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: 

Rashomon Salad

 

Rashomon Salad is my indie band name, of course, but... Drawing by Reuben Bolling (thanks, Jesse!) via TVTropes.

Live-blogging Volume 5—

Of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Russian active measures in the 2016 election, focusing (this final volume) on counterintelligence aspects, that is, on the

threat posed by the Russian influence operation. For example, the Committee examined Paul Manafort' s connections to Russian influence actors and the FBI' s treatment of reporting produced by Christopher Steele. 

And a good deal more. It was released this morning, as I learned from a couple of eager tweets from Emptywheel, and I guess it's going to take over my life for a while.

It really is almost 1000 pages long (the last piece, "Additional Views of Senator Wyden", comes on pages 949-66), and that doesn't mean with a lot of filler, as far as I can tell, though there's pretty heavy redaction in some spots. The report on the 9 June Trump Tower meeting (pp.322-95), which I couldn't help peeking at, reads like a kind of Rashomon salad, with all the participants' conflicting accounts chopped and tossed together on the page. Incidentally, 

Michael Cohen told the Committee that, in his opinion: "The reason why Jared and Manafort were in that meeting is because Mr. Trump would never have allowed Junior to be in that meeting by himself. Mr. Trump was very quick to tell everybody that he thinks Don Jr. has the worst judgement of anyone he's ever met in the world. And I can assure you that when that meeting, conversation, took place, that Mr. Trump turned around and said: Make sure that Jared and Paul are part of the meeting. Because he would never let Don Jr. handle that meeting by himself." Cohen Tr. II, p. 376; Cohen's statement is notable only because of the access-he had to the individuals involved, including Trump, at the time of meeting. The Committee did not find information that corroborate's Cohen's statement, and did find information that contradicts it. (360, fn. 2321) 

Pretty sure the contradictory information concerns how Kushner and Manafort got involved in the meeting (their information makes it clear that Junior invited them himself, and even kind of pestered them, in what looks to me like recruiting them as witnesses to what he expected to be a glorious intelligence coup), not Trump's opinion of Junior's judgment.