RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
240 lbs? :conceitedsideeye:
:ALERTRED:
Blaming the Political climate?
I guess you could call it Climate Change
Gee...if only there was an emoluments clause to prevent this shyt in the first place
Fact is this is a fake business anyways
They down own ANYTHING
Blaming the Political climate?
I guess you could call it Climate Change
Gee...if only there was an emoluments clause to prevent this shyt in the first place
Fact is this is a fake business anyways
They down own ANYTHING
:ALERTRED:
Andrew McCabe’s disturbing account of working for Sessions and Trump
Greg Miller
Greg Miller is national security correspondent for The Washington Post, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy.”
He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in newspaper clips. He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects. He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness.
This isn’t how President Trump is depicted in a new book by former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. Instead, it’s McCabe’s account of what it was like to work for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos — who knows what they’re doing?”
It’s a startling portrait that suggests that the Trump administration’s reputation for baseness and dysfunction has, if anything, been understated and too narrowly attributed to the president.
The description of Sessions is one of the most striking revelations in “The Threat,” a McCabe memoir that adds to a rapidly expanding collection of score-settling insider accounts of Trump-era Washington. McCabe’s is an important voice because of his position at the top of the bureau during a critical series of events, including the firing of FBI chief James Comey, the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller, and the ensuing scorched-earth effort by Trump and his Republican allies to discredit the Russia probe and destroy public confidence in the nation’s top law enforcement agency. The work is insightful and occasionally provocative. The subtitle, “How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” all but equates the danger posed by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to that of the current president.
But overall, the book isn’t the comprehensive account McCabe was presumably capable of delivering. He seems reluctant to reveal details about his role in conflicts at key moments, rarely adding meaningful new illumination to areas of the Trump-Russia-FBI timeline established by Mueller, news organizations and previous authors.
McCabe is a keen observer of detail, particularly when it comes to the president’s pettiness. He describes how Trump arranges Oval Office encounters so that his advisers are forced to sit before him in “little schoolboy chairs” across the Resolute Desk. Prior presidents met with aides on couches in the center of the room, but Trump is always angling to make others feel smaller.
McCabe was known as a taciturn figure in the bureau, in contrast to the more garrulous Comey. His book reflects that penchant for brevity, with just 264 pages of text. Even so, he documents the president’s attempts to impair the Russia probe and incessant attacks on the institution, describing the stakes in sweeping, convincing language.
“Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law,” McCabe writes. “Yet now the rule of law is under attack, including from the president himself.”
Inevitably, the book includes disturbing new detail about Trump’s subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin. During an Oval Office briefing in July 2017, Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea had test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile — a test that Kim Jong Un had called a Fourth of July “gift” to “the arrogant Americans.”
Trump dismissed the missile launch as a “hoax,” McCabe writes. “He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.”
McCabe, of course, has some baggage that hurt the reputation he’d built over 22 years at the bureau and raised questions about his credibility. He was accused by the FBI inspector general of making false statements about contacts with the media.
McCabe also has ample motivation to lash out at the president. He had been a target of Trump insults and taunts for nearly two years by the time he was fired, mainly because McCabe’s wife, a pediatrician, had run for state office in Virginia with the financial backing of longtime Clinton ally and former governor Terry McAuliffe.
Trump seized on the connection to insinuate that McCabe had stifled the bureau’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails — a claim debunked by internal FBI investigations. Trump seems never to have let go of the issue, even as he dangled the FBI director job to McCabe, sneering in one conversation that it “must have been really tough” when McCabe’s wife lost her race. “To lose,” Trump said, driving the dagger further. “To be a loser.”
When McCabe was finally forced out, it was in the most petty fashion possible. He was fired just 26 hours before his own self-declared retirement date. Trump was gleeful. “Andrew McCabe FIRED,” he tweeted. “A great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI.”
But for all of the understandable alarm and indignation that McCabe registers, he seems, like other Trump dissidents, never to have found reason or opportunity to stand up to the president. There are paragraphs in “The Threat” that recount in detail McCabe’s inner outrage — but no indication that those thoughts escaped his lips in the presence of Trump.
What is it that makes otherwise proud public servants, Comey included, willing to subject themselves to Trump-inflicted indignities?
Deference to the office? A determination to cling to power? A view of oneself as an indispensable institutional savior?
At one point, McCabe puts his odds of getting the FBI director’s position at “one-in-ten-million,” but he goes through a job interview with Trump that feels like a charade from the outset.
One of the most frustrating aspects of “The Threat” is that it steers around scenes where McCabe might have provided more detail or insight. He is known to have had a series of tense interactions with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the aftermath of Comey’s firing, each suspicious of his counterpart and convinced that the other should recuse himself from the Russia probe.
McCabe was also witness to secret conversations in which Rosenstein raised the possibility that officials should wear a wire in meetings with the president. You won’t learn about any of that in “The Threat.”
McCabe skims over the conduct of two of his FBI subordinates, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, whose text exchanges during an illicit affair included disparaging remarks about Trump and, when they were later revealed, fueled doubts about the organization’s impartiality.
When first confronted with the details of the Page-Strzok texts, McCabe was asked by the inspector general whether he knew that Page — his closest legal adviser — had had interactions with the press. McCabe said he didn’t, though in fact he had authorized those contacts. In the book, he downplays that false testimony as a momentary mental lapse during a confusing conversation — which sounds a lot like the excuses offered by countless defendants who find themselves being prosecuted by the FBI for lying.
McCabe’s disdain for Trump is rivaled only by his contempt for Sessions. He questions the former attorney general’s mental faculties, saying that he had “trouble focusing, particularly when topics of conversation strayed from a small number of issues.”
Logs on the electronic tablets used to deliver the President’s Daily Brief to Sessions came back with no indication he had ever punched in the passcode. The attorney general’s views on race and religion are described as reprehensible.
Sessions “believed that Islam — inherently — advocated extremism” and ceaselessly sought to draw connections between crime and immigration. “Where’s he from?” was his first question about a suspect. The next: “Where are his parents from?”
McCabe notes that he would like to “say much more” about his firing and questions of his candor toward other bureau officials, but that he is restrained from doing so because he is pursuing a lawsuit.
There is one area, however, in which he is considerably more forthcoming than Comey. He acknowledges that the bureau made major miscalculations in its handling of the Clinton probe in 2016 and its decision to discuss it publicly.
“As a matter of policy, the FBI does everything possible not to influence elections,” he writes. “In 2016, it seems we did.”
The Threat
How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump
By Andrew G. McCabe
St. Martin’s. 274 pp. $29.99
:ALERTRED:
:ALERTRED::ALERTRED::ALERTRED:
Russia Investigation: Senate Probe Faces Critical Point - The Atlantic
The Senate’s Russia Probe Is Facing a Reckoning
Meanwhile, the Democratic-led House committee is gearing up for a reinvigorated inquiry.
Natasha Bertrand is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers national security and the intelligence community.7:40 PM ET
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr and Vice Chairman Mark WarnerJ. Scott Applewhite / AP
About two years ago, Republican congressman Devin Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, went on a “midnight run” to the White House that changed everything.
Nunes embarked on the late-night excursion just as the panel he oversaw was opening an investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. He then used the information he'd obtained from White House sources to allege surveillance abuses by President Barack Obama’s administration, raising critics’ concerns that his chumminess with the administration delegitimized the House’s Trump/Russia probe. It was also a sign, critics said, that the committee couldn’t operate in a bipartisan way.
So the public looked to the Senate Intelligence Committee for a comprehensive, bipartisan examination of Trump’s Russia ties—a reputation the panel’s Republican chairman Richard Burr, who had served as a senior national security advisor to the Trump campaign, has largely upheld by keeping the investigation scandal-free. “Nothing in this town stays classified or secret forever,” Burr told the Associated Press last August. “And at some point somebody’s going to go back and do a review. And I’d love not to be the one that chaired the committee when somebody says, ‘well, boy, you missed this.’ So we’ve tried to be pretty thorough in how we’ve done it.”
Though Burr and Mark Warner, the committee’s Democratic vice-chairman, have largely agreed on the parameters of the investigation, they have recently begun to disagree more publicly on what the facts they’ve collected actually add up to—conspiracy? a series of coincidences and bad decisions? Or something in between?
The new Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, does not believe those questions can be answered without a thorough examination of Trump’s financial history and his potential entanglements with Russian money launderers, especially given new revelations about Trump’s efforts to pursue a multi-million dollar real-estate deal in Moscow in 2016. So he has revived the panel’s floundering Russia probe by hiring upwards of a dozen dedicated staffers with expertise in corruption, illicit finance, and prosecutorial experience. That brings the current total number of investigators, which could increase, to 24 on the House panel alone. Many are bringing specific skills to the committee that the nine staffers working on the Senate’s Russia probe—despite their extensive intelligence community experience—do not have, according to two people with direct knowledge of that committee’s work.
The reinvigorated House probe intends to pursue avenues of inquiry that may have been overlooked by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee investigation, including the substance of Trump’s closed-door conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the last two years. A particular emphasis will also be placed on Deutsche Bank—the Trump family’s bank of choice for decades that was fined in 2017 over a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme involving its Moscow, New York and London branches. “The concern about Deutsche Bank is that they have a history of laundering Russian money,” Schiff told NBC in December. “This, apparently, was the one bank that was willing to do business with the Trump Organization,” Schiff said. “If this is a form of compromise, it needs to be exposed.” Deutsche Bank representatives said last month that the bank was working with the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees to “determine the best and most appropriate way of assisting them in their official oversight functions.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing a separate federal investigation into a potential conspiracy between the campaign and Russia in 2016. While he can issue indictments, the Congressional inquiries can pursue a broader inquiry that assesses misconduct that may not rise to the level of criminal activity.
***
It is undeniable that the Senate Intelligence Committee has traditionally been far more unified than its House counterpart, mostly by virtue of longer term limits and different rules. The committee produced important bipartisan reports over the last two years, including one last July that reaffirmed the Intelligence community’s assessment that Russia worked to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016, and another that provided a sweeping analysis of Russia’s ongoing disinformation campaigns. The panel has also interviewed more than 200 witnesses and sifted through hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.
Nevertheless, the bipartisan ground on which the Senate purported to have built its inquiry may be cracking. On Tuesday, Warner said he disagreed with Burr’s claim that the probe had found no “direct evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The comment left some legal experts perplexed, too: “I don’t think I’ve ever had a case where I have direct evidence of a conspiracy,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a Justice Department veteran who served as former FBI Director James Comey’s chief of staff until 2015. “If there is snow on your front lawn, you can safely conclude that it snowed,’ Rosenberg told me. “Is that direct evidence? No. It’s circumstantial—someone could’ve driven up to your house and thrown snow on your lawn. But that’s unlikely. The law treats circumstantial and direct evidence of being of equal weight.”
Some Democratic aides were also confused at Burr’s recent claim that a key witness in the probe, former British spy Christopher Steele, had not responded to the committee’s attempts to engage with him. In fact, Steele submitted written answers to the panel last August, two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the investigation told The Atlantic.
The Senate’s subpoena for his testimony was dropped shortly thereafter—indicating that they were satisfied enough with his responses that they weren’t planning to compel further testimony.
Moreover, the House Democrats’ willingness to launch a full investigation into Trump's financial history may not be "politically realistic" in the Republican-controlled Senate, said one of the people with direct knowledge of the Senate’s investigation. “The follow-the-money pieces of this are really important, but the question is who is best positioned to do it,” this person said, referring to the committee’s jurisdictional limitations. The source added that it was “absolutely fair” to criticize the panel’s decision not to bring in outside investigators with expertise in financial investigations, ethics, and money laundering. “But I give full credit to Burr and Warner for keeping this investigation bipartisan, in a very difficult environment on such a fraught issue,” the source said.
Burr recently defended the decision not to hire outside investigators, telling CBS that they “would've never had access to some of the documents that we were able to access from the intelligence community." A spokesperson for Warner declined to comment on whether the senator agreed with that assessment. A Republican committee aide, who requested anonymity to discuss the panel’s staff, reiterated that Burr has “full confidence in the bipartisan investigative staff, who were selected by both himself and the Vice Chairman. Over the last two years, members of the Committee on both sides of the aisle have praised the investigators’ work and integrity.”
But Ryan Goodman, an expert in national security law, told me he saw “red flags” in the way the investigation was being carried out, including the chairman’s “failure to hire outside staff with professional expertise and experience in complex investigations, and the failure to use the subpoena power to easily obtain financial records from entities like Deutsche Bank.”
“A successful congressional inquiry like this can stand or fall on the size and investigative skills of its staff,” Goodman added.
Another contention in the Senate’s inquiry is the extent to which Steele has cooperated with the committee. The retired MI6 officer, who authored a collection of memos known as the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016, submitted written answers to the committee last August, sources said. The committee had prepared a subpoena for Steele's testimony in March 2018, but withdrew it after he provided his testimony. Investigators who have traveled to London since then have not approached Steele for an interview, according to Steele’s lawyer, who declined to be identified due to sensitivities surrounding the probe. Burr suggested in an interview with CBS last week that Steele remained out of reach. “We've made multiple attempts,” to elicit a response, Burr said.
Steele’s lawyer said that was “flatly not true,” and that the committee had actually agreed in writing not to seek further information from Steele after he submitted his written testimony. The panel has not reached out to request another interview, the lawyer said.
The Republican committee aide did not dispute that the panel had received Steele’s statements. But the aide said the committee had “made clear to Mr. Steele and his attorney that there is no substitute for a face-to-face interview when it comes to answering some of the Committee's most pressing questions.” A spokesperson for Warner confirmed that the committee “would like to speak with Mr. Steele.” The committee did not respond to Steele’s lawyer’s comments.
The dossier, which alleges serious misconduct and conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in 2016, was presented to Trump by the nation's top intelligence officials in January 2017. Trump dismissed it as “phony,” but many of the document’s core allegations appear to align with events during the campaign and are slowly being corroborated.
It’s getting harder for the Senate committee’s Republicans and Democrats to remain in step as they near the point where they’ll have to draw conclusions from their findings. One Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee aide put it simply: “There is a common set of facts, and a disagreement on what those facts mean,” they said. “We are closer to the end than to the beginning, but we are not wrapping up.”
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
Last edited: