Peter Strozk has said that he’ll answer every question and not hold anything back. So of course, they want to take his testimony in a closed door session.
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If these materials remain highly classified, then unauthorized distribution beyond the members of the cited House committees with the appropriate access and “need-to-know” is a security violation and a potential felony, particularly for Top Secret and codeword information.
The Statute of Limitation is 5 years. Not sure the “Speech and Debate” clause would cover everyone’s rear end in the event they illegally try to move these things, and it certainly will be tested when a new Democratic Administration takes office in Jan. 2021. (This is June 2018, ~3 1/2 years from that blessed date.)
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As part of the “checks and balances” of our government, committees are charged with oversight of the executive branch. They are supposed to be sensitive to national security in the process, though, keeping classified information classified, etc - but we know all too well that they leak like sieves when they think there’s a political advantage to doing so…
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Would the career professionals at DOJ really release information to Nunes that could be used to derail the investigation? Would they have released just enough to put off the conspirators for a while longer? Maybe Mueller is close enough to wrapping up, they could release enough to let Nunes and his co-conspirators know that they are well and truly fucked. THAT would be delicious.
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This is actually a trap for Nunes. Give him classified documents. Then when the information in them becomes common knowledge, put him in the same cells that they held all the other people who were charged with revealing classified information. Since only the president has the power to unilaterally declassify secrets, Nunes will have nothing to stand on. Go for it!
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That was my thought too. Then Mueler’s team is going “wah wah” sad trombone as they high-5 each other.
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Spankee will declassify to protect his stooge.
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In my ideal universe – admittedly some probable distance from the current one – the documents are tagged to identify traitors/oath-breakers like Nunes when leaked/shared with Trump resulting in prosecutions all around.
Hey, a fella can dream.
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This routine by the DOJ (even after showing signs of life a couple weeks back) is becoming ever more tiresome. Rosenstein (a cipher if there ever was one) should have just baited these lawless fucks into a lawsuit that would have taken years to resolve. Instead, he caves in yet again. I no longer have any illusions that he’s some grand tactician and is protecting Robert Mueller with every trick he knows. No, he’s just another milequetoast, quisling bureaucratic fuck who doesn’t want to lose his job. Full stop. (I understand there are scores of homeless former acting attorneys general, so it’s highly understandable.)
To that end, the notion that there is a battalion of quiet men and women doing everything they can to save the republic is also illusory. Why do I say that? Because history has no precedent for such a thing. But it does record the scores of functionaries who simply went along with everything and walked into the meat grinder without so much as a muffled scream.
It’s also apparent that the next Demoratic administration has to GOP-proof the government as much as possible, starting with turning these “norms and customs” into law. Never again can a Republican (much less a Republican president) ever be trusted not to abuse and degrade the government in such obvious and vulgar ways.
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To get around all that legal stuff, Nunes and the Evil Republicans will just totally lie about what is in the classified documents and therefore not divulge any classified information.
This typical Republican lying tactic cannot be countered with the Truth since that would be releasing classified information.
For obvious reasons, DOJ will not step in to out the Lies of Nunes.
Evil reigns!
To be fair, Strozk was in counter-intelligence, so he knows the REAL secrets on a lot of stuff that has not been published and not just about the Trump operation either.
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The fact that so far, no contents have leaked to the conservative press should tell us a lot about the nature of that information. My conclusion, Trumpsters do not want it known by the public. This coming week should be swirling around captain chaos just as last week was.
His random tweet about Russian witch hunts earlier today, I think is a tell that some story is brewing.
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I am constantly amazed by how entitled these two year wonders think they are. Traitors the lot of them.
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That’s a good one!
I wish Josh didn’t use AP that much, they pretty much exemplify every wrong with the media today, lazy, overly adjective ridden, depthless crap.
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I hope Rosenstein knows what he is doing. The volume of documents referenced here is troubling. You see how Trump has been trying (and continues to try) to latch on to one nugget to build a house of cards to attack the investigation with the IG report. It literally says the opposite of what he claims, but he’ll lie about it and broadcast it widely anyway.
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“The department is also working to provide outstanding documents related to former British spy Christopher Steele, Tyson said, and the dossier he compiled of anti-Trump research during the presidential campaign. Trump and congressional Republicans have charged that the research in the dossier, paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was used inappropriately to obtain the warrant on Page.”
And the AP with its subtle propaganda strikes again, when will TPM learn to stop publishing this garbage. The dossier originated from a GOP candidate’s campaign oppo research, funny how the AP leaves this detail completely out, and only prints Trump and the GOP’s “charge”. Kind of an important detail to ignore, no?
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There hasn’t been a Russia related article to post to this weekend, but there have been some significant developments in the investigation over the past week.
1. Michael Cohen
Judge Kimba Wood issued what looks to be the final Order on the matter of the evidenced seized from Cohen by the FBI. Only 8 items of communication out of nearly 300k items were protected by attorney client privilege. There are a total of 161 items of information that are designated as highly personal and not relevant for the gov’t, but all the rest goes to the gov’t.
The intensity attached to this part of the case diminished substantially over the past two weeks, which would tend to confirm the view that Cohen both lost the fight and lost interest in it due to high costs and low return and also probably because he has adopted a different legal strategy which appears aimed at seeking a formal cooperation deal. The attorney he hired this past week, Guy Petrillo, has prior experience at SDNY and is well known and respected by that office. It is most likely the case that Cohen has hired Petrillo to negotiate a deal.
Then there’s the matter of this Tom Arnold business. Arnold is a bizarre guy and his interview on CNN was an utter joke. However, Lawrence O’Donnell had a much more focused follow-up interview where Arnold did make very clear, declarative statements indicating that Cohen has a lot of evidence and is in fact cooperating or in the process of doing so. Arnold is a bit of a clown so I would not take what he is saying to the bank until we see a plea deal. However, Cohen’s actions over the past few weeks indicate that a deal of some kind is more likely than not. I was also struck by the body language in Cohen’s photo with Arnold. He appeared much less tense than what we’ve seen over the past several months. Stay tuned.
2. A new traitor: Adam Waldman
The Guardian had a lengthy and somewhat tortuous piece on the mysterious Adam Waldman, a lawyer who worked for both Oleg Deripaska and Julian Assange. Mother Jones took its own stab at this story and provided a much clearer and more succinct summary.
Here is my own short analysis of it (suggested and implied in the article but not stated so these conclusions are my own): Waldman is a de facto Russian agent who was part of an elaborate cat fishing scheme developed in coordination with Russian intelligence to snag and discredit both Senator Mark Warner and Christopher Steele.
First, Waldman just so happened to represent two figures who are allied with and are agents for the Russian government, both of whom were very involved in the Russian election conspiracy. What are the odds?
Second, for some reason, he was texting Mark Warner on behalf of Assange to negotiate a deal. He offered that Assange would return or agree not to release a stolen CIA archive in exchange for some sort of deal (agreement not to prosecute?), and also implicitly threatened that if his demands were not met he would release it. Warner appears to have informed the FBI and CIA, CIA balked at the offer, and Assange released the material (March 2017).
Warner then continued to text with Waldman trying to see if he could get some info from Deripaska about Paul Manafort. Waldman suggested Warner could meet Deripaska if he traveled to London. No meeting occurred. I translate that to mean that Warner didn’t take the bait. He also sent texts trying to put Warner in touch with Christopher Steele. Nothing materialized. Here, I suspect Waldman had close ties to people like Aron Banks and similarly allied pro-Brexit/Pro-Russian folks within the UK who were looking for ways to gaslight and discredit Steele’s reports.
Fox somehow got a hold of these texts which Warner had turned over to the Senate Intel Committee (hint: Nunes likely had an aide who got that info and leaked it).
In short, Warner appears to have been shrewd in determining that Waldman was well connected, but had an angle to play and wasn’t trustworthy. I believe Waldman is a pro-Russian hack who should be questioned and investigated for possible obstruction of justice and conspiracy to commit espionage/blackmail.
3. Paul Manafort
Manafort lost additional motions to suppress evidence in his DC trial. In his VA trial, Mueller is moving to commence jury selection and is looking at juror questionnaires. Suffice it to say that the case against Manafort continues to chug along and an increasingly rapid pace.
This begs us to revisit the question of when/if he will look to cut a deal. His lawyers are duty bound to tell him that he has virtually no chance of prevailing at trial and that he will be convicted. They have to suggest to him that a deal is the best legal option. Manafort appears to be waiting for Trump to blow up the investigation by firing people and shutting it down. When a man can consciously embark on a plan to kidnap, abuse, ransom and offer innocent children up for adoption, I suppose anything is possible. However, the more likely result, the more logical result is that Manafort will cut a deal at some point between now and his trial. It’s also possible he waits until after conviction, though the gov’t may not have as much flexibility in such situations.
4. Russia-Brexit-US
Something which has been plainly obvious to my eyes is breaking through the code of silence in the UK: Russia had a big hand in engineering the Brexit result. This past week, Carol Cadwalladr who has been the face of a multi-pronged effort by UK investigative reporters (Guardian, Observer, Channel 4, BBC) to get to the truth about the nefarious cloud surrounding the pro-Brexit orgs, like Leave.EU, UKIP, Cambridge Analytica, AggregateIQ, has been exposing some actual Brits (Aron Banks and Andy Wigmore) who collaborated (colluded) with Russians and were essentially offered bribes and inducements in the form of mineral rights investment opportunities to tune of billions. In addition, they reportedly shared confidential information (FBI docs) with the Russians. The link between Brexit and the US election interference campaign has been hiding in plain sight: Nigel Farage. Cadwalladr calls him out in a tweet on Saturday as a comment to a New Yorker piece summarizing what has been happening in the UK on this matter.
An even bigger deal here is Paul Wood, the BBC reporter who first broke the Steele Dossier story, is back with a new claim, that an American lawyer he knows met with a Cambridge Analytica employee shortly after the 2016 election who told this US lawyer that Cambridge Analytica had HRC’s emails 1 full month before Wikileaks released them. When this C.A. employee asked the US lawyer what to do, he said ‘talk to Mueller’. C.A., therefore, had possession of stolen material and would appear to have coordinated activities in connection with that stolen material. This implies potential violations of the federal election campaign act, the computer fraud and abuse act and conspiracy. This would mean people like Jared Kushner, Brad Parscale, Steve Bannon, Rebekah Mercer, Alexander Nix, Mark Turnbull (Nix’s managing director) and others could be implicated in criminal charges.
The thing is that Mueller has known about this phase of the Russia investigation (call it the Brexit Connection) for a while. We’re just getting caught up.
The horrific scandal of family separation will continue to dominate the headlines until Trump elects to give up the hostages (I still think that process is another 3 weeks away), but on the Russia front, there are major things afoot.
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If the Dems take the House this fall, I hope investigating Nunes will be one of their top priorities!
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I think you’re mistaken about Rosenstein.
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Tom Arnold is a fool. He’s Cohen’s Rudy Giuliani.
Adam Waldman would have to get up pretty early in the morning to outsmart Mark Warner. Warner is wicked smart!
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