A billion tiny October surprises

Image via INKinc.

A week or ten days ago this thing caught my attention: from Fox News's Maria Bartiromo, a story on the counter-counterintelligence investigation being conducted by John Durham at the behest of William Barr to look at the "origins" of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe of the relations between Russian operations in the 2016 election and a select group of Trump associates:

"It is unlikely that we will get a John Durham interim report or any indictments before the election. Now, just 37 days away, a debate has begun within the Department of Justice, as the timing of John Durham's criminal investigation conclusions. I'm being told by sources it is now too close to the election and could be seen as politically motivated," Bartiromo said on "Sunday Morning Futures."

This despite Barr's assurances, going back as far as July, that it would not be politically motivated

“I will be very careful. I know what Justice Department policy is,” Barr said during a long-awaited appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. “Any report will be, in my judgment, not one that is covered by the policy and would disrupt the election.”

My first thought was, well, that's the end of that; Durham can't get what Trump and Barr want him to get (indictments against McCabe, Strzok, and Ohr, and in their steamier fantasies Comey and Mueller, and in Trump's wet dreams Obama and Brennan), and he's throwing in the towel: another October surprise bites the dust:

Liar-in-Chief

 

Web of Deceit: Deadly Sands, by Big Fish Games.

Sometimes with Trump it's really fish in a barrel:

Was Andy McCabe ever forced to pay back the $700,000 illegally given to him and his wife, for his wife’s political campaign, by Crooked Hillary Clinton while Hillary was under FBI investigation, and McCabe was the head of the FBI??? Just askin’?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2020

McCabe wasn't head of FBI, and Clinton wasn't under investigation, when Jill McCabe ran for office in 2015, for two things. Email investigation was opened in January 2016. McCabe became acting director when you fired Comey in May 2017. You seem seriously disoriented.

— Your Strenuous Flu (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2020

Not to mention that the contributions in question were given only to Jill McCabe's campaign, not to "him and his wife" (way to acknowledge that you do regard campaign contributions as personal income, to be spent any way you choose, Donald, which is what young Duncan Hunter got 11 months for doing, and I do hope laundering campaign money into your wallet through your businesses is one of the things you get charged with), nor in any sense illegal, and had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton but were from Terry McAuliffe, the incumbent governor of Virginia. It's at least mildly amusing that he doesn't remember he's the one who gave McCabe the job.

I'm pretty much running out of what passed for a sense of humor since what is to my mind the most sinister of Trump's confessions to Woodward, on the order of Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman to a team of his thugs to murder the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, spiriting away the remains after dismembering them with a bone saw, in October 2018:

Counterintelligence Matters

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, from a May 2019 piece by Murray Waas in New York Review of Books suggesting—with receipts, as they say—that Rosenstein really should not have been supervising Mueller's work in the first place, before Barr took over; because of a conflict of interest, since he was apparently a central witness in the special counsel's inquiry.

The New York Times's Michael Schmidt, who broke the story of Hillary Clinton's improper email storage habits and also of James Comey's memos on Trump attempting to shake him down to stop the Flynn investigation, has a book about to come out (Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President—stop him, that is, from threatening the rule of law, and Schmidt doesn't seem to have adopted the GOP view that he shouldn't be stopped), and the big scoop, in today's paper, is that the FBI has no counterintelligence investigation into Trump's Russia connections.

That is, there was such an investigation, as we've been supposing (for me most embarrassingly here, where I suggested that I knew more about it than Jeffrey Toobin), but Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein shut it down days after acting FBI director Andrew McCabe opened it, just after appointing Robert Mueller special counsel, leaving McCabe under the false impression that Mueller would be taking it over: 

Huge News II

Where it all started, on a Dominican beach. Maybe not this one. Via CNN Travel.

The primary subject of the Yates hearing, of course, was dear old General Flynn, and his panicky series of phone calls when he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic at the end of December 2016, after President Obama decreed a new set of Russia sanctions to punish Russian interference in that year's presidential campaign, in which he advised Ambassador Kislyak on how the Russian government should respond, or rather not respond, to facilitate the Trump decision to make sure the Russians wouldn't be punished after Trump entered office; and, as Yates said,

these were not conversations that were just off the top of his head. But rather, he had been coordinating all of this with his Deputy National Security Advisor [K.T. McFarland], who was at Mar-a-Lago with other transition team members. And it was a very deliberate planned set of conversations with the Russian Ambassador to essentially tell them, “Don’t worry about it. Things are going to change what’s... in place.”

Following which, whoever knew about the calls (and it's still not clear who that was, beyond Flynn and McFarland) decided to keep their content a secret from those who didn't (starting, perhaps, with Mike Pence and Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer and going on to everybody else), to the extent of lying about it to the general public and to the FBI, the latter of which is illegal.

I want to talk about how Republicans have tried to turn this story into the story of a crime committed by the FBI against General Flynn, as represented in the rhetorical gyrations of Lindsey Graham's questioning of Sally Yates last week, but first it's a good idea to work through the known facts, of which I keep getting a better idea.

Counterintelligence News

Update 8/29/20: Since it turns out that Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein shut down the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump's Russian ties around the same time as he appointed the spccial counsel, it looks like Toobin was right and I was totally wrong on a central point below.

Zandar flagged some important and at first sight kind of depressing reporting from Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker, showing how the fix was in on the Mueller investigation from the start, with some new details on two meetings from the beginning, one in which Andrew McCabe (in his brief time as acting director of the FBI) briefs Mueller on what the FBI knows about the stuff Mueller will be investigating, and one in which Mueller gets initial instructions from acting attorney general Rod Rosenstein. It's in the latter that the fix comes:

Rosenstein wasn’t as familiar with the evidence as McCabe and his team were, but he had a broader piece of advice for Mueller. Now that he was Mueller’s boss, it could be interpreted as a command. “I love Ken Starr,” Rosenstein said, according to people present. (Starr was the independent counsel who oversaw the Clinton Whitewater investigation; Rosenstein had been a prosecutor on the Arkansas portion of that inquiry.) “But his investigation was a fishing expedition. Don’t do that. This is a criminal investigation. Do your job, and then shut it down.”

In other words, far from authorizing a wide-ranging investigation of the President and his allies, the Justice Department directed Mueller to limit his probe to individuals who were reasonably suspected of committing crimes.

I always forget how good Toobin is (as a TV pundit I find him annoying, but on the page he's still a real New Yorker writer), but in this case I think he's mistaken; Rosenstein was right about the danger of emulating Starr, and Mueller was right to take heed. But I also think Toobin is missing something important that we here in Left Blogistan just happen to know about, and it's causing him to misread his evidence.

And in Trump Nemesis News

Drawing by Baulking Trams/DeviantArt.

Before he stepped down on 15 May as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a result of the Covid insider trading scandal, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) made an official request, side by side with the ranking member Mark Warner (D-VA), to the Trump administration, asking it to move quickly to declassify the fifth and final volume of the committee's report on Russian active measures in the 2016 presidential election—the one that finally gets down to examining the interactions and relationships between the Russian activities and the Donald Trump campaign. It's said to be over a thousand pages long.

I should say straight out that you shouldn't count on the report providing the "smoking gun" evidence for an indictment of Trump—this is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation, so it's not what they were looking for. Though you shouldn't be sure it won't, either: it's going to have a lot of detail on Trump's personal business relations in Russia going back from who knows how long before 2013 and continuing up to after the election, when his lieutenants were still working on the Trump Tower Moscow deal; and on the not necessarily illegal collusion between Trump's agents like Manafort and Stone with Putin's agents like Deripaska, which may or may not go over the line into definitely illegal conspiracy. (I think it does, of course; as with a huge theme I've been catching up with from Emptywheel, laying out evidence that Deripaska engineered the disinformation in the Steele dossier to benefit the Trump campaign and Manafort was aware of it.)

A fascinating Twitter thread from @BlakesMustache yesterday (it's under protection right now, and you may not be able to access it—I can't access it myself—but there's the link, for the record) set forth the possibility that it's got enough damaging information to have Trump, and Barr, really freaked out, explaining a whole bunch of strange things that have been going on lately. I want to walk through some of this material (as best I can without the tweets) to see where it gets us.

Got Paranoia? Giuliani and John Solomon

Emperor Calus of the Cabal Empire, via Destinypedia.

A detail brought up by emptywheel the other day caught my attention, on the subject of the SDNY investigation of Rudolph Giuliani's activities in Ukraine: when Giuliani was supposedly working with the prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko on a list of imaginary crimes committed by Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and other Americans regarded as Trump enemies (allegations Lutsenko now denies he ever made), the procedure he followed, as reported in The Times:

Mr. Lutsenko initially asked Mr. Giuliani to represent him, according to the former mayor, who said he declined because it would have posed a conflict with his work for the president. Instead, Mr. Giuliani said, he interviewed Mr. Lutsenko for hours, then had one of his employees — a “professional investigator who works for my company” — write memos detailing the Ukrainian prosecutors’ claims about Ms. Yovanovitch, Mr. Biden and others.

Mueller: The Airport Paperback

Here's some drafting for the airport novel version. Superscript notes identify material that's exclusive to the Mueller Report. Material on Flynn in the previous sketch is not yet known to these characters, although I guess it will be. Sorry I can't seem to get rid of the links and blockquotes.

Justice League of America #1, October 1960, art by Murphy Anderson, via Wikipedia.

Sally Yates, the slender blonde with the soft Southern accent who'd become the acting attorney general three days earlier, as the new president was being inaugurated, swept her hair back with an impatient hand. "I'm really freaked out about it," ^{[M II:30 fn 134]} she told Andy McCabe, the FBI nerd, contemplating her from the other side of the desk, as Mary McCord, DOJ national security specialist, shook her head from side to side next to him.

"This" was General Mike Flynn, fired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the previous administration and now the new chief of the National Security Council. A craggy-faced fanatic from the paranoid wing of his Republican party, he'd become indispensable to his candidate, Donald J. Trump, a pudgy, pasty hotel-keeper and television schmoozer, lending him an air of austerity and toughness, one of the men the candidate called "my generals", but he'd been turning out to have more in his past than just his enmity with the outgoing president.

The Paranoid Style, 2019

Experiment in trying to imagine the workings of the minds of the Republican conspiratorialists, now led by Attorney General Barr, with a scene from the FBI investigation as Fox News might imagine it, if they tried to imagine it in any detail, and the consequences of trying to believe simultaneously that (a) FBI agents worked to prepare an "insurance policy" to make sure they could depose Trump in the unlikely event he was elected; (b) everything in Christopher Steele's "dossier" is fake; (c) the FBI conspirators were completely dependent on Steele's work to commence their investigation (though it had already begun); and (d) everybody agreed that the best way to get started was by putting a FISA order on Carter Page, Ph.D.

US Embassy, Rome, photo by DPA.

Early August 2016. Tracking shot follows two men with briefcases and upscale water bottles, Gaeta and Steele, down a corridor in the US Embassy in Rome, Gaeta, FBI’s man in the post, in a rumpled American suit, Steele British, ex-MI6 and now a freelancer, rather more expensively dressed; they enter a small meeting room where two Washington-based agents, McCabe and Strzok, and an FBI lawyer, Page, are concentrated around the middle of a long table, and Gaeta performs the introductions:

GAETA

Andy, Pete, Lisa, this is Chris Steele, who I met in London early July. As I was saying, he’s heard you’re looking for an insurance policy.

STRZOK

Just in case our candidate doesn’t work out and that guy wins the election and we need to overthrow him, like the FBI usually does in these situations, as you know.

STEELE (shaking hands)

Of course, understood. Delighted to meet you.

MCCABE

You’ve been doing some research, we understand?

STEELE

Yes, on behalf of your candidate, I’m told, for Mr. Simpson, who kindly asked me to help out with the Russian government angle.

MCCABE

And you’ve discovered something useful?

STEELE

Heavens no, I just make stuff up. What do you take me for, a spy?

Got Paranoia? Puppet Puppet

Via Truiceman.

We're hearing a lot about Andrew McCabe's story, as retailed on CBS Sixty Minutes, of Trump telling his intelligence briefers, "I believe Putin", which doesn't seem like news to me at all—he's been telling us all himself for at least a couple of years. But NPR's interview with McCabe helpfully laid out the context, from which I think we can learn something new, and possibly a whole lot: I think we can tell exactly when and where Putin could have told him this, on an extremely significant day, and in that way corroborate that the story is true and fill in some important details of the conspiracy hypothesis, if you'll follow along:

Exhibit A: an FBI briefing with Trump that had "gone completely off the rails from the very beginning."

McCabe said the topic was supposed to be how Russian intelligence officers were using diplomatic compounds inside the U.S. to gather intelligence on American spy agencies. Those compounds were closed as part of the long diplomatic chill between the two countries.

"Instead the president kind of went off on a diatribe," McCabe told NPR, explaining that Trump changed the subject to his belief that North Korea had not actually launched any missiles because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that the U.S. intelligence assessment was wrong and that "it was all a hoax."

The diplomatic compounds, officially home-away-from-home dachas for Russian diplomats missing their own dachas, were closed on a very specific occasion, on 28 December 2016, as part of the new sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration as retribution for Russia's interference in the presidential election, along with the expulsion of 35 personnel.

Word to the Wise Guys

From Ralph Bakshi's 1972 Fritz the Cat.

The most incoherent bit in The Atlantic's excerpt from Andrew McCabe's book, when he's describing his weird interactions with Trump and McGahn just after the firing of James Comey, when McCabe was the FBI's acting director, and Trump had this idea that he wanted to pay a formal visit to the Bureau, where he was convinced he was deeply loved, and McCabe wished he wouldn't, but was afraid to say so. Trump somehow doesn't believe his assurances:

I knew what a disaster it could turn out to be if he came to the Hoover Building in the near future. He pressed further, asking specifically, Do you think it would be a good idea for me to come down now? I said, Sure.

He looked at Don McGahn. The president said, Don, what do you think? Do you think I should go down to the FBI and speak to the people?

McGahn was sitting in one of the wooden chairs to my right. Making eye contact with Trump, he said, in a very pat and very prepared way, If the acting director of the FBI is telling you he thinks it is a good idea for you to come visit the FBI, then you should do it.

Then McGahn turned and looked at me. And Trump looked at me and asked, Is that what you’re telling me? Do you think it is a good idea?

It was a bizarre performance. I said it would be fine. I had no real choice. This was not worth the ultimate sacrifice.

What on earth is this about? Why would they be pressing him like this, to say something he's already said? Is it that they see his reluctance in his eyes? Or are we reading this—is McCabe reading this—completely backwards? Is McGahn actually begging McCabe to tell Trump no? Aware that it's a terrible idea, as anti-Trump emotions in the FBI rise to fever pitch, but afraid to tell the wicked old tyrant himself and looking for backup, which McCabe, equally frightened or just clueless or both, fails to provide? It's very odd. And then,

The Calls Are Coming From Inside the (White) House

Rupert Murdoch, Jared Kushner, and friends in a less stressful period, at the Met Museum Costume Institute gala, 2011. Photo by Joe Fornabaio/New York Times. 

Smoking hot takes on the Rosenstein ruckus reported by Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt in the New York Times and Devlin Barrett and Mark Zapotosky in the Washington Post shortly afterwards; I'll say straight out that I believe the WaPo story does much better service to the story and the readers in its treatment, in the first place in the way the Times makes the lede about a particular individual and his surprising language and emotions

WASHINGTON — The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit.

The extreme suggestions show Mr. Rosenstein’s state of mind in the disorienting days that followed Mr. Comey’s dismissal. Sitting in on Mr. Trump’s interviews with prospective F.B.I. directors and facing attacks for his own role in Mr. Comey’s firing, Mr. Rosenstein had an up-close view of the tumult. Mr. Rosenstein appeared conflicted, regretful and emotional, according to people who spoke with him at the time. 

and the Post about the institutions of government responding to a moment of crisis through its principal documentary source:

Trumps Fall Apart

Drawing by John Darkow, 1./28/16, via George H.'s Pinterest.

At the end of an anxious post Friday, Digby wrote:

Trump is getting stronger every day. Don't let the chaos fool you. 

Which is somewhat the opposite of what I've been thinking, that he's starting at last to really fall apart, which is pretty daunting. I'm diametrically disagreeing about something with Digby! A friend was shocked enough to ask about it, by email, but it's going to take me a while to get around to the point, so bear with me.

A lot of people, Digby included, think we can't know much about the official grounds for the firing of Andrew McCabe until an official report is issued—

It is certainly true that we don't know all the facts underlying the firing of Andrew McCabe. Maybe he was leaking damaging information to the press about Hillary Clinton and/or Donald Trump and then blatantly lied about it. From what we understand his crimes so far, they are much more vague than that but we'll have to wait and see. 

—but that's not quite correct. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman for The New York Times seem to have found out a good deal, though they also don't seem to think it's a very important part of the story, and don't get there until paragraphs 22-23, and it turns out to be about an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation: