RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Donald Trump vs British spies | Coffee House
Paul Wood
6-8 minutes
Coffee House
Will Trump continue his battle against the ‘Deep State’ when he visits Britain?
Christopher Steele (PA)
The Daily Telegraph this week has a ‘scoop’ about the UK government giving permission for the Mueller inquiry to talk to former MI6 officer Christopher Steele about his evidence, which said Donald Trump was compromised by the Kremlin. The Telegraph story certainly sets the mood for President Trump’s state visit to Britain in eleven days’ time, and has some important new details, but it is not quite an exclusive. I wrote in The Spectator a year ago that Mueller’s team had been in the UK in late 2017 to question Steele, a meeting that was set up ‘through official channels’. Nevertheless, one of the sources I quoted said that in general ‘Mueller’s team… weren’t happy with the level of cooperation they were getting’ from the British government. Steele himself was said to feel that the government and his old employer, MI6, had abandoned him because they were anxious not to offend the President.
What happened in 2017 might be old news, especially now that Mueller has completed his report. A more urgent question for the government is whether they will cooperate with efforts by President Trump and his allies to get a ‘reckoning’ for what they call ‘the Russia hoax’.
On Twitter, Trump has called Steele a ‘failed spy’ paid by ‘crooked Hillary’ to write a ‘phony dossier’. A dossier Trump believes gave the FBI what they needed for warrants to ‘spy’ on his campaign: ‘illegal’ acts that led him to fire James Comey, which led in turn to the Mueller inquiry. Trump wants an investigation of the investigators – and under the attorney general, Bill Barr, he is getting one. The Associated Press reports that Barr is working with the FBI and the CIA to examine ‘the origins of the Russia investigation’.
In fact, this is only one of three US government inquiries into the Russian investigation. The last attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ordered one before he was fired in a last humiliation. Sessions had appointed a federal prosecutor from Utah named John Huber who, a year on, has yet to report. Huber may be the most silent man in Washington, so little has been seen or heard of him. Perhaps newspapers should offer a prize to anyone who spots Huber around the city – like the newspaper in Greene’s Brighton Rock giving ten guineas to anyone who challenged their reporter with the words: ‘You are Mr Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize.’ Trump’s critics say the Sessions and Barr inquiries are cynical attempts to turn the accusations about the Trump campaign and Russia back on the accusers. The existence of an official inquiry, or three, certainly helps Trump to carry on tweeting that he was the victim of an ‘illegal takedown’ by the ‘Deep State’ and Hillary supporters. More red meat for Fox News and Trump’s supporters.
Will Trump raise this with the British prime minister – whoever that may be – on his visit in June and what will he ask for? Details of what Britain gave the US under the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing agreement? More questioning of Steele? Steele’s extradition? Trump’s allies in Congress have already raised the possibility that Steele might face criminal charges. The third inquiry into the Russia investigation is led by the DoJ’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz. This might be seen as a more bureaucratic, less political exercise. Still, Horowtiz has said he will review how the FBI handled Steele’s dossier; he has probably already asked the British government for permission to speak to the spy. Steele might be more inclined to cooperate with this inquiry rather than the other two.
Trump maintains that he was ‘exonerated’ by Mueller’s report. He wasn’t. Mueller said only that he could not ‘establish’ – that is prove – that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. On page 79 of the second part of the Mueller report (the part about obstruction of justice) there is a passage that’s worth quoting at length:
[T]he President had a motive to put the FBI’s Russia investigation behind him. The evidence does not establish that the termination of Comey was designed to cover up a conspiracy between the Trump Campaign and Russia: As described in Volume I, the evidence uncovered in the investigation did not establish that the President or those close to him were involved in the charged Russian computer-hacking or active-measure conspiracies, or that the President otherwise had an unlawful relationship with any Russian official. But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.
That last sentence is astonishing: a thorough FBI investigation ‘would’ have uncovered facts about ‘the President personally’ that Trump ‘could have understood to be crimes’. What crimes? What did Mueller suspect but not fully investigate? Trump and his supporters would argue that there was a ‘thorough’ investigation – Mueller’s – and it had time and money and all the legal powers of the FBI to twist the arms of reluctant witnesses. But one reading of Mueller’s report suggests he did not get to the bottom of two of the dossier’s most important stories about Trump and the Kremlin: that the Russians were blackmailing Trump with sex tapes; and that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, met Russian agents in Prague during the campaign.
Mueller’s report deals with the story of a sex tape in one brief footnote. A Georgian middleman based in Moscow assures Cohen by text that he has ‘stopped flow of some tapes from Russia’. Later, the middleman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze, tells Mueller’s prosecutors that the tapes were fake. Cohen himself was never told this and he spoke to Trump ‘about the issue’ during the campaign. The denial of the Prague story is put entirely in Cohen’s mouth in the report. Mueller does not himself say they showed it was untrue. Steele has never disowned his dossier. He feels he will be vindicated in the end, believing there is more to come out about both stories. If he ends up talking to American investigators again, the final word on ‘collusion’ may not have been written. President Trump should be careful what he wishes for.
Paul Wood is a BBC correspondent.
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nytimes.com
Trump Gives Attorney General Sweeping Power in Review of 2016 Campaign Inquiry
7-9 minutes
Image
President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr this week at the White House. The directive gives Mr. Barr immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
President Trump took extraordinary steps on Thursday to give Attorney General William P. Barr sweeping new authorities to conduct a review into how the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia were investigated, significantly escalating the administration’s efforts to place those who investigated the campaign under scrutiny.
In a directive, Mr. Trump ordered the C.I.A. and the country’s 15 other intelligence agencies to cooperate with the review and granted Mr. Barr the authority to unilaterally declassify their documents. The move — which occurred just hours after the president again declared that those who led the investigation committed treason — gave Mr. Barr immense leverage over the intelligence community and enormous power over what the public learns about the roots of the Russia investigation.
The order is a change for Mr. Trump, who last year dropped a plan to release documents related to the Russia investigation amid concerns from Justice Department officials who said making them public could damage national security. At the time, the president was being encouraged by a group of Republican Congress members to declassify the information.
Mr. Barr, who has used the word “spying” to describe how the Trump campaign was investigated, has been deeply involved in the department’s review of how intelligence was collected on the campaign. Mr. Barr has told Congress that he personally authorized the review. While he has asked John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, to spearhead it, a Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr has personally met with the heads of the intelligence agencies to discuss the review and that the project was a top priority after the release last month of the special counsel’s report.
One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said previously that Mr. Barr wanted to know more about what foreign assets the C.I.A. had in Russia in 2016 and what those informants were telling the agency about how President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sought to meddle in the 2016 election.
The C.I.A. on Thursday referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A spokeswoman for the office did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The directive is likely to irk the intelligence community, which has long prized its ability to determine what information about its operations can be released to the public. During the investigations of the C.I.A.’s enhanced interrogation programs, the agency stymied investigators by refusing to declassify documents.
There could be other implications for the intelligence agencies. The C.I.A. considers confidential sources its most highly classified and most protected assets, and any investigation that could possibly force it to reveal those identities is likely to create a standoff. Last year, the agency lost trust in the Justice Department’s ability to keep the names of informants and sources secret after the identity of an F.B.I. informant who interacted with two Trump campaign officials under investigation, Stefan Halper, was revealed as part of congressional inquiries, according to former intelligence officials.
Late Thursday, Jeremy Bash, a chief of staff at the C.I.A. under President Barack Obama, said that the president’s move was “a very significant delegation of power to an attorney general who has shown he’s willing to do Donald Trump’s political bidding.”
“It’s dangerous,” he continued, “because the power to declassify is also the power to selectively declassify, and selective declassification is one of the ways the Trump White House can spin a narrative about the origins of the Russia investigation to their point of view.”
He added that confidential sources around the globe might be fearful of talking now.
“It sends a signal that their identity may be exposed for purely political purposes,” Mr. Bash said. “If I were in charge of intelligence operations, I would be worried about sources clamming up tonight.”
Mr. Barr has said that he believes Mr. Trump’s campaign was “spied” on, appearing to bolster unfounded accusations that Mr. Trump has made about the Obama administration illegally wiretapping his associates.
The dual decisions on Thursday were announced in a presidential memorandum, and explained in a statement by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The directive will “help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions,” the statement said.
Despite the significant step, there are indications there may be little criminality to uncover. Mr. Durham is conducting only a limited review, not a criminal investigation, which suggests Mr. Barr may not have identified enough wrongdoing to open such an inquiry.
Mr. Durham is not the only federal prosecutor who has been examining this issue. For over a year, John W. Huber, the United States attorney in Utah, also examined aspects of the Russia investigation until Mr. Durham subsumed that part of his work. When Mr. Barr’s predecessor, Matthew G. Whitaker, was the acting attorney general, and Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed for him to appoint a second special counsel, Mr. Whitaker told people he considered Mr. Huber to essentially be serving in that role.
A Justice Department official confirmed that Mr. Barr asked the president to issue the memo, which broadens his authority in an inquiry in which he is personally interested. The order also extends to several other parts of the federal government, including the Departments of Defense, Energy and Homeland Security.
Since the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was released, Mr. Trump has repeatedly called the inquiry a “hoax” on Twitter and has expressed frustration and anger over the efforts by the Democrat-controlled House to review aspects of the report.
The White House has recently ratcheted up its messaging about the Russia investigation. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump held a hastily called news conference in the Rose Garden to denounce Democrats. There, on a lectern, hung a sign featuring statistics about the Mueller investigation, and it also said, “No Collusion, No Obstruction.”
Meantime, the official White House Twitter page has featured quotations from the president, including one saying, “The crime was committed on the OTHER SIDE.”
Officials at the F.B.I. have denied that anything improper took place in relation to the Russia inquiry.
But in an interview this month with Fox News, Mr. Barr expressed concern about a lack of answers about its origins.
“I’ve been trying to get answers to the questions, and I’ve found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together,” he said.
Katie Benner, Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 2019, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Barr Given Broad Power to Review 2016 Campaign Inquiry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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