RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions
Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions
Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in a ruling that the misleading statements were similar to others that William P. Barr, the former attorney general, had made about the Mueller investigation.
May 4, 2021Updated 8:04 p.m. ET
Former Attorney General William P. Barr was singled out for how he spun the Russia investigation’s findings in a summary of the Mueller report.Doug Mills/The New York Times
A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.
The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson ruled that it contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.
“The fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Judge Jackson wrote of Mr. Trump.
She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.
“The attorney general’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.
Her rebuke shed new light on Mr. Barr’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump. She also wrote that although the department portrayed the advice memo as a legal document protected by attorney-client privilege, it was done in concert with Mr. Barr’s publicly released summary, “written by the very same people at the very same time.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr did not return an email seeking comment. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Judge Jackson said that the government had until May 17 to decide whether it planned to appeal her ruling, a decision that will be made by a Justice Department run by Biden appointees.
The ruling came in a lawsuit by a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asking that the Justice Department be ordered to turn over a range of documents related to how top law enforcement officials cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.
At issue is how Mr. Barr handled the end of the Mueller investigation and the release of its findings to the public. In March 2019, the office of the special counsel overseeing the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III, delivered its report to the Justice Department. In a highly unusual decision, Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump had illegally obstructed justice.
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That opened the door for Mr. Barr to take control of the investigation. Two days after receiving the report, Mr. Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress saying that Mr. Trump would not be charged with obstructing justice and summarizing the report. Mr. Mueller’s team believed that Mr. Barr’s characterization of the document was misleading and privately urged him to release more of their findings, but Mr. Barr refused.
About a month later, around the time that the report was released to the public, Mr. Barr testified to Congress that he had made the decision not to charge Mr. Trump “in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers,” and that the decision to clear the president of wrongdoing had been left to Mr. Barr because Mr. Mueller had made no determination about whether Mr. Trump broke the law.
Judge Jackson said in the ruling that Mr. Barr had been disingenuous in those assertions, adding that it had not been left to him to make the decision about the prosecution.
She also said that in the litigation between the government and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department under Mr. Barr had claimed that the memo, written by his top officials, had been about legal advice he had relied on to make the decision and should be shielded from the public.
Under federal law, the Justice Department can claim that such advice should be shielded because it is “deliberative” and the possibility of releasing it could keep advisers from giving their unvarnished counsel because they fear it may become public someday.
But instead, Judge Jackson wrote, Mr. Barr and his aides had already decided not to bring charges against Mr. Trump. She reprimanded the department for portraying the memo as part of deliberations over whether to prosecute the president. She noted that she had been allowed to read the full memo before making her decision, over the objections of the Justice Department, and that it revealed that “excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the attorney general to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time.”
The department “has been disingenuous to this court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege,” Judge Jackson wrote.
She oversaw the trial of Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. and one of the cases against Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Although Mr. Trump has publicly attacked Judge Jackson, legal experts say she operated as an unbiased arbiter during the Russia investigation.
In late March, the judge similarly called into question the credibility of the Trump-era government’s description of documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by The New York Times for certain White House budget office emails related to Mr. Trump’s freeze on military aid to Ukraine, which led to his first impeachment.
The Justice Department argued that the emails were exempt from disclosure and filed sworn affidavits about their contents by lawyers for the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration. But Judge Jackson insisted on reading the emails for herself and wrote that “the court discovered that there were obvious differences between the affiants’ description of the nature and subject matter of the documents, and the documents themselves.”
Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
Team Trump's info sharing with Russia comes into sharper focus
Team Trump's info sharing with Russia comes into sharper focus
We knew Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chair, lied to prosecutors. Now, we're finally learning what it is he lied about.
May 25, 2021, 10:38 AM EDT
It's difficult to choose a favorite among the many criminals from Donald Trump's political organization. After all, the former president's campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, campaign adviser, lawyer, and national security adviser, among others, were all convicted of assorted felonies.
But even within this motley crew, Paul Manafort still stands out as special.
Manafort, of course, oversaw Trump's political operation in 2016, before he was convicted of a variety of felonies, including tax fraud and bank fraud, and he even served some time in federal prison -- right up until Trump pardoned him, rewarding his former aide for failing to cooperate with law enforcement.
But there's long been some mystery surrounding the short-lived cooperation agreement Manafort initially reached with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. We know that Manafort ended up lying about a great many things, which in turn voided the agreement and sent the Republican to prison. What we didn't know was some of the relevant details: court records of the episode included a variety of redactions, obscuring key elements.
Now, however, the details are coming into focus as the materials are being unredacted, which means we now have a better sense of what the former president's campaign chairman lied to prosecutors about -- lies he was willing to tell, even if they sent him to prison. TPM noted yesterday:
The evidence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had suggesting that Paul Manafort was sharing polling with a shady figure with links to Russian intelligence was more extensive than previously known, as revealed by documents unsealed Monday in Manafort's case.
Quite right. As Rachel explained on last night's show, Manafort specifically lied about sharing internal campaign polling data -- during the 2016 campaign, as Russia was targeting our political system in the hopes of putting Donald Trump in power -- with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Manafort business associate whom U.S. officials have identified as a Russian intelligence agent.
It was just last month when the U.S. Treasury Department said Kilimnik relayed the information he received from Team Trump to Russian Intelligence Services.
So where does that leave us? For one thing, Manafort insisted that the internal campaign polling data he shared wasn't important. According to the newly unredacted court documents, that wasn't true.
For another, the same unredacted filings indicate that Manafort also lied about knowing that the leaked information would be passed along to the Kremlin.
I'm mindful of the debate surrounding the opaque definition of "collusion" -- a political term, not a legal one -- but none of these revelations do Team Trump any favors. Donald Trump's own campaign chair shared internal information with a Russian intelligence officer, who conveyed that information to Russian Intelligence Services, during Russia's attack on our elections, and then lied about it to federal prosecutors.
Occasionally, the former president likes to claim that the Russia scandal was a "hoax." It's among the most important lies he's ever told.
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Unsealed Manafort Docs Shed New Light On Sharing Of 2016 Data With Alleged GRU Officer
Unsealed Manafort Docs Shed New Light On Sharing Of 2016 Data With Alleged GRU Officer
Tierney Sneed
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 15: Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort arrives at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse for a hearing on June 15, 2018 in Washington, DC. Today a federal judge could rule on whether ... MORE
The evidence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had suggesting that Paul Manafort was sharing polling with a shady figure with links to Russian intelligence was more extensive than previously known, as revealed by documents unsealed Monday in Manafort’s case.
The freshly unsealed filings also provide new details about the critical August 2016 meeting at the Grand Havana Room, which occurred hours after Manafort allegedly asked his deputy, Richard Gates, to print out and bring detailed, internal Trump campaign polling data on the morning of the meeting.
While former President Trump and his allies have for years embraced a “no collusion” mantra about the Mueller investigation, the picture that Mueller ultimately presented was more complicated — with one of the biggest questions lingering around how Manafort, while leading Trump’s 2016 campaign, shared certain polling data with an enigmatic associate who the FBI describes as tied to Russian intelligence.
That associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, was recently sanctioned by the Biden administration, which said last month that Kilimnik had “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”
Manafort’s lack of candor about his interactions with Kilimnik, including those that involved campaign polling, unraveled the cooperation deal he reached with Mueller’s probe. The documents released Monday revealed previously obscured aspects of that dispute, during which most of the information about the data sharing was heavily redacted. The documents include notes from an FBI interview with Gates discussing the data.
An Account From Gates Apparently Backed By Kilimnik Emails
When Mueller first accused Manafort of violating his plea deal by misleading investigators, it was kept out of public view how those allegations related to polling data that was shared with Kilimnik.
That section in a Mueller filing initially submitted in late 2018 was almost entirely redacted.
It did become public — accidentally — in early 2019 that Manafort’s account of campaign data sharing was an aspect of his dispute with Mueller over his candor; Manafort’s Jan. 2019 filing responding to Mueller’s allegations had a redaction error that allowed it to be seen that that was one of the things Mueller had accused him of.
But thanks to the documents unsealed Monday, we now have a fuller picture of what Mueller told Manafort’s judge about Manafort’s interactions with Kilimnik, who by then had been linked by Mueller to a Russian intelligence agency. Mueller accused Manafort of lying to the government about an instruction he gave Gates to share the data with Kilimnik.
Much of what Mueller had learned about the data sharing came from Gates, who pleaded guilty and started cooperating with Mueller’s probe in February 2018. Gates discussed with investigators during four different debriefings how he passed along the data to Kilimnik, according to one of the newly released Mueller filings. One of those debriefings happened in February 2019, after the claim inadvertently became public. Mueller told the court that Gates had been “consistent” in his account of “repeatedly” receiving instructions from Manafort to share the data.
FBI notes from the February 2019 interview with Gates show that prosecutors were interested in data that the Manafort deputy shared with Kilimnik, and how it might have also affected internal Trump campaign decision-making. Prosecutors showed Gates one piece of Trump campaign polling, though it’s unclear from the notes if it was passed along to Kilimnik.
Gates told prosecutors, the notes say, that the data was “strategically useful” for deciding where to send candidates.
”Manafort’s strategic decision of where to send Pence was based on that document,” interview notes read.
In addition to what Mueller’s team heard from Gates’ himself, Mueller also obtained eight emails where Kilimnik mentioned campaign polling data. The references popped up in Kilimnik emails sent starting in late July 2016 and through mid-August, according to the newly unsealed court documents. In seven of those emails, Kilimnik said he was referring to what Trump’s “internal polling” shows.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which also purportedly obtained those communications, gave one example in its Russia probe report of how Kilimnik framed up what he had seen.
“Trump’s internal polling shows signs of strengthening of their positions among key target groups they care about,” Kilimnik wrote then.
Manafort Plays Down What Mueller Has On The Campaign Data Sharing
When Manafort responded to Mueller’s allegations, he stressed Gates’ supposed unreliability as a witness. Manafort also said that the Kilimnik emails didn’t prove what Mueller said they proved.
“These emails do not suggest Mr. Kilimnik ever received internal polling data; rather, they explain what he is hearing that the internal polls show strengthening in the candidate position,” according to a newly unsealed portion of a Manafort filing.
Manafort argued that another point in his favor was that Mueller hadn’t presented any Kilimnik emails that contained campaign data themselves.
“Importantly, while the OSC has obtained Mr. Kilimnik’s emails, it has not produced a single message showing he ever received any internal polling data,” Manafort said.
However, as the newly released Gates interview notes showed, Gates said he sent Kilimnik the polling on an encrypted messaging app and then promptly deleted the messages.
New details emerge about crucial Havana Cigar Room meeting
Much of Mueller’s focus at the time was directed towards an August 2016 meeting between Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Room, a Fifth Avenue cigar joint.
The filings show that on the morning of the meeting, Manafort told Gates to “Print out and bring to our SCh [sic] meeting.” Attached to that email, prosecutors said, was an Excel spreadsheet with 18 tabs, containing internal Trump campaign polling data.
While the Mueller prosecutors didn’t provide much more detail about exactly what data was in the spreadsheet, the Senate Intelligence Committee report said that it contained “historical polling data and internal Campaign polling data” for locales in 17 states.
Gates purportedly arrived late to the meeting with the alleged Russian intelligence officer, but once there, told the feds that he bore witness to a “detailed discussion of internal polling data.”
FBI notes show that Gates recalled Manafort discussing in particular how the polling related to “blue-collar workers” and that the data was a synthesis of internal and publicly available information.
The unredacted filings show how Manafort’s counsel used ambiguities in the special counsel’s investigation to argue that nothing untoward occurred at the Grand Havana Room.
Manafort said that it’s not clear that he wanted Gates to share the printout with Kilimnik, and that in the email prosecutors cite, the then-Trump campaign manager was referring to a separate meeting.
“There is nothing surprising about a campaign manager asking for a printout of data to use at a typical campaign related scheduling meeting with staff,” Manafort’s attorneys argued.
In another filing, Manafort’s attorneys pushed back hard, saying that the data printout was for an entirely different meeting.
“In fact, the 79 pages of polling information was printed in preparation for a campaign scheduling meeting and did not relate to the later meeting with Mr. Kilimnik,” they asserted.
Known unknowns
The filings leave many key questions about the events of summer 2016 unanswered.
Both the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report note that Manafort and Kilimnik made extensive use of encrypted messaging applications, and would, as a matter of practice, delete messages.
“When they did communicate electronically, Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik used a variety of encrypted applications, eliminating a documentary record of many communications that almost certainly would have had high investigative value,” the Senate report reads, listing a variety of practices that Manafort used to evade detection including keeping a laptop that he only used in Ukraine, and buying a pay-as-you-go phone to communicate with Kilimnik and Gates after Manafort was indicted. FBI interview notes also show that Gates told prosecutors that he would delete messages to Kilimnik as soon as they were sent.
All this leaves a yawning gap in what can be nailed down about how and what data was transferred, particularly with respect to the data that Kilimnik received. By all accounts, the actual data that was sent to Kilimnik on WhatsApp has disappeared, with only oblique references by the alleged Russian intelligence officer to what he learned remaining in the eight emails cited by the Mueller team.
In a sense, it’s the kind of uncertainty that deleting messages as a matter of course is designed to create: a veneer of plausible deniability, or at least enough murkiness to allow for spin.
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Unsealed Manafort Docs Shed New Light On Sharing Of 2016 Data With Alleged GRU Officer
Tierney Sneed
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 15: Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort arrives at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse for a hearing on June 15, 2018 in Washington, DC. Today a federal judge could rule on whether ... MORE
The evidence that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had suggesting that Paul Manafort was sharing polling with a shady figure with links to Russian intelligence was more extensive than previously known, as revealed by documents unsealed Monday in Manafort’s case.
The freshly unsealed filings also provide new details about the critical August 2016 meeting at the Grand Havana Room, which occurred hours after Manafort allegedly asked his deputy, Richard Gates, to print out and bring detailed, internal Trump campaign polling data on the morning of the meeting.
While former President Trump and his allies have for years embraced a “no collusion” mantra about the Mueller investigation, the picture that Mueller ultimately presented was more complicated — with one of the biggest questions lingering around how Manafort, while leading Trump’s 2016 campaign, shared certain polling data with an enigmatic associate who the FBI describes as tied to Russian intelligence.
That associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, was recently sanctioned by the Biden administration, which said last month that Kilimnik had “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”
Manafort’s lack of candor about his interactions with Kilimnik, including those that involved campaign polling, unraveled the cooperation deal he reached with Mueller’s probe. The documents released Monday revealed previously obscured aspects of that dispute, during which most of the information about the data sharing was heavily redacted. The documents include notes from an FBI interview with Gates discussing the data.
An Account From Gates Apparently Backed By Kilimnik Emails
When Mueller first accused Manafort of violating his plea deal by misleading investigators, it was kept out of public view how those allegations related to polling data that was shared with Kilimnik.
That section in a Mueller filing initially submitted in late 2018 was almost entirely redacted.
It did become public — accidentally — in early 2019 that Manafort’s account of campaign data sharing was an aspect of his dispute with Mueller over his candor; Manafort’s Jan. 2019 filing responding to Mueller’s allegations had a redaction error that allowed it to be seen that that was one of the things Mueller had accused him of.
But thanks to the documents unsealed Monday, we now have a fuller picture of what Mueller told Manafort’s judge about Manafort’s interactions with Kilimnik, who by then had been linked by Mueller to a Russian intelligence agency. Mueller accused Manafort of lying to the government about an instruction he gave Gates to share the data with Kilimnik.
Much of what Mueller had learned about the data sharing came from Gates, who pleaded guilty and started cooperating with Mueller’s probe in February 2018. Gates discussed with investigators during four different debriefings how he passed along the data to Kilimnik, according to one of the newly released Mueller filings. One of those debriefings happened in February 2019, after the claim inadvertently became public. Mueller told the court that Gates had been “consistent” in his account of “repeatedly” receiving instructions from Manafort to share the data.
FBI notes from the February 2019 interview with Gates show that prosecutors were interested in data that the Manafort deputy shared with Kilimnik, and how it might have also affected internal Trump campaign decision-making. Prosecutors showed Gates one piece of Trump campaign polling, though it’s unclear from the notes if it was passed along to Kilimnik.
Gates told prosecutors, the notes say, that the data was “strategically useful” for deciding where to send candidates.
”Manafort’s strategic decision of where to send Pence was based on that document,” interview notes read.
In addition to what Mueller’s team heard from Gates’ himself, Mueller also obtained eight emails where Kilimnik mentioned campaign polling data. The references popped up in Kilimnik emails sent starting in late July 2016 and through mid-August, according to the newly unsealed court documents. In seven of those emails, Kilimnik said he was referring to what Trump’s “internal polling” shows.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which also purportedly obtained those communications, gave one example in its Russia probe report of how Kilimnik framed up what he had seen.
“Trump’s internal polling shows signs of strengthening of their positions among key target groups they care about,” Kilimnik wrote then.
Manafort Plays Down What Mueller Has On The Campaign Data Sharing
When Manafort responded to Mueller’s allegations, he stressed Gates’ supposed unreliability as a witness. Manafort also said that the Kilimnik emails didn’t prove what Mueller said they proved.
“These emails do not suggest Mr. Kilimnik ever received internal polling data; rather, they explain what he is hearing that the internal polls show strengthening in the candidate position,” according to a newly unsealed portion of a Manafort filing.
Manafort argued that another point in his favor was that Mueller hadn’t presented any Kilimnik emails that contained campaign data themselves.
“Importantly, while the OSC has obtained Mr. Kilimnik’s emails, it has not produced a single message showing he ever received any internal polling data,” Manafort said.
However, as the newly released Gates interview notes showed, Gates said he sent Kilimnik the polling on an encrypted messaging app and then promptly deleted the messages.
New details emerge about crucial Havana Cigar Room meeting
Much of Mueller’s focus at the time was directed towards an August 2016 meeting between Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Room, a Fifth Avenue cigar joint.
The filings show that on the morning of the meeting, Manafort told Gates to “Print out and bring to our SCh [sic] meeting.” Attached to that email, prosecutors said, was an Excel spreadsheet with 18 tabs, containing internal Trump campaign polling data.
While the Mueller prosecutors didn’t provide much more detail about exactly what data was in the spreadsheet, the Senate Intelligence Committee report said that it contained “historical polling data and internal Campaign polling data” for locales in 17 states.
Gates purportedly arrived late to the meeting with the alleged Russian intelligence officer, but once there, told the feds that he bore witness to a “detailed discussion of internal polling data.”
FBI notes show that Gates recalled Manafort discussing in particular how the polling related to “blue-collar workers” and that the data was a synthesis of internal and publicly available information.
The unredacted filings show how Manafort’s counsel used ambiguities in the special counsel’s investigation to argue that nothing untoward occurred at the Grand Havana Room.
Manafort said that it’s not clear that he wanted Gates to share the printout with Kilimnik, and that in the email prosecutors cite, the then-Trump campaign manager was referring to a separate meeting.
“There is nothing surprising about a campaign manager asking for a printout of data to use at a typical campaign related scheduling meeting with staff,” Manafort’s attorneys argued.
In another filing, Manafort’s attorneys pushed back hard, saying that the data printout was for an entirely different meeting.
“In fact, the 79 pages of polling information was printed in preparation for a campaign scheduling meeting and did not relate to the later meeting with Mr. Kilimnik,” they asserted.
Known unknowns
The filings leave many key questions about the events of summer 2016 unanswered.
Both the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report note that Manafort and Kilimnik made extensive use of encrypted messaging applications, and would, as a matter of practice, delete messages.
“When they did communicate electronically, Manafort, Gates, and Kilimnik used a variety of encrypted applications, eliminating a documentary record of many communications that almost certainly would have had high investigative value,” the Senate report reads, listing a variety of practices that Manafort used to evade detection including keeping a laptop that he only used in Ukraine, and buying a pay-as-you-go phone to communicate with Kilimnik and Gates after Manafort was indicted. FBI interview notes also show that Gates told prosecutors that he would delete messages to Kilimnik as soon as they were sent.
All this leaves a yawning gap in what can be nailed down about how and what data was transferred, particularly with respect to the data that Kilimnik received. By all accounts, the actual data that was sent to Kilimnik on WhatsApp has disappeared, with only oblique references by the alleged Russian intelligence officer to what he learned remaining in the eight emails cited by the Mueller team.
In a sense, it’s the kind of uncertainty that deleting messages as a matter of course is designed to create: a veneer of plausible deniability, or at least enough murkiness to allow for spin.
@88m3 @ADevilYouKhow @wire28 @dtownreppin214
@dza @wire28 @BigMoneyGrip @Dameon Farrow @re'up @Blackfyre @NY's #1 Draft Pick @Skyfall @2Quik4UHoes
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