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Home Front: Politix
Trump pardons former national security adviser Michael Flynn
2020-11-26
[MSN] President Trump on Wednesday announced he had pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, ending a three-year legal saga that saw Flynn seek to withdraw a guilty plea for lying to the FBI and a controversial reversal by the Justice Department on his case.

Flynn pleaded guilty to a felony in December 2017, admitting that he had misled Sherlocks about details of his conversations with the Russian ambassador during Trump’s presidential transition.

His plea was one of the first major courtroom victories for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who had been appointed seven months earlier.

But this spring, Attorney General William P. Barr and the Justice Department declared that prosecutors should not have brought the case against him and sought to have it dismissed. That request has been pending before a federal judge, who has been reviewing the case.

Trump’s pardon of Flynn marks a full embrace of the retired general he had ousted from the White House after only 22 days on the job — and a final salvo against the Russia investigation that shadowed the first half of his term in office.

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Home Front: Politix
Mueller's Labored Performance Was a Departure From His Once-Fabled Stamina
2019-07-25
watch the shoveling behind the shit-show parade hearings today. "How dare you pick on this impaired man?
[NY Times] WASHINGTON — Soon after the special counsel’s office opened in 2017, some aides noticed that Robert S. Mueller III kept noticeably shorter hours than he had as F.B.I. director, when he showed up at the bureau daily at 6 a.m. and often worked nights.

He seemed to cede substantial responsibility to his top deputies, including Aaron Zebley, who managed day-to-day operations and often reported on the investigation’s progress up the chain in the Justice Department. As negotiations with President Trump’s lawyers about interviewing him dragged on, for example, Mr. Mueller took part less and less, according to people familiar with how the office worked.
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-Lurid Crime Tales-
Deep State Damage Control: Steele Dossier Appears To Be False (And Maybe Was A Russian Disinformation Effort)
2019-04-21
[Hot Air] Well, it took them a while to get there but the NY Times has finally taken notice that the Steele dossier appears to contain a lot of false and unverifiable garbage:
The 35-page dossier, spiced up with tales of prostitutes and spies, sketched out a hair-raising story more than two years ago. Russian intelligence had used bribery and blackmail to try to turn Donald J. Trump into a source and ally, it said, and the Kremlin was running some Trump campaign aides practically as agents.

But the release on Thursday of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months — that while many Trump aides had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove. Mr. Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out…

Interviews with people familiar with Mr. Steele’s work on the dossier and the F.B.I.’s scramble to vet its claims suggest that misgivings about its reliability arose not long after the document became public — and a preoccupation of Trump opponents — in early 2017. Mr. Steele has made clear to associates that he always considered the dossier to be raw intelligence — not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation.

Hold on a minute. If Steele considered the dossier raw intelligence and merely cause for further investigation, why was he talking to multiple news outlets about the dossier prior to the election? He gave quotes to Mother Jones about it in October of 2016. That doesn’t sound like someone who is handling raw intelligence. It sounds like someone helping to dump oppo prior to the election.

New York Times article found at this link.
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-Lurid Crime Tales-
Is This Legal? Official Copies Of The Mueller Report Are Being Sold Online, And The Release Date Listed Is '26 March'
2019-03-06
[End of The American Dream] Can this possibly be legal? Somebody apparently thinks so, because copies of the Mueller report are being offered for sale online right now, and according to the pre-order announcement the release date is going to be "March 26". As a former attorney, I have no idea how anyone can legally do this. As I have documented previously, when Mueller is done with his report he is supposed to submit it to Attorney General William Barr, and then it will be up to Barr to determine how much of the report, if any, will be made available to the public. I suppose that it is possible that Barr has already agreed to release the full report to the public at the end of this month, but I find it difficult to believe that it would have been kept so quiet. To me, something is not right about all of this.

Earlier today, I was shocked to hear that the Mueller Report was being offered for sale online, and so I decided to check it out for myself.

And sure enough, you can find it listed on Amazon.com for $9.37 right here. "Robert S. Mueller III" is listed as an author, "Special Counsel’s Office U.S. Department of Justice" is listed as an author, and the listing tells us that the introduction will be written by attorney Alan Dershowitz.

So has Dershowitz already seen the report? If not, did he write his introduction without access to it?

And as I noted earlier, a March 26th release date is listed for this report. That is a major bombshell, because it appears to confirm that the Mueller Report is officially coming out this month.
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Government
End of Mueller investigation could spark battle between Justice Dept. and Congress over release of special counsel's report
2019-02-05
[WAPO] The growing expectation that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is nearing the end of his work is pushing the Justice Department toward a potential confrontation with congressional Democrats over the release of any report he produces ‐ and lawmakers will have the edge in any battle, according to former department officials.

The confirmation hearings for William P. Barr to be the next attorney general highlighted the uncertainty surrounding the public’s ability to read Mueller’s conclusions when he finishes his investigation into President Trump and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Democrats delayed Barr’s committee vote to this week, after they were unhappy he would not pledge to make any Mueller report public and follow the advice of Justice Department ethics officials on whether he should recuse himself from the investigation because of past positions on the matter.
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-Land of the Free
Trump Tweets Added to Obstruction Odessy
2018-07-27
The Dallas Morning News features the latest anti-Trump stuff on the front page every day. It appears todays article was cribbed from this one.
[New York Times] For years, President Trump has used Twitter as his go-to public relations weapon, mounting a barrage of attacks on celebrities and then political rivals even after advisers warned he could be creating legal problems for himself.
Talking, when someone is listening, can cause you problems. Twitter is basically talking out loud, yes?
Those concerns now turn out to be well founded for the desperate Dems. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey.
Breathless pause.
Several of the remarks came as Mr. Trump was also privately pressuring the men ‐ both key witnesses in the inquiry ‐ about the investigation, and Mr. Mueller is examining whether the actions add up to attempts to obstruct the investigation by both intimidating witnesses and pressuring senior law enforcement officials to tamp down the inquiry.
Tamp it down? Doesn't he have the power to squash it?
Mr. Mueller wants to question the president about the tweets.
He didn't know the POTUS used them until Obama told him to check into that.
His interest in them is the latest addition to a range of presidential actions like negotiating, policy-making, breathing, living he is investigating as a possible obstruction case: private interactions with Mr. Comey, not previously leaked to the press or documented in the book and book tours Mr. Sessions and other senior administration officials about the Russia inquiry; misleading White House statements; public attacks; and possible pardon offers to potential witnesses.
Possible pardon offers. Yeah, look into that. Maybe he offered Flynn a pardon.
None of what Mr. Mueller has homed in on constitutes obstruction, Mr. Trump's lawyers said. They argued that most of the presidential acts under scrutiny, including the Rosenstein-recommended firing of Mr. Comey, fall under Mr. Trump's authority as the head of the executive branch and insisted that he should not even have to answer Mr. Mueller's questions about obstruction.
Let Mueller keep digging while Trump keeps winning.
But privately, some of the lawyers have expressed concern that Mr. Mueller will stitch together several episodes, encounters and pieces of evidence, like the tweets, to build a case that the president embarked on a broad effort to interfere with the investigation.
Hey! Maybe he daydreamed about shooting Comey to pieces. How about a lie-detector test? Psychoanalysis? Mind reading?
Prosecutors who lack one slam-dunk piece of evidence in obstruction cases often search for a larger pattern of behavior, legal experts said.

The special counsel's investigators have told Mr. Trump's lawyers they are examining the tweets under a wide-ranging obstruction-of-justice law beefed up after the Enron accounting scandal, according to the three people. The investigators did not explicitly say they were examining possible witness tampering, however, that's what the Slimes infers but the nature of the questions they want to ask the president, and the fact that they are scrutinizing his actions under a section of the United States Code titled "Tampering With a Witness, Victim, or an Informant," raised concerns for his lawyers about Mr. Trump's exposure in the investigation.
Maybe Mueller tampered with Flynn and Manafort to get them to roll over on the POTUS?
A spokesman for Mr. Mueller's office declined to comment.

Mr. Trump's lead lawyer in the case, Rudolph W. Giuliani, dismissed Mr. Mueller's interest in the tweets as part of a desperate quest to sink the president.
But the Slimes dismisses that, too. I have more important things to do. RTWT, for the entertainment value!
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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Putin must wonder what else America knows about Russia
2018-07-17
An interesting perspective.
[In Military] When Russian President Vladimir Putin sits down at the table in Helsinki on Monday, he will surely have in the back of his mind some intelligence worries that have nothing to do with the U.S. president seated across from him.

Putin’s elite spy world has been penetrated by U.S. intelligence. That’s the implication of the extraordinarily detailed 29-page indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers handed up by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators on Friday. The 11-count charge includes names, dates, unit assignments, the GRU’s use of "X-agent" malware, its bitcoin covert funding schemes and a wealth of other tradecraft.

Putin must be asking himself: How did the Americans find out all these facts? What other operations have been compromised? And how much else do they know?

"The Russians have surely begun a ’damage assessment’ to figure out how we were able to collect this information and how much damage was done to their cyber capacity as a result," says Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel, in an email. "They are probably also doing a CI (counter-intelligence) assessment to determine whether we have any human sources or whether the Russians made mistakes that we were able to exploit."

Must the GRU assume that officers named in Friday’s indictment are now "blown" for further secret operations? Should Russian spymasters expect that operations they touched are now compromised? What about other Russian operations that used bitcoin, or X-agent, or another hacking tool called X-Tunnel? Has the United States tracked such operations and identified the targets? Finally, how are U.S. intelligence services playing back the information they’ve learned ‐ to recruit, exploit or compromise Russian officers?
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Home Front: Politix
"The Treasury Department's inspector general is investigating whether confidential banking information involving a company controlled by President Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen was leaked..."
2018-05-10
h/t Instapundit
[Althouse] Detailed claims about the company’s banking history were made public Tuesday by Michael Avenatti, an attorney for Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star who was paid $130,000 by Cohen’s company shortly before the 2016 election to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump.

Inspector General Eric Thorson, who operates independently of the agency’s political leadership, launched the probe in response to media reports, said counsel Rich Delmar. It might ‐ or might not ‐ answer a question that was the source of much speculation Wednesday: How did Avenatti come into hard-to-get information touching on some of the most sensitive issues before the White House, including the probe led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III?
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-Lurid Crime Tales-
Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen's Office, Hotel Room, and Home Raided; Stormy Daniels Records and Other Documents Seized by FBI
2018-04-09
[The Wrap] The FBI raided the office of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, and collected records on subjects including Cohen’s $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, the New York Times reported.

The raid Monday came after federal prosecutors in Manhattan got a search warrant after a referral from special counsel Robert S. Mueller, who is looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, among other issues. The Times said the search did not appear to be directly related to Mueller’s investigation, but likely resulted from information he found and shared with the New York prosecutors.

"Today the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants and seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohen, and his clients," Stephen Ryan, Cohen’s lawyer, told The Times. "I have been advised by federal prosecutors that the New York action is, in part, a referral by the Office of Special Counsel, Robert Mueller."
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Home Front: Politix
Mueller told Trump's attorneys the president remains under investigation but is not currently a criminal target
2018-04-04
Golly.
[WAPO] Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III informed President Trump’s attorneys last month that he is continuing to investigate the president but does not consider him a criminal target at this point, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

In private negotiations in early March about a possible presidential interview, Mueller described Trump as a subject of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors view someone as a subject when that person has engaged in conduct that is under investigation but there is not sufficient evidence to bring charges.

The special counsel also told Trump’s lawyers that he is preparing a report about the president’s actions while in office and potential obstruction of justice, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

Mueller reiterated the need to interview Trump ‐ both to understand whether he had any corrupt intent to thwart the Russia investigation and to complete this portion of his probe, the people said.

Mueller’s description of the president’s status has sparked friction within Trump’s inner circle as his advisers have debated his legal standing. The president and some of his allies seized on the special counsel’s words as an assurance that Trump’s risk of criminal jeopardy is low. Other advisers, however, noted that subjects of investigations can easily become indicted targets ‐ and expressed concern that the special prosecutor was baiting Trump into an interview that could put the president in legal peril.

John Dowd, Trump’s top attorney dealing with the Mueller probe, resigned last month amid disputes about strategy and frustration that the president ignored his advice to refuse the special counsel’s request for an interview, according to a Trump friend.
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Home Front: Politix
Mueller's Focus on Lindbergh Baby Adviser to U.A.E. Indicates Broader Inquiry
2018-03-04
[NYT] WASHINGTON ‐ George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, has hovered on the fringes of international diplomacy for three decades. He was a back-channel negotiator with Syria during the Clinton administration, reinvented himself as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and last year was a frequent visitor to President Trump’s White House.

Mr. Nader is now a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Nader and have pressed witnesses for information about any possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

The investigators have also asked about Mr. Nader’s role in White House policymaking, those people said, suggesting that the special counsel investigation has broadened beyond Russian election meddling to include Emirati influence on the Trump administration. The focus on Mr. Nader could also prompt an examination of how money from multiple countries has flowed through and influenced Washington during the Trump era.

How much this line of inquiry is connected to Mr. Mueller’s original task of investigating contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia is unclear. The examination of the U.A.E. comes amid a flurry of recent activity by Mr. Mueller.
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-Lurid Crime Tales-
Release of disputed GOP memo on FBI surveillance unleashes waves of recrimination
2018-02-04
[WASHINGTONPOST] The four-page memo, written by House Republicans, said its findings "raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain [Justice Department] and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)," which authorizes surveillance of individuals believed to be agents of foreign powers. The memo cites "a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process," a reference to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The memo alleges that a surveillance warrant was obtained and renewed on a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, with information from an individual with an anti-Trump agenda. And Republicans have charged that the warrant taints the origins of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into possible coordination between Trump associates and agents of the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.

It is unclear whether Trump will use the memo to fire people involved in the Russia probe, including Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees it. Asked Friday by a news hound whether he was more likely to fire Rosenstein after the release of the memo and whether he had confidence in him, Trump replied, "You figure that one out."

Democrats warned against any dismissals at the Justice Department, saying such moves would trigger a constitutional crisis.

Matthew Olsen, a former Justice Department official who used to oversee the FISA process, called the memo "a transparently political, amateurish effort" that does not raise meaningful legal questions about the application to surveil Page. "Not only does it not undermine the basis for the surveillance, but it reinforced that there was real merit and foundation for the application, because this application was approved and renewed multiple times," he said.
Previous articles involving Matthew:2015-09-12,2014-09-10,2014-09-06, 2012-09-27 where Clinton gave her speech on Libya to the UN,2009-06-14,2009-01-16, 2009-02-21 BTW he's had many long titles.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security,
a 12-year career prosecutor and acting assistant attorney general for national security,
head of the Obama administration's Guantanamo Review Task Force,
the director of the National Counterterrorism Center,
US terrorism expert Matthew Olsen,
Former National Counterterrorism Center Director
a former Justice Department official who used to oversee the FISA process

Wikipedia on Mr Olsen

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