All the President's Minions

My Substack post on the Nunes-Meadows theft of classified documents related to the Russia investigation, with a lot of material you-all have seen before but quite a bit of new stuff and response to the Trump indictment.

Victory Laps

Time for another victory lap, or two. I told you so, doubters:

Seven counts, and, says The Guardian, and the other papers,

At least some of the counts filed in federal district court in Miami by the office of special counsel Jack Smith include the willful retention of national defense information, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, false statements and concealment under title 18 of the US criminal code, the person said.

"Willful retention of national defense information" is espionage, in the definition provided by the Espionage Act, if you missed that. For what it's worth. I'm afraid it's not espionage in the everyday sense of the word: that's acquiring national defense information with a specific motivation:

with the intent for that information to be used against the United States or for the gain of any foreign nation  

which doesn't seem to be alleged here; it's not going to be selling stuff to the Russians or the Chinese or the Saudis. Which is not to say that he necessarily didn't do that but that the special counsel's office doesn't have proof of it. I, as you know, don't think spying in that sense is a significant part of what Trump was doing with the document collection (though I still think Jared Kushner must have been supplying information from the President's Daily Briefing to Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and I know PDBs were included in the stuff squirreled away in Trump's Palm Beach place), so I'm not surprised, but I do hope, narratologically speaking, that they won't make this a bloodless legalist argument about whether the conditions of the statute are met, but rather work to show what Trump and his goons were trying to accomplish by the thefts.

That, as I was just saying a while back, could be part of the prosecutorial point of that Bedminster audio of his interview with Meadows's ghostwriters, that it illustrates him trying to use the stolen documents to implicate his enemies, who included not just those FBI persecutors but also, for instance, General Milley, and Susan Glasser's article showing Milley restraining him from committing war crimes in the final days. CNN has now gotten hold of a transcript:

“Well, with Milley – uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump says, according to the transcript. “They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some. This was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”

Trump continues: “All sorts of stuff – pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”

"I just found" this classified report sitting on my desk that happens to prove my point but you're not allowed to look at it. And then the ghostwriters dutifully added the lie to the book:

Meadows’ autobiography includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump “recalls a four-page report typed up by (Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency.”

And Kash Patel continually teased the classified documents that would reveal the plots of which Trump was a victim, throughout 2021 and 2022, without ever showing them, as he told "Clay and Buck":

“And what [Trump] did was on his way out of the White House, he declassified — made available to every American citizen in the world — large volumes of information relating, not just to Russiagate, but to national security matters, to the Ukraine impeachment, to his impeachment one, impeachment two.”

They had to be classified documents to explain why the reporters never got a chance to look!

Speaking of Meadows and, not coincidentally, of stolen classified documents, does anybody remember our discovery last January in the J6 Committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson that Meadows was a document thief too, receiving classified materials from the House Intelligence Committee passed to him by Devin Nunes, photocopying them in the White House and taking a bunch of them home, where he intended to get them to fascist journalists John Solomon (now Trump's designated representative along with Patel with the National Archives) and Mollie Hemingway? 

I'd pretty much given up hope that anybody professional was ever going to go there, but Hutchinson's testimony has now been discovered by the great Murray Waas, who has posted his findings on Substack, proving, at least, that I wasn't hallucinating this stuff, so I'm giving myself a victory lap on that too.

Namely, in late January, I wrote:

Narratology really starting to come into its own, as the Special Counsel picks up on the stuff I've been telling you, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case merges with the case of Trump's effort to incriminate the Crossfire Hurricane and Mueller investigations, as I've been saying it should; according to The Independent and the great Murray Waas:

Investigators working for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith have reportedly questioned multiple ex-Trump administration officials about the fate of a large tranche of classified documents pertaining to the FBI probe into Russia’s campaign of interference in the 2016 election.

A report by Murray Waas, a freelance investigative reporter and former National Journal staff writer, wrote on Wednesday that “at least three” figures in Mr Trump’s inner circle have been pressed by prosecutors on whether Mr Trump took “thousands of pages” of documents from the White House — including many bearing classification markings — with an eye towards making them public in attempt to discredit the Justice Department’s probe into alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation.

I'd hope the three or more figures would include Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed the process, on the cooperative side.

That's now happened. Waas's treatment misses some important details, I think, and I'll be posting something on that at Substack before too long. In the meantime, a happy Indictment Weekend to you all!

Indictment Time?

 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine as the tail manipulating dogsbody president Benjamin Harrison, 1891. Via.

A lot of Independent Counsel news coming down the pike, and in a familiar kind of sequencing, as the leakers—attorneys and friends of the possible targets and defendants—seek to seize whatever control they can of the emerging narrative, while Gym Jordan pulls out a distraction: in March, ahead of the Manhattan Trump indictment, Jordan and Elise Stefanik and J.D. Vance were pulling out the story of how DA Vance is a paid puppet of the financier George Soros; last week Jordan sent his demand to Attorney General Merrick Garland for information on the ongoing special counsel investigations, including names for the FBI personnel involved, while new information kept emerging about the moving round of documents throughout 2022 at Maga-Lardo.

So this evening, The Guardian reports that Trump's lawyers have been formally notified that he is a target in the case of the stolen presidential documents case, and The Independent announces that the federal grand jury in DC will be asked to vote on charges tomorrow 

It is understood that prosecutors intend to ask grand jurors to vote on indictments on Thursday, but that vote could be delayed as much as a week until the next meeting of the grand jury to allow for a complete presentation of evidence, or to allow investigators to gather more evidence for presentation of necessary.

(though it could take up to a week before they do the actual voting). They're also claiming that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has done what Trump likes to call "flipping"

For the Record: January 6 Meets Mar-a-Lago

Posted this expansion of the January 1 post as a Twitter thread,  but I've messed up the threading in at least a couple of places. What follows is a more or less unformatted version.

Talking about mishandled classified documents, did I ever tell you about the time Mark Meadows stole a large number of photocopies of classified docs from the White House, some to give to well-known rightwing journalists, some for purposes unknown? On or about January 19 2021?

 **

Actually I did, in a blogpost of January 1 this year http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2023/01/narratology-new-on-mar-lago-documents.html, but that was more for the fun of scooping the real journalists who, I assumed, would be jumping on the story in the next couple of days. Only they didn't.

So I'm pushing it out On Here.

**

The material is basically from Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the J6 Committee of 5/17/22, just after she's been talking about Meadows improperly burning documents in his fireplace in 12/21, after discussions with Scott Perry about "election matters". https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041/pdf/GPO-J6-TRANSCRIPT-CTRL0000930041.pdf 

**

Starting p. 44, Cheney turns the discussion to whether Meadows ever took any documents home, and on p. 46, gets more specific:

**

No Foul, No Harm

 

Vintage Space Jam T-shirt via.

I've been thinking about sports lately, partly no doubt because it's that one time in a quadrennium when I start following a sport myself with some assiduity (maybe should be twice in a quadrennium now that I've found out about the women's game), and wanting to say something about how Republican politics relates to sports, but it wasn't coming together until this remarkable series on Mark Meadows texts from the effort to overturn the 2020 election began coming out at Talking Points Memo, and then something Hilzoy said (Hilzoy is the philosopher Hilary Bok, one of the great bloggers until she quit blogging in 2009, and still a really valuable presence on Twitter) crystallized it for me:

... and the point is not to reflect people's actual will but to see whether, if you torture the rules badly enough, you can see, or pretend to see, a way that YOU can win.

— hilzoy (@hilzoy) December 14, 2022

If it's what you say I love it, especially on January 6

 

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who "frequently cries at work." Screenshot from video at Huffpost.

aardvarkcheeselog comments:

Is there any doubt at all that Mark Meadows defied a Congressional subpoena? What is the hold-up on indicting him for that, since Congress declined to do so on their own hook?

It would be easier to expect good faith from DOJ if they were doing anything to discipline scofflaws that don't need cases built against them. Maybe I am not paying enough attention to news and am missing reports about this?

It might be interesting to ask why Congress declined to do it on their own and kicked the can over to DOJ instead. It's my impression that they have almost never done that historically, but they've done it four times in the January 6 investigation: for Bannon in October, for Meadows in January, and for Scavino and Navarro last week.

The procedure for criminal contempt (as opposed to inherent contempt, handled by Congress, or civil contempt, for the Senate, when they sue the party in civil court), is:

Following a contempt citation, the presiding officer of the chamber is instructed to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia;^[20] according to the law it is the duty of the U.S. Attorney to refer the matter to a grand jury for action.

So in Bannon's case the grand jury did issue an indictment pretty quickly, in just a few weeks, and nothing further seems to have happened, nothing at all has happened with the Meadows complaint, and it's certainly too soon to ask about the other two.

So what has happened to the Meadows complaint? Prosecutors were required to do something with it, and my hypothesis is that they've folded it into something bigger negotiations for a cooperation agreement in which he will cooperate with the investigation and in turn face relatively light criminal charges, in which criminal contempt of Congress (1-12 months in jail and $100-$100,000 in fines) could certainly play a role.

At the time he first rejected the demand that he give the committee a deposition, in December,

Mr. Thompson said Mr. Meadows had provided some useful information to the committee, including a November email that discussed appointing an alternate slate of electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and a Jan. 5 message about putting the National Guard on standby.

Mr. Meadows also turned over to the committee his text messages with a member of Congress in which the lawmaker acknowledged that a plan to object to Mr. Biden’s victory would be “highly controversial,” to which Mr. Meadows responded, “I love it.” And he furnished text exchanges about the need for Mr. Trump to issue a public statement on Jan. 6 aimed at persuading the mob marauding through the Capitol in his name to stand down.

But Mr. Meadows also informed the committee he had turned in the cellphone he used on Jan. 6 to his service provider, and he was withholding some 1,000 text messages connected with the device, Mr. Thompson said, prompting additional questions and the need for more cooperation and a deposition.

Meadows has committed more crimes than the House committee is prepared to charge him with; we're starting to get a sense of it through the leaked text messages, which show him operating as a coup planning communications center, fielding demands from volunteer insurgents, from Junior to Ginni, to pass up the hierarchy. "I love it!" He also had that reputation for getting weepy under stress. He needs to be made to tell what he knows first, before he goes to jail.

DOING SOMETHING

 

Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. Not just because he and Mrs. Meadows seem to be inveterate committers of voter fraud, or his text conversations with Mrs. Virginia Thomas, but especially because he was clearly one of the people using one of those burner phones during the seven hours when the official White House phone logs went dark on January 6. Photo by Patrick Semansky/AP via NPR (which has the voter fraud story if you need a link for that).

Redhand writes,

the failure fault line runs directly through Merrick Garland's office. It's hard not to feel despair when the chief individual charged with combating criminality threatening our own Government lacks the courage to do his job. I believe the news that Justice Dept. expands Jan. 6 probe to look at rally prep, financing about as much as I do the Putin regime's claims that they are curtailing military activities around Kiev.

Actually, for me, that's one of the few bright and hopeful spots, and that WaPo story is one of the reasons, though I think they got the story wrong when they suggested that the development (subpoenas to White House officials who contributed to planning the January 6 rally) is some kind of new and surprising development. Especially because I predicted it a couple of months ago, around the time of the arrest of Stewart Rhodes and the other Oath Keeper defendants.

That's when I learned that there was a special grand jury working all the January 6 cases, methodically working its way up the chain up from Viking Boy in the Wagnerian headdress to somebody senior enough that he didn't enter the Capitol himself but rather directed it, by phone, from outside.