelligence, raised grave concerns about Russians’ secret and frequent contact with Trump allies and advisers during the campaign and before his inauguration.

In the second conversation, an attorney for Trump tried to learn whether Flynn had any problematic information about the president after Flynn’s attorney signaled his client might begin cooperating with Mueller’s investigators. The attorney was John Dowd, then a private attorney for the president, according to people familiar with the episode. The special counsel was then threatening to charge Flynn with lying to FBI agents about his call to the ambassador. Dowd’s voice mail was scrutinized as Mueller’s investigators probed whether the president engaged in obstruction of justice to try to thwart the probe, and whether he deployed his aides to assist him.

In one of the previously redacted filings released Thursday, prosecutors said Flynn described multiple episodes in which “he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation.”

In addition to the transcripts, it also is possible that the judge may release the audio recordings of the conversations. In his Thursday order, Sullivan directed that the government provide a copy of those recordings to him in his chambers, along with any other calls Flynn made to the Russians, so he can review them.

Dowd and the president’s current attorney, Jay Sekulow, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the White House.

Robert Kelner, the attorney for Flynn, could not be reached for comment Thursday night.

The newly unsealed portions of court records showed Flynn was a deep source of useful information to the special counsel’s team in 2017 and 2018, helping it probe the Trump campaign’s effort to gain stolen emails and the question of whether Trump sought to criminally interfere in the investigation bearing down on him.

The records confirm the questions that Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and former military intelligence officer, helped federal prosecutors answer after his guilty plea. Flynn admitted in 2017 that he tried to conceal the nature of his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and then began cooperating with Mueller’s team to try to reduce and possibly avoid a prison sentence.

Flynn also provided the special counsel with information about efforts by the Trump campaign and Trump allies to seek out stolen emails during the campaign after WikiLeaks began publishing internal Democratic correspondence in July 2016, the records show. He also provided evidence of “multiple efforts” by people connected to Trump that could have impacted his willingness to cooperate with the probe, useful information as Mueller explored whether the president obstructed justice.

At the same time, Flynn assisted federal prosecutors based in Alexandria, Va., who were preparing criminal charges against his former business partner, Bijan Kian, for working as an unregistered agent of Turkey. Kian has pleaded not guilty to the charges. He is expected to face trial in July, and Flynn is expected to be a critical witness for the government.

The new material echoes the Mueller report findings, but helps explain why prosecutors told Sullivan they had found Flynn’s cooperation valuable and recommended he receive little or no prison time.

Ultimately, Flynn opted to postpone his sentencing when Sullivan said he was distressed by Flynn’s conduct and said he was inclined to give him prison time if he hadn’t yet finished cooperating with the government.

The Mueller team analyzed the Dowd call to Kelner and other allies’ outreach to Flynn for possible obstruction of justice, but ultimately determined the evidence of Trump’s intent was “inconclusive.” Mueller’s team noted its inquiry was hampered because much of the conduct involved Trump’s legal team, and concerns about attorney-client privilege limited the special counsel’s investigation.

Mueller’s team noted in particular that, in November 2017 — after Flynn withdrew from his joint defense agreement with the president — Trump’s “personal counsel,” who was Dowd, left a voice mail for Kelner that urged him to give a “heads up” if they had anything that implicated the president. He added: “Remember what we’ve always said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn.” In a later call, Kelner repeated that he could not share information with Dowd, and Dowd grew indignant and said he believed the president would be very displeased, the report said.

Trump seemed particularly eager to convey his affection for Flynn after Flynn left the White House in the wake of reports about his calls with Kislyak. Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and the former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland told investigators Trump asked them to reach out to Flynn to check on him and tell him to stay strong, according to Mueller’s report.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

The Daily 202: Judge’s order to release Flynn transcripts illuminates an under-covered episode in the Mueller report

THE BIG IDEA: Lordy, there are tapes.

Responding last night to a motion filed by The Washington Post, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to make public the still-redacted portions of Bob Mueller’s report relating to Michael Flynn.

Sullivan also directed the government to publish the transcripts of two conversations by May 31: The first is from Flynn’s December 2016 phone call with Sergey Kislyak during which President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser urged the then-Russian ambassador to go easy in response to the sanctions that Barack Obama had just announced so that the incoming administration would have breathing room. Flynn later lied to FBI agents about this call, which had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence, a felony for which he has pleaded guilty and still awaits sentencing.

The second transcript might be more politically explosive: Trump’s then-private attorney John Dowd left a voice mail for Flynn’s lawyer Robert Kelner on Nov. 22, 2017, a few hours after being informed that the former general had withdrawn from a joint defense agreement. It was a clear sign that he was planning to cooperate with the special counsel. Dowd wanted to convey that Trump felt fondly about Kelner’s client, though he had forced him out of the White House earlier that year, and he also demanded to know whether Flynn was going to turn over “information that implicates the president.”

This voice mail was mentioned as part of one of the 10 episodes of potential obstruction of justice that Mueller explored in the second volume of his report, but it hasn’t drawn nearly as much public attention as the chapters involving former White House counsel Don McGahn. That could change if the public gets to hear the audio of Dowd’s message. Sullivan, the judge, directed the Justice Department yesterday to provide him with a DVD of the original recordings, along with any other calls Flynn made to the Russians, so he can consider whether to release them.

The Mueller report includes this excerpt of Dowd’s voice mail: “I understand your situation, but let me see if I can’t state it in starker terms. … It wouldn't surprise me if you've gone on to make a deal with ... the government. … If … there's information that implicates the president, then we've got a national security issue, … so, you know, … we need some kind of heads up. Um, just for the sake of protecting all our interests if we can. … Remember what we've always said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn, and that still remains .…” (These ellipses and this punctuation are taken directly from the report.)

Kelner called Dowd back the next day and told him that he could no longer share information with the president’s defense team under any sort of privilege. “According to Flynn‘s attorneys, the President‘s personal counsel was indignant and vocal in his disagreement,” the Mueller report said. “The President’s personal counsel said that he interpreted what they said to him as a reflection of Flynn’s hostility towards the President and that he planned to inform his client of that interpretation. Flynn’s attorneys understood that statement to be an attempt to make them reconsider their position because the President’s personal counsel believed that Flynn would be disturbed to know that such a message would be conveyed to the President.”

Mueller struggled to establish obstruction in this instance because Dowd was protected by attorney-client privilege from needing to answer questions about whether Trump had personally directed him to pass along this message. The president also refused to grant an interview to Mueller, and he declined to answer even written questions related to possible obstruction of justice. “That sequence of events could have had the potential to affect Flynn's decision to cooperate, as well as the extent of that cooperation,” Mueller wrote. “Because of privilege issues, however, we could not determine whether the President was personally involved in or knew about the specific message his counsel delivered to Flynn's counsel.”

“Dowd and the president’s current attorney, Jay Sekulow, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for the White House,” Carol Leonnig and Roz Helderman reported last night. “Kelner, the attorney for Flynn, could not be reached for comment Thursday night.”

The Mueller report highlighted how eager Trump seemed from the start to keep his former national security adviser from flipping. The president asked then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland to reach out to Flynn to encourage him to “stay strong,” Priebus and McFarland separately told investigators.

We also learned last night that there was a previously unknown congressional element to this effort. In a portion of a December filing that was finally unsealed yesterday, Mueller’s team said that Flynn had described multiple episodes, before and after his guilty plea, in which “he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation.”

We do not know the identity of the person or persons connected to Congress and what they said, though that seems important. It seems quite germane whether that lawmaker, if it’s safe to assume it was a member of Congress who called and not a staffer, had been in touch with the president before receiving said communications. Making the case that Flynn shouldn’t serve prison time, prosecutors told the judge that, “in some of those instances,” they had been “unaware of the outreach until being alerted to it by the defendant.”

A few days after the Dowd voice mail, Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements as part of a deal to cooperate. The next day, Trump was asked whether he still stood behind Flynn. “We’ll see what happens,” the president replied.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Why the Michael Flynn revelations are so important

The Post reports:

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that prosecutors make public a transcript of a phone call that former national security adviser Michael Flynn tried hard to hide with a lie: his conversation with a Russian ambassador in late 2016.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington ordered the government also to provide a public transcript of a November 2017 voice mail involving Flynn. In that sensitive call, President Trump’s attorney left a message for Flynn’s attorney reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn at a time when Flynn was considering cooperating with federal investigators. . . . Sullivan also ordered that still-redacted portions of the Mueller report that relate to Flynn be given to the court and made public.

The voice mail was from John Dowd, President Trump’s former personal lawyer who, according to The Post, “tried to learn whether Flynn had any problematic information about the president after Flynn’s attorney signaled his client might begin cooperating with Mueller’s investigators.”

The kicker: “In one of the previously redacted filings released Thursday, prosecutors said Flynn described multiple episodes in which ‘he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation.’ ”

This may be the most significant revelation since we learned of the president’s efforts to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Even Attorney General William P. Barr conceded in his infamous memo to the Justice Department, “Obviously, the President and any other official can commit obstruction in this classic sense of sabotaging a proceeding’s truth-finding function. Thus, for example, if a President knowingly destroys or alters evidence, suborns perjury, or induces a witness to change testimony, or commits any act deliberately impairing the integrity or availability of evidence, then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction.” Barr also told Senate Judiciary Committee members during his confirmation hearing that it would be illegal for a president to coach a witness or persuade a witness to change testimony.

The disclosure, of course, raises serious questions as to why Barr redacted this material in the report, and why evidence that Trump did precisely what Barr said was illegal did not convince him that the president had obstructed justice.

How big a deal is this? “It appears to support the mounting evidence uncovered by Mueller that Trump’s lawyers, and presumably Trump himself (unless his lawyers were on an unauthorized mission of their own, which seems most unlikely), were committing the felony of witness tampering,” constitutional lawyer Laurence H. Tribe tells me. “And the subject matter — what we were conceding to our Russian adversaries — went to the core of our national security. So it seems like a very big deal indeed.”

The apparent participation of Trump’s lawyers in a scheme to sway Flynn should come under scrutiny as well. “Trump’s lawyers are fortunate that Mueller did not aggressively investigate their own conduct,” says former prosecutor Renato Mariotti. “The House may not show the same level of restraint that Mueller did.” Dowd, who resigned as Trump’s lawyer in March 2018, might still have criminal liability and could lose his law license for such conduct.

Even if we are not talking about criminal liability, the episode points to Trump’s unfitness for office. Former prosecutor Joyce White Vance tells me, “Knowing that the President’s lawyers sought to discourage Flynn from cooperating with prosecutors underscores how fundamentally flawed this presidency is. Mob bosses try to keep their associates from helping law enforcement uncover crimes, not presidents.” Recall that in the articles of impeachment that were drawn up against President Richard M. Nixon, “approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counselling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings” was included in Article I.

The revelation notes that Flynn received communications from someone connected to the administration or to Congress. Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman, tells me, “These revelations make clear just how important it is that Congress get all of the materials underlying the Mueller report. We already knew that one of Trump’s attorneys had tried to dissuade Flynn from cooperating, but the news that someone connected to Congress did so as well raises questions both for Congress’s own internal ethics process and for the public.” Miller adds, “We need to know who that was and what they did.”

We should focus on three main takeaways from the new information.

First, Barr’s redactions should now come under severe scrutiny. What else has the attorney general hidden, and why? The House now has even more reason to obtain the entire report and to obtain Mueller’s testimony.

Second, this direct evidence of witness tampering calls into doubt Barr’s conclusion that there was no obstruction. Tribe notes, “Barr’s self-contradictions are piling up around him. Just when it seems his once-estimable reputation as a straight-shooter couldn’t be any more thoroughly ground down, it goes through the shredder yet again.”

And third, this incident points to the urgency of hearings in which evidence of Trump’s misconduct is laid out for the public. It is one thing to be told there is evidence the president’s lawyer contacted Flynn; it’s another to read his exact words and hear his voice. No wonder Trump now frantically tries to stop further proceedings. The more we know, the shakier his grip on the presidency appears.

Is anyone in the Senate hard of hearing?  Will Trump get them to review the tapes?

#Resist

[Athos_131]

GOP lawmaker: Trump has engaged in multiple actions that 'meet the threshold for impeachment'

A Michigan Republican and member of the House Freedom Caucus accused President Trump of "impeachable conduct" in a break with his party.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweeted Saturday that the president's actions to potentially obstruct the now-shuttered special counsel investigation warrant impeachment by the House. He also accused Attorney General William Barr of "deliberately misrepresenting" Robert Mueller's report of the investigation's findings.

"Here are my principal conclusions: 1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report. 2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct. 3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances. 4. Few members of Congress have read the report," Amash wrote Saturday afternoon.

"Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment," the Michigan Republican continued. "Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence."

In other tweets, Amash accused Barr of "sleight-of-hand" to obscure the findings of Mueller's report in his own summary released to Congress earlier this year.

 
"In comparing Barr’s principal conclusions, congressional testimony, and other statements to Mueller’s report, it is clear that Barr intended to mislead the public about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s analysis and findings," Amash wrote.

Amash has been a frequent critic of Trump. He has previously said he will not rule out running for the Libertarian Party nomination for president next year.

Amash also co-sponsored a resolution to block Trump's emergency declaration earlier this year.

"Barr’s misrepresentations are significant but often subtle, frequently taking the form of sleight-of-hand qualifications or logical fallacies, which he hopes people will not notice."

Amash's statements make him the first Republican in the House to come out publicly in support of impeachment proceedings, even as Democratic leadership has hesitated to bow to demands from dozens of House Democrats who support the issue and come out in support of impeachment.

Both Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) have come out against impeachment proceedings, while calling for Trump's conduct to be addressed at the ballot box.

#Resist

[Lois]

It's good to know all Republicans are not hypocrites. 

[Athos_131]

Why Justin Amash stands alone

Staunch libertarian Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) on Saturday said — or rather, tweeted — what no other Republican member of Congress has yet had the nerve to utter: President Trump committed impeachable acts that Attorney General William P. Barr tried to downplay by misrepresenting the Mueller report, and Republicans are too partisan to do anything about it and too lazy to even read the report:

https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1129831615952236546

“Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash said. “In fact, Mueller’s report identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.” That judgment is supported by more than 900 former federal prosecutors who have signed onto a letter reaffirming this exact point.

Not surprisingly, Trump punched back at Amash on Sunday, tweeting that Amash is “a loser” and “a total lightweight who opposes me and some of our great Republican ideas and policies just for the sake of getting his name out there through controversy.”

The Post reports: "Republican leaders on Sunday joined Trump in criticizing Amash. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called Amash’s comments “very disturbing.'” The Post said “Amash’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”

In his tweets Saturday, Amash’s toughest language was reserved for his peers. “Few members of Congress even read Mueller’s report; their minds were made up based on partisan affiliation—and it showed, with representatives and senators from both parties issuing definitive statements on the 448-page report’s conclusions within just hours of its release,” Amash observed. “America’s institutions depend on officials to uphold both the rules and spirit of our constitutional system even when to do so is personally inconvenient or yields a politically unfavorable outcome. Our Constitution is brilliant and awesome; it deserves a government to match it.”

We can marvel at Amash’s intellectual and moral clarity and applaud his courage. However, he’s just saying indisputable facts and refusing to go along with the scheme to distract voters from the magnitude of Trump’s offenses. Unfortunately, that is what counts for courage these days.

So we return to the question that vexes NeverTrumpers and Democrats: Why are Republicans such quivering sycophants, willing to lie and debase themselves in support of an unpopular president who is repudiating many of the principles they have spent their lives advancing?

I’d suggest there are three distinct groups of Republican grovelers. Some may fall into multiple categories.

First are the cynics who know Trump is unfit, if not dangerous; however, they’ll get what they can (e.g., judges, tax cuts) and bolster their resumes (e.g., working for the administration, getting fawning Fox News coverage). When Trump bottoms out, they’ll move on, probably insisting they were secretly against Trump all along. They consider Republicans who’ve resisted Trump such as the Weekly Standard’s editors and writers, who refused to imbibe the Trump Kool-Aid and in the process lost their publication, to be fools, saps and fusspots upset about a few tweets, dumb lies and crass language. All politicians are rotten, right, so why not grab what you can get?

In the second category are Republicans convinced that they’ll never find work if they speak out against Trump. They’ll lose their offices and/or offend Republican officialdom, including think tanks, right-wing media, donors, party activists and elected officials. (They are part of a right-wing ecosystem; some might call it a racket.) No plum lobbying gigs or Fox contributorships for them. They fear ostracism would ruin them financially and personally, leaving them in a political wilderness from which they fear they’d never return. They, like the cynics, occasionally feel a pang of conscience, especially when NeverTrumpers remind them that there is an alternative to self-debasement. They then will swiftly revert to “But Gorsuch and Kavanaugh” or “But taxes” to justify their moral and intellectual collapse. They’ll whisper behind closed doors that Trump is a menace, but coo and kvell over him when the cameras are on.

And finally, there are the cranks, the zealots, the racists and the haters — a group, it turns out, much larger than many ex-Republicans could ever fathom. This includes not just the overt white nationalists and the tea party crowd but also those who have been simmering with personal resentment against “liberal elites.” Vice President Pence insists he and his fellow evangelical Christians are hapless victims; the children and grandchildren of Dixiecrats fume that everything went downhill in the 1960s. Some of these people will insist they are not racists nor misogynists — but yet they sure seem to have an extraordinarily high tolerance for those who are.

If you eliminate the retirees who couldn’t take it any more (e.g., former U.S. senator from Arizona Jeff Flake), the cynics, the scaredy-cats and the resentful self-made victims, you’re down to a precious few congressional Republicans who will refuse to rationalize (and even praise) whatever Trump does. Only 13 House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans voted to block Trump’s noxious emergency declaration on the U.S.-Mexico border, which amounted to a repudiation of our constitutional government of separation of powers.

I’d love to think Amash’s statements free and embolden many more Republicans in the House and Senate to step forward.

Is that likely? No.

This is why voters must continue to reject Trump and Trumpism, driving the current crew of Republicans out of office. Only then, like saplings poking up from the ashes of a forest fire, can new, sustainable and decent political life on the right emerge. Unless and until Amash has many, many allies, the voters must do the heavy lifting of ridding ourselves of Trump and Trumpism.

#Resist