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FOCUS: Mueller's Entirely Redacted Three Bullets and a Theory of the Case |
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Tuesday, 24 April 2018 12:05 |
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Wheeler writes: "In this post, I showed how the list of crimes for which Paul Manafort was being investigated mushroomed between the time FBI searched an Alexandria storage locker on May 27, 2017 and the time they searched his home using a no-knock warrant on July 27, 2017."
Former FBI director Robert Mueller. (photo: Getty Images)
Mueller's Entirely Redacted Three Bullets and a Theory of the Case
By Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel
24 April 18
 n this post, I showed how the list of crimes for which Paul Manafort was being investigated mushroomed between the time FBI searched an Alexandria storage locker on May 27, 2017 and the time they searched his home using a no-knock warrant on July 27, 2017.
As a threshold matter, between May and July 2017, the scope of crimes being investigated mushroomed, to include both the fraudulent loans obtained during the election and afterwards, as well as foreign national contributions to an election, with a broad conspiracy charge built in.
Compare the list of crimes in the storage unit affidavit:
- 31 USC 5314, 5322 (failure to file a report of foreign bank and financial amounts)
- 22 USC 618 (Violation of FARA)
- 26 USC 7206(a) (filing a false tax return)
With the list in the residence affidavit:
- 31 USC 5314, 5322
- 22 USC 611 et seq (a broader invocation of FARA)
- 26 USC 7206
- 18 USC 1014 (fraud in connection with the extension of credit)
- 18 USC 1341, 1343, 1349 (mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud)
- 18 USC 1956 and 1957 (money laundering)
- 52 USC 30121 (foreign national contributions to an election)
- 18 USC 371 and 372 (conspiracy to defraud the US, aiding and abetting, and attempt to commit such offenses)
So this motion to suppress would suppress both evidence used to prosecute Manafort in the EDVA case, as well as the eventual hack-and-leak conspiracy.
And in addition to records on Manafort, Gates’, and (another addition from the storage unit warrant), the warrant permits the seizure of records tied to the June 9 meeting and Manafort’s state of mind during all the enumerated crimes (but that bullet appears right after the June 9 meeting one).
It also includes an authorization to take anything relating to Manafort’s work for the foreign governments, including but not limited to the Ukrainians that have already been charged, which would seem to be a catchall that would cover any broader conspiracies with Russia.
This makes sense. The June 9 story broke in July 2017 based off documents that Jared Kushner and Manafort had provided to Congress in June — though I do wonder whether there were any records relating to the meeting in the storage unit.
I also noted that Manafort seemed particularly worried about several things in the later search — such as that the government took stuff pertaining to his state of mind, that the FBI seized his iPods, and that they hadn’t given anything back.
In this post, I noted that Rod Rosenstein appeared to have included a third bullet in his description of the crimes that Robert Mueller could investigate Manafort for in his August 2, 2017 memo, written just after the later search.
Now consider this detail: the second bullet describing the extent of the investigation into Manafort has a semi-colon, not a period.
It’s possible Mueller used semi-colons after all these bullets (of which Manafort’s is the second or third entry). But that, plus the resumption of the redaction without a double space suggests there may be another bulleted allegation in the Manafort allegation.
There are two other (known) things that might merit a special bullet. First, while it would seem to fall under the general election collusion bullet, Rosenstein may have included a bullet describing collusion with Aras Agalarov and friends in the wake of learning about the June 9 Trump Tower meeting with his employees. More likely, Rosenstein may have included a bullet specifically authorizing an investigation of Manafort’s ties with Oleg Deripaska and Konstantin Kilimnik.
The Mueller memo actually includes a specific reference to that, which as I’ve noted I will return to.
Open-source reporting also has described business arrangements between Manafort and “a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.”
The latter might be of particular import, given that we know a bunch of fall 2017 interviews focused on Manafort’s ties to Deripaska and the ongoing cover-up with Kilimnik regarding the Skadden Arps report on the Yulia Tymoshenko prosecution.
At a recent court hearing, Manafort’s team confirmed there is a third bullet (which is unredacted to them), and the government seemed to confirm (with their insistent refusal to share) that there are other documents laying out Rosenstein’s authorizations for the investigation.
Last night, the government responded to the Manafort challenges (response to Bill of Particulars, response to search of storage locker, response to search of condo).
Aside from a bunch of subtle details showing that Mueller continues to work closely with FBI Agents on appropriate task forces and US Attorneys officers, it includes these three redacted bullets laying out the evidence supporting probable cause for the crimes for which FBI is investigating Manafort.
Now, there’s not necessarily a correlation between those three bullets and the three bullets we now know are in Rosenstein’s memo. I say that, most of all, because the first of Rosenstein’s bullets pertains to the general “collusion” investigation.
- Committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States, in violation of United States law;
- Committed a crime or crimes arising out of payments he received from the Ukrainian government before and during the tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych.
As I noted in my post speculating what the third might be, it might include either more details on the then-recently disclosed June 9 meeting, or it might provide more evidence of the way that Manafort worked with Oleg Deripaska, the former of which especially might fit under the election bullet. A likely third bullet is also the more recent money laundering Manafort allegedly conducted, as he tried to use mortgages to stave off financial ruin, which gets included in the expanded list of crimes for which Manafort was being investigated.
In any case, the affidavit (and therefore these three paragraphs) presumably lay out probable cause to support all three of Rosenstein’s bullets:
- The Ukraine-based money laundering at issue in the existing DC indictment — showing a long-term hidden relationship with Russian-backed entities
- Manafort’s recent attempts to remain liquid as reflected in the EDVA indictment — showing he had an incentive to do crazy things to make money
- Efforts to “collude” with Russia, as reflected in the Trump Tower meeting
This is as much as what Amy Berman Jackson suggested in the most recent hearing (the one where Manafort confirmed there was a third bullet).
So perhaps, those three redacted bullets lay out the theory of the case: Paul Manafort had long-standing ties to Russian oligarchs and an urgent need to continue receiving their money when four Russians walked into Trump’s campaign proposing dirt on Hillary in exchange for sanctions relief.
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FOCUS: Bernie Sanders Has Conquered the Democratic Party |
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Tuesday, 24 April 2018 10:56 |
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Spross writes: "Quietly but steadily, the Democratic Party is admitting that Sanders was right."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Bernie Sanders Has Conquered the Democratic Party
By Jeff Spross, The Week
24 April 18
 ernie Sanders' bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 was not universally welcomed, to put it mildly. His basic argument was that Democrats could assemble a cross-ethnic and cross-class coalition by offering big universal public programs like Medicare-for-all and free college tuition. But large portions of the party dismissed him as an interloper, a naive radical, or even just another entitled white male.
Which makes developments since the 2016 election rather interesting: Quietly but steadily, the Democratic Party is admitting that Sanders was right.
Let's begin with the signature issue of Sanders' campaign: a national single-payer health-care program, or Medicare-for-all as it's known.
Hillary Clinton, who ultimately bested Sanders for the party's nomination, insisted the idea "will never, ever come to pass." Fast forward roughly a year, and Sanders' proposed Medicare-for-all legislation attracted 16 Democratic co-sponsors, including likely presidential contenders Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Corey Booker (D-N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).
Meanwhile, the liberal think tank Center for American Progress has proposed bundling Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP into a public health coverage option on steroids. It would use bargaining tactics similar to Medicare to hold down health-care costs; premiums and cost-sharing would be capped to make it affordable for low-income Americans; and children and new retirees would be enrolled in it automatically. This isn't the same as Sanders' proposal, which would involve no premiums or cost-sharing at all (a provision unlikely to survive), and would blow up the whole health-care system in one fell swoop. But the idea is clearly for the new public option to ultimately swallow the rest of the system.
To the extent the CAP proposal disagrees with Sanders, it's over theories of change rather than the end goal. Furthermore, CAP is closely aligned with the centrist Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, and does a lot of the party's policy construction. That the think tank felt the need to release this proposal shows how profoundly the ground has shifted in a short time.
Then there's the minimum wage. During the 2016 campaign, the Democrats were nervously tip-toeing up to $12 an hour as the new national minimum they wanted. But Sanders' surprisingly strong bid for the nomination had its effect, forcing a $15-an-hour minimum onto the party platform. Since then, it's been the Democratic default: The bulk of the party in the Senate has consolidated around a $15-minimum legislation.
Meanwhile, a Democratic bill to make college tuition and living expenses debt-free has eight senators and 14 House members co-sponsoring.
In fact, parts of the Democratic Party are arguably trying to out-Sanders Sanders.
The social democrat from Vermont never got around to endorsing a universal child allowance, for instance. But the idea clearly comports with his overall philosophy and preference for Nordic-style welfare states. Enter Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who have a bill that would transform the currently-inadequate child tax credit into the closest possible thing to a universal child allowance, while still being run through the tax code.
But the most interesting policy here is a federal job guarantee. This would be a public option for work, offering employment with a living wage and benefits to anyone who wants it. The idea goes back at least as far as the Civil Rights movement. Stephanie Kelton, one of Sanders' key economic advisers, has been working on the idea for years with economists associated with the University of Kansas City-Missouri and the Levy Institute, and pushing it up through Sanders' network of political outfits. Meanwhile, another group of economists, including Mark Paul, William Darity and Darrick Hamilton, has also been building out the idea. And Sanders himself organized a townhall with Hamilton to talk about it.
CAP suggested a watered-down but still admirable version of a job guarantee a few months ago. Then Gillibrand publicly endorsed a job guarantee in mid-March. And she's kept up the drumbeat since. This past Friday, Booker released legislation for a pilot program version of the job guarantee, built off Paul, Darity and Hamilton's work. Then on Monday, Sanders pushed his chips in, announcing legislation for a full-bore national version of the policy.
This actually looks somewhat similar to how Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards all egged each other on towards health reform in the 2008 campaign. Parts of the Democratic Party are now taking the basic building blocks of Sanders' political philosophy and running with them.
"Donald Trump's victory implies that people need to be more bold," Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) recently observed. "People yawned at the smallness of American politics, at the stagnation of American politics, at the same faces, the same ideas, the same talking points." In the late stages of Obama's presidency, before Trump won, the idea of the Democrats hitching their wagon to Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, or a national public works program seemed radical. But if Sanders' campaign delivered no other message to the Democrats, it was that they needed to get out of their comfort zone. Go big or go home.
The Democrats went home in 2016. So now they're finally going big.
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As the Haspel Nomination Looms, the World Is Watching |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 24 April 2018 08:34 |
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Kiriakou writes: "At every free moment during the week that I was in Athens, with every single interlocutor, their questions for me were the same: How in the world could the U.S. government have a known torturer as director of the CIA?"
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
As the Haspel Nomination Looms, the World Is Watching
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
24 April 18
had the great fortune of addressing a gathering of Greek parliamentarians last week in Athens and meeting members of the European Parliament to discuss national security whistleblowing. The European Union is in the final stages of drafting a new whistleblower protection law that would be the finest and most comprehensive legislation of its kind in the world. Our country could learn a lot from the Europeans.
At every free moment during the week that I was in Athens, with every single interlocutor, their questions for me were the same: How in the world could the U.S. government have a known torturer as director of the CIA? What is President Trump thinking? Do we fully understand the message that the Haspel nomination sends to the rest of the world? That the president of the United States would name Gina Haspel as CIA director was utterly incomprehensible to the Europeans. I couldn’t disagree with them.
One Greek parliamentarian from the progressive ruling Syriza party told me that he has a certain respect for Donald Trump because Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp” resonated in Greece, where corruption has been endemic for generations and where, until 2014, governance passed back and forth between the corrupt conservatives and the equally corrupt socialists. Indeed, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, a Euro-Communist, was one of the first foreign leaders to visit Trump in the White House.
But what the Greeks (and the Germans, the Italians, the Belgians, and others) just cannot get past is that Trump has named Gina Haspel as CIA director. Haspel, as you know, was instrumental in the implementation of the CIA’s torture program and was responsible for destroying video tapes of the torture at the insistence of her patron, the notorious former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez.
(In the interest of transparency, I must tell you that I know Gina Haspel and Jose Rodriguez personally. I don’t like them and they don’t like me. Indeed, after my conviction for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, and three or four days before I left for prison, Rodriguez tweeted at me. “Don’t drop the soap,” he said, showing the kindness, elegance, and class for which he was known in the Agency. I responded, “Jose, I’m on the right side of history and you are not.” That pretty much has defined our relationship over the long term.)
Getting back to the Europeans, many of them have dealt with ugly periods in their contemporary history, where their own citizens were victims of torture. The U.S. supported a brutal military dictatorship in Greece between 1967 and 1974 that was responsible for the murders of hundreds of innocent civilians, the injuries of thousands, and the imprisonment of even more. Torture, sometimes to death, was a common occurrence during the junta. The Greeks haven’t forgotten.
The Germans are so ashamed of their Nazi past that even advocating anti-Semitism or anti-immigrant policies is a crime in that country. The federal prosecutor in Germany is so appalled by the Haspel nomination that he has discussed filing charges against her so that, in the event she travels to Germany (or any other European Union country), she can be arrested and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Almost all other EU countries have expressed similar or identical sentiments.
That leads us to Capitol Hill. Haspel’s confirmation hearings are set to begin in an open session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on May 9. We are likely in for the closest confirmation vote in the history of the CIA. And it’s clear that Haspel can be defeated.
Haspel needs 50 votes in the Senate, where the Republicans have 52 seats, to become CIA director. If she gets 51 votes, she wins. If it’s 50-50 and Vice President Pence casts the tie-breaking vote, she wins. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ken.) has already said that he will vote against Haspel and will filibuster the nomination. Taken alone, that’s not enough to block her. Democrats also must join the filibuster, and none have yet done so. Furthermore, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that he would not “whip” votes on Haspel, meaning that all Democrats are free to vote any way they want. Schumer will do nothing to block her. But Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) is vocally opposed to torture. He could vote “no” or he could miss the vote because he’s currently being treated in Arizona for brain cancer.
With that said, many Democrats are lining up to vote “no.” As soon as Haspel’s nomination was announced, Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders indicated that they would oppose her. Good start. More importantly, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), all members of the Intelligence Committee, released a statement saying that they had asked the CIA five times for additional information on Haspel’s background and had been ignored. In the meantime, the CIA released its own “background information” on Haspel, saying that she enjoys movies, hockey, long walks on the beach … You get the idea. I was surprised that they didn’t add that her pet peeves were “negative people” and other such nonsense.
What the CIA hasn’t told the Senate or the American people or anybody else is exactly what Gina Haspel’s role in the torture program was. Is it true that she oversaw one or more secret prisons? Is it true that she personally watched or participated in the torture? Is it true that she ordered the destruction of the tapes? Why can’t the CIA just come clean? Do they think they can fool the American people? Obviously, they haven’t fooled our friends and allies abroad.
The Democrats are beginning to fall in line, whether Chuck Schumer wants them to or not. The rumor in the press, though, is that the Republicans could pick up the Democratic votes they need to get Haspel approved. Democratic senators running for reelection in states that Trump won in the general election are panicked and, to make themselves more palatable to Republicans in their home states, are considering voting “yes.” Those include Heidi Heitkamp (D-N. Dak.), John Tester (D-Mont.), Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. We can win this thing. We can take a real stand against torture by demanding that our elected officials vote “no” on Gina Haspel. Email or write to your senator right now. Or better yet, call your senator at 202-224-3121. I spent years on Capitol Hill, and I can tell you that senators really do care what their constituents think. They really do respond to the will of the people.
It’ll only take a minute to make the call. Do it for human rights and for the rule of law. Don’t let Bloody Gina wreak any more havoc than she already has.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism
officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the
Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish
spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to
oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
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The Republicans' Desperate Obsession With Nancy Pelosi |
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Tuesday, 24 April 2018 08:29 |
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Heer writes: "Republicans became obsessed with Pelosi the moment she ascended as a national figure."
Nancy Pelosi. (photo: Anne Epstein/Getty Images)
The Republicans' Desperate Obsession With Nancy Pelosi
By Jeet Heer, The New Republic
24 April 18
She's the star of GOP attack ads because the party has no other choice.
n a tweet on Friday, President Donald Trump laid out the likely Republican messaging strategy to hold on to Congress in this fall’s midterm elections: warn voters that Nancy Pelosi, the leading Democrat in the House, is going to raise their taxes if her party takes control of the chamber. Or in Trump’s words:
While Trump is often accused of interjecting a new level of acrimony in American politics, his attack on Pelosi is perfectly in keeping with the Republican mainstream. Pelosi has been a major GOP target ever since she became House Minority Leader in 2003, and the onslaught is only increasing in intensity. And with both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton retired from public life, Pelosi has become Republicans’ scapegoat of choice, the Democratic politician most likely to be used in attack ads designed to rile up the conservative faithful.
“Nancy Pelosi has long been a favorite target of GOP attack ads,” USA Today reported recently. “But Republicans seem to be taking it to another level in this election cycle.” 34 percent of Republican ads in House races this year mentioned Pelosi, up from 13 percent from the 2014 midterm cycle. In some races, this is the dominant message: In the special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District last month, 58 percent of Republican ads were anti-Pelosi.
Republicans became obsessed with Pelosi the moment she ascended as a national figure. In 2003, Los Angeles Times observed that Republicans were “eager to attack Pelosi as a loopy San Francisco liberal and exploit her city’s reputation as the odd-sock drawer of America. Within days, her face—garish and twisted—showed up in an attack ad slamming the Democrat in a Louisiana House race. (He won anyway.) She surfaced as Miss America, complete with tiara, in a spoof on Rush Limbaugh’s Web site.”
The relentless demonization of Pelosi, who has reached the highest office of any female politician in American history, is partly fueled by—and an appeal to—sexism. “I think they need to get a new game book,” Representative Joseph Crowley, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said last month of Republicans. “The attempts to use Nancy Pelosi, it’s failing them at this point. And I think, quite frankly, it’s sexist.”
But Republicans’ animosity toward Pelosi is also certainly driven by fear: As both the minority leader (from 2003-2007 and 2011-present) and House speaker (from 2007-2011), she has been an accomplished and indomitable captain of House Democrats.
Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has hailed her as the “strongest and most effective speaker of modern times” because of her success in securing stimulus funding in 2009 and overseeing the passage of the Affordable Care Act the following year. As Peter Beinart pointed out in this month’s Atlantic, “even after being relegated to minority leader when Republicans took the House in 2010, she kept winning legislative fights. In the summer of 2015, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Republican Party launched a mammoth lobbying campaign to kill Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Pelosi quickly secured the votes to prevent Republicans from overturning the agreement, thus checkmating the deal’s foes.”
Pelosi’s record of success is a marked contrast to her Republican counterparts’ during the same era, ranging from Dennis Hastert to Tom DeLay to John Boehner to Paul Ryan. They presided over a Republican Party that theoretically should have been more unified than the Democrats, since it is more ideologically homogenous, but is in fact riven by factional fighting. Ryan’s feeble leadership today, marked by only one major achievement (the 2017 tax cuts) and an increasingly hollow ideological agenda, is representative of the larger GOP failures of this era.
Pelosi is a Democratic powerhouse in an era where the two parties are dividing along gender lines. This is not just a matter of the gender gap among voters or Donald Trump’s long history of sexism. Democrats are much more likely to have female lawmakers than Republicans are. A third of all Democrats in Congress are female (78), whereas just 9 percent of Republicans are (26). “Democrats, even though they are outnumbered by Republicans, have three times more women in the two chambers,” Politifact noted.
Republicans are, of course, attacking Pelosi because they think it’s a winning strategy. Her liberal track record makes her especially unpopular in Republican-leaning districts, where Democrats are hoping to pick up seats by fielding more centrist candidates. But it’s not clear that these attacks work.
Congressional leaders have long been broadly unpopular because they’re among the most visible figures in Congress, which itself is broadly unpopular. This is especially true in the House, which is the more divisive of the two chambers because the small size of its representative districts—relative to statewide Senate seats—tends to produce more extreme candidates.
But as Harry Enten of CNN pointed out, the history of using congressional leaders as bogeymen has seldom yielded measurable success. “Democrats tried to run against Newt Gingrich in 1994 and 1998,” he wrote. “They did the same in 2010 and 2014 against John Boehner. Their record is at best mixed, as the president’s popularity has been the most important factor.” The latest evidence of the strategy’s limits: Democrat Conor Lamb won last month’s special election in Pennsylvania, despite the 59 percent of Republican ads trying to tie him to Pelosi.
Pelosi is a polarizing figure nationally, but she’s popular with Democrats. As Politico reported in June 2017, “Pelosi has a 2-to-1 favorable-to-unfavorable rating among Democrats, 49 percent to 25 percent. But her ratings among Republicans (21 percent to 63 percent) and independents (20 percent to 52 percent) are far worse.” When polling questions about Pelosi are linked to specific issues, Pelosi does even better. A CNBC poll showed that 49 percent of the public agreed with her that corporations got reaped a windfall from the GOP tax cuts while only giving workers “crumbs.”
If the Republicans continue to throw darts at Pelosi, it may be because they have no alternative. Except in the most pro-Trump districts, Republicans can’t run wholeheartedly in praise of a historically unpopular president. And Republicans are much more reliant on negative partisanship than their opponents, defining themselves in opposition to Democrats rather than for a positive agenda. That’s especially true after last year, when Republicans had unified control of the government but failed to repeal Obamacare and only managed one major legislative achievement. This year, Congress is widely expected to be even quieter.
As Pelosi sees it, the sad state of the GOP policy agenda forces them to smear her. “This is part of the bankruptcy of the Republican Party,” she said last month about her prominence in GOP attack ads. “They’re devoid of ideas about how they can meet the needs of the American people, so it’s an ad hominem.”
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eff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, announced on Tuesday that when the purported “pee tape” becomes available it will be offered free to all Amazon Prime members.
