The Enemy Within

What's taking that Merrick Garland guy so long? Why doesn't he make some moves?

First you have to make sure you know who the good guys are, and since some of the bad guys could be working in the office right down the hall from you, it makes sense to go with caution.

Former senior FBI official accused of working for Russian he investigated

NEW YORK — The former head of FBI counterintelligence in New York has been charged in two separate indictments that accuse him of taking secret cash payments of more than $225,000 while overseeing highly sensitive cases, and allegedly breaking the law by trying to get Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska removed from a U.S. sanctions list, officials said Monday.

Charles McGonigal, 54, who retired from the FBI in September 2018, was indicted in federal court in Manhattan on money laundering, sanctions-violation and other charges in connection to his alleged ties to Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In his role at the FBI, McGonigal had been tasked with investigating Deripaska, whose own indictment on sanctions-violation charges was unsealed in September.

Separately, McGonigal was accused in a nine-count indictment in federal court in Washington of hiding his receipt of $225,000 from a former Albanian intelligence agent living in New Jersey. McGonigal was also accused of hiding foreign travel and contacts with senior leaders in countries including Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia where the former Albanian agent had business interests.

McGonigal’s alleged involvement with Deripaska may impact a significant push by the Justice Department to hit wealthy Russians with economic sanctions for conducting business in the United States, an effort that accelerated last year with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The twin indictments are also a black eye for the FBI, alleging that one of its most senior and trusted intelligence officials was taking secret cash payments and undermining the bureau’s overall intelligence-gathering mission.

McGonigal’s lawyer, Seth DuCharme, said his client plans to plead not guilty. “Charlie served the United States for decades in positions of public trust and leadership, so this is a distressing day for him, but we’re going to litigate the case in the courtroom,” DuCharme said.

Skepticism before a search: Inside the FBI's Mar-a-Lago documents investigation

Prosecutors alleged that from at least August 2017 and beyond his retirement from the FBI, McGonigal failed to disclose to the FBI his relationship with the former Albanian security official, described as “Person A” in charging papers. He also allegedly failed to disclose that he had an “ongoing relationship with the Prime Minister of Albania,” the indictment said.

In late 2017, authorities charge, McGonigal received packages of cash totaling $225,000 from Person A — the first time, in a parked car outside a New York City restaurant, the next two times at the person’s New Jersey home. According to the indictment, McGonigal “indicated to Person A that the money would be paid back.”

Months later, at McGonigal’s urging, the FBI opened an investigation into an American lobbyist for an Albanian political party that is a rival of the Albanian prime minister, an investigation that used Person A as a source of information, authorities said.

Current and former U.S. officials who know and have worked with McGonigal said they were shocked by the indictments. As a senior FBI counterintelligence official, McGonigal had access to an extraordinary amount of sensitive information, potentially including investigations of foreign spies or U.S. citizens suspected of working on behalf of foreign governments, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the work McGonigal did. One former official said that McGonigal had worked with the CIA on counterintelligence matters.

According to the New York indictment, a law firm retained McGonigal to work as a consultant and investigator on the effort to get Deripaska removed from the sanctions list. He was listed as a consultant and arranged for $25,000 monthly payments to be sent to an account controlled by another person, a government interpreter who was a former Russian diplomat. The interpreter, Sergey Shestakov, was also charged.

McGonigal’s FBI role gave him access to classified information including a then-secret list of Russian prospects for sanctioning by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Justice Department said. That list included Deripaska before the sanctions were actually imposed.

The Russian billionaire next door: Putin ally is tied to one of D.C.'s swankiest mansions

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement that McGonigal and Shestakov “should have known better” given their experience in government service. Both defendants were expected to appear in federal court in New York Monday afternoon.

U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves of D.C. called the alleged coverup of foreign contacts and financial relationships a “gateway to corruption” and credited the FBI with its handling of the “delicate and difficult” investigation of a former senior assistant director.

“McGonigal is alleged to have committed the very violations he swore to investigate while he purported to lead a workforce of FBI employees who spend their careers protecting secrets and holding foreign adversaries accountable,” said FBI Los Angeles Field Office Director Donald Alway, who announced the charges along with Graves and the leaders of the Washington FBI and Justice Department National Security Division.

McGonigal faces a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on the two D.C. counts of falsification of records and documents, and up to five years in prison for each of seven counts of concealing material facts or making false statements. The most serious charge in the New York indictment also carries a maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison.

Today's Crooked Politician

I know, I know - it can't always be a Republican. So why is it always a Republican?

  via 

Newly-Elected Georgia Rep Steps Down After Drug Arrest

Republican Danny Rampey was arrested last month after investigators said he stole prescription narcotics at the retirement complex he manages.

WINDER, Ga. (AP) — A Republican arrested after winning his race for a seat in the Georgia House has decided to step aside instead of facing a possible suspension as soon as he was sworn into office later this month,

The decision by Danny Rampey means a special election will be held on Jan. 31 to choose the new representative for the House seat based around Winder, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Rampey, 67, was arrested last month after investigators said he stole prescription narcotics at the retirement complex he manages.

Republican leaders were pressuring Rampey to step aside before new legislators are sworn in on Jan. 9 because the special election to fill the seat would only be for Republicans since Rampey didn’t have a Democratic opponent in November’s election.

Rampey’s withdrawal ”will ensure his constituents have a voice in this session of the General Assembly after the special election is held,” said House Speaker Jan Jones and incoming House Speaker Jon Burns in a joint statement to the newspaper.

The newspaper couldn’t reach Rampey’s attorney.

Rampey was charged in Barrow County with six counts of obtaining drugs by misrepresentation or theft, six counts of exploiting an elder or disabled adult, five counts of burglary and one count of drug possession.

Rampey and his family own a chain of personal care homes in northeast Georgia. Authorities said they began investigating him after missing prescription narcotics were reported.

That Old Feelin'

I get a sneaking suspicion about George Santos and the GOP - and the Dems too.

Maybe they didn't vet him properly, and maybe they did.

Maybe he's a Kremlin stooge and maybe he's not.

This is where I say I kinda hate myself when I start thinking a little too much about the 'maybes'.

With (some) Republicans coming out seemingly to take a giant dump on George's head, they're speaking in some pretty generic terms - the passive voice (ie: mistakes were made). So there's a fair probability they're taking this opportunity to shit on Trump using George as a surrogate, while maintaining a little cover - they'll play those very reasonable and down-the-middle comments in their ads come 2024 when they need "the undecided" voters to think kindly of them.

"But what about the Democrats?"

First, fuck that noise. Democrats are not to blame for the shitty behavior of Republicans.

Second, maybe they did vet old George, and they figured on slamming the GOP for it all along. That doesn't make a great deal of sense because the district was up for grabs, but a Dem win in NY03 wouldn't have changed the overall outcome, and it's way more fun to sit here idly speculating.

The talented Mr. Santos: A congressman-elect’s unraveling web of deception

Even by the low standards for truth-telling in politics, the scope of the falsehoods from the newly elected House Republican has been breathtaking

The Republican who won a congressional seat on Long Island before his claims of being a wealthy, biracial, Ukrainian descendant of Holocaust survivors were debunked had, for a while, been generally consistent about two details in his improbable life: He has long said his first name is George and his last name is Santos.

But not always.

Before George Santos, 34, made a name for himself in politics, he had insisted on being called Anthony — one of his middle names — and often used his mother’s maiden name, Devolder, eventually incorporating a company in Florida with that name.

“He hated that we called him George,” a former friend and onetime co-worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid being associated with him publicly. “His whole family called him Anthony. He wanted to be called Anthony. He would use the name Anthony Devolder.”

With echoes of the fabulist protagonist at the heart of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” book and movie, Santos has spun an elaborate web of lies and deceptions about his identity and his past, according to acquaintances, public records, media reports and, in some cases, by his own admission. He also claims to have suddenly come into millions of dollars in wealth over the past 18 months, even as the financial data company Dun & Bradstreet estimated in July that his private family firm, the Devolder Organization, only had $43,688 in revenue.

He said he is part Black. He said he is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. He claimed he helped develop “carbon capture technology.” He claimed to have worked at companies that never employed him. He claimed to be a graduate of two universities, only to admit that he has no college degree at all. He even said his parents’ financial hardship forced him to leave the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx “months” before he could graduate. But that claim and numerous others have either been shown to be false or lacking evidence by The Washington Post and other news organizations.

Even by the low standards for truth-telling in politics, the scope of Santos’s falsehoods has been breathtaking. It has surprised Democrats who researched him and missed so many details, as well as Republicans who vouched for him.

In an unsuccessful House race in 2020 and his successful race for New York’s 3rd Congressional District in November, Santos pitched himself as a gay man of Brazilian descent at home in the Republican Party of Donald Trump. He spoke at a rally in D.C. on Jan. 5, 2021, telling the assembled crowd one day before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol: “Who here is ready to overturn the election for Donald Trump?”

In interviews as a congressional candidate, he described himself as “the American Dream.”

He told Lara Trump in an interview this year, “I’m a business guy. I’ve done private equity for 11 years in New York,” adding that he “had the privilege of doing business” with the Trump Organization. He told another interviewer, “I’ve gone up the chains of Wall Street. I’ve developed many companies. I’ve opened my own business.” His campaign website said he had previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and had degrees from Baruch College and New York University.

On Dec. 19, the New York Times reported that Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Baruch College and New York University had no records of him. On Monday, Santos spoke about the revelations for the first time, telling WABC he was guilty of “résumé embellishment” but insisting the larger story about his life is true: “I’m not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up the fictional character and ran for Congress.”

Rep.-elect George Santos acknowledges 'résumé embellishment' but offers few answers on finances

Later, Santos’s claims of having Jewish ancestors who fled persecution during World War II were challenged by a report in Jewish Insider. An undisclosed marriage, and divorce, to a woman was revealed by the Daily Beast. He also wrote on Twitter that “9/11 claimed my mothers life”; she actually passed away in 2016.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Gerard Kassar, chair of the Conservative Party of New York State. “His entire life seems to be made up. Everything about him is fraudulent.”

Santos and his representatives did not respond to numerous telephone, email and text messages seeking comment for this article. On Wednesday, Santos wrote on Twitter that he is looking forward to working in Congress.

But even before his scheduled swearing-in on Jan. 3, Santos has already spawned new proposed legislation in Congress. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said he will introduce legislation requiring that when candidates for federal office provide details of their education, employment and military history, they do so under oath. Torres calls the bill the Stop Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker (SANTOS) Act.

The offices of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly (R) and Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz (D) each said they are examining whether Santos broke any laws in their jurisdiction. ABC News reported that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, which covers Long Island, was also examining Santos’s activities; spokespeople for the office declined to comment when contacted by The Post.

Last week, Santos gave a handful of interviews that only raised more questions. Still unknown is the exact source of the $700,000 he claimed to have loaned his campaign in 2022, just two years after filing a financial disclosure report that said he had no major assets or earned income. The Times also reported suspicious spending by Santos’s campaign.

A spokesperson for the House Ethics Committee declined to comment when asked whether the committee will launch an investigation into Santos if he is sworn in next week.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent body that reviews ethical complaints from the committee, could also scrutinize Santos if the office is reauthorized by the Republican-controlled House. Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at the office, said he would expect an investigation.

“They are not going to let something like this just happen,” he said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters on Wednesday that Santos is now “tattooed” on Republicans in Congress. House Republican leaders, as well as Reps. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who endorsed Santos, did not respond to messages seeking comment about him. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told the Washington Examiner that he is not supportive of Santos joining their conference.

Rep.-elect Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) said in a statement that Santos should be investigated by the House Ethics Committee and “if necessary, law enforcement, is required.” Rep.-elect Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said in a statement that Santos should “cooperate fully” with the investigations. And Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman (R) told CNN that Santos needs to address the “emotional issues” that led to his lying.

“A normal person wouldn’t do that,” Blakeman said.

The North Shore Leader, a small paper on Long Island, had raised questions about Santos in September, but those threads were largely ignored by other outlets. Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat whom Santos defeated in November, and whose campaign spent thousands of dollars on research, told The Post that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story.

A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal but no one paid attention

Kassar, the Conservative Party of New York State’s leader, said he spoke with Santos soon after the first Times story was published. “When I spoke to him, he clearly told me he had no intuition of running again and I told him that was a good idea and the Conservative Party would have a hard time endorsing him,” he said.

When Santos’s mother died on Dec. 23, 2016, he collected money from people at a church in Queens after saying he had no money for a funeral, according to a priest who spoke with CBS News.

Around this time, Santos asked the former friend and co-worker to set up a GoFundMe page so that he could raise money for the funeral, telling the person he was too distraught to submit the necessary ID and bank record requirements for the crowdfunding service.

The page shows that several hundred dollars was raised, and the friend said it went directly to Santos, who at the time was using the name Anthony Devolder on Facebook and with acquaintances around New York. The friend said they believed the money had been used for the funeral, which they attended in late December that year. Then on Jan. 6, 2017, the friend said Santos contacted them to ask if they wanted go skiing in the Poconos, where he had just rented a room. The friend declined.

In June 2020, Santos wrote on Twitter that he is the “grandson of Holocaust refugees.” This month, Jewish Insider cast doubt on that claim, noting that the dates Santos cited for his grandparents departure from Belgium to Brazil do not line up, nor do immigration records support his version of his family’s history. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which featured Santos as part of its annual November conference in Las Vegas, denounced his false claims about his heritage and said that “he will not be welcome at any future RJC event.”

In March, Santos said in a podcast interview that he was “raised Catholic, born to a Jewish family — very, very confusing religious background.” Last week, he told the New York Post: “I never claimed to be Jewish.”

Even early parts of Santos’s life story were fabricated by him.

In an October 2020 interview, Santos recalled an allegedly painful childhood experience. He said of his parents: “They sent me to a good prep school — which was Horace Mann Prep in the Bronx. And in my senior year of prep school, unfortunately, my parents fell on hard times.” Santos went on to say that at the time, his family couldn’t “afford a $2,500 tuition” and “I left school [with] four months till graduation.”

After the school was contacted by The Post and provided with several variations of Santos’s name that he has used in public, Ed Adler, a spokesman for Horace Mann, wrote in an email: “George Santos or any of the aliases you [cite] never attended HM.”

In that same March podcast interview, Santos also said, “I’ve been to Moscow many times in my career.” He also referred to “carbon capture technology” as something “that I’ve helped develop and fundraised for in my career. I’ve had a very extensive role in gas and oil in this country.” Santos and his representatives have provided no proof of those claims.

The only time Santos provided a specific defense about his falsehoods was during his interview on WABC. When asked why Goldman Sachs and Citigroup had no record of him as an employee, as he had previously claimed, Santos admitted to both lying and being sloppy in describing his actual work in the industry.

“[A] lot of people overstate in their résumés or twist a little bit,” he said. He said he worked with Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, just not as an employee at those companies. “I did extensive work on the LP side with Goldman Sachs in my time at LinkBridge,” he said, referring to a one-time employer. “I did extensive work with Citigroup, in my time in the LP position in LinkBridge Investors, just like I did work with firms on the GP side of things like Blackstone, and Deloitte, and Robbins, Geller, Dowd and so many other big firms in the industry of private equity.”

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup declined to comment on this latest explanation. Deloitte and Blackstone did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, a law firm that sues corporations, told The Post, “We cannot verify this claim. We have no record of Mr. Santos or his business having any business relationship with our firm.”

More George

He fucking lied, goddammit

Be consistent

And notice how some of the rubes will simply not come to grips with the problem. The GOP has conditioned them to accept any and all fuckery in the name of tribal interests.

George Santos Faces Federal and Local Investigations, and Public Dismay

Prosecutors said on Wednesday that they would examine Mr. Santos, who has admitted lying about his work and educational history during his campaign.

Federal and local prosecutors are investigating whether Representative-elect George Santos committed any crimes involving his finances and lies about his background on the campaign trail.

The federal investigation, which is being run by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, is focused at least in part on his financial dealings, according to a person familiar with the matter. The investigation was said to be in its early stages.

In a separate inquiry, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney’s office said it was looking into the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos” during his successful 2022 campaign to represent parts of Long Island and Queens.

It was unclear how far the Nassau County inquiry had progressed, but the district attorney, Anne Donnelly, said in a statement that Mr. Santos’s fabrications “are nothing short of stunning.”

She added: “No one is above the law, and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on Wednesday. The office’s interest in Mr. Santos was reported earlier by ABC News, and the Nassau County inquiry was first reported by Newsday.

Both investigations followed reporting in The New York Times that uncovered that Mr. Santos had made false claims about his educational and professional background, including whether he worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. The Times also found that Mr. Santos had omitted key details about his business on required financial disclosures.

Questions remain about how Mr. Santos has generated enough personal wealth to be able, as campaign finance filings show, to lend his campaign $700,000. Mr. Santos has said his money comes from his company, the Devolder Organization, but he has provided little information about its operations.

The statement by Ms. Donnelly, a Republican like Mr. Santos, added to the growing pressure on Mr. Santos, who was elected in November to represent northern Nassau County and northeast Queens in Congress beginning in January.

In interviews with several other media outlets on Monday, Mr. Santos confirmed some of the inaccuracies identified by The Times. He admitted that he had lied about graduating from Baruch College — he said he does not have a college degree — and that he had made misleading claims about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Santos also acknowledged not having earned substantial income as a landlord, something he claimed as a credential during the campaign. In making his admissions, he has sought to explain his dishonesty as little more than routine résumé padding.

But among more than two dozen Long Island residents interviewed on Wednesday, many, including some who said they had supported Mr. Santos, expressed disappointment at his actions and anger over his explanations.

Felestasia Mawere, who said she had voted for Mr. Santos and had given money to his campaign, insisted that he should not serve in Congress after admitting to having misled voters.

“He cheated,” Ms. Mawere, an accountant who lives in Manhasset, said. Of the falsehoods in his biography, she added, “He intentionally put that information knowing that it would persuade voters like me to vote for him.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Santos appeared to retain the support of many in his party, including those who are set to be his constituents.

Jackie Silver, of Great Neck, said she had voted for Mr. Santos and would do so again. Ms. Silver said that those calling for him to face further investigation, or even relinquish his seat, were only targeting him because he is a Republican.

“When they don’t like someone, they really go after them,” Ms. Silver, a courier for Uber Eats and DoorDash, said, before echoing Mr. Santos’s primary defense: “Everyone fabricates their résumé. I’m not saying it’s correct.”

Others who made financial contributions to Mr. Santos’s campaign did not appear ready to cast him aside, although only a few of about three dozen donors contacted for comment responded.

Lee Mallett, a general contractor from Louisiana and the chairman of the state contractors’ board there, said Mr. Santos’s immediate task was straightforward.

“He has to ask for forgiveness, and he’ll be forgiven,” Mr. Mallett, a registered Republican, said. He added: “He’s just making it way too complicated. It’s really simple.”

Barbara Vissichelli of Glen Cove, N.Y., said that she had met Mr. Santos while helping to register voters and had bonded with him over their shared love of animals. Ms. Vissichelli contributed $2,900 to his campaign and said she would continue to support him.

“He was never untruthful with me,” she said.

House Republican leaders have so far been silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, but he has gotten a tougher reception close to home. Ms. Donnelly is just one of several Long Island Republicans to show a willingness to examine him closely over his statements during the campaign and on his financial disclosure forms.

On Tuesday, Representative-elect Nick LaLota, a Republican who won election in a neighboring Long Island district, said the House Ethics Committee should investigate Mr. Santos. Nassau County’s Republican Party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said he “expected more than just a blanket apology” from Mr. Santos.

Another incoming member of New York’s Republican House delegation, Mike Lawler of Rockland County, sounded a similar refrain.

“Attempts to blame others or minimize his actions are only making things worse and a complete distraction from the task at hand,” Mr. Lawler said in a message posted on Twitter. He added that Mr. Santos should “cooperate fully” with any investigations.

Mr. Santos and his representatives have not responded to The Times’s repeated requests for comment, including to detailed questions raised by the newspaper’s reporting and to an email seeking a response to Ms. Donnelly’s statement.

In an interview broadcast on Fox News Tuesday night, Mr. Santos again asserted that he had merely “embellished” his résumé. The interviewer, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who left the party in October, challenged him bluntly.

“These are blatant lies,” Ms. Gabbard said. “And it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you’re standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.”

On Wednesday, one more possible misrepresentation emerged. During his first campaign, Mr. Santos said on his website and on the campaign trail that he attended the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in Riverdale in the Bronx, but that his family’s financial difficulties caused him to drop out and get a high school equivalency diploma.

But a spokesman told The Washington Post that it could not locate records of Mr. Santos’s attendance, using several variations of his name. The spokesman, Ed Adler, confirmed that report to The Times. Mr. Santos’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.

On Wednesday, the news site Semafor published an interview with Mr. Santos in which he said his work with his company, the Devolder Organization, involved “deal building” and “specialty consulting” for a network of 15,000 wealthy people, family offices, endowments and institutions.

As an example, he said, he might help one client sell a plane or a boat to someone else, and that he would receive fees or commissions. But he provided no details on his contracts or clients to Semafor and has not answered similar questions from The Times.

Mr. Santos’s exercise in damage control has also involved cleaning up his personal biography, which was removed from his campaign website for most of Tuesday. By the time an updated version appeared on Wednesday, it had been stripped of several significant details.

Gone, for instance, was the claim that he had received a degree from Baruch College. (Another profile of him, on the House Republicans’ campaign committee website, said he had studied at New York University; that information is now gone as well.)

Mr. Santos’s campaign biography also no longer mentions work on Wall Street. A reference to Mr. Santos’s mother working her “way up to be the first female executive at a major financial institution” has also been expunged.

Mr. Santos also deleted a reference to past philanthropic efforts. He previously claimed he had founded and run a tax-exempt charity, Friends of Pets United. The Internal Revenue Service and the New York and New Jersey attorney general’s offices said they had no records of a registered charity with that name.

In an interview with the political publication City & State, Mr. Santos said he was not the charity’s sole owner and that he was responsible for the “grunt work.” But he did not address the lack of official documents related to the organization.

The revised biography now also omits any mention of where Mr. Santos lives, another detail thrown into doubt by the The Times’s reporting.

It Unravels

This confirms my suspicions that crypto is a way to shelter &/or launder funds, which makes it a very convenient and invisible conduit for bad actors (foreign and domestic) to fuck with American politics.

There's a whole big bunch of guns turning up that seem to be quite smokey.

WASHINGTON — On Dec. 8, someone made a simultaneous transfer of 28.15 bitcoins — worth more than $500,000 at the time — to 22 different virtual wallets, most of them belonging to prominent right-wing organizations and personalities.

Now cryptocurrency researchers believe they have identified who made the transfer, and suspect it was intended to bolster those far-right causes. U.S. law enforcement is investigating whether the donations were linked to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

While the motivation is difficult to prove, the transfer came just a month before the violent riot in the Capitol, which took place after President Trump invited supporters to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” and “take back our country.”

Right-wing figures and websites, including VDARE, the Daily Stormer and Nick Fuentes, received generous donations from a bitcoin account linked to a French cryptocurrency exchange, according to research done by software company Chainalysis, which maintains a repository of information about public cryptocurrency exchanges and whose tools aid in government, law enforcement and private sector investigations. Chainalysis investigated the donations after Yahoo News shared the data points about the transaction.

According to one source familiar with the matter, the suspicious Dec. 8 transaction, along with a number of other pieces of intelligence, has prompted law enforcement and intelligence agencies in recent days to actively investigate the sources of funding for the individuals who participated in the Capitol insurrection, as well as their networks. The government is hoping to prevent future attacks but also to uncover potential foreign involvement in or support of right-wing activities, the source said.

During a press conference on Tuesday on the investigation into the Capitol riot, acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin said the “scope and scale of this investigation in these cases are really unprecedented.” At this time, Sherwin added, prosecutors are treating the matter as a “significant counterterrorism or counterintelligence investigation” involving deeper dives into “money, travel records, disposition, movement, communication records.”

One of the ways extremist groups have made money in recent years is online through cryptocurrency and crowdfunding. Bitcoin, which was anonymously released online in 2009 as open-source software, exists only virtually. It does not utilize a central bank or administrator to disburse funds, nor does any government control or distribute it. While bitcoin has fluctuated in value in recent years, and continues to do so, it gained mainstream popularity around 2017, the same year prominent alt-right figure Richard Spencer tweeted, “Bitcoin is the currency of the alt right.”

A 2017 Washington Post investigation explored how far-right groups turned even more aggressively toward bitcoin following the deadly August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. The story cited research by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center that identified a large bitcoin donation to Andrew Anglin, the editor of the Daily Stormer, a prominent neo-Nazi website that accepts bitcoin donations. At the time, the donation was worth around $60,000.

A “newfound expertise in online messaging and recruitment, coupled with the fact that modern extremist groups are generally young and digitally savvy, means that these organizations and individuals have fundamentally altered the way that extremists raise money,” wrote Alex Newhouse, a data analyst at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in a 2019 report that explored the links between white supremacists and digital currency.

Some prominent right-wing groups or sites display their bitcoin wallets prominently, the report noted. “The lack of regulation over Bitcoin has driven its adoption by white supremacists,” it said.

While cryptocurrency has been used by extremist groups and criminals to raise funds while shielding their identities, bitcoin is pseudonymous rather than anonymous. Bitcoin wallet addresses are permanent, and the digital ledger of transactions, called the blockchain, is public and can’t be changed. That means if people identify their bitcoin wallet addresses, as many right-wing groups do to raise funds, transactions can be traced, which is what allowed Chainalysis to uncover information about the source of the large December donations.

The source of the funding, according to research conducted by Chainanalysis, appears to be a computer programmer based in France who created an account in 2013 — and who maintained a personal blog, which was not updated between 2014 and Dec. 9, 2020, the day after the “donations.”

Chainalysis researchers discovered a blog post from the bitcoin user that reads like an apparent suicide note, bequeathing his money to “certain causes and people” in light of what he describes as “the decline of Western civilization,” though the researchers were unable to confirm that the user was in fact dead. Chainalysis declined to publish the user’s name, citing privacy concerns due to the inability to conclusively confirm his death and out of concerns over ongoing law enforcement investigations.

An email to the apparent French donor did not immediately receive a reply.

Chainalysis investigators relied on openly available information, or public bitcoin transactions, to investigate and map out the large transaction. The original donor was registered on NameID, an internet service that allows bitcoin users to tie their online pseudonym or email address with their bitcoin profile — information the original donor included. Investigators tracked that email address to the blog, and to several cryptocurrency forum posts going back to 2013.

According to their research, Fuentes, a popular right-wing commentator who was suspended from YouTube last winter for violating its policies on hate speech, received the largest chunk of funding on Dec. 8 — about $250,000 in bitcoin. The Daily Stormer and the anti-immigration website VDARE were among the other recipients.

Yahoo News reached out to the recipients named in this article to confirm whether they had received the funding, what information they had about the donor and what they planned on doing with the funds. None returned a request for comment, although Fuentes tweeted an obscene gesture, naming several journalists, including this reporter, shortly after the inquiry was sent.

While the Daily Stormer website openly requests cryptocurrency donations, it also includes a disclaimer that says it is “opposed to violence” and that “anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned.”

While there’s no evidence that Fuentes directly participated in the Capitol riot, something he has so far denied, the financial resources of prominent right-wing actors are of growing interest to law enforcement.

“I’d be stunned if both nation-state adversaries and terrorist organizations weren’t figuring out how to funnel money to these guys,” one former FBI official who reviewed the data for Yahoo News said. “Many of them use fundraising sites (often in Bitcoin) that are virtually unmonitored and unmonitorable. If they weren’t doing it, they’d be incompetent.”

Additionally, much like conversations that took place on social media in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot, the digital currency transactions are happening in plain sight. While cryptocurrency has the reputation of being anonymous and shadowy, that’s actually a common misconception, explained Maddie Kennedy, Chainalysis’s communications director. “With the right tools you can follow the money,” she said. “Cryptocurrency was designed to be transparent.”

While there are methods that cryptocurrency users can deploy to obfuscate their identities — including using “privacy coins” such as Monero, which are difficult to trace, or using a “mixer” that allows various users to combine their bitcoins and mix them together to disguise their origin — there’s no indication the French programmer utilized those tools, Kennedy said.

Though the donations are not a smoking gun or indicative of a crime, and it remains unclear to what extent the Capitol riot was coordinated in advance, the activity is nonetheless revealing, according to Kennedy.

“These extremist groups are probably more well organized and well funded than what was previously believed,” she said. Chainalysis maintains a database of “domestic extremists” who have cryptocurrency accounts, and while the company has traced donations to right-wing groups over the years, the December deposit was “the single biggest month we’ve ever observed” directed toward these causes, the researchers wrote.

“This is evidence to show they’re raising money,” Kennedy said. Additionally, the fact that the donor was outside the United States suggests “this has international scope,” she continued, a fact that “law enforcement should be paying attention to.”

"Hunter's Laptop"

After years of rumor and innuendo and flat-out lies, we finally get to where everything's supposed to be revealed in startling detail and blah blah blah. Sound familiar?

• I'll release my tax records in a month or so
• My investigators in Hawaii are finding some very interesting evidence about that birth certificate, and I expect we'll see it in the coming weeks
• Hillary spied on my campaign / Obama spied on my campaign - we have proof and that's going to be made public in about 2 weeks
• We have smoking-gun-level evidence of massive voter fraud, and you'll see it all come out in court next month - next week - before Halloween - or Christmas - or Memorial Day...

So now we have "Hunter's Laptop".

But it's not a laptop at all.

It's also not the hard drive from Hunter's laptop.

"It's a copy of the hard drive on Hunter's laptop, and even tho' we got the laptop itself from a guy who says he got it from Hunter - or maybe it was somebody on Hunter's staff, or something like that - anyway, we don't actually have the laptop, we have a copy of what we assume was the hard drive from what we assume was Hunter Biden's laptop. And there's lots and lots of other stuff we got from Rudy Giuliani - so that has to be legit, right?"

And then there's the issue of Chain Of Custody.

So I'm not saying there couldn't possibly be anything sketchy about Hunter Biden or his attempts to turn a buck trading on his old man's name. That's more than a fair probability. And if there's something illegal about what he did, he should burn just like anybody else - of course, we've been a little light on consequences around here lately, so it's more than probable we'll gladly crucify Hunter in order to shield POTUS.

But that's only if there's a really solid connection - that can be proved.

Dissecting GOP claims about Hunter Biden deals allegedly involving his father

“To be clear, Joe Biden is the ‘big guy.’ This evidence raises troubling questions about whether President Biden is a national security risk and about whether he is compromised by foreign governments.”  -- Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, at a news conference, Nov. 17

Soon after claiming control of the House in the upcoming Congress, Republicans announced that they would launch an investigation into business dealings of Hunter Biden, the president’s son, with the aim of proving that the president was involved in some of those deals as well. The news conference, and accompanying report issued by House Republicans, relied heavily on materials found on a hard-drive copy of the laptop Hunter Biden supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019.

The laptop has been a source of significant reporting about Hunter Biden’s personal and business life, but many news organizations have treated its contents with trepidation because it emerged late in the 2020 presidential campaign and, at the time, they were unable to verify its authenticity.

Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani provided material from the laptop to the New York Post but refused to share a copy of the hard drive with The Washington Post and other news organizations. In 2021, The Washington Post received 217 gigabytes of data from a Republican activist, who said he had received it from Giuliani. The Washington Post asked two security experts to examine the data, and they found nearly 22,000 emails among those files carrying cryptographic signatures that could be verified using technology that would be difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to fake.

The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified, the security experts said. But The Washington Post also found financial documents on the hard-drive copy that matched documents and information found in other records. The New York Times separately said it had authenticated a cache of emails found on the laptop concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and with a Chinese company. CBS News, in a report that aired Monday, said it obtained a copy of the hard drive directly from a lawyer for the repair shop and that its security experts found “no evidence it is fake or tampered with.”

Asked whether the GOP committee staff had verified the laptop hard drive itself, spokeswoman Jessica Collins said “the laptop’s authenticity has been confirmed by several forensic analysts,” noting specifically the CBS report.

At several points Comer referenced a deal Hunter Biden tried to strike with CEFC China Energy, an energy conglomerate. Many aspects of his financial arrangements have been examined by news organizations, including The Washington Post. But at a news conference, Comer made assertions that have not been proved, are in dispute or appear incorrect. Any potential connection between Joe Biden and his son’s business dealings, thus far, is especially strained.

Here’s a guide to some of the claims made in the news conference.

“One of these deals involves the sale of American natural gas to China. Evidence suggests Joe Biden had a 10% equity stake through his son.”  --Comer, at the news conference

The phrase “evidence suggests” is doing a lot of work here. Comer is referring to a single email — dated May 13, 2017 — whose meaning has been under dispute. In the hard-drive copy of the laptop obtained by The Washington Post, the email lacked verifiable digital information that allowed it to be verified.

The Washington Post, in its reporting, cites only materials from the laptop that the security experts were able to verify or can be confirmed elsewhere. Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger, in his 2021 book “The Bidens,” said the email had been verified as authentic by “a person with independent access to Hunter’s emails.”

The 2017 email described possible ownership stakes for five partners, including Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim Biden, in a planned venture with CEFC, the Chinese company. The entity was to be called Oneida Holdings LLC.

James Gilliar, a business associate summarizing the allocation of the equity in Oneida Holdings LLC., in the email, wrote how four partners would get 20 percent each, except for Jim Biden, who would get 10 percent. He added a question: “10 held by H for the big guy?” One of the recipients of the mail, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that the “big guy” referred to Joe Biden and that “H” referred to Hunter. Bobulinski was a guest of Trump at one of the 2020 presidential debates.

But Gilliar told the Wall Street Journal in 2020: “I would like to clear up any speculation that former Vice President Biden was involved with the 2017 discussions about our potential business structure. I am unaware of any involvement at anytime of the former vice president. The activity in question never delivered any project revenue.”

Three days after the email was sent, a draft agreement setting up Oneida was circulated. It shows each partner would receive 20 percent, including Jim Biden. No mention is made of Joe Biden. The company agreement signed on May 22, 2017, had the same allocation. Oneida was to hold 50 percent of another corporate entity called SinoHawk. Neither Gilliar nor James Biden responded to requests for comment.

The Wall Street Journal said that it had reviewed corporate records and found no role for Joe Biden. The Washington Post, in an extensive report on the CEFC dealings, also did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC. The Biden campaign at the time denied he had any role.

Comer says that this deal involved natural gas, but he appears to be referring to a different transaction, described below. There is no evidence this particular deal concerned natural gas.

Collins said Comer had not made a mistake. “Committee Republicans have evidence the Bidens’ deal with CEFC — a company closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party — was changed when the Bidens cut out their Western partners of SinoHawk to keep the business in the family,” she said. Asked to provide the evidence, she would only say it was “based on whistleblower information provided to Committee Republicans.”

In an Oct. 13 letter to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said that an FBI summary of an interview with Bobulinski revealed that the deal was intended to pay the partners for deals that had “remained intentionally uncompensated while Joe Biden was Vice President.” The venture failed but, in a separate arrangement, Hunter and Jim Biden received nearly $5 million from CEFC, Grassley noted.

“At a time when Americans are suffering from high energy prices because of this administration’s terrible energy policy, we found evidence that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden were involved in a scheme to try to get China to buy liquefied natural gas.”  --Comer, at the news conference

Hunter Biden, by his own account, discussed a $4 million joint venture in which CEFC would produce liquefied natural gas in Louisiana. But the deal fell through when Ye Jianming, the founder and chairman of the Chinese firm, was detained in mid-February 2018. The reasons for the arrest were unclear, although Reuters reported that it was related to suspected economic crimes.

In any case, the natural gas deal appears separate from Oneida; it involved a Hunter Biden company known as Hudson West III LLC. Joe Biden’s alleged involvement has never been proved.

“Hunter brought in millions of dollars from this deal from entities tied to the Chinese government. In emails obtained by committee Republicans, Hunter wanted keys made for Joe Biden and Jill Biden, his office mate. He provided Joe Biden’s personal cell number and called him his partner.” -- Comer, at the news conference

Comer mixes documented facts with innuendo here. The Washington Post, via government records, court documents and bank statements, found that CEFC and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter and Jim Biden. But the alleged connection of these deals to Joe Biden remains tenuous. It again hinges on a single email — also describing something that did not happen.

In the fall of 2017, Hunter Biden wrote to a building manager of the House of Sweden, where he was renting office space. “Please have keys made for new office mates,” he wrote, listing Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden and Gongwen Dong, whom he called “emissary” of CEFC. He also asked the signage updated to say the “Biden Foundation” and “Hudson West (CEFC U.S.).”

The email was on the laptop hard drive but also confirmed by public records released by the Swedish government and first reported in 2021 by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

But a representative of the Biden Foundation told The Washington Post the House of Sweden was never under consideration as a location. A spokeswoman for the Swedish authority that oversees the property said that the four keys were made available, as requested, but that Hunter Biden never picked them up. The signboard on the door wasn’t changed, she said.

It seems pretty obvious that after years of being on the defensive, expending enormous amounts of damage control energy trying to excuse and rationalize and ignore hundreds of incidents of Trump et al doing all manner of shitty things, the Republicans just can't afford to pass on a chance for some unearned payback, and the Press poodles are doing their usual Both Sides schtick.

Today's Trump Fuckery

Another day, another revelation that Trump is a scum-sucking pig who wouldn't bat an eye about fucking his own grandma out of her pension.

When does this prick see the inside of a jail cell?

Federal judge finds that Trump lied under oath about voter fraud in Georgia while trying to overturn the 2020 election results

A federal judge said Wednesday Trump lied under oath about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump knew the fraud figures were wrong but touted them in court and publicly, the judge said.
This came in a ruling saying a GOP lawyer must give his communications to the Capitol-riot panel.

A federal judge said Wednesday that former President Donald Trump lied under oath about voter fraud in Georgia while trying to get the state's 2020 election results overturned.

US District Judge David Carter made the determination in a ruling ordering the conservative lawyer John Eastman to turn over to the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, a batch of his communications related to Trump's and his allies' efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.

On December 4, 2020, Trump's legal team filed a lawsuit in Georgia state court alleging that Fulton County had miscounted thousands of votes. It also contested the state court's proceedings in federal court.

But later that month, according to Carter's ruling, Eastman said in an email that while Trump had "signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate."

Eastman added: "For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.'"

Trump and his lawyers still filed their complaint citing those numbers, and Trump signed a letter "swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers 'are true and correct' or 'believed to be true and correct' to the best of his knowledge and belief," Carter wrote.

He added: "The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public."

Wednesday wasn't the first time Carter suggested the former president committed a crime in connection to his crusade to undermine the 2020 election results.

In a March ruling, the judge said Trump likely obstructed Congress — a felony — when he tried to disrupt the election-certification process on January 6.

Carter pointed out the dozens of lawsuits Trump's campaign and his Republican allies filed in court contesting the election results in battleground states that now-President Joe Biden won.

After "filing and losing more than sixty suits, this plan was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means," the ruling said, adding that the "illegality of the plan was obvious."

Trump and Eastman "launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history," Carter wrote, adding: "Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory."

About Judge Cannon

I'll probably go on referring to judges like Aileen Cannon as "Trump's own", but I want to keep in mind that while 45* had to sign off on all of their appointments - for the sake of official protocol - most of these Smarmspace Rangers are on the bench now because The Federalist Society and Mitch McConnell put them there.

Trump is simply a pile of partially animated meat with just enough sentience to hold a pen and sign his name. IOW, he's exactly the schmuck that guys like Grover Nordquist have been salivating for all these years.

That said, looking at her Wikipedia page, I think we get a fair idea of why she's where she is, and what she was put there to do.

FWIW - this was a lame duck confirmation

So anyway -

(pay wall)

A thorough rebuke of Judge Aileen Cannon’s pro-Trump order

From a panel that was two-thirds comprised of fellow Trump-nominated judges, no less.

As U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ruled twice in the Mar-a-Lago documents case for the former president who nominated her to the bench, many legal experts — including conservatives and executive-power advocates — have strained to understand how she could have reached such conclusions about Donald Trump’s claims.

On Wednesday night, two fellow Trump nominees joined with another judge to provide the rebuke of Cannon’s jurisprudence that those experts suggested might be coming.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit was rather unsparing in unanimously granting the Justice Department a reprieve from Cannon’s order barring them from reviewing documents with classified markings seized from Mar-a-Lago. The stay is temporary, but the reasoning is firm.

They repeatedly rejected not just the Trump legal team’s lack of arguments, but also Cannon’s acceptance of them. Indeed, they suggested it was inexplicable that Cannon ruled for Trump even by her own logic.

The ruling really kicks into gear when the judges address what a 1977 Supreme Court case considered the “foremost consideration” in deciding whether a court such as Cannon’s should exercise jurisdiction in such a case: whether the government “displayed a callous disregard for … constitutional rights” in its seizure.

The judges say Cannon conceded that it hadn’t displayed such disregard, but then disregarded that consideration all the same — and say she thus “abused” her “discretion.”

“Here, the district court concluded that [Trump] did not show that the United States acted in callous disregard of his constitutional rights. No party contests the district court’s finding in this regard,” the judges write. “The absence of this ‘indispensab[le]’ factor … is reason enough to conclude that the district court abused its discretion in exercising equitable jurisdiction here.”

The judges continue, rather dryly: “But for the sake of completeness, we consider the remaining factors.”

Cannon might wish they hadn’t.

On the second test — whether Trump has an interest in the documents marked classified at issue — the judges note that Cannon ruled Trump had an interest in some of the documents seized.

“But none of those concerns apply to the roughly one-hundred classified documents at issue here,” the judges write, before twisting the knife a little more: “And the district court made no mention in its analysis of this factor as to why or how Plaintiff might have an individual interest in or need for the classified documents.”

Indeed, Cannon’s apparent lack of curiosity — best exemplified by her acceptance of the Trump legal team’s claims that the documents might have been declassified without actually stating as much — was a feature of the remainder of the opinion. The judges repeatedly note Trump’s lawyers weren’t even compelled to furnish arguments on some of the crucial matters at hand. And they say that even if they had been, it might not have mattered.

“Plaintiff has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents,” they write. “Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents. And even if he had, that, in and of itself, would not explain why Plaintiff has an individual interest in the classified documents.”

They go on to not only rebuke Cannon’s ruling, but the very idea that Trump’s public, out-of-court claims (which his lawyers have conspicuously declined to echo) that he declassified the documents even matters — a crucial point that shouldn’t be lost in all of this.

“Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President. But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified,” the judges write. “And before the special master, Plaintiff resisted providing any evidence that he had declassified any of these documents.”

They add: “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal. So even if we assumed that Plaintiff did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them.”

It’s an opinion that brings home virtually all of the criticism of Cannon’s ruling and even of the significance of the underlying dispute over the classification status of the documents. It’s saying both that she got it wrong — and that it’s beside the point.

But Cannon is hardly the only one to suffer a rebuke in the opinion. Trump has publicly claimed he declassified all of the documents, but his lawyers watered that down to suggest merely that he might have, and Cannon accepted that evidence-free claim as rendering the documents’ status as in dispute. Yet judges signaled that they have no time for any of it. Rather, they repeatedly refer to the documents as classified, without qualifying that description in any way.

They refer to “the roughly one-hundred classified documents at issue here” and repeatedly to “the classified documents.” And in their concluding sentence, they twice flat-out call them classified: “The district court order is STAYED to the extent it enjoins the government’s use of the classified documents and requires the government to submit the classified documents to the special master for review.”

It’s the second time in two days that judges have undercut the Trump legal strategy that Cannon accepted, after the special master, Raymond J. Dearie, pressed Trump’s legal team much more than she had on its unsubstantiated declassification claims.

And for the second time in two days, it comes from judges Trump himself recommended.

Welcome To Smarmspace

Just as Mike Cohen testified, Trump never gives anyone any direct instruction as to what he wants done. Even on the phone calls where the conversations were recorded, there's always a way for him to wriggle around and deny that what he said actually meant what everybody knows he meant.

So when we're trying to track down what caused several dozen boxes - some holding classified material - to land at Mar-A-Lago, there's an obvious trail leading to Trump's gang, but the link that tags it all directly to Trump himself is blurry enough so as to leave a little smarmspace for him to maneuver.

And before we get down to arguing that link, he will have thrown everybody and their uncle under the bus.

My conclusion is that it'll do no good to subpoena Trump because he'll drag that out forever, and while there's no doubt in my mind that his legal beagles will work like demons to fight it, he has to be indicted for us to get this fuckin' circus on the sawdust.

(pay wall)

Trump team claimed boxes at Mar-a-Lago were only news clippings

The 2021 assertion to the National Archives vastly misrepresented the scale and variety of documents, including classified records, later recovered from Trump’s property

Months before National Archives officials retrieved hundreds of classified documents in 15 boxes from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, they were told that none of the material was sensitive or classified and that Trump had only 12 boxes of “news clippings,” according to people familiar with the conversations between Trump’s team and the Archives.

During a September 2021 phone call with top Archives lawyer Gary Stern, former deputy White House counsel Pat Philbin offered reassuring news: Philbin said he had talked to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who made the assertion about the dozen boxes of clippings, the people familiar with the call said. Trump’s team was aware of no other materials, Philbin said, relaying information he said he got from Meadows.

The characterization made in the call vastly misrepresented the scale and variety of documents, including classified records, eventually recovered by the Archives or the FBI.

Philbin said that Meadows also told him no documents had been destroyed, according to two people with knowledge of the call and a third person with knowledge of Stern’s contemporaneous account of the call. These and other people spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details.

Stern had sought the call because he believed there were still more than two dozen boxes of materials that Trump had, and he also had concerns about whether digital records had been properly retained, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. Top Archives officials continued to believe there was more material than they were being told about, according to people familiar with their thinking.

A spokeswoman for Philbin declined to comment. A person close to Philbin said he was unaware of the contents of the boxes and did not know there was classified material in them.

“Mr. Meadows did not personally review the boxes at Mar A Lago and did not have a role in examining or verifying what was or wasn’t contained within them,” Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Meadows, said in a statement Friday night after the article was published online.

In the year since the call, Archives and Justice Department officials have recovered 42 boxes of records from Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., property, including 15 boxes handed over by Trump’s representatives to the Archives last January and an additional 27 boxes retrieved by the FBI during a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago last month.

The records recovered by the FBI included documents that detailed top-secret U.S. operations and information about a foreign government’s nuclear capabilities, The Washington Post has reported. Some of the documents retrieved by the Archives had also been torn up, which Trump had a habit of doing.

The new details about the Philbin call show that Meadows was more deeply involved in the communications with Archives officials than previously known. Some White House advisers had previously said Meadows was deeply involved in the final packing at the White House.

The Justice Department has conducted interviews with Archives officials and subpoenaed documents from the Archives as a part of their probe into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. Officials are seeking to understand what the Archives was told and whether Trump’s representatives were honest, according to people familiar with the matter.

In an email to Trump lawyers in May 2021 previously reported by The Post, Stern wrote that there were roughly two dozen boxes that were kept in the White House residence that had yet to be returned to the Archives, “despite a determination by [former White House counsel] Pat Cipollone in the final days of the administration that they need to be.”

In court filings, the Justice Department has released an email from the Archives to Trump’s counsel stating that NARA officials had “ongoing communications” with Trump’s representatives “throughout 2021” to try to secure missing presidential records, which resulted in the transfer of only the first 15 boxes.

Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday that there would be “problems in the country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he were indicted on charges of mishandling classified records.

“I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it,” Trump said.

Trump’s legal team has said the documents seized include some personal records. They have argued that the former president has “an absolute right to access” to his presidential records and suggested that it is possible that some of the documents marked classified may have been declassified by Trump before he left office. However, his lawyers have not formally asserted any were declassified or otherwise addressed concerns that Trump might have been improperly storing national security secrets at his Florida club.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon appointed Raymond J. Dearie, a former chief federal judge in New York, as a special master to sort through the documents seized by the FBI to see whether any should be shielded from criminal investigators because of attorney-client or executive privileges. The Justice Department is barred from using any of those documents in its criminal probe until Dearie reviews them, significantly slowing down the inquiry.

Today's Yikes

It's not like we haven't suspected (ie: known all along) that Trump is corrupt as fuck, but when practically every day we get another bit of confirmation, it piles up into one big DAILY YIKES.

And remember how Trump has been whining about "Biden's politicized DOJ", which lines up very neatly with:

Daddy State Awareness, Rule 1

Every accusation is a confession

Also - don't ever forget what a slimy ball of partly congealed pig snot Bill Barr is.

(pay wall)

Trump Pushed Officials to Prosecute His Critics, Ex-U.S. Attorney Says

Geoffrey S. Berman, who headed the Manhattan office, says in a book the Justice Department pushed cases, against John Kerry and others, to help Mr. Trump.

A book by a former top federal prosecutor offers new details about how the Justice Department under President Donald J. Trump sought to use the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics — even pushing the office to open a criminal investigation of former secretary of state John Kerry.

The prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for two and a half years until June 2020, when Mr. Trump fired him after he refused a request to resign by Attorney General William P. Barr, who sought to replace him with an administration ally.

A copy of Mr. Berman’s book, “Holding the Line,” was obtained by The New York Times before its scheduled publication Tuesday.

The book paints a picture of Justice Department officials motivated by partisan concerns in pursuing investigations or blocking them; in weighing how forthright to be in court filings; and in shopping investigations to other prosecutors’ offices when the Southern District declined to act.

The book contains accounts of how department officials tried to have allusions to Mr. Trump scrubbed from charging papers for Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, and how the attorney general later tried to have his conviction reversed. It tells of pressure to pursue Mr. Kerry, who had angered Mr. Trump by attempting to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.

And in September 2018, Mr. Berman writes, two months before the November midterms, a senior department official called Mr. Berman’s deputy, cited the Southern District’s recent prosecutions of two prominent Trump loyalists, and bluntly asserted that the office, which had been investigating Gregory B. Craig, a powerful Democratic lawyer, should charge him — and should do so before Election Day.

“It’s time for you guys to even things out,” the official said, according to Mr. Berman.

The book comes as Mr. Trump and his supporters have accused the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland of using the Justice Department as a weapon after a judge authorized FBI agents to search his Florida house for missing classified records. Mr. Trump, who is a likely presidential candidate in 2024, has suggested without evidence that President Biden is playing a role in that investigation.

However, Mr. Berman’s book says that during Mr. Trump’s presidency, department officials made “overtly political” demands, choosing targets that would directly further Mr. Trump’s desires for revenge and advantage. Mr. Berman wrote that the pressure was clearly inspired by the president’s openly professed wants.

In the book, Mr. Berman, who as U.S. attorney did not give news interviews, offers new details about the high-profile prosecutions of defendants like Mr. Cohen; Chris Collins, a Republican congressman from New York; Michael Avenatti, the celebrity attorney and Trump antagonist; and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.

He says there were cases his office pursued without pressure from Washington, but in others, he makes clear his greatest challenges did not always have to do with the law.

“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Mr. Berman, 62, writes, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”

“I walked this tightrope for two and a half years,” writes Mr. Berman, who is now in private practice. “Eventually, the rope snapped.”

Mr. Berman, who in the book describes himself as a Rockefeller Republican, had been a federal prosecutor in the Manhattan office from 1990 to 1994, and went on to become a co-managing partner of the New Jersey office of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.

During the 2016 presidential primary season, Mr. Berman volunteered for Mr. Trump’s campaign and later for his transition committee. Originally believing he might be named U.S. attorney for New Jersey, he was instead tapped to lead the Southern District, the most prestigious prosecutor’s office outside Washington. It handles Wall Street crime, international terrorism, political corruption and complex frauds.

Mr. Berman met briefly with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in June 2017, where the president did most of the talking, he writes. Mr. Berman, a Princeton resident, said he would need to move into the city. Mr. Trump recommended he live in downtown Manhattan, near the Southern District’s offices, ahead of what could be a dicey confirmation hearing.

“Make it a rental,” Mr. Trump said.

In March 2018, some two months after Mr. Berman assumed the post, the Justice Department, then headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, referred to the Southern District the investigation of Mr. Craig.

The allegations focused on whether Mr. Craig, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, had concealed work he had done years earlier for the government of Ukraine in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and whether he had lied to the Justice Department when questioned about it.

After months of investigation, the Southern District and Justice Department met with Mr. Craig’s lawyers, who made a presentation on his behalf. After his lawyers left and prosecutors voiced their opinions, Mr. Berman said he believed Mr. Craig was innocent of the FARA charge and so a jury would be unlikely to convict him on a false statement count.

A short time later, around mid-September, Mr. Berman writes, his deputy, Robert S. Khuzami, walked into his office and said he had just gotten a call from Edward O’Callaghan, the principal associate deputy attorney general, a political appointee. Mr. O’Callaghan, the book says, asked that the office “even things out” by charging Mr. Craig before Election Day.

In that conversation, Mr. Berman writes, Mr. O’Callaghan kept reminding Mr. Khuzami that the Southern District had just prosecuted Representative Collins and Mr. Cohen.

Mr. O’Callaghan said in a brief interview Wednesday that he had not read the book, but after being told by The Times of the statements attributed to him, called them “categorically false.”

Mr. Berman says he ignored the edict.

In mid-December, after a thorough investigation, Mr. Berman informed the department that his office was declining to prosecute Mr. Craig. He writes that he soon learned that the department had “peddled” the case to the U.S. attorney in Washington, where Mr. Craig was eventually indicted and tried on a single count of making false statements.

On Sept. 4, 2019, Mr. Craig was acquitted by the jury in less than five hours.

One of his lawyers, William W. Taylor III, said after the trial that the department had “hounded” his client “without any evidence and without any purpose.”

Mr. Berman writes: “The verdict felt like justice. Greg Craig should never have been prosecuted.”

One case Mr. Berman says his office had to fight to keep alive was the 2018 prosecution of Mr. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer. That August, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations over payments he arranged before the 2016 election, to keep two women from disclosing affairs they said they had with Mr. Trump. Mr. Berman did not participate in the investigation, because he had volunteered for the campaign. But he was later briefed on interference in the case.

Before the plea, Mr. Berman writes, as his office was preparing a charging document detailing the crimes, a Justice Department official badgered his deputy, Mr. Khuzami, without success, to remove all references to a person identified as “Individual-1.” It was Mr. Trump.

In the months after Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea, Mr. Berman writes, the Southern District continued to pursue investigations related to possible campaign finance violations, apparently by others in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

But after Mr. Barr became attorney general in February 2019, Mr. Berman writes, he tried to kill the investigations and suggested that Mr. Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed, even though six months had passed since Mr. Cohen had entered his guilty plea.

In late February, he writes, Mr. Barr summoned the Southern District deputy, Mr. Khuzami, who was overseeing the inquiry, to challenge the legal basis for Mr. Cohen’s plea and “the reasoning behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals.”

His office was ordered to pause all investigative steps, Mr. Berman writes. “Not a single document in our possession could be reviewed,” he says. Mr. Barr assigned the department’s Office of Legal Counsel to study the issue.

Mr. Berman says his office submitted memos to the department in support of its position, and top prosecutors met with officials in Washington, including Mr. Barr, to press the case.

In late April, with the case effectively stalled, Audrey Strauss, who had succeeded Mr. Khuzami as Mr. Berman’s deputy, finally persuaded Mr. Barr there was no basis to dismiss any charges against Mr. Cohen and that the investigations should be completed, Mr. Berman writes. The inquiry eventually ended without additional charges.

Mr. Barr did not respond to a request for comment.

After the September 2019 acquittal of Gregory Craig, Mr. Berman writes, he hoped the verdict would ease pressure on the Southern District “to prosecute yet another enemy of the president” — Mr. Kerry.

“That was naïve on my part,” Mr. Berman says.

Mr. Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran and a former longtime Massachusetts senator, was secretary of state under President Obama, a role in which he led the lengthy negotiations that produced the Iran nuclear accord — that administration’s signature foreign policy achievement. Mr. Trump, during his presidential campaign, called the deal “insane” and a “disaster.”

On May 7, 2018, Mr. Trump tweeted about Mr. Kerry’s “possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy” — an apparent reference to reports of Mr. Kerry having conversations as a private citizen with Iranian and other officials.

Mr. Trump tweeted another attack on Mr. Kerry the next day — the same day Mr. Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the accord.

On May 9, Mr. Berman writes, Justice Department officials told his office that it would be responsible for an investigation into Mr. Kerry’s Iran-related conduct. The F.B.I. would join the inquiry.

The focus was on the Logan Act, a rarely invoked 1799 statute barring private citizens from unauthorized negotiations with foreign governments, which has been criticized as unconstitutionally vague. Mr. Berman notes that no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the law.

But, as he puts it, “The conduct that had annoyed the president was now a priority of the Department of Justice.”

Although Mr. Berman says he does not know what prompted the Justice Department to seek a Kerry investigation, “No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted. You could read his tweets.”

Mr. Berman writes that Mr. Kerry did not learn of the investigation and it never leaked into the news media.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, kept tweeting. “Iran is being given VERY BAD advice by @JohnKerry,” he tweeted on the morning of April 22, 2019. “Big violation of Logan Act?”

That afternoon, Mr. Berman says, one of the co-chiefs of the Southern District’s national security unit got a call from a Justice Department official, asking why the office was delaying seeking an order to review “header information,” such as the date, recipients and senders of Mr. Kerry’s electronic communications. A more senior official pressed the issue again the next day with Southern District officials.

Mr. Berman writes that the pattern was “clear — and outrageous.” He said that the investigation began after Mr. Trump started tweeting “his displeasure about Kerry,” and a new tweet 11 months later prompted further prodding.

“And they were asking us, basically, what’s taking so long? Why aren’t you going harder and faster at this enemy of the president? There was no other way for me to look at it,” Mr. Berman writes.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Berman says that after an investigation of roughly a year, his office told the Justice Department that it would not prosecute Mr. Kerry.

A short time later, on Sept. 19, 2019, Mr. Berman writes, a senior adviser to the attorney general called to say that Mr. Barr expected to take the Kerry case to another U.S. attorney’s office, this time in Maryland.

That office reached the same conclusion as the Southern District had, Mr. Berman writes, “and the Kerry investigation just quietly died — as it should have.”