RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT

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Ecuador will give Julian Assange’s embassy computers and files to the US
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Ecuador will give Julian Assange’s embassy computers and files to the US
Judicial authorities greenlight search of a room used by the WikiLeaks founder during his seven-year stay in the diplomatic headquarters in London



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José María Irujo
Madrid 13 MAY 2019 - 11:04 CEST
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Julian Assange inside a police van after his arrest on April 11. Reuters
The government of Ecuador has taken one more step in its offensive against cyberactivist Julian Assange. The Ecuadorian attorney general has greenlighted an operation to search one of the rooms that the WikiLeaks founder used during his prolonged stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and agreed to turn over to US authorities any documents, cellphones, digital files, computers, memory drives, CDs and any other devices that may turn up during the search, according to an official notice that EL PAÍS has seen.

The US government wants Assange to be extradited from the United Kingdom so he can be tried for the release of classified military material in 2010. He is being charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion in the US, and faces up to five years in prison if found guilty of leaking 450,000 internal documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the media.

The systematic violation of Assange’s rights is going beyond the limits of what’s conceivable

Baltasar Garzón, Assange’s lawyer



The search of Assange’s sealed-off room will take place on May 20 as part of a petition for judicial assistance issued by the US Department of Justice to the government of Ecuador. The request says the search will take place at 9am London time, under the oversight of police chief Diego López and second sergeant Milton Jaque, a computer forensic expert. The decision to confiscate Assange’s belongings has been communicated to his lawyer in Ecuador, Carlos Poveda.

The 47-year-old activist was arrested on April 11 at the embassy in London and turned over to British authorities after Ecuador withdrew its asylum. Assange was granted political asylum in June 2012, by the leftist government of Rafael Correa after all his legal efforts to fight extradition to Sweden had failed. He was wanted in that country on two sexual assault charges.

But Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno, considered Assange “an inherited problem” and “a stone in the shoe.” The new administration in Ecuador improved its relations with the US, and Moreno introduced tougher visiting rules and living conditions for Assange at the diplomatic mission in London. On April 11 Ecuador revoked its protection, allowing British authorities to arrest the activist, and now the Moreno administration is agreeing to turn over his personal computing devices and files to the US government.

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Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean embassy.

Baltasar Garzón, a former crusading judge from Spain who is now Assange’s lawyer, has described this latest decision as “an absolute violation of the institution of asylum by Ecuador.”

“It is incomprehensible that the country that afforded him protection is now taking advantage of its privileged position to turn over his belongings to the country that is persecuting him. These belongings will be seized without a court warrant, without protecting the rights of political refugees, without respecting the chain of custody,” added Garzón. “And this is made worse by the system of illicit recordings that went on at the embassy, and over which a complaint has already been filed. The systematic violation of Assange’s rights is going beyond conceivable limits.”


The judicial cooperation between the current government of Ecuador and the US began months ago. The Ecuadorian justice system allowed US authorities to take statements from diplomatic personnel at the London embassy, and Assange’s lawyers are not ruling out the possibility that recordings, audio files and documents taken from the activist and one of his lawyers during an alleged spy operation may have ended up in the hands of the United States government.



This is confidential material that will allow the US to come up with new charges to request his extradition

Aitor Martínez, lawyer

Meanwhile, Assange has also filed a complaint with Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, against a Spanish journalist and four computer programmers who attempted to sell him hundreds of videos and documents depicting private moments of his last few years at the embassy. This group was asking for €3 million in exchange for not releasing this material to the media. The United Nations special rapporteur on privacy is also analyzing this alleged case of spying.

Aitor Martínez, one of the lawyers in the legal team defending the Australian activist, says that Ecuador’s recent initiatives are “a manifest and radical violation of the right to a defense, since those documents and devices contain all of [Assange’s] communications with his lawyers and his legal documents. This is confidential material that will allow the US to come up with new charges to request his extradition.”

The WikiLeaks founder has formally told a London court that he does not wish to surrender to extradition to the US. Days before that, another British court sentenced him to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail in 2012, at the time when he was facing extradition to Sweden on rape and sexual assault charges.



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Barr Assigns U.S. Attorney in Connecticut to Review Origins of Russia Inquiry
By Adam Goldman, Charlie Savage and Michael S. Schmidt

May 13, 2019
The United States attorney for Connecticut, John H. Durham, in 2006. He has been assigned to examine the opening of the Russia investigation.Bob Child/Associated Press

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The United States attorney for Connecticut, John H. Durham, in 2006. He has been assigned to examine the opening of the Russia investigation.Bob Child/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful.

John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.

His inquiry is the third known investigation focused on the opening of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign into possible ties between Russia’s election interference and Trump associates.

The department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is separately examining investigators’ use of wiretap applications and informants and whether any political bias against Mr. Trump influenced investigative decisions. And John W. Huber, the United States attorney in Utah, has been reviewing aspects of the Russia investigation. His findings have not been announced.

Additionally on Capitol Hill, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he, too, intends to review aspects of law enforcement’s work in the coming months. And Republicans conducted their own inquiries when they controlled the House, including publicizing details of the F.B.I.’s wiretap use.

Thomas Carson, a spokesman for Mr. Durham’s office, declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the Justice Department. “I do have people in the department helping me review the activities over the summer of 2016,” Mr. Barr said in congressional testimony on May 1, without elaborating.

Mr. Durham, who was nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 and has been a Justice Department lawyer since 1982, has conducted special investigations under administrations of both parties. Attorney General Janet Reno asked Mr. Durham in 1999 to investigate the F.B.I.’s handling of a notorious informant: the organized crime leader James (Whitey) Bulger.

In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned Mr. Durham to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes in 2005 showing the torture of terrorism suspects. A year later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. expanded Mr. Durham’s mandate to also examine whether the agency broke any laws in its abuses of detainees in its custody.

Mr. Barr has signaled his concerns about the Russia investigation during congressional testimony, particularly the surveillance of Trump associates. “I think spying did occur,” he said. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

His use of the term “spying” to describe court-authorized surveillance aimed at understanding a foreign government’s interference in the election touched off criticism that he was echoing politically charged accusations by Mr. Trump and his Republican allies that the F.B.I. unfairly targeted the Trump campaign.

Last week, the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, defended the bureau, saying he was unaware of any illegal surveillance and refused to call agents’ work “spying.” Former F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have defended the genesis of the investigation, saying it was properly predicated.

Yet Mr. Durham’s role — essentially giving him a special assignment but no special powers — also appeared aimed at sidestepping the rare appointment of another special counsel like Robert S. Mueller III, a role that allows greater day-to-day independence.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/13/us/politics/trump-investigations.html
Mr. Trump and House Republicans have long pushed senior Justice Department officials to appoint one to investigate the president’s perceived political enemies and why Mr. Trump’s associates were under surveillance.

Mr. Trump’s calls to investigate the investigators have grown after the findings from Mr. Mueller were revealed last month. Mr. Mueller’s investigators cited “insufficient evidence” to determine that the president or his advisers engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia.

The Mueller report reaffirmed that the F.B.I. opened its investigation based on legitimate factors, including revelations that a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had told a diplomat from Australia, a close American ally, that he was informed that the Russians had stolen Democratic emails.

“It would have been highly, highly inappropriate for us not to pursue it — and pursue it aggressively,” James Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s general counsel in 2016, said in an interview on Friday with the Lawfare podcast.

As part of the Russia inquiry, the F.B.I. investigated four Trump associates: Mr. Papadopoulos; Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman; Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser; and Carter Page, another campaign foreign policy adviser.

Mr. Flynn and Mr. Papadopoulos later pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. as part of the inquiry; Mr. Manafort was also convicted of tax fraud and other charges brought by the special counsel, who took over the investigation in May 2017, and pleaded guilty to conspiracy.

F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors also obtained approval from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap Mr. Page after he left the campaign. Mr. Trump’s allies have pointed to the warrant as major evidence that law enforcement officials were abusing their authority, but the investigation was opened based on separate information and the warrant was one small aspect in a sprawling inquiry that grew to include more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants and about 500 witness interviews.

Law enforcement officials have also drawn intense criticism for using an informant — a typical investigative step — to secretly report on Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos after they left the campaign and for relying on Democrat-funded opposition research compiled into a dossier by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who was also an F.B.I. informant.

Investigators cited the dossier in a lengthy footnote in its application for permission to wiretap Mr. Page, alerting the court that the person who commissioned Mr. Steele’s research was “likely looking for information to discredit” the Trump campaign.

The inspector general is said to be examining whether law enforcement officials intentionally misled the intelligence court, which also approved three renewals of the warrant. The last application in June 2017 was signed by Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who defended the decision last month in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Horowitz is also said to be scrutinizing how the F.B.I. handled Mr. Steele and another informant, Stefan A. Halper, an American academic who taught in Britain. Agents asked Mr. Halper to determine whether Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos were in contact with Russians. Mr. Barr has said the inspector general could finish his inquiry in May or June.

Mr. Durham is also investigating whether Mr. Baker made unauthorized disclosures to the news media, according to two House Republicans closely allied with Mr. Trump, Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina, who disclosed in a letter to Mr. Durham in January that they had learned of that inquiry.

While they implied that it was related to the Russia investigation, another witness in Mr. Durham’s inquiry into Mr. Baker, Robert Litt, the former general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, came forward to say that he had been interviewed and that the investigation has nothing to do with Russia. Mr. Baker said last week that he was confident he had done nothing wrong and would be exonerated.




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