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Special counsel pushing Paul Manafort for information on Roger Stone: Sources


PHOTO: U.S. political consultant Roger Stone, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, speaks to reporters after appearing before a closed House Intelligence Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Sept. 26, 2017.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters, FILE
WATCH Paul Manafort agrees to cooperate with special counsel

Prosecutors from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office have been asking former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — their newest cooperating witness — about his friend and former business associate Roger Stone, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Stone, a longtime political adviser to President Donald Trump and onetime partner of Manafort’s at the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, has come under increasing scrutiny from the special counsel in recent months. Nearly a dozen individuals close to Stone have been brought in for interviews with the Mueller team, and many of those same individuals have also appeared before a federal grand jury.

Mueller’s interest in Stone appears to be focused on whether Stone or his associates communicated with Julian Assange or WikiLeaks about the release of damaging emails allegedly hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign by Russian intelligence officers masquerading as hacker persona “Guccifer 2.0.”

Some of Stone’s public statements from that time appeared to indicate that he knew in advance that WikiLeaks was preparing to publish information damaging to Clinton’s campaign.

PHOTO: Special Counsel Robert Mueller departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 21, 2017.Reuters/FILE PHOTO
Special Counsel Robert Mueller departs after briefing members of the U.S. Senate on his investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 21, 2017.more +
The special counsel’s office did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Manafort declined to comment.

When asked what questions Mueller’s team might be asking Manafort — who recently pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy in Washington, D.C. and is awaiting sentencing on 18 counts of financial crimes in Virginia — Stone told ABC News that it “certainly wouldn’t be surprising” that his investigators would question Manafort about him since he and Manafort “have been friends since childhood.”

"I am highly confident Mr. Manafort is aware of no wrong doing on my part during the 2016 campaign, or at any other time, and therefore there is no wrongdoing to know about,” Stone said. “Narratives to the contrary by some in the media are false and defamatory."

Manafort and Stone’s ties indeed run deep. In the early 1970s, Manafort and Stone both frequented the same circles of young GOP operatives working on national political campaigns. In 1977, when Stone was 24, he was elected president of the Young Republicans. Paul Manafort was his campaign manager.

PHOTO: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater are young political operatives who have set up lobbying firms. Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater are young political operatives who have set up lobbying firms.
And both men had tumultuous tenures at the Trump campaign. Stone, who has taken credit for persuading President Trump to get into politics, served as an adviser to Trump’s campaign before leaving amid controversy in 2015. Manafort served as Trump campaign chairman before resigning suddenly just a few months before Election Day.

Stone, meanwhile, appears to have steeled himself for the possibility that he could be one of Mueller’s next targets.

“It’s not outside the realm of possibility,” Stone previously told ABC News, “that [Mueller] may consider bringing some offense against me.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/special ... d=58572284

Massive Twitter data release sheds light on Russia’s Trump strategy

NANCY SCOLA10/17/2018 09:04 AM EDT

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
Twitter and Facebook have been widely criticized since the 2016 election for not doing more to stem the abuse of their platforms by Russians and other foreign actors hoping to manipulate the American political landscape. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Twitter on Wednesday released a trove of 10 million tweets it says represents the full scope of foreign influence operations on the platform dating back nearly a decade — including Russia's consistent efforts to disparage Hillary Clinton and an initially erratic approach to Donald Trump that eventually settled on a concerted pro-Trump message during the 2016 campaign.

The huge data cache consists of tweets from some 3,400 accounts tied to the Kremlin troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency and 770 others linked to Iran. It also includes some 2 million GIFs, videos and other pieces of visual content. Twitter said it's making the information available to "enable independent academic research and investigation," according to a company blog post.

The Russian tweets around the 2016 presidential election showed distinct patterns when it came to Clinton and Trump, according to researchers at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has been scouring the data since late last week.

While the Clinton animus was clear from the start, it took the IRA awhile to settle on its Trump strategy, as the Republican primary played out.

"Literally from the day Clinton announced her candidacy they were attacking her," Ben Nimmo, an information defense fellow at the lab, told POLITICO. "But on the Republican side, in the early days, they seemed to be backing more than one horse."

He described "peaks and troughs — a lot of pro-Trump content and a lot of anti-Trump content" in 2015 and 2016, adding that Trump's GOP rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) got a similar mixed treatment while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was the target of negative content. But Nimmo said the messaging around Trump turned decidedly in his favor around the time the reality show star began locking up the Republican nomination.

That period of time is said to be of interest to investigators with special counsel Robert Mueller's team, which is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election — including a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

By Election Day, the Russian trolls' tweets were nearly uniformly pro-Trump, expressing sentiments like, "I don’t want a criminal in office! I’d vote for Monica before I vote for Killary! #Trump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain #TrumpForPresident," according to the Atlantic Council lab's findings published Wednesday.

After Election Day, though, the researchers found the trolls returned to their mixed-bag approach to Trump — for example, both cheering and jeering what were reported to be his disparaging remarks in January 2018 about Haiti and African nations. "Call it what it is — racist!" read one tweet in part. "Y’all have to admit that Trump is right," read another.

Nimmo said the research into the data is still in its early stages, but he said it's clear that much of the U.S.-focused tweeting was aimed at simply fomenting discord around political and social issues, a dynamic similar to what's already been identified in Facebook ads and highlighted in Mueller's indictment of Russian nationals and entities over 2016 election interference.

"There was a lot of stuff that was just plain divisive, that were just attempts to inflame," Nimmo said. "They had Black Lives Matter accounts and Blue Lives Matter accounts. There was a lot of sticking fingers in painful wounds."

The archive includes Russian-placed tweets arguing both sides of the gun debate the day after the Dec. 2, 2015, attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that left more than a dozen people dead. "Mass shooting occurs even in #GunFreeZones so people is the problem not guns #Prayers4California," read one. "[M]ass shooting wont [sic] stop until there are #GunFreeZones #Prayers4California," read another.

Twitter and Facebook have been widely criticized since the 2016 election for not doing more to stem the abuse of their platforms by Russians and other foreign actors hoping to manipulate the American political landscape. Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill say the companies have failed to do proper postmortems of that interference, including via digging into the enormous stores of online data they alone hold.

The newly released Twitter data may eventually shed light on the style as well as substance of foreign campaigns.

Russian accounts appeared to be particularly good at building personality into their tweets, such as those published by accounts like @TEN_GOP and @Jenn_Abrams, the Atlantic Council researchers found. By comparison, the Iranian operation was "much clumsier and clunkier and less engaging," focused mostly getting users to click on government propaganda, Nimmo said.

The Twitter database is not limited to U.S. influence operations. Many of the Kremlin-linked tweets are in Russian and appeared aimed at shaping politics in Russia and Ukraine, according to Nimmo.

While aspects of social media foreign-influence operations have been disclosed in bits and pieces, he said, "the massive value of this Twitter dump is now it looks like we've got the lot."
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/ ... ons-910005

Ryan Goodman
‏
"People around Trump and other witnesses believe more criminal indictments will come from Mueller. Attorneys who have dealt with Mueller's investigators and other officials expect that the special counsel's efforts…include an active post-election period"

"Paul Manafort has kept the Russia prosecutors busy. The former Trump campaign chairman and his lawyers have visited Mueller's office in Washington at least nine times in the last four weeks, a strong indication that the special counsel is moving at a steady clip."

Mueller's quiet period has not been very quiet

What's next in the Mueller investigation?
Washington (CNN)Ever since reaching a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, Paul Manafort has kept the Russia prosecutors busy.

Michael Cohen meets with prosecutors investigating Trump's family business, charity
The former Trump campaign chairman and his lawyers have visited Mueller's office in Washington at least nine times in the last four weeks, a strong indication that the special counsel is moving at a steady clip.

September and October at first glance appear to be quiet periods for the investigation, under the Justice Department's guidelines to avoid public political acts before the midterm elections. But the quiet period has seen a persistent murmur of activity, based on near-daily sightings of Mueller's prosecutors and sources involved in the investigation.

In addition to Manafort, Mueller's team has kept interviewing witnesses, gathered a grand jury weekly to meet in Washington on most Fridays, and kicked up other still-secret court action. Plus, the discussions between the President's legal team and the special counsel's office have intensified in recent weeks, including after the special counsel sent questions about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government. The President's attorneys are expected to reply to the questions in writing.

People around Trump and other witnesses believe more criminal indictments will come from Mueller.

Attorneys who have dealt with Mueller's investigators and other officials expect that the special counsel's efforts, now 17 months in the works, will include an active post-election period a much-anticipated report where Mueller will outline what his investigators decided to prosecute and what they declined.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation, on Wednesday called the probe "appropriate and independent," in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
"[A]t the end of the day, the public will have confidence that the cases we brought were warranted by the evidence and that it was an appropriate use of resources."

Treasury official charged with leaking docs related to Russia, Manafort
A frequent cooperator


At least nine times since he pleaded guilty on September 14, a black Ford SUV has brought Manafort to Mueller's office in southwest DC around 10 am. Manafort's lawyers arrive around the same time, waiting in the lobby for the car to arrive. There they remain inside the offices, typically for six hours.

It's not entirely clear yet what Manafort has shared with prosecutors, and if his interviews check facts that haven't yet come to light outside of the prosecutors' own notes. Among the questions, investigators have asked Manafort about his dealings with Russians, according to one source familiar with the matter.

Former Obama WH counsel's lawyers gave presentation to federal prosecutors
Attorneys for Manafort would not discuss their activities for this story.

The visits amount to what could total dozens of hours of interviews between Mueller's prosecutors and Manafort since he finalized his plea agreement. Manafort agreed to fully cooperate with the Justice Department as it investigates the Trump campaign and the Russian government's actions before the 2016 election.

At the same time, Trump has distanced himself from crimes investigators still may be pursuing. He publicly claimed this week that criminal charges so far brought by Mueller's team have nothing to do with him. Trump attorneys declined to comment for this story.

Other help


The flurry of interviews with Manafort and other cooperating defendants leaves Trump's legal team somewhat in the dark on what Mueller is pursuing.

Manafort's lawyers have shared information with the Trump legal team, but according to sources familiar with the case, there is no formal joint defense agreement.

Manafort's criminal confessions and separate conviction by a jury dealt with his Ukrainian lobbying work and financial dealings largely before 2016. Yet his cooperation is widely expected to include helping the prosecutors build potential criminal cases about coordination between the Russian government and Trump campaign.

Rick Gates continues to help Mueller investigation, lawyer says
Aside from Manafort, three other Trump campaign officials have pleaded guilty to charges. Two of them, campaign deputy Rick Gates and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, also agreed to broadly help Mueller's team with its investigation and have visited the special counsel's office to give interviews since their pleas.

Mueller's team has also been speaking with Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney, who has spent hours with Mueller's team since his own guilty plea in August, in which he accused President Donald Trump of directing him to commit a crime.
Trump legal team


Meanwhile, Trump's team is working up answers to Mueller's questions. Even if the defense team were to sign and deliver their answers soon, Mueller's office may have follow-up questions that drag out their discussions. The legal team, comprised of personal and White House lawyers Jay Sekulow, Marty and Jane Raskin and Emmet Flood, still hasn't reached an agreement on whether the President will be interviewed in person or must respond to questions about possible obstruction of justice related to his firing of FBI Director James Comey.

While they're in investigatory limbo, expectations have grown in Washington legal circles that Mueller will issue a report soon after the November election or even before the end of the year.

When it's finished, Mueller's report is expected to explain the decisions of the Justice Department to bring or to decline to bring criminal cases during the course of the investigation. Mueller's findings and decisions will be confidential, unless higher-up officials in the Justice Department decide to make the report public.

As of now, the Trump legal team operates under the belief that Mueller won't finish his work without bringing indictments that hit closer to the Trump campaign.

Trump doesn't 'trust everybody in the White House' 01:46

Activity in the DC courthouse


The next campaign contact in Mueller's crosshairs may be Trump adviser Roger Stone, who's publicly said he expects to be indicted after nine of his friends and aides spoke to Mueller's office or received grand jury subpoenas. In the last two weeks, multiple contacts of Stone have been in touch with the special counsel's office about them providing information, according to CNN's reporting.

Special counsel prosecutors have also visited the federal courthouse in downtown Washington almost daily.

Once in early September and once in early October, Chief Judge Beryl Howell held hour-long sealed hearings in her courtroom featuring trial and appellate prosecutors from Mueller's office. Both times, the lawyers opposite the Justice Department declined to share with CNN their names, clients names or law firms. Howell oversees court action related to the federal grand jury that Mueller has used to approve indictments in DC.

With new counsel on board, White House braces for post-election fights
Previously she has ordered two witnesses -- a real estate agent and a lawyer -- to testify against Manafort before the grand jury, and she held Andrew Miller, a Stone associate, in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena. The real estate and lawyer orders became public on the eve of Manafort's indictment last October, and Miller's attorneys spoke publicly about his subpoena challenge as it was ongoing.

Other times in the courthouse in recent weeks, the Mueller investigators visit the chief judge's chambers and then clerk's office, indicating a flurry of court paperwork.

A spokesperson for Howell and the federal court in DC declined to comment on the nature of the recent sealed court activity, as did a spokesman for the special counsel's office.

As the court action moves forward, Trump himself has said he is working on giving information to Mueller. When asked by the Associated Press on Tuesday if he would sit for an interview with Mueller or simply answer written questions, as his lawyers have agreed to do, Trump said: "You know that's in process. It's a tremendous waste of time for the president of the United States."

CNN's Sara Murray, Erica Orden, Kara Scannell, Laura Robinson, Em Steck and Sam Fossum contributed to this report.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/17/politics ... index.html

Judge Denies Manafort Request To Wear Suit To All Future Court Hearings


Nicole Lafond

The judge in Paul Manafort’s Virginia trial denied the former Trump campaign chairman’s request to wear a suit for his next hearing on Oct. 19, and “all subsequent hearings,” arguing that Manafort should be treated no differently than other defendants who are in custody.


“Defendants who are in custody post-conviction are, as a matter of course, not entitled to appear for sentencing or any other hearing in street clothing,” Judge T.S. Ellis wrote in the court order on Tuesday. “This defendant should be treated no differently from other defendants who are in custody post-conviction.”

In the Virginia case, Manafort, who has been in jail since June, was convicted on eight counts of federal financial crimes, with the jury deadlocked on the remaining 10 counts.

The Oct. 19 hearing will focus on Manafort’s decision to strike a deal to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in order to avoid a second trial in Washington, D.C. The judge will assess whether Manfort’s sentencing will be stalled until Manafort is finished cooperating with Mueller. Ellis has called the terms of Manafort’s plea deal — involving the delay of proceedings — “highly unusual.”

Read Ellis’ motion denial below:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/judg ... -wear-suit

emptywheel
‏
emptywheel Retweeted Robert Maguire
This could be part of the genius of Mueller referring the Cohen stuff to SDNY. Bc now they have a cooperating witness who knows all about this fraud, and the US Attorney is recused.

Robert Maguire
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Legal experts say that, based on pattern reported by @ProPublica/@WNYC, Ivanka Trump may have committed felony fraud

Legal Experts: Ivanka Trump May Have Committed Felony Fraud

Ivanka Trump misrepresented the sales figures of various Trump-branded properties around the world on multiple occasions over the past decade, according to a lengthy exposé released late Wednesday by public interest news organization ProPublica in conjunction with Manhattan public radio station WNYC.

Those real estate-related misrepresentations were almost certainly criminal according to legal experts surveyed by Law&Crime.

First, a bit of backstory. According to the ProPublica-WNYC “Pump and Trump” report:

In interviews and press conferences, Ivanka Trump gave false sales figures for projects in Mexico’s Baja California; Panama City, Panama; Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood. These statements weren’t just the legendary Trump hype; they misled potential buyers about the viability of the developments.

The specifics–all of which are contained and copiously documented in the joint exposé–proceed as follows:

In 2009, Ivanka Trump claimed that a Toronto Trump property was “virtually sold out.” In reality, fewer than 25 percent of those units had been sold–according to a bankruptcy filing by the property developers. The property was built. Then it went bankrupt. The Trump name was removed from the building.

In 2008, Ivanka Trump claimed that a Panama Trump property was “over 90 percent” sold. In reality, fewer than 80 percent of those units had been sold–according to Moody’s Investors Service. The property was built. Then it went bankrupt, too. The Trump name was removed from the building.

Also in 2008, Ivanka Trump claimed that a Manhattan SoHo Trump property was 60 percent sold. In reality, only 15 percent of those units had been sold–according to a legal affidavit filed by a Trump partner. The property was built. Then? Bankrupt again. Trump’s name was removed from the building.

The SoHo property shenanigans were egregious enough to raise alarm bells with New York City investigators. The report notes, “The Manhattan district attorney’s office [under Cyrus Vance] considered charging the Trumps but backed off after a visit from a donor — Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz.”

Even though Vance’s office passed on the prosecution, special counsel Robert Mueller focused some of his vast resources on the Trump Soho Hotel fiasco in late 2017. And there’s also an apparent coda here: The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is now under investigation by the FBI over those corruption and pay-to-play allegations, according to the New York Daily News.

In light of the FBI’s investigation into Vance’s office, it’s possible that Ivanka Trump could be facing criminal charges herself over the fraudulent real estate schemes.

Former federal prosecutor Daniel S. Goldman noted:

If Ivanka knowingly and intentionally made false representations to investors that were material to the investors’ decision to invest in one of her real estate projects, then that is the crime of wire fraud (or, potentially, securities fraud, depending on what instrument the investment was). The knowledge and intent is what makes it criminal fraud.

The one-time Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York also offered a caveat about Ivanka Trump’s potential liability over the misrepresentations due to how old they are.

“The Manhattan DA’s office reportedly looked into the Trump Soho and declined to prosecute for unknown reasons,” Goldman said. “There may be statute of limitations issues now, but with Trump Soho partner Felix Sater reportedly cooperating with law enforcement, there may be more evidence now.”

Elizabeth de la Vega is also a former federal prosecutor. In an interview with Law&Crime, she was emphatic that Ivanka Trump had engaged in criminal schemes to defraud investors and others.

“Yes, absolutely,” de la Vega said when asked if Ivanka Trump’s on-the-record statements were potentially criminal. The former chief of the San Jose branch of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California then elaborated. She said:

A pattern of knowing false statements to real estate investors exposes perpetrators to multiple counts of bank, wire, and mail fraud, depending on the means used to convey the false statements. It’s likely that such a scheme may also involve money laundering. Defendants convicted of such frauds are also sentenced to pay restitution to any investors who have suffered provable losses.

Law&Crime reached out to the White House for comment on these allegations. No response was forthcoming at the time of publication.

[image via Patrick Semansky – Pool /Getty Images]

Follow Colin Kalmbacher on Twitter: @colinkalmbacher
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/le ... ssion=true

Mueller Probes WikiLeaks’ Contacts With Conservative Activists

Ties between the website and Roger Stone, Peter W. Smith get a closer look

Dustin Volz Updated Oct. 19, 2018 4:07 p.m. ET

Trump associate Roger Stone after meeting with House lawmakers in September 2017.


WASHINGTON—Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is scrutinizing how a collection of activists and pundits intersected with WikiLeaks, the website that U.S. officials say was the primary conduit for publishing materials stolen by Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Mueller’s team has recently questioned witnesses about the activities of longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone, including his contacts with WikiLeaks, and has obtained telephone records, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Investigators also have evidence that the late GOP activist Peter W. Smith may have had advance knowledge of details about the release of emails from a top Hillary Clinton campaign official by WikiLeaks, one person familiar with the matter said. They have questioned Mr. Smith’s associates, the person said.

Right-wing pundit Jerome Corsi was also questioned by investigators about his interactions with Mr. Stone and WikiLeaks before a grand jury in September, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Corsi declined to comment. A lawyer for Mr. Stone said he hasn’t been contacted by the special counsel. Mr. Smith died last year.

Mr. Mueller’s office declined to comment.

Throughout 2016, Messrs. Stone, Smith and Corsi, who long worked on the margins of Republican politics, tried to dig up incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president, according to emails and some public comments. A lawyer for President Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign staffer who interacted with Mr. Stone, said he also was questioned by Mr. Mueller’s team about communications he had with Mr. Stone regarding WikiLeaks. New York radio host Randy Credico also said the special counsel asked about his communications with Mr. Stone and WikiLeaks. Mr. Credico interviewed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016 and has known Mr. Stone for years.

The role WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange played during the 2016 election as the chief publisher of stolen Democratic emails has been of enduring interest to investigators probing Russian election interference in 2016 and whether there was collusion with Trump associates. President Trump has denied collusion, and Moscow has denied meddling in the election. The Mueller probe has resulted in more than two dozen indictments as well as guilty pleas by five Trump associates.

Mr. Mueller’s office has begun shedding staff and has indicated that key witnesses are ready to be sentenced, a sign that their cooperation is no longer needed.

It couldn’t be determined whether WikiLeaks or Mr. Assange are targets of the probe or if investigators are primarily interested in those who interacted with the organization. As Mr. Mueller focuses on hacking and Russian interference, individuals or groups who may have been involved could be exposed to charges such as conspiracy to aid in a hacking operation.

A July indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence officers that derived from the special counsel’s investigation alleged that WikiLeaks obtained stolen material from Russian military intelligence through an online persona known as Guccifer 2.0. Much of that material was hacked in the spring of 2016, according to the special counsel.

WikiLeaks didn’t respond to a request for comment. Mr. Assange has said that Russia wasn’t the source of the emails.

The scrutiny of activities related to WikiLeaks suggests investigators believe the organization’s importance to the Russia probe may extend beyond its dealings with Guccifer 2.0. A list of questions Mr. Mueller wanted Mr. Trump to answer and gave to the president’s legal team earlier this year included one about the president’s knowledge of communication between Mr. Stone, his associates and WikiLeaks, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

According to the July indictment, WikiLeaks received an encrypted attachment from Guccifer 2.0 on July 14, 2016, that held “instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents.” More than a month earlier, on June 12, Mr. Assange said during an interview with a British television station that he had obtained Clinton-related emails that were pending publication.

That claim came three days before the Guccifer 2.0 persona appeared online, raising the possibility that there may have been another channel that served as a conduit for Clinton-related emails. In the weeks before the election, WikiLeaks released emails belonging to John Podesta, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

Jerome Corsi in 2008.
Jerome Corsi in 2008. Photo: AP
The person familiar with Mr. Smith recalled him repeatedly implying that he knew ahead of time about leaks of Mr. Podesta’s emails. The Journal previously reported that in the fall of 2016, Mr. Smith told friends and wrote in an email that he directed hackers to give emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private server to WikiLeaks. It is unclear whether hackers ever obtained the emails belonging to Mrs. Clinton, which she had said were deleted because they were deemed personal. Those emails have never been made public.

In August 2016, Mr. Stone told Alex Jones, a right-wing provocateur who runs the website InfoWars, that he had a “foreshadowing” of the material that would be released by WikiLeaks. Days later, Mr. Stone tweeted that it would soon be “the Podesta’s [sic] time in the barrel.” Several days before WikiLeaks began to post the hacked material from Mr. Podesta’s email account, Mr. Stone tweeted that he had “total confidence” that WikiLeaks would “educate the American people soon.”

Mr. Stone has since said the messages were “benign” and that he had no advance notice of the website’s plans. He also has said his tweet referencing “the Podesta’s” was about the lobbying activities of Mr. Podesta and his brother, Tony.

It isn’t clear to what degree, if any, Mr. Stone’s and Mr. Smith’s efforts were connected. Messrs. Smith and Stone had mutual associates in Mr. Corsi as well as former Wall Street financier Charles Ortel, who was researching the Clinton Family Foundation, emails and public comments show. Mr. Stone said he wasn’t aware of Mr. Smith’s work. Mr. Ortel said he wasn’t aware of a relationship between Mr. Stone and Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith referred to his project as the “Clinton Email Reconnaissance Initiative.” He compiled a long list of businessmen, activists, lawyers, researchers and Trump campaign officials who he wanted to work with to obtain Mrs. Clinton’s 33,000 emails. While many people on that list say they never gave Mr. Smith permission to use their names, some were copied or named in emails circulated by Mr. Smith in 2016. Others got unsolicited approaches from Mr. Smith they say they never responded to.

—Drew FitzGerald and Rebecca Ballhaus contributed to this article.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-pr ... 1539978208

Mueller report PSA: Prepare for disappointment

And be forewarned that the special counsel’s findings may never be made public.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN 10/19/2018

President Donald Trump's critics have spent the past 17 months anticipating what some expect will be among the most thrilling events of their lives: special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on Russian 2016 election interference.

They may be in for a disappointment.

That’s the word POLITICO got from defense lawyers working on the Russia probe and more than 15 former government officials with investigation experience spanning Watergate to the 2016 election case. The public, they say, shouldn’t expect a comprehensive and presidency-wrecking account of Kremlin meddling and alleged obstruction of justice by Trump — not to mention an explanation of the myriad subplots that have bedeviled lawmakers, journalists and amateur Mueller sleuths.

Perhaps most unsatisfying: Mueller’s findings may never even see the light of day.

“That’s just the way this works,” said John Q. Barrett, a former associate counsel who worked under independent counsel Lawrence Walsh during the Reagan-era investigation into secret U.S. arms sales to Iran. “Mueller is a criminal investigator. He’s not government oversight, and he’s not a historian.”

All of this may sound like a buzzkill after two years of intense news coverage depicting a potential conspiracy between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign, plus the scores of tweets from the White House condemning the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt.”

But government investigation experts are waving a giant yellow caution flag now to warn that Mueller’s no-comment mantra is unlikely to give way to a tell-all final report and an accompanying blitz of media interviews and public testimony on Capitol Hill.

“He won’t be a good witness,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior counsel to independent counsel Kenneth Starr now working as a senior fellow at the nonprofit R Street Institute. “His answers will be, ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe.’”

cont...

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/ ... ngs-914754

IN WHAT MAY BE A SECOND BID TO GO AFTER YEVGENIY PRIGOZHIN AND VLADIMIR PUTIN, DOJ CHARGES PRIGOZHIN’S TROLL ACCOUNTANT

October 19, 2018/2 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
The Eastern District of VA just charged the accountant for Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s influence operation Project Lakhta, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, with conspiring to defraud the US, the same charge that Prigozhin company laywers lawyers are aggressively fighting in DC right now. On top of everything else, this charge may be an effort to get a second bid at laying out the crimes behind Prigozhin’s influence operation, first laid out on Mueller’s Internet Research Agency indictment, in a sustainable way.

KHUSYAYNOVA MAY BE NAMED, BUT THE REAL TARGET IS PRIGOZHIN

The affadvit against Khusyaynova not only incorporates the IRA indictment by reference, it repeats the introductory paragraph on Concord Consulting (the entity that’s challenging the Mueller indictment), changing only the name (replacing ORGANIZATION, referring to Internet Research Agency, with Project Lakhta, and lumping both Concord entities into one).

Defendants Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering (collectively, “Concord”) are related Russian entities with various Russian government contracts. Concord was the primary source of funding for Project Lakhta operations. Concord controlled funding, recommended personnel, and oversaw Project Lakhta activities through reporting and interaction with the management of the various Project Lakhta entities.

It also repeats a paragraph from the IRA indictment on how Lakhta laundered money through a bunch of bank accounts.

To conceal the nature of Project Lakhta activities, since at least January 2016 the Conspiracy labeled the funds paid by Concord to Project Lakhta as payments related to software support and development. Moreover, since at least January 2016, Concord distributed funds to Project Lakhta through approximately fourteen bank accounts held in the names of Concord affiliates, including Glavnaya Liniya LLC, Merkuriy LLC, Obshchepit LLC, Potentsial LLC, RSP LLC, ASP LLC, MTTs LLC, Kompleksservis LLC, SPb Kulinariya LLC, Almira LLC, Pishchevik LLC, Galant LLC, Rayteks LLC, and Standart LLC.

The complaint against Khusyaynova focuses closely on Prigozhin, even calling him “Putin’s Chef” (not something that appeared in the IRA indictment). It also presents the same theory of the case as laid out in the IRA indictment: that by obscuring their foreign identity, the trolls prevent DOJ from administration FARA and the FEC from administering FECA.

In other words, while Khusyaynova may be named, the focus in this complaint is on Prigozhin’s use of money laundering to move Concord’s money into a troll operation targeting the US.

PRIGOZHIN CONTINUES TO FUND INFLUENCE OPERATIONS AFFECTING US POLITICS

The complaint then lays out the influence operations conducted under the larger Lakhta umbrella, including IRA but also GlavSet, Federal News Agency, and others, describing how Khusyaynova funded it all. Of significant note, it describes how she paid for advertising on social media sites.

In addition to administrative expenses, such as office rent, utility payments, and garbage disposal, the budget identified IT expenses, such as “registration of domain names” and the purchase of “proxy servers,” and social media marketing expenses, such as expenses for “purchasing posts for social networks,” “[a]dvertisement on Facebook,” [a]dvertisement on VKontakte,” “[a]dvertisement on Instagram,” “[p]romoting news postings on social networks,” and social media optimization software (such as Twidium and Novapress) (preliminary translation of Russian text). The budgets also contained a section on “USA, EU” activities, which included itemized expenditures for “Instragram,” “Facebook advertisement” and “Activists” (preliminary translation of Russian text).

Having laid out that Khusyaynova was funneling money from Concord to pay for these things, the affidavit lays out how this funding engaged in US politics.

Its description of the trolling makes it clear that the trolls are still being instructed to take a view that benefits Trump, down to attacking Mueller.

Special prosecutor Mueller is a puppet of the establishment. List scandals that took place when Mueller headed the FBI. Direct attention to the listed examples. State the following: It is a fact that the Special Prosecutor who leads the investigation against Trump represents the establishment: a politician with proven connections to the U.S. Democratic Party who says things that should either remove him from his position or disband the entire investigation commission. Summarize with a statement that Mueller is a very dependent and highly politicized figure; therefore, there will be no honest and open results from the investigation. Emphasize that the work of this commission is damaging to the country and is aimed to declare impeachment of Trump. Emphasize that it cannot be allowed, no matter what.

Another of the trolls posted this image:




Though other trolls called to take to the streets and protest if Trump fires Mueller. Several of the trolls even RTed…

Dear @realDonaldTrump: The DOJ indicted 13 Russian nationals at the Internet Research Agency for violating federal criminal law to help your campaign and hurt other campaigns. Still think this Russia thing is a hoax and a witch hunt? Because a lot of witches just got indicted.

Or tweeted on both sides of the Mueller indictment of the IRA.

Russians indicted today: 13 Illegal immigrants crossing Mexican border indicted today: 0 Anyway, I hope that all those Internet Research Agency f*ckers will be sent to gitmo.

We didn’t vote for Trump because of a couple of hastags shilled by the Russians. We voted for Trump because he convinced us to vote for Trump. And we are ready to vote for Trump again in 2020!

And one of the key allegations involves the effort to provide advertising in support of this flash mob against Trump, including collaborating with Move On and Code Pink. Another of the key allegations describes @CovfefeNationUS’ efforts to raise money targeting (among others) Tammy Baldwin, Claire McCaskill, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Elizabeth Warren.

All of this, of course, is political influence peddling. By citing paid influence peddling, including some that extended beyond the time of the IRA indictment (meaning Concord was on notice that they needed to register) you make it clear this is paid foreign tampering.

THIS COMPLAINT RE-SITUATES THE CHARGES AGAINST CONCORD IN SUSTAINABLE WAY

I said, above, that this complaint may be designed to make the charges against Prigozhin sustainable. It comes — with its preliminary translation of Russian passages suggesting some haste — on the heels of a legal challenge by Concord’s US lawyer — of the ConFraudUs theory in this case. Concord has argued that because the indictment doesn’t allege it knew it had to register under FECA and FARA, the conspiracy itself is unsustainable.

Earlier this week, there was a hearing on that challenge in which Trump appointee Dabney Friedrich showed some sympathy for Concord’s argument.

Mueller alleges Concord Management, along with other defendants named in the indictment, conspired to impede the ability of the Justice Department to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act — which requires people who are lobbying in the U.S. on behalf of foreign individuals or entities disclose that lobbying — and the ability of the FEC to administer its ban on foreign expenditures in elections, under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) .

Concord Management is arguing that Mueller has not shown in the indictment that the Russians knew about their legal obligations under those regulations, which according to Dubelier is required to bring criminal charges under the law, and is using the conspiracy charge as a workaround.

“They don’t have the evidence to charge a substantive violation of FARA or a substantive passport violation or a substantive FECA violation, because there is no evidence anywhere that any of these foreign people knew anything about any of these laws or regulations, none,” Dubelier said at the hearing.

Prosecutors argued that to bring the conspiracy count, all they need to show is that defendants had some knowledge that the government regulated those areas and that they took actions to impede that enforcement through acts of deception.

“It doesn’t matter if they knew it was the FEC or the DOJ or some other agency,” Mueller prosecutor Jonathan Kravis argued Monday. “They know that there is a lawful government function here, and they are acting with a purpose of interfering with it.”

Kravis pointed to the Russian trolls’ alleged move to disguise not just their identities, but the origin of the computer networks they used to influence the election on social media.

Then today, the judge in that case, Friedrich, asked for more briefing from Mueller’s team.

By issuing this complaint, the government does several things.

First, because this is just a complaint, Prigozhin isn’t going to be able to challenge it; his employee, Khusyaynova, would first have to be indicted, and then would have to show up in person to contest the charges, which isn’t going to happen.

But also, because this complaint focuses on the accountant’s role, it focuses much more closely (though not exclusively) on the laundering of the money, and not the laundering of the Russian origin of the voices engaging in politics.

Finally, because this complaint focuses on a different named defendant, is charged out of a different office with no visible overlap in team, and encompasses a more recent time period (showing that the government continues to collect solid information on Prigozhin’s operation), there’s no double jeopardy issue and Friedrich can’t touch this case.

I don’t know whether Mueller will just dismiss Concord from the other indictment, and be done with that nuisance once and for all, or whether this is just designed to ensure that the allegations, and the tie to Putin, remain intact regardless of what happens in DC. But it does seem like a hasty bid to solidify the charges in a way that hews closer to past legal precedent.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/10/19/i ... ccountant/

YEVGENIY PRIGOZHIN’S PAID TROLLS PROVE HIS LEGAL CHALLENGE TO HIS INDICTMENT TO BE FALSE

October 20, 2018/4 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, 2018 Mid-Term Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
I have long argued that the most visible error that Robert Mueller’s team has made thus far in their investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 election was in charging Concord Management as part of the Internet Research Agency indictment. Doing so effectively charged Vladimir Putin’s crony, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, in both his natural and corporate form, giving him a way to defend against the charges without having to show up in person in the US to do so. On April 11, almost two months after first being indicted (and after Prigozhin assumed an official role in management of Concord so he could claim he needed to be personally involved in any defense of the company), some American lawyers from Reed Smith showed up to start defending Concord against the charges.

By paying money to have lawyers defend his corporate self against trolling accusations, Prigozhin got the opportunity to do several things:

Obtain discovery about what the government knew of his companies’ efforts and communications with (among others) Vladimir Putin
Challenge Robert Mueller’s authority as Special Counsel
Dispute Mueller’s theory that online trolls operated by foreigners should be subject to regulation under campaign finance law and DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (as well as laws prohibiting visa fraud)
Thus far, Prigozhin’s efforts have done no real damage. Mueller found a way to limit what Prigozhin could look at by requiring his lawyers keep most discovery here in the US. And he beat back Prigozhin’s first challenge to his authority in Judge Dabney Friedrich’s District Court; Concord has submitted an amicus brief in Roger Stone aide Andrew Miller’s challenge to Mueller’s authority under the same theory, but it won’t get a chance to appeal Friedrich’s decision itself unless the case actually goes to trial.

Prigozhin’s third challenge, to Mueller’s theory of the case, poses more of a problem. While Special Counsel has lots of case law to argue that when charging ConFraudUS you don’t need to prove the underlying crimes (here, that Prigozhin’s trolls committed campaign finance, FARA, and visa fraud violations), Prigozhin’s lawyers nevertheless have argued — starting formally in a brief filed on July 15 — that those poor Russian trolls sowing division in the US had no way of knowing they were supposed to register with the FEC and DOJ before doing so, and so could not be accused of fraudulently hiding their Russian nationality, location, and funding. Effectively, the brief argued over and over and over — some form of the word “willful” shows up 99 times in the filing, “mens rea” shows up 33 times, “knowingly” shows up 58 times — that these poor Russian trolls just can’t be shown to have willfully violated America’s laws against unregistered foreign influence peddling because they had no way to know about those laws.

No case has specifically addressed whether a willfulness mens rea is required in a § 371 defraud conspiracy case like this one. But that is only because of the novelty of this Indictment. In circumstances where, as here, complex regulations are implicated against a foreign national with no presence in the United States, and the threat of punishing innocent conduct is extant, courts frequently have expressed the need for a heightened mens rea requirement. And even in those cases favored by the Special Counsel in his prior briefing, which he erroneously believes serve to relax the standard for criminal intent—requiring only some vague proof that Concord knew “on some level” the existence of some unspecified “regulatory apparatus” governing foreign nationals who participate in some fashion in United States elections (Hr’g Tr. 9:17–22)— the concerns over the proof of mens rea are evident, just as they should be in any conspiracy case. It is simply impossible for any person, whether a foreign national or a U.S. citizen, to have any knowledge of, let alone understand, the Special Counsel’s imaginary “on some level” mens rea standard. Further, none of the cases relied upon by the Special Counsel provide any reason not to impose a willfulness requirement in this case.

As Mueller’s August 15 response emphasized, the trolls focused their challenge to this indictment on Brett Kavanaugh well before he was confirmed.

Concord repeatedly invokes (at 1, 7, 17, 19, 20, 23-24, 27, 31, 32) Judge Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in Bluman v. Federal Election Comm’n, 800 F. Supp. 2d 281 (D.D.C. 2011), sum aff’d, 565 U.S. 1104 (2012), and his concurring opinion in United States v. Moore, 612 F.3d 698 (D.C. Cir. 2010), but neither addresses Section 371. Bluman—a civil case—assessed the constitutionality of the ban on non-citizens’ political expenditures and cautioned that, when the government “seek criminal penalties for violations of th[at] provision” (which requires a defendant “act ‘willfully’”), the government must prove the defendant’s “knowledge of the law.” 800 F. Supp. 2d at 292 (citation omitted; emphasis added). Similarly, Moore concerned a violation of Section 1001, which “proscribes only those false statements that are ‘knowingly and willfully’ made.’” 612 F.3d at 702 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring) (emphasis added). Accordingly, Judge Kavanaugh opined, the government must prove that “the defendant knew his conduct was a crime.” Id. at 704. Because Count One need not allege a violation of a substantive offense other than Section 371 and that statute does not contain an express “willful” element, Bluman and Moore contribute nothing to Concord’s mens rea argument.

Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh, the troll lawyers have been chanting since 6 days after he was nominated. And while Mueller’s team argued that those past Kavanaugh opinions did not address ConFraudUS, the newest Supreme Court Justice clearly believes any legal limits on foreign influence peddling must be clearly conveyed to those foreigners doing their influence peddling. Kavanaugh’s elevation, then, presented the real possibility that by charging Concord, Mueller might make it easier for foreigners to tamper in our election than for Americans.

Moreover, it looked like Trump appointee Dabney Friedrich (who gave the challenge to Mueller’s authority far more consideration than she should have) was sympathetic to the troll challenge to the indictment. Not only did Friedrich seem sympathetic to the Concord challenge in a hearing on Monday, on Thursday she ordered Mueller’s team to be more specific about whether the trolls had to — and knew they had to — register with the FEC and DOJ.

Specifically, should the Court assume for purposes of this motion that neither Concord nor its co-conspirators knowingly or unknowingly violated any provision, civil or criminal, of FECA or FARA by failing to report expenditures or by failing to register as a foreign agent?

That is the genius (and I suspect, the entire point) of the complaint against Prigozhin’s accountant, Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, who oversees the funding of all these trolls, which was unsealed yesterday.

It provides proof that Prigozhin and Concord continued to engage in ConFraudUS long after receiving notice, in the form of that February 16 indictment, that the US considered engaging in such trolling without registration a crime.

Among the overt acts of the conspiracy, for example, the complaint describes Khusyaynova:

Requesting payment from Concord for trolling expenses on February 21, February 28, March 6, April 6, May 8, May 10, June 1, June 4, June 9, and July 10, 2018

Submitting a 107 million ruble budget in March to cover April’s expenditures, a 111 million ruble budget in April to cover May’s expenditures, and a 114 million budget for June in June (the complaint calculates these budgets to amount to over $5.25 million, though not all of that got spent in the US)

Following up with a Concord employee on April 11 and 12 to make sure one of Concord’s laundering vehicles, Almira LLC, paid its part of the budget for March expenditures

Spending $60,000 in Facebook ads and $6,000 in Instagram ads between January and June of this year

Spending $18,000 for “bloggers” and “developing accounts” on Twitter between January and June

In other words, the complaint shows that even after Concord got indicted for spending all this money to influence American politics, even after it hired lawyers to claim it didn’t know spending all that money was illegal, it continued to spend the money without registering with FEC or DOJ. The very same day Prigozhin’s lawyers filed their attorney appearances in court in DC, his accountant in St. Petersburg was laundering more money to pay for trolling.

But the true genius of the complaint comes in the evidence of trolling it cites. As noted, the complaint cites two trolls tweeting about the February 16 indictment of their own trolling.

@JemiSHaaaZzz (this was an RT): Dear @realDonaldTrump: The DOJ indicted 13 Russian nationals at the Internet Research Agency for violating federal criminal law to help your campaign and hurt other campaigns. Still think this Russia thing is a hoax and a witch hunt? Because a lot of witches just got indicted.

[snip]

@JohnCopper16: Russians indicted today: 13 Illegal immigrants crossing Mexican border indicted today: 0 Anyway, I hope that all those Internet Research Agency f*ckers will be sent to gitmo.

@JohnCopper16: We didn’t vote for Trump because of a couple of hashtags shilled by the Russians. We voted for Trump because he convinced us to vote for Trump. And we are ready to vote for Trump again in 2020!

Prigozhin has paid 7 months of legal fees arguing that he had no idea that this was a crime, even while paying $5 million, part of which paid his own trolls to describe being indicted for “violating federal criminal law” and asking to be sent to Gitmo for that crime.

And his trolls continued to claim they had knowledge of American campaign law, as when on March 14, almost a month after the indictment, @TheTrainGuy13 reposted a pro-Trump tweet noting that voter fraud is a felony.



The complaint even cites @KaniJJackson tweeting about a Net Neutrality vote on May 17, well after Reed Smith had told the court they were representing Concord to make claims that Prigozhin had no idea unregistered political trolling was illegal.

Ted Cruz voted to repeal #NetNeutrality. Let’s save it and repeal him instead.

Here’s the list of GOP senators who broke party lines and voted to save #NetNeutrality: Susan Collins John N Kennedy Lisa Murkowski Thank you!

Since July, Prigozhin’s Reed Smith lawyers have spent 326 pages briefing their claim that their poor foreign client and his trolls had no way of knowing that the United States expected him and his trolls to register before tampering in US politics. Even while they were doing that, in a complaint filed in sealed form three weeks ago, on September 28, DOJ had compiled proof that even after receiving official notice of the fact that the US considered that a crime on February 16, even after Prigozhin showed on April 11 his knowledge that the US considered that a crime by hiring attorneys to argue he couldn’t have known, he and his accountant and his trolls continued trolling.

As persuasive as Reed Smith lawyers have been in arguing Prigozhin couldn’t have known this was illegal, his trolls have laid out far better proof that he knew he was breaking the law.

As I disclosed July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/10/20/y ... -be-false/

emptywheel
‏
I'll repeat, again: A Republican who has seen the unclassified file told me the case against Page was a slamdunk.

GOPers for 18 months: OMIGOD they got a FISA order on Page using only Steele's intelligence!!!!

FBI: We had more sources.

GOPers: OMIGOD they used sources in addition to Steele to get Page FISA!!!!

Convicted Ex-Trump Adviser George Papadopoulos Fights to Become the Next Big Fox News Star

Asked if aides and those close to Trump see Papadopoulos as an ongoing liability, one White House official replied that they see him generally as a ‘clown trying to make a buck.’

10.20.18 4:43 PM ET
Late last year, George Papadopoulos, a lower-tier foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, found himself at the center of the Russia investigation. He was facing a prison sentence, his life picked apart by the press, disowned by prior associates, and rejected and publicly belittled by President Donald Trump, who denounced Papadopoulos as a “proven” liar.

Even his old Russian politics professor at DePaul University was making fun of him on the record.

Most operatives and political figures who face legal jeopardy in the Robert Mueller investigation have taken decidedly quiet routes, forgoing frequent media appearances or large social-media footprints. Papadopoulos has, conspicuously, taken a polar-opposite approach.

Nowadays, he is a married man, freely hate-tweeting the so-called “Deep State” and acting like he’s auditioning for the role of Fox News regular.

A source close to Papadopoulos told The Daily Beast that the former Trump campaign figure has become chummy with Sean Hannity, one of Fox’s biggest stars and one of President Trump’s top confidants. Papadopoulos plans to be a guest on the show in the upcoming week.

Earlier this month, he excitedly announced the beginning of what could shape up to be his Trump-loving media tour: He tweeted out that he and Simona are set to appear in late-October on the Fox News program hosted by Jesse Watters, another Trump favorite and unapologetic defender of the president.

It’s just one way Papadopoulos—who one year ago was practically left for dead by the entirety of Trumpworld—is vying to get back in the game. The source close to Papadopoulos said that the former Trump hand has also talked about eventually trying to return to foreign policy work. But first, he wants to share his side of the events that led to the FBI opening an investigation into alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

In the meantime, he’s back on Twitter, echoing the various Deep State-related conspiracy theories parroted and amplified by the president’s preferred cable-news personalities. He’s also gunning to do a lot of TV and media.

“Whatever I post or say on TV is all backed up with evidence,” Papadopoulos told The Daily Beast on Friday. “I think a lot of questions will be answered after my testimony on the Hill. Regarding TV, am just getting my story out there. It’s up to America to decide if they like what am saying or not.”

On Thursday, Papadopoulos is expected to testify voluntarily behind closed doors before lawmakers on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, as part of the Republican-led investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigations and Hillary Clinton’s emails.

A Democratic staffer with direct knowledge of the oversight committee’s activity said that Papadopoulos’ planned interview has generated more media interest than any of the other possible witnesses discussed before him.

“The only potential witnesses for whom there’s been even as close to as much media interest for this House investigation are Rod Rosenstein and James Comey,” the staffer assessed, based on a surge in recent weeks of numerous TV news outlets, print publications, and photographers inquiring for confirmation and details. “People are expecting a circus, and are trying to be there to witness it.”

It’s exactly how Papadopoulos wants it.

As The Daily Beast reported last month, Papadopoulos has also been shopping around a Trump-boosting book, and landed himself a book agent at David Vigliano’s shop, an agency that largely focuses on celebrity books but has represented pro-Trump players like Jeanine Pirro, a Fox host and the president’s longtime friend.



Last year, when Papadopoulos became a central fixture in Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling and Trump associates, the president claimed on Twitter that “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.”

At the time, former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo famously knocked Papadopoulos as a mere “coffee boy” who didn’t actually know anything valuable about Team Trump, even though it would later emerge that Papadopoulos had more of a substantive impact during the presidential run than some senior aides were ready to admit. For instance, two months before the election, the adviser helped arrange a meeting between Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the New York Times reported.

By now, even some of his harshest former critics in Trumpworld have come around.

““Nowadays I find myself retweeting George Papadopoulos more than the President.””

— Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo, who famously knocked Papadopoulos as a mere “coffee boy”

“Nowadays I find myself retweeting George Papadopoulos more than the President,” Caputo, himself a peripheral figure in the Trump-Russia investigations, told The Daily Beast. “I’m certain George has important and shocking information to share with investigators…He has an important role to play in discovering and prosecuting the anti-Constitutional spying operation [against Trump]—and he clearly wants to play it.”

Caputo added, “I really think his country failed him and I’m amazed at his fortitude.”

Barry Bennett, a senior adviser on the 2016 Trump campaign turned federal lobbyist, was markedly more muted in his encouragement of Papadopoulos, as the latter attempts a career revival.

“He’s trying to cash in on his celebrity,” said Bennett, who says he hired Papadopoulos (whom he dubs “Dumb George”) to do foreign policy work on Ben Carson’s presidential campaign. Around the same time Bennett moved over to Team Trump in early 2016, so did Papadopoulos.

“It’s a free country, go make some money, but don’t overplay your hand,” Bennett continued. “His celebrity is all because he got arrested…He wasn’t a player, and he still isn’t. I’m not rooting against him. I don’t root against anybody.”

Every step of the way lately, Papadopoulos has been joined by his new wife and biggest cheerleader Simona, who acted, essentially, as a media surrogate last year when he was under the gun of the Mueller probe. In the time since, she has had to fend off speculation that she is in fact a Russian spy, but has not yet publicly wavered on her mission to clear her husband’s name.



One White House official told The Daily Beast that aides in Trump’s West Wing have indeed taken notice of the pair’s online antics. Some, apparently, find it amusing, with the official saying that it looked like the Papadopouloses were trying to reinvent themselves as the next big “MAGA power couple.” Asked if aides and those close to Trump see George as an ongoing liability, the official replied that they see him generally as a “clown trying to make a buck.”

In response to this charge, Simona simply messaged The Daily Beast, “We are loyal to the truth and…to each other.” She said that while “we have been through a lot” and “survived the distress of a federal investigation…we are still together.”

“Yes we are a power couple,” she wrote, punctuating the statement with a smiley face emoticon.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/convicted ... itter_page

THE UNIVERSE OF HACKED AND LEAKED EMAILS FROM 2016: DNC EMAILS

October 21, 2018/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, emptywheel, Mueller Probe, WikiLeaks /by empty wheel

When Mueller’s team released George Papadopoulos’ plea deal last year, I noted that the initial denials that Papadopoulos had advance warning of the emails the Russians were preparing to hack and leak did not account for the entire universe of emails known to have been stolen. A year and several Mueller indictments later, we still don’t have a complete understanding of what emails were being dealt when. Because that lack of understanding hinders understanding what Mueller might be doing with Roger Stone, I wanted to lay out what we know about four sets of emails. This series will include posts on the following:

DNC emails

Podesta emails

DCCC emails

Emails Hillary deleted from her server

The series won’t, however, account for two more sets of emails, anything APT 29 stole when hacking the White House and State Department in 2015, or anything released via the several FOIAs of the Hillary emails turned over to the State Department from her home server. It also won’t deal with the following:

Emails from two Hillary staffers who had their emails released via dcleaks
The emails of other people released by dcleaks, which includes Colin Powell, some Republican parties (including some 2015 emails Peter Smith sent to the IL Republican party), and others with interests in Ukraine
A copy of the Democrats’ analytics program copied on AWS
The NGP/VAN file, which was not directly released by Guccifer 2.0, but is central to one of the skeptics’ theories about an alternative source other than Russia

DNC EMAILS

The “DNC emails” are generally thought of as the 20,000 emails WikiLeaks released on July 22, 2016. The GRU indictment describes the theft and conveyance of those emails this way:

Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC employees. During that time, YERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and managing the Microsoft Exchange Server.

[snip]

On or about June 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to “end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing.” On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, “if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.” The Conspirators responded, “ok . . . i see.” Organization 1 explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”

After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email with an attachment titled “wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.” The Conspirators explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had “the 1Gb or so archive” and would make a release of the stolen documents “this week.”

On or about July 22, 2016, Organization 1 released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators. This release occurred approximately three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Organization 1 did not disclose Guccifer 2.0’s role in providing them. The latest-in-time email released through Organization 1 was dated on or about May 25, 2016, approximately the same day the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server.

Raffi Khatchadourian (who has done as much work as anyone else on the known universe of emails) noted that by the time the July 14 exchange had happened, Julian Assange had already said he had emails and Guccifer 2.0 had already said he had shared them with WikiLeaks.

On June 12th, three days before the creation of Guccifer 2.0, Assange announced that he had a substantial trove of Clinton-related e-mails that were pending publication. Likewise, Guccifer 2.0 proclaimed, on its very first post on the WordPress site, “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.” Again and again, the G.R.U. officers tried to drive home this point—which, of course, was evidently the main point of creating the persona. “I sent a big part of docs to WikiLeaks,” Guccifer 2.0 told the editor of the Smoking Gun that same day. On June 17th, Guccifer 2.0 said in another e-mail, “I gave WikiLeaks the greater part of the files.” (For e-mail, the G.R.U. gave Guccifer 2.0 another fake identity: Stephan Orphan.)

In other words, both the G.R.U. and Assange appear to have confessed to the transmission and reception of a large trove of Clinton-related e-mails in mid-June, before Guccifer 2.0 was apparently created. The indictment does not address this. There is no way to say precisely what that trove was—if it was the Podesta archive given to WikiLeaks much earlier than is generally presumed, or the D.N.C. e-mails, or both, or something else. (There is also the possibility that both parties were not speaking truthfully.) But, if Assange did have the D.N.C. e-mails before Guccifer 2.0 was created, then the details in the indictment take on new meaning. Some version of the following may be true: it is mid-June, with the convention approaching, and Assange is about to release a bombshell, when he notices the sudden appearance of Guccifer 2.0, a “hacker” edging into his turf, inviting journalists to write in. So he writes in, asking for material that interests him. He has already gone through the D.N.C. e-mails and has recognized that the trove highlights conflict within the Democratic Party. He signals that he wants more on that specific issue. The G.R.U. is happy to comply, through its new cutout. Perhaps some of it overlaps with what the G.R.U. already provided, making Guccifer 2.0’s confessions literally accurate. Perhaps it is the same irrelevant dross that Guccifer 2.0 fed to others.

Last year, I visited Assange several times in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He often emphasized to me that the sourcing of his election publications was complex. I usually took this as a dodge. But the sourcing may indeed have been multilayered. There are many conceivable ways that G.R.U. officers could have provided e-mails to WikiLeaks before they created Guccifer 2.0. They could have used the WikiLeaks anonymous-submission system. They could have used a different fictitious online persona. They could have used a human intermediary. Last year, James Clapper told me, “It was done by a cutout, which of course afforded Assange plausible deniability.” In January, 2017, Clapper oversaw a formal intelligence assessment on Russian meddling. At the time, more than one news organization reported that a classified version of the assessment made clear that the intermediaries between the G.R.U. and WikiLeaks were already known. (Certainly, the intelligence community would also have been in possession of Guccifer 2.0’s Twitter D.M.s at that time, too.) One intelligence official, describing the report, indicated to Reuters last year that the e-mails relayed to WikiLeaks had followed a “circuitous route,” by a series of handoffs, on their journey from Moscow. Such a scenario seems to be at odds with the idea that Guccifer 2.0 merely sent WikiLeaks an encrypted link to download it all in one swoop.

An earlier Khatchadourian piece describes WikiLeaks experiencing some pressure to publish before the convention.

In early July, for example, Guccifer 2.0 told a Washington journalist that WikiLeaks was “playing for time.” There was no public evidence for this, but from the inside it was clear that WikiLeaks was overwhelmed. In addition to the D.N.C. archive, Assange had received e-mails from the leading political party in Turkey, which had recently experienced a coup, and he felt that he needed to rush them out. Meanwhile, a WikiLeaks team was scrambling to prepare the D.N.C. material. (A WikiLeaks staffer told me that they worked so fast that they lost track of some of the e-mails, which they quietly released later in the year.) On several occasions, and in different contexts, Assange admitted to me that he was pressed for time. “We were quite concerned about meeting the deadline,” he told me once, referring to the Democratic National Convention.

His original release date for the D.N.C. archive, he explained, was July 18th, the Monday before the Convention; his team missed the deadline by four days. “We were only ready Friday,” he said. “We had these hiccups that delayed us, and we were given a little more time—” He stopped, and then added, strangely, “to grow.”

Khatchadourian’s earlier mention of a July 18 deadline is quite interesting, given the response from WikiLeaks to a Guccifer 2.0 email, promising to publish that week, on the 18th.

Khatchadourian also describes WikiLeaks as doing significant work to verify the emails — more than they could have done in the time between July 14 and July 22.

Once they were in Assange’s hands, his overriding concern was to insure that they were genuine. “We had quite some difficulties to overcome, in terms of the technical aspects, and making sure we were comfortable with the forensics,” he recalled. As an Australian, he had only a vague grasp of the way the D.N.C. operated, which made deciphering the political significance of the e-mails difficult. “It’s like looking at a very complex Hieronymus Bosch painting from a distance,” he told me. “You have to get close and interact with it, then you start to get a feel.” Often, a first encounter with a WikiLeaks database submission can be overwhelming—as one former staffer told me, “My heart sinks a bit.”

To work on the material, Assange had to coördinate with operatives outside the building, and avoid surveillance inside it. “I have a lot of security issues in the Embassy,” he told me. “It’s not like you can be comfortable with your source material and read it.” He would not tell me how many people worked on the project, except that the number was small. “We’re all secret squirrels now,” he said.

All this raises questions about how much verification WikiLeaks did, and if instead this was a tale told to Khatchadourian, not to mention why they had confidence publishing them would not blow up on them.

Now, I have suggested that one possible second source of the emails — or at least one alternate explanation that Russia and WikiLeaks might claim that could provide GRU some plausible deniability — would be via the contents of email boxes stolen using passwords released just before the DNC hack from Yevgeniy Nikulin’s past hacks of Linked-In and MySpace. Nikulin has utterly stalled his prosecution until February by refusing not only to cooperate with his defense (though he has had repeated contacts from Russian diplomatic officials), but also with a competency evaluation. So we won’t learn anything (and Nikulin won’t be coerced to cooperate) anytime soon as a result of his extradition to the US.

But, as part of an effort to track changes to WikiLeaks’ website and the DNC emails, Emma Best identified what at first appeared to be a change in one email but ultimately just revealed that the cache includes both the sent and received copies of some emails.

After pointing this out on Twitter and listing the 36 known instances, one user checked a copy of the DNC emails they had retrieved months before. They found what appeared to be a modification to the email – a missing piece of metadata that identified the internal IP address that sent the email. After several hours of searching and comparing five different caches of DNC emails, the difference was both confirmed and explained – WikiLeaks’ copy of the DNC emails comes from several accounts, which resulted in some duplicates in their cache. The internal message ID for the duplicates would be the same, but differences in metadata would appear based on whether the email was being sent or received, and in the case of the former what device and client was sending the emails. Since the x-originating-ip metadata which seemed to appear and then disappear is added by the server when it’s sent, it would naturally be missing from the sender’s copy of the email. This addresses the most alarming question regarding the DNC emails, but does nothing to address the rest.

There are reasons to believe that this means the email in question comes from the Microsoft Exchange server and not from someone’s own mailbox (Update: though I may be 100% wrong on this point). Which, if my speculation that WikiLeaks might invoke the Nikulin alternate theory, might still show Assange got the emails in one batch early on, but then published what he got via the delivery identified in the indictment and didn’t spend much time vetting that delivery.

Meanwhile, it’s crucial to note, as Khatchadourian does in his earlier piece, that emails Guccifer 2.0 claimed were DNC documents when he released them the day after the WaPo revealed the DNC had been hacked didn’t come from the DNC; those that have been identified came, instead, from John Podesta. It wasn’t until July 6 that the Guccifer 2.0 documents billed as DNC ones actually were.

But then, on July 6th, just before Guccifer 2.0 complained that WikiLeaks was “playing for time,” this pattern of behavior abruptly reversed itself. “I have a new bunch of docs from the DNC server for you,” the persona wrote on WordPress. The files were utterly lacking in news value, and had no connection to one another—except that every item was an attachment in the D.N.C. e-mails that WikiLeaks had. The shift had the appearance of a threat. If Russian intelligence officers were inclined to indicate impatience, this was a way to do it.

The notion that the Guccifer 2.0 persona may have — in addition to discrediting the WaPo article and providing a quick cover for the Russian attribution of the hack — served to pressure Assange to keep to some kind of July 18 deadline raises more stakes on that detail from the GRU indictment, but also may relate to the kind of signaling we saw elsewhere.

As I disclosed July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/10/21/t ... nc-emails/

ON THE ROGER STONE INVESTIGATION: TALKING TO GUCCIFER 2.0 OR WIKILEAKS IS NOT A CRIME

October 22, 2018/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
Before I get further in my series on the known universe of hacked and leaked emails from 2016, I want to explain something about Roger Stone, especially given this WaPo story that provides interesting details but claims Mueller is pursuing them in hopes of answering this question:

Did longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone — or any other associate of the president — have advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to release hacked Democratic emails in 2016?

While I don’t claim to understand much more than the rest of the world about what the Mueller probe is doing, I say with a fair degree of certainty that Mueller has not had three prosecutors chasing leads on Roger Stone since February because he wants to know if Stone had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans on releasing emails. Knowing that WikiLeaks planned on releasing emails is not a crime.

Indeed, Assange at times (most notably on June 12) telegraphed what he was up to. There were WikiLeaks volunteers and some journalists who knew what WikiLeaks was up to. None of that, by itself, is a crime.

With that in mind, consider the following:

IT MATTERS WHAT EMAILS STONE CLAIMED TO KNOW WOULD BE RELEASED

At the risk of spoiling my series, let me explain the significance of it. While knowing that WikiLeaks would release emails is not by itself a crime, advance knowledge becomes more interesting based on what Stone might have done with that knowledge. Here’s why:

DNC emails: Mueller has presumably tracked whether and to whom George Papadopoulos shared advance knowledge of the tip he got on April 26 that the Russians would release emails to help Trump. That’s important because if he can show meeting participants knew those emails had been offered, then June 9 meeting becomes an overt act in a conspiracy. While there’s no public allegation Stone knew that WikiLeaks would be releasing Hillary emails before Julian Assange stated that publicly on June 12 (after the Trump Tower meeting and therefore at most a response to the meeting), if Stone knew that WikiLeaks would be part of the delivery method it adds to evidence of a conspiracy.

Podesta emails: The Democrats’ focus on Stone has always been on his seeming advance knowledge that WikiLeaks would release the Podesta emails, though the public case that he did is in no way definitive. Even assuming he did learn in advance, there are multiple channels via which Stone might have learned the Podesta emails were coming (just as an example, Democrats have necessarily always been obfuscating about how much they knew). But any presumed advance knowledge is still only a crime if Stone in some way coordinated with it or encouraged ongoing hacking.

Deleted Hillary emails: While the evidence that Roger Stone knew that WikiLeaks would release Podesta’s emails is inconclusive, the evidence that he “knew” WikiLeaks had Hillary’s deleted emails is not. Stone made that claim over and over. It’s actually not public whether and when WikiLeaks obtained files purporting to be Hillary’s deleted emails, though we should assume they got at least some sets of purported emails via the Peter Smith effort. If Stone had involvement in that effort, it might be criminal (because operatives were soliciting stolen emails from criminal hackers, not just making use of what got released), though Stone says he was unaware of it.

DCCC emails: The DCCC files, which offered more operational data about downstream campaigns, might raise other problems under criminal law. That’s because the data offered was generally more operational than the DNC and Podesta emails offered, meaning operatives could use the stolen data to tweak their campaign efforts. And Guccifer 2.0 was sharing that data specifically with operatives, providing something of value to campaigns. Guccifer 2.0 tried to do the same with Stone. The text messages between Stone and Guccifer 2.0 show the persona trying to get Stone interested in some of the DCCC files pertaining to FL. But at least on those DMs, Stone demurred. That said, if Stone received and operationalized DCCC data in some of his rat-fucking, then it might raise criminal issues.

IT MATTERS FROM WHOM STONE LEARNED (IF HE DID) OF WIKILEAKS’ PLANS

A big part of Mueller’s focus seems to be on testing Stone’s public claims that his go-between with WikiLeaks was Randy Credico, who had ties to Assange but was not conspiring to help Trump win via those channels.

There are other possible go-betweens that would be of greater interest. For example, the public discussion of Stone’s potential advance knowledge seems to have forgotten the suspected role of Nigel Farage, with whom Stone dined at the RNC and later met at Trump’s inauguration. That would be of heightened interest, particularly given the way Stone suggested the vote had been rigged against Brexit and Trump when in reality Russians were rigging the vote for both.

IT MATTERS WHETHER STONE LIED ABOUT THE WHOM OR THE WHAT

Stone’s testimony to the House, in which he offered explanations about any advance knowledge and his Podesta comment, was sworn. If Mueller can show he lied in his sworn testimony, that is certainly technically a crime (indeed, Sam Patten got referred to Mueller based on on his false statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee). But it’s unlikely Mueller would charge, much less investigate, Stone for 8 months solely to prove whether he lied to Congress.

But if Stone did lie — claiming he learned of WikiLeaks’ plans from Credico when in fact he learned from someone also conspiring with the Russians — then those lies would lay out the import of Stone’s role, in what he was hypothetically trying to cover up.

STONE’S FLIP-FLOP ON BLAMING THE RUSSIANS AT THE MOMENT HE CLAIMED TO HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF WIKILEAKS’ PLANS IS OF LIKELY INTEREST

There’s a data point that seems very important in the Roger Stone story. On or around August 3, the very same day Stone told Sam Nunberg that he had dined with Julian Assange, Stone flip-flopped on his public statements about whether Russia had hacked Hillary or some 400 pound hacker in a basement had. During that period, he went from NY (where he met with Trump) to LA to coordinate with his dark money allies, then went home to Florida to write a column that became the first entry in Stone’s effort to obfuscate the Russian role in the hack. That flip-flop occurred just before Stone started making public claims about what WikiLeaks had.

I suspect that flip-flop is a real point of interest, and as such may involve some other kind of coordination that the press has no public visibility on (particularly given that his claimed meeting with Assange happened while he was meeting with his dark money people).

MUELLER MAY HAVE HAD PROBABLE CAUSE ROGER STONE BROKE THE LAW BY MARCH

In the wake of Michael Caputo’s testimony, Roger Stone briefly claimed that he must have been targeted under FISA, apparently based on the fact that Mueller had (possibly encrypted) texts he didn’t provide himself showing that he and Caputo had had contact with a presumed Russian dangle they had hidden in prior sworn testimony. A more likely explanation is that Stone’s was one of the at-least five phones Mueller got a warrant for on March 9, in the wake of Rick Gates’ cooperation. But if that’s the case, then it means that Mueller already had shown probable cause Stone had committed some crime by the time he got this phone.

MUELLER IS SCRUTINIZING STONE FOR MORE THAN JUST KNOWLEDGE OF WIKILEAKS

Even the public reporting on Mueller’s investigative actions make it clear that he is scrutinizing Stone for more than just a hypothetical knowledge of, much less coordination with, WikiLeaks. He seems to have interest in the two incarnations of Stone’s Stop the Steal dark money group, which worked to intimidate Cruz supporters around the RNC and worked to suppress Democratic voters in the fall. There’s reason to suspect that the ways in which Stone and his people sloshed that money around did not follow campaign finance rules (in which case Don McGahn might have played a role). Certainly, Andrew Miller seems to worry that his own role in that sloshing might lead to criminal exposure. But Jerome Corsi has also suggested that Stone might have pitched some legally suspect actions to him, and those would constitute rat-fuckery, not campaign finance violations in the service of rat-fuckery.

Now, those other potential crimes might just be the gravy that Mueller has repeatedly used, charging people with unrelated crimes (like Mike Flynn’s Turkish influence peddling or Michael Cohen’s Stormy Daniel payoffs) to get their cooperation in the case in chief. Or they might be something that more closely ties to conspiracy with Russians.

As I disclosed in July, I provided information to the FBI on issues related to the Mueller investigation, so I’m going to include disclosure statements on Mueller investigation posts from here on out. I will include the disclosure whether or not the stuff I shared with the FBI pertains to the subject of the post.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/10/22/o ... t-a-crime/

Robert Mueller Honing In On Roger Stone's Alleged Wikileaks Ties, Says Report

4 hours ago
Special counsel Robert Mueller is closely investigating whether Trump-ally Roger Stone was communicating with WikiLeaks and had advance knowledge of the group's plans to release hacked Democratic emails in 2016, the Washington Post reports. The newspaper says Mueller's office has been “aggressively pursuing leads behind the scenes” of late about whether Stone was communicating with Julian Assange's group. The group's leak of emails believed to have been hacked by Russian operatives served as a major disruption in the 2016 presidential campaign. Stone boasted during the election campaign that he was in touch with Assange, but has since backtracked and said his past comments were exaggerated or misunderstood. However, prosecutors are examining public comments and alleged private assertions that Stone made in 2016 suggesting he had a way to reach Assange.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/robert-mu ... ays-report

Counterchekist
‏

Let’s not forget about Ms Fairbanks, who was in contact with a GRU officer while working at Sputnik. And wouldn’t you know it? She’s friends with Roger Stone. Imagine that.

https://twitter.com/counterchekist/stat ... 2022910982

While Felix Sater pursued Trump Tower Moscow discussions he did a deal with an accountant linked to Aras Agalarov

In 2017 I stumbled across an intriguing scoop — real estate filings showing that Felix Sater was involved in a 2015 Manhattan real estate deal with a Russian-born NYC accountant named Ilya Bykov. A colleague shared research with me showing links Bykov had to: 1) Prevezon companies related to the money laundering scheme uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, 2) Larisa Markus who was convicted of embezzling $2 billion from Russia’s Vneshprombank, and, 3) Parason Inc., a company identified by the OCCRP as part of the Russian Laundromat. Last week The Guardian reported on Prevezon and Markus in a story that revealed that Ilyas Bykov has worked for Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.

Donald Trump has repeatedly said he has nothing to do with Russia. One example that the statement is false is that Aras Agalarov paid almost $20 million to partner with Trump to host the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013. The Agalarov-Trump relationship continued through the presidential election, when Aras Agalarov, his son/singer Emin and publicist Rob Goldstone were involved in arranging a June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner with several Russians who were promising ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton. One meeting attendee was Ike Kaveladze, an executive at Aras Agalarov’s company Crocus Group.

Last month Buzzfeed reported that a few days after the June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, Aras Agalarov wired $19.5 million to the U.S. through BVI-based Silver Valley Consulting. The Guardian story revealed that in May 2016, shortly before the Trump Tower meeting, Aras Agalarov’s accountant Ilya Bykov set up Delaware registered Silver Valley Consulting, which was related to the $19.5 million transaction reported by Buzzfeed.

With the new reporting on Aras Agalarov’s accountant Ilya Bykov, and his connection to Prevezon and the Vneshprombank fraud case, it’s intriguing that in 2015 Bykov was also affiliated with Felix Sater as they represented the same anonymous shell company in a New York City real estate deal. There is a mystery regarding who they represented, and there’s no indication the deal is connected to the Trump-Russia investigation, nor any evidence of wrongdoing.

However, Felix Sater was involved in the NYC real estate deal in December 2015, the same month he was negotiating the Trump Tower Moscow deal with Michael Cohen on behalf of Donald Trump. The NYC real estate deal concluded with a sale that was $8 million (over 20%) above the purchase price a year earlier. Following is information on this newly reported real estate transaction involving Felix Sater and Ilya Bykov, and expanded context on their backgrounds and business networks.

(Note that Sater did not respond to several requests for comment for this story and I was not able to reach Bykov. The information reported is all from open source data cited in links which are highlighted in bold.)
One striking result of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation has been exposure of a vast network of politicians, billionaire oligarchs and mafia-connected businessmen with a proclivity for laundering money through shell companies and real estate deals. Trump is the quintessential real estate mogul with shady connections, the sort exemplified by his former business partner and ex-felon Felix Sater. Now, property documents reveal Felix Sater worked alongside a Russian-born NYC accountant who is connected to several significant Russian money laundering cases — and to Aras Agalarov who, like Sater, is a central figure in the Trump-Russia story.

At the end of 2015, Felix Sater and Trump’s then lawyer Michael Cohen were discussing a deal to put a Trump Tower in Moscow. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.” That same month Sater also represented the owner of a midtown Manhattan office building at 22 West 38th Street, in a sales transaction worth $43.5 million. Sater signed the sales deed as a representative of 22 West 38th Street Associates, LLC. In prior financial transactions that year the building owner was represented by Russian-born New York City accountant Ilya Bykov.

ILYA BYKOV

Fluent in English and Russian, Ilya Bykov was born in Moscow and moved to New York City in 1979. He became a citizen in 1985, and in 1986 graduated from New York University and established his accounting company in the financial district of Manhattan where his current and prior office addresses connect to companies involved in several Russian money laundering cases.

For decades Bykov has represented many famous Russian clients including model Irina Shayk, musician Igor Krutoy, fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin, and billionaires Oleg Baibakov and Alexander Lebedev who owns the London Evening Standard and The Independent in the U.K., and 49% of Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Bykov has helped his clients purchase real estate at the Plaza Hotel, the Time Warner Center, and other prime locations.

In 2011, Bykov told reporters from The Seattle Times that his Russian clients “have the money and they always want the best in everything. Most of these people are buying pied-a-terres and it’s quite common that the person would buy a luxury apartment in New York and a condo or penthouse in Miami.”
In 2010 Ilya Bykov represented Igor Krutoy (aka Igor Kr​o​utoi), a famous Russian composer, in his search for an apartment in the Plaza Hotel and helped provide legal representation for Krutoy to purchase a mansion in South Hampton. Krutoy is close friends with Emin Agalarov who performed at Trump’s Miss Universe contest in Moscow in 2013, which Krutoy also attended and where he was photographed with Donald Trump.

In 2010 Krutoy started discussions with the Trump Organization and Ivanka Trump about developing an entertainment complex and Trump hotel in Riga, Latvia. In 2014, as part of a major criminal inquiry in Latvia, the government’s anti-corruption bureau made inquiries into Krutoy’s business deal and contacted the FBI for assistance. According to the Guardian, Latvian investigators examined secret recordings in which Trump was mentioned by a suspect. The Latvian real estate deal with Igor Krutoy revealed the FBI was looking into Trump’s business deals earlier than previously known. Krutoy, who was not accused of any wrongdoing, has continued to work with Ilya Bykov, registering one of his companies as recently as April 2017 at Bykov’s Protax office address.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a consortium of investigative organizations based in Eastern Europe, tracked billions of dollars pumped out of Russia in what is known as the Russian Laundromat, and found that $8.3 million was received in 2014 by Delaware corporation Parason Inc. The shareholders, directors, and officers of Parason are not disclosed, but OCCRP reported that the address for Parason was the office address of Ilya Bykov.

By coincidence, the building where Bykov’s company has been located since 2011, was previously owned by Kushner Companies and its partner, CIM Group, from June 2013 to March 2016.

PREVEZON MONEY LAUNDERING CASE

In 2008 Russian auditor Sergei Magnitsky was arrested and later died in prison, after an investigation for Bill Browder’s investment advisory company Hermitage Capital led Magnitsky to accuse the Russian government of sanctioning the takeover of three Hermitage companies, which then reclaimed $230 million in “overpaid taxes.” Some of the refunded tax money was allegedly laundered through Cyprus-based Prevezon Holdings, Ltd. and used to purchase stakes in four Dutch subsidiaries of Africa Israel Investments (AFI), owned Lev Leviev, an ally of Putin. Leviev was also a business partner with Jared Kushner and in October 2015 sold a $295 million stake in the Old New York Times Building to Kushner Companies.

According to the complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, from 2009 to 2011 some of the allegedly laundered funds were used by Prevezon companies to purchase eight New York City properties, including five units at 20 Pine Street, owned by the U.S. subsidiary of Leviev’s AFI.
Some of the Prevezon companies have addresses c/o Gabriella Volshteyn, a Brooklyn-based lawyer, who represents Prevezon on all of the NYC real-estate transactions. And according to NY State Division of Corporations records and ACRIS real estate records many Prevezon companies are also listed at the old and new address for Bykov’s business.

According to the recent story in the The Guardian:

“During an interview earlier this year, Bykov first suggested that the Prevezon he worked with was a different company using a similar name, which was “selling some electronics.” But he later confirmed his firm “provided bookkeeping and tax services for a short period of time” for the Prevezon pursued by the US government.”

The Prevezon companies had appeared in the 2013 complaint alleging money laundering filed by former U.S. District Attorney Preet Bharara, which was dismissed in a 2017 settlement, in which Prevezon did not admit guilt. Bharara was fired by Trump in February 2017, shortly after taking office. A year later, Prevezon still has not paid their settlement, but in a March 2018 court filing agreed to pay using escrowed funds from the seizure and sale of the NYC properties.

Bloomberg reported in September that, while the Prevezon case was settled, a separate criminal investigation into the laundering allegations was underway.
The lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who represents Denis Katsyv, the owner of Prevezon Holdings Ltd., attended the July 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. Ike Kaveladze, who works for Aras Agalarov, also attended the meeting with Veselnitskaya.
Bykov has denied any involvement in Prevezon’s alleged wrongdoing.

VNESHPROMBANK $2 BILLION EMBEZZLEMENT

Ilya Bykov has had a significant business relationship with Larisa Markus who was sentenced by Russian authorities to nine years in prison for embezzling over $2 billion.
Since 2008, Larisa Markus, who co-owned Russia’s Vneshprombank, set up companies through Bykov’s company that were allegedly used to launder bank money through New York real estate. Vneshprombank was considered a “VIP bank,” holding accounts of important officials like Sergei Ivanov (former Chief of Staff of the President), Sergey Shoigu (Minister of Defense), Dmitry Kozak (Deputy Prime Minister), and Rosneft, Rosneftgas, Transneft, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian Olympic Committee.
In December 2015 — the same month as the sale of the West 38th Street building that Bykov and Sater had represented — Russia’s central bank reported a 187.4 billion ruble ($2.3 billion) “hole” in the accounts of Vneshprombank. On December 22, Larisa Markus was arrested by Russian authorities. Her brother, Georgy Bedzhamov, who co-owned the bank, fled Russia, and was arrested in Monaco in April 2016. The next month he was released on bail; the paper Novaya Gazeta reported that Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who resides in Monaco, helped obtain his release. Monaco announced it would refuse an extradition request from Russia, and Bedzhamov became a fugitive. In May of 2017, his sister was sentenced in a Moscow court to nine years in prison.

Bykov, who was appointed as the manager of Markus’s U.S.-based business affairs, has continued to transact real estate deals on behalf of Markus even after her arrest and conviction. Bykov was part of an unsuccessful October 2017 court motion to block Russian investigators from looking into the banking transactions associated with Markus’s properties. The motion was argued by lawyer Marlen Kruzhkov, who was involved with Ilya Bykov in the 22 West 38th Street building deal, where his name appears on the 2014 purchase deed.

In another coincidence, another law firm representing Vneshprombank in the same case has a connection to Trump: Bruce Marks and his firm Marks & Sokolov LLC also represented the Donald J. Trump for President Campaign.
Given Bykov’s vast network of Russian clients, from celebrities to billionaires to convicted felon Larisa Markus, it may not be surprising that his path crossed with ex-felon and former Trump associate Felix Sater.

FELIX SATER

An enigmatic character, Felix Sater was born in the Soviet Union and at the age of eight moved to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn where his father allegedly had mafia ties. After a bar fight at the age of 27, Sater served jail time, and a few years later, after opening an investment firm, he was charged with racketeering and money laundering. Sater avoided jail by serving for ten years as an informant, providing the FBI with information on members of the Italian mafia, La Cosa Nostra, and Stinger missiles on the loose in Afghanistan.

In 2003, Sater became an executive of the Bayrock Group, a development and investment company founded two years earlier by Kazakh businessman Tevfik Arif. The company began developing Trump Soho in 2007. There has been extensive coverage of Sater and his work with Trump and the Bayrock Group and, in recent months, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has been reportedly examining the financing of the 46-story hotel condominium for possible money laundering.

While Trump had claimed in a 2013 deposition that he didn’t even know what Sater looked like, as recently as 2010 Sater — who had resigned from Bayrock in 2008 — occupied an office just two floors beneath the Trump Organization in Trump Tower, he had a Trump email address and business cards that called him “SENIOR ADVISOR TO DONALD TRUMP.”

Trump has insisted he has had no business dealings with Russia. But in 2005 the Trump Organization had an exclusive one year deal with Bayrock and Felix Sater to explore building a Trump Moscow Tower. In 2013, when Trump visited Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, he had discussions with Aras Agalarov about building a Trump Tower in Moscow. And in December 2015 Felix Sater and Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen were “pursuing a plan to develop a massive Trump Tower in Moscow.”
According to Michael Cohen, the 2015 project (similar to the previous ones) was never realized. But during that time frame, Sater did close a different real estate deal in New York City.

SATER, BYKOV AND 22 WEST 38TH STREET ASSOCIATES, LLC

The same month that Felix Sater was urging Trump to come to Moscow, records show that he and Ilya Bykov represented the same company, which was simultaneously finalizing the $43.5 million sale of a midtown Manhattan office building.

A year prior, in December 2014, the company “22 West 38th Street Associates, LLC” purchased a 12-floor office building on West 38th Street in New York City’s Garment District for $35.35 million. The 2014 purchase deed filing was signed by Ilya Bykov for 22 West 38th Street Associates, LLC.

Image from purchase deed documents in NYC ACRIS database

When 22 West 38th Street Associates, LLC sold the building for $43.5 million in December 2015 to Manhattan real estate investment firm Dalan Management, the sales deed was signed by Felix Sater. In one year, the company Bykov and Sater both represented, and its mystery owner, made an estimated $8 million or 22% increase over the purchase price.


Images from sales deed documents in NYC ACRIS database

The seller of the 22 West 38th Street building was represented by Ron Solarz and Nataliya Stelmakh at Eastern Consolidated and Elena Borokhovich of OneWorld Property Advisors.
An article in The Real Deal noted that the seller for 22 West 38th Street was “an affiliate of Alvin Jacobson Realty.” However, Alvin Jacobson Realty had sold the building to 22 West 38th Street Associates LLC in the prior transaction in December 2014.

In 2013 when Donald Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, he was in discussions with Aras Agalarov about building a Trump Tower in Moscow:
The elder Mr. Agalarov had been talking with Mr. Trump about building a Trump Tower in Moscow as part of a $3 billion real estate project involving hotels, a shopping center and office space.
Then in 2015, Felix Sater and Michael Cohen pursued discussions about a Trump Moscow deal. Two of Trump’s business partners who had been involved with discussions about a Trump Tower in Moscow — Felix Sater and Aras Agalarov — both had business interactions in 2015 and 2016 with accountant Ilyas Bykov.

There is no indication that Bykov has any connection to Trump or to any part of the Trump-Russia investigation or that he is involved in any wrongdoing.
The beneficial owner of the company, 22 West 38th Street Associates LLC, represented by Bykov and Sater may be connected to one of the many Russian-related clients Bykov has worked with previously. One thing is clear — this newly uncovered NYC real-estate deal provides a revealing example of how anonymous shell companies can mask the identities of beneficial owners — many based in other countries, and many who keep their identities secret to hide the flow of money into the United States.
https://medium.com/@wsiegelman/while-fe ... acb41d559b

Roger Stone Is Running Out of Options


Stone, who is under investigation by Robert Mueller, says he’ll never “roll” on Trump. Is he betting on a presidential pardon, or simply taking a cue from Paul Manafort?

Abigail TracyOctober 22, 2018 1:08 pm
Mueller Investigation

Roger Stone
By Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images.
For months, Roger Stone has been predicting his indictment by Robert Mueller. “It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election,” he told Meet the Press in May. At least eight of his current or former associates had been “terrorized” by the special counsel’s office, he claimed. In an August e-mail to supporters, urging them to help fund his legal defense, he sounded resigned to his fate. “Robert Mueller is coming for me,” he wrote.

Stone, a longtime Republican operative who has worked with Paul Manafort and advised Donald Trump, remains a free man. But as the midterms approach and Mueller prepares to re-enter the spotlight, a flurry of activity inside the special counsel’s office suggests that Stone’s “time in the barrel,” as he memorably said of John Podesta, may finally be at hand. In recent weeks, federal prosecutors have interviewed nearly a dozen Stone associates, a number of whom have testified before a grand jury. They have also interviewed Manafort, who recently cut a plea deal with the special counsel, about his former colleague. According to multiple reports, investigators are interested in whether Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks and the Russian hacker known as “Guccifer 2.0,” who allegedly hacked the Clinton campaign, constitute a criminal conspiracy.

At issue is whether Stone or other Trump associates had prior knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans to release the thousands of e-mails obtained by the Russians, or whether they coordinated their efforts in any way. Stone, for his part, has long maintained that he knew nothing of the e-mail dumps himself, despite his August 2016 boast about communicating with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his subsequent prediction that Podesta—Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager—would be their next target. When Podesta’s hacked e-mails were indeed leaked, some six weeks later, Stone immediately came under suspicion. Throughout October, the self-described “dirty trickster” continued to make predictions about future WikiLeaks e-mail dumps, hinting often at an “October surprise.”

Stone has since downplayed his ties to WikiLeaks, insisting that he never actually spoke with Assange, and that his real source was radio personality Randy Credico. The supposed prophecy regarding Podesta, Stone later claimed, was also a reference to his brother, Tony Podesta, a well-known Democratic lobbyist.

Stone’s account puts him at odds with Credico, who has denied that he acted as the intermediary between WikiLeaks and Stone. Credico allies told The Washington Post that he believes Stone has set him up as a “decoy.” Of course, both men have an incentive to blame the other. According to a person familiar with the matter, Credico has testified before a grand jury that Stone told him about his back channel to WikiLeaks. But two Stone associates, filmmaker David Lugo and attorney Tyler Nixon, said Credico has acknowledged that he was Stone’s source. In text messages Lugo provided to the Post, Credico wrote, “I knew Rodger [sic] was going to name me sooner or later and so I told you that I’m the so-called back Channel.”

The stakes are high for Stone as Mueller seeks to disentangle the conflicting claims. During his September 2017 testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Stone claimed he had “never said or written” that he had any direct communications with Assange, and that any of his communications with WikiLeaks were through Credico. Stone’s phrasing may have been deliberately unclear. But if Credico’s account is truthful, then Stone may have perjured himself.

It is a federal crime to “knowingly and willfully” provide “materially” false statements to Congress—even if one is not under oath. If Stone is determined to have misled lawmakers about his contacts with WikiLeaks and Assange, he could face up to five years in prison. And notably, Stone wouldn’t be the first individual to get saddled with this charge as part of a special-counsel investigation. John M. Poindexter, who served as the national-security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, was sentenced to prison for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, though the conviction was later overturned. More recently, Mueller has leveraged false statements by Mike Flynn, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos to gain their cooperation. If the special counsel is still working his way up the food chain, as the White House fears, then he may be seeking to flip Stone next.

Stone, for his part, has said he will never turn on Trump. “The special counsel pokes into every aspect of my social, family, personal, business, and political life, seeking something—anything—he can use to pressure me, to silence me, and to try to induce me to testify against my friend Donald Trump,” he told the Post. “This I will not do. When I say I won’t roll on the president, what I mean is I will not be forced to make up lies to bring him down.” The strength of that assertion may suggest Stone is holding open the door for a presidential pardon if things go south. Or perhaps Stone is simply taking his cue from Manafort when it comes to dealing with the special counsel, and waiting until the last moment to cave.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10 ... estigation

Mueller drills down on Roger Stone's WikiLeaks contacts

Mueller investigating Stone's WikiLeaks contacts

Washington (CNN)Special counsel Robert Mueller's scrutiny of Roger Stone includes investigating whether Stone had backchannels to WikiLeaks during the 2016 election beyond the New York radio host and political activist whom Stone claims was his primary go-between, according to people familiar with the matter.

Investigators' queries to people connected to Stone, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, suggest Mueller's team is skeptical of Stone's explanation that Randy Credico was his main intermediary, according to people familiar with interviews conducted by investigators. The scrutiny also includes probing Stone's relationship with right-wing journalist and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi about whether he also acted as a go-between with Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a source said.

The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal previously reported about Mueller's interest in Corsi's possible interactions with WikiLeaks.
Washington Post: Special counsel examining Roger Stone's conflicting accounts of WikiLeaks ties
Additionally, investigators are looking into whether Stone shared information that he believed was from WikiLeaks with members of Trump's presidential campaign, according to a source familiar with the probe. Investigators have been provided recordings of Stone claiming he talked to Trump regularly early in the 2016 presidential campaign, CNN has learned. Later, after various document dumps from WikiLeaks, Stone claimed in separate communications he should receive credit for coordinating with the group, the source said.

The queries about whether Stone may have shared information with the Trump campaign are a strong indication that Mueller's team is still actively investigating the possibility that someone close to Trump engaged in collusion with the Russians.

"We have said over and over again that he shared nothing with the campaign because he had nothing to share," said Grant Smith, an attorney for Stone. "He received nothing from anybody. At what point does this old record get worn out from being played over and over again?"

"I never discussed WikiLeaks stuff with Trump and would never have said I should get credit for coordinating with WikiLeaks since I did no such thing," Stone said.

A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment. A lawyer for the President declined to comment.

In an interview with the Associated Press last week, Trump denied that he knew about WikiLeaks before the shadowy website started releasing hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The President said, "When WikiLeaks came out ... never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it. When WikiLeaks came out, all I was just saying is, 'Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff.'"

Stone's associates questioned on contacts


While Stone said he has not been contacted by Mueller's team, many of his associates have been called in for interviews or testimony before the grand jury. Witnesses said the main focus of their interviews has been Stone's contact with WikiLeaks and Assange. Some of them are still actively cooperating with Mueller's team and have handed over troves of communications involving Stone, according to sources familiar with the matter.

A key area of inquiry is whether Stone actually received information from WikiLeaks and who helped facilitate that information-sharing. Investigators' questions to Corsi about his communications with WikiLeaks and Stone indicate they are trying to determine whether Stone had other go-betweens with WikiLeaks.

Corsi has participated in hours of interviews with Mueller's team and testified before the grand jury, according to sources familiar with the situation. Corsi's lawyer declined to comment.
2016 Presidential Campaign Hacking Fast Facts
At one point, Corsi appeared to provide cover for one of Stone's most inflammatory tweets: His summer 2016 claim that "it will soon (be) the Podesta's time in the barrel." It was later seen as an indication Stone may have had advance warning that then-Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's hacked emails would soon be public.

In March 2017, Corsi -- who was then the Washington bureau chief for InfoWars -- wrote, "Having reviewed my records, I am now confident that I am the source behind Stone's tweet." In his article, Corsi claimed his own research inspired Stone's Twitter missive. Stone has since said he was referring to the business dealings of both John Podesta and his brother, DC lobbyist Tony Podesta.
Mueller's quiet period has not been very quiet
Stone has suggested that the special counsel may be interested in Corsi's own relationship with Trump rather than Corsi's interactions with Stone. But a person familiar with the situation said investigators were mainly interested in Corsi's interactions with Stone and whether he acted as Stone's backchannel.

Stone told CNN, "Corsi told me he was never in communication with WikiLeaks or Assange, I believe him and know of no evidence to the contrary."

Corsi's own attorney denied to CNN back in September that his client was in touch with Assange, WikiLeaks or Guciffer 2.0, US intelligence has determined that the online persona Guccifer 2.0 was a front for Russian intelligence and Russian officers who hacked Democrats and passed the stolen material on to WikiLeaks during the campaign.

Stone's own words fuel questions


Stone has been under scrutiny for his contact with Guccifer 2.0 and comments he made in 2016 that appeared to suggest he had advance knowledge of material from WikiLeaks before it was released.

"I actually have communicated with Assange," Stone said in a speech in Florida on August 8, 2016. "I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there's no telling what the October surprise may be."

The Atlantic reported Stone and WikiLeaks exchanged direct messages on Twitter, but both have denied that they were in direct contact about the release of Clinton emails.
Stone told CNN that "although my claims were dramatized for effect before a partisan audience, they were not fabricated and I clarified in a dozen interviews that my 'communication' with Assange had been through a third party." He added, "I had no advance knowledge of the source or content of the material WikiLeaks would ultimately release."

Roger Stone aide hopes Kavanaugh will support his case against Mueller
Meanwhile, Stone's claim that he used Credico as that third party has been met with inconsistencies as well as denials from Credico. The radio host, who is open about his friendship with Assange, has denied funneling information back-and-forth to Assange on Stone's behalf.

"I am a decoy, the patsy to divert attention," Credico told CNN. "Or he just didn't have one (an intermediary) and his ego was too big to admit that."

Stone also suggested to reporters and associates that he had other links to WikiLeaks. A source familiar with the matter said Credico told the grand jury that Stone mentioned having another link to WikiLeaks.

"I did tell Credico I had an additional source who also told me the material was coming and that the revelations would address the Clinton Foundation," Stone told CNN.

When he appeared before the House Intelligence Committee last year, Stone testified that he had no direct contact with Assange during the election and instead relied on a go-between.

In a letter following his committee appearance, Stone's lawyer identified his intermediary as Credico.

Special counsel's office has radio interviews between Roger Stone and alleged WikiLeaks 'back channel'
"Mr. Stone noticed Credico had traveled to London on at least two occasions and conducted two landmark interviews with Julian Assange on WBAI," Stone's lawyer wrote, referring to the New York progressive radio station where Credico worked.

But Stone's timeline doesn't align with public events.

Stone claims that Credico's interviews with Assange inspired Stone to use Credico as a backchannel, according to the letter from Stone's attorney. But Credico didn't interview Assange until August 25, 2016, weeks after Stone started touting an intermediary. Stone now says that he knew Credico had ties to WikiLeaks even before the Assange interview.

As first reported by CNN, in multiple radio interviews between Credico and Stone -- now in the special counsel's possession -- Credico also asked Stone about the backchannel and expressed doubt that any such backchannel exists.
In yet another discrepancy, the letter from Stone's lawyer to the House committee also insists that Stone had only ever asked Credico to confirm information that Assange had shared publicly in media interviews or via social media.

Roger Stone built a 'dirty trickster' image. Now Robert Mueller might build a case on it.
But on September 18, 2016, Stone asked Credico to ferret out other information from Assange that Stone believed would be damaging to Hillary Clinton. "Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30...," a portion of the email from Stone to Credico says about Clinton emails from 2011.

"My testimony before the House Intelligence Committee was entirely truthful and there is no credible evidence to the contrary," Stone told CNN, maintaining that Credico was his primary backchannel and that he has associates who will corroborate his account.

"From the beginning, I wanted to protect the identity of Credico, because I knew that his support for Julian Assange and the journalistic independence of WikiLeaks would not be popular in the progressive left circles where he made a living," Stone said. "I turned over Randy Credico's name to the House Intelligence Committee only reluctantly."

Stone's lawyer said there were "no inconsistencies in what we sent to the House."

While Stone has proclaimed his innocence, he has said he believes Mueller's team could bring charges against him to try to force him to cooperate against Trump.

Prosecutors may also be confronted with the possibility that Stone, a braggadocios self-proclaimed "dirty trickster," did not actually have access to a legitimate backchannel providing him information from WikiLeaks.

"He may have had somebody, I don't know," said Credico. "Who can tell with this guy?"

UPDATE: This story has been updated to add more detail about previous reporting from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/22/politics ... index.html

DETOUR: ROGER STONE’S EPICALLY SHITTY EXPLANATION FOR HIS PODESTA TWEET

October 22, 2018/1 Comment/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
I need to take another detour from my series on the universe of the known hacked and leaked emails from 2016.

While working on the Podesta email post, my treatment of how epically shitty Stone’s explanation for his August 21, 2016 tweet boasting that “it would soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel” grew so big it has become its own post.

For reasons I laid out in this post, the public record is not all that convincing that Stone did have foreknowledge of the Podesta dump. Both in August, when he started talking about foreknowledge of a Hillary release, and in October, when he promised it on a specific day (that turned out to be wrong), he predicted WikiLeaks would dump Hillary’s deleted emails, not Podesta’s emails.

But Stone’s explanation for the tweet is epically shitty and increasingly makes me think he not only knew that Podesta’s emails would be released, but may have seen some of them in advance.

Effectively, Stone claimed to the House Intelligence Committee that his Podesta comment referred to a report Jerome Corsi did for him between August 14 and 31 2016 (which doesn’t identifiably show up in Stone’s political expenditures in this period).

My Tweet of August 21, 2016, in which I said, “Trust me, it will soon be the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary” Must be examined in context. I posted this at a time that my boyhood friend and colleague, Paul Manafort, had just resigned from the Trump campaign over allegations regarding his business activities in Ukraine. I thought it manifestly unfair that John Podesta not be held to the same standard. Note, that my Tweet of August 21, 2016, makes no mention, whatsoever, of Mr. Podesta’s email, but does accurately predict that the Podesta brothers’ business activities in Russia with the oligarchs around Putin, their uranium deal, their bank deal, and their Gazprom deal, would come under public scrutiny. Podesta’s activities were later reported by media outlets as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. My extensive knowledge of the Podesta brothers’ business dealings in Russia was based on The Panama Papers, which were released in early 2016, which revealed that the Podesta brothers had extensive business dealings in Russia. The Tweet is also based on a comprehensive, early August opposition research briefing provided to me by investigative journalist, Dr. Jerome Corsi, which I then asked him to memorialize in a memo that he sent me on August 31st , all of which was culled from public records. There was no need to have John Podesta’s email to learn that he and his presidential candidate were in bed with the clique around Putin.

The claim is, particularly knowing what we know about efforts Paul Manafort was making to hide his own corruption by asking Tony Podesta to avoid legally mandated reporting, … interesting. Particularly given the way this timeline overlaps with some other events, notably Manafort’s increasingly desperate efforts to stave off bankruptcy even while working for Trump for “free.” There are also some oddities about how the timing evolved from those August “research” documents and later October publications. I’ll hit both those timing issues in my Podesta email post.

For now, consider what Corsi claimed back in March 2017, the first attempt to explain Stone’s tweet. In his version, Stone’s tweet was about four different reports.

Corsi first said that he started researching the Podestas and Russia in response to reading a July 31, 2016 Government Accountability Institute report, one not mentioned in Stone’s explanation.

On July 31, 2016, the New York Post reported that Peter Schweizer’s Washington-based Government Accountability Institute had published a report entitled, “From Russia with Money: Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset, and Cronyism.”

That report detailed cash payments from Russia to the Clintons via the Clinton Foundation which included a Putin-connected Russian government fund that transferred $35 million to a small company that included Podesta and several senior Russian officials on its executive board.

“Russian government officials and American corporations participated in the technology transfer project overseen by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation,” the report noted in the executive summary.

“John Podesta failed to reveal, as required by law on his federal financial disclosures, his membership on the board of this offshore company,” the executive summary continued. “Podesta also headed up a think tank which wrote favorably about the Russian reset while apparently receiving millions from Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs via an offshore LLC.”

Reading Schweizer’s report, I began conducting extensive research into Secretary Clinton’s “reset” policy with Russia, Podesta’s membership on the board of Joule Global Holdings, N.V. – a shell company in the Netherlands that Russians close to Putin used to launder money – as well as Podesta’s ties to a foundation run by one of the investors in Joule Energy, Hans-Jorg Wyss, a major contributor to the Clinton Foundation.

Corsi appears to be playing some temporal games here. While he points to the NY Post’s August 1 report on the report, by URL, the public version of it appears to have been released on August 12. That’s not a huge deal (it’s not like Corsi couldn’t get Schweizer’s rat-fuckery directly, though he pointedly doesn’t cite it), but it does suggest he’s making efforts to play with the August timeline to date it to the first days of August, which is particularly interesting given that Stone claimed Corsi’s research took place in “early” August.

Having claimed this report got him interested in substantiating a tie between Hillary and Russia, Corsi then shifts, saying that the August 14 NYT story on Manafort’s secret ledgers did (which I would call “mid-August,” not early August). He claimed his goal in response to the NYT reporting — it’s not clear whether this started on August 1 or August 14 — was just to publicize the already-written GAI report.

On Aug. 14, 2016, the New York Times reported that a secret ledger in Ukraine listed cash payments for Paul Manafort, a consultant to the Ukraine’s former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

When this article was published, I suggested to Roger Stone that the attack over Manafort’s ties to Russia needed to be countered.

My plan was to publicize the Government Accountability Institute’s report, “From Russia With Money,” that documented how Putin paid substantial sums of money to both Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

Putin must have wanted Hillary to win in 2016, if only because Russian under-the-table cash payments to the Clintons and to Podesta would have made blackmailing her as president easy.

On Aug. 14, 2016, I began researching for Roger Stone a memo that I entitled “Podesta.”

So Corsi suggests the report he did for Stone was based on the GAI one.

Except Corsi’s report (starting at PDF 39, copies of the report are at this point just reproductions without metadata to track when they were written, but Corsi claims to have handed over ways for Mueller to track such things when he interviewed with Mueller’s team and then appeared before the grand jury in September) doesn’t deal with the GAI report at all. Instead, it is a direct response to the NYT Manafort report, claiming that the NYT reporting (the stuff that has since been confirmed by all of Manafort’s guilty pleas) was not substantiated. It then makes a key logical move, admitting that his report is an attempt to undermine the claim that Russia’s close ties to Manafort had some relation to the hack-and-leak.

From there, the Democratic Party narrative continues to suggest Manafort’s close relationship to the Kremlin allowed him to position the Trump campaign to receive a dump of hacked emails that embarrassed the Clinton campaign by exposing the efforts Debbie Wasserman Schultz, as chairman of the DNC, took to rig the primaries for Hillary, to the distinct disadvantage of challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The entire Democratic Party narrative is thrown into disarray if it turns out the Podesta brothers, via the Podesta Group, have tighter and more easily documentable financial ties to Russia, involving far greater numbers than have ever been suggested to tie Manafort to Russia via Ukraine.

This is a key distinction. While the report definitely responds to the burgeoning scandal about Manafort’s ties to Russian oligarchs, Corsi admits that this report is about undercutting the claim that Russia would have reason to target Hillary in a hack-and-leak effort. So yeah, it’s about Stone’s “boyhood friend and colleague” (who at the time was setting off on a crime spree to hide his Russian ties), but it’s also about his longtime buddy Donald Trump, too.

From there the Corsi report focuses on the Podesta Group, on Uranium One, on Clinton’s ties to Fethulla Gulen (whom Mike Flynn was moving towards on kidnapping at the time), as if any of that suggests closer ties to Russia than Manafort has. Virtually the only claim about John Podesta (as opposed to Tony) is that he had ties to Hillary’s Foundation.

The idea behind Corsi’s story, I suppose, is that if Corsi started writing this report on August 14, then when Podesta tweeted on August 21, it would reflect a draft of the report that bears the final date of August 31. There’s no public record to support that chronology, though.

From there, Corsi notes that he and Podesta returned to the subject of the GAI report — Podesta’s ties with Joule — in October.

On October 6, 2016, I published in WND.com the first of a series of articles detailing Putin’s financial ties to Clinton and Podesta, based largely on the research contained in the Government Accountability Institute’s report, “From Russia With Money.”

On Oct. 13, 2016, Stone published on his website an article entitled, “Russian Mafia money laundering, the Clinton Foundation and John Podesta.”

So thus far, Corsi argues that the progression goes from an August 1 GAI Report, to … something … to his research starting on August 14 about entirely unrelated allegations about the Podestas, back to both he and Stone writing on Joule in October.

In his description of the October pieces, Corsi claims — citing selectively — that Stone’s Joule piece relied on his and (he seems to claim, but this is nonsense) his private research report.

A comparison of the two articles will show the extent to which Stone incorporated my research into his analysis.

Though he cites Stone’s denials of advance knowledge that WikiLeaks would dump the Podesta emails, Corsi doesn’t cite this passage in Stone’s October 13 piece.

Wikileaks emails tie John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, into the money-laundering network with the confirmation Podesta had exercised 75,000 shares out of 100,000 previously undisclosed stock options he was secretly issued by Joule Unlimited, a U.S. corporation that ties back to Vekselberg connected Joule Global Stichting in the Netherlands – a shady entity identified in the Panama Papers as an offshore money-laundering client of the notorious Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

As a clear indication of guilty conscience, the Wikileaks Podesta file further documents that Podesta made a serious effort to keep the transaction from coming to light as evidenced by his decision to transfer 75,000 common shares of Joule Unlimited to Leonidio LLC, another shady shell corporation – this one listed in Salt Lake City at the home apartment of the gentlemen who registered the company.

Stone mentions — but does not link to — some of the WikiLeaks files he’s discussing. It is true that two Podesta emails released two days earlier on October 11 (December 31, 2013 resignation letter, January 7, 2014 severance letters) relate to the stuff Stone mentions and have some of the same numbers. They certainly don’t substantiate Stone’s claim about mob ties and shell corporations. Plus, two of the Joule documents that might actually pertain to Stone’s claims weren’t released until October 31 and November 1.

That at least suggests that Stone may have had those WikiLeaks emails earlier — and it may suggest he had “WikiLeaks documents” that never got published, which he ironically would have referenced in a piece purporting to prove he didn’t have advance knowledge of the release.

Stone also claims further research reflects an unsubstantiated further tie with (Trump inauguration donor) Viktor Vekselberg, one he didn’t repeat when he revived the post to implicate Michael Cohen last May.

Further research has documented that Viktor Vekselberg arranged for two transfers of unknown amounts to a private Clinton Foundation account in the Bank of America, with the funds passing though a pass-through account at Deutsche Bank and Trust Company Americas in New York City – with the first transfer made on Feb. 10, 2015, and the second on March 15, 2016.

I’m not actually sure what to make of Stone’s post. I have yet to chase down where all these claims come from (if not from Stone’s ripe imagination).

But even aside from these three unsubstantiated claims, I know this.

Corsi originally claimed that all four reports — the August 1 GAI report, his own August 14-31 private report to Stone, his own revival of the GAI report the day before the Podesta emails started coming out on October 7, and then Stone’s own piece after some WikiLeaks documents came out that sort of related to his arguments but not entirely — were part of the same effort.

That’s not right. His own report for Stone is the outlier.

While it’s unsurprising that Manafort’s “boyhood friend” might solicit a report both to protect that boyhood friend and his longtime political mentee, Donald Trump, that report was part of a separate effort than the GAI research — which Stone would ultimately claim without proof WikiLeaks releases supported. It’s unclear which of the three things is most damning: the Stone report which claimed to use WikiLeaks research to elaborate on the GAI research, the report attempting to disprove true facts about Manafort’s ties to Russia, or the tweet.

But they don’t explain each other. And inserted into the timeline — as I’ll do — they become even more problematic.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/10/22/d ... sta-tweet/

Manafort Associate Firtash Lurches Towards U.S. Extradition

Josh Kovensky
on July 17, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Win McNamee/Getty Images North America

October 24, 2018 12:52 pm

Ukrainian oligarch and Paul Manafort associate Dmytro Firtash is one step closer to seeing the inside of a U.S. courtroom.

The European Union Court of Justice issued a ruling on Wednesday denying the possibility for Firtash to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

The ruling removes a final hurdle to Firtash’s extradition to the United States, leaving it up to Austria’s Supreme Court to decide on the oligarch’s deportation.

Firtash’s attorneys wrote in a letter this month that the European court ruling would allow the oligarch’s case to be “quickly” decided.

“Mr. Firtash’s lawyers believe that the Austrian Supreme Court will move quickly and Mr. Firtash could face extradition in a short time frame following the decision by the Court of Justice,” wrote Firtash lawyer Dan Webb in an Oct. 9 letter to Chicago Federal Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer.

Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch known alternately for acting as middleman in a scheme to jack up gas prices for European customers and for ordering Manafort to scout out an $850 million New York City real estate opportunity, has been awaiting extradition to federal court in Chicago since his arrest in Austria in March 2014.

Firtash, who prosecutors have alleged is “an upper-echelon” member of Russian organized crime, was indicted on foreign bribery charges relating to a scheme to gain rights to mine titanium in India for use in Boeing’s supply chain.

But after four years of litigation, Firtash has nearly exhausted his avenues to appeal the extradition request.

Manafort, who pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges in September as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, worked closely with Firtash and his associates while in Ukraine.

Apart from the alleged mission to scout out Manhattan hotel properties on Firtash’s behalf, Manafort was accused of collaborating with the oligarch on Ukrainian political campaigns in a New York lawsuit that was later struck down. Firtash denies the allegations against him.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/mana ... xtradition

Top EU Court Rejects Extradition Appeal By Ukrainian Oligarch Firtash

Mike Eckel
The European Union’s top court turned away an appeal by Dmytro Firtash, the latest twist for the Ukrainian oligarch whose extradition from Austria the United States has been fighting for since his 2014 arrest in Vienna.

The October 24 ruling by the EU Court of Justice paves the way for the Austrian Supreme Court to hear Firtash’s challenge to the U.S. extradition request.

If the Austrian Supreme Court rules for his extradition, a final decision will then be made by the country's justice minister.

A former business partner of President Donald Trump's ex-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and one of Ukraine's wealthiest men, Firtash has been charged in a U.S. federal court in Chicago, as part of an alleged bribery scheme involving titanium supplies for aircraft giant Boeing.

His case has seen several twists, including being rearrested in Vienna on a Spanish warrant in February 2017, just minutes after an Austrian court cleared the way for his U.S. extradition.

It’s unclear when the Austrian Supreme Court will hear the case.

However, his lead U.S. lawyer, former federal prosecutor Dan Webb, told the Chicago federal court earlier this month that it was believed "that the Austrian Supreme Court will move quickly and Mr. Firtash could face extradition in a short time frame following the decision by the Court of Justice.”

Firtash, who has denied the charges, has been out on bail since shortly after his arrest, but barred from leaving Austria. His lawyers had argued that the U.S. prosecution was politically motivated.

Firtash’s wealth stems in large part from the lucrative natural gas trade in Ukraine, whose pipelines have long served as the key conduit for Russian gas supplies heading to Western Europe.

He is also considered an important financier of the Party of Regions political party, and was involved in hiring Manafort, then a U.S. political consultant and lobbyist, in 2005 to help rebuild the party after its then-leader, Viktor Yanukovych, was defeated for the presidency by Viktor Yushchenko following the 2004 Orange Revolution.

Firtash also had a brief partnership with Manafort in 2008 to invest in New York City real estate, although that deal never materialized.

Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman in 2016, until he was fired that August, amid revelations about his extensive work in Ukraine.

After a jury convicted him of bank and tax fraud in August, Manafort decided to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his sprawling investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and interactions between Trump associates and Russian officials.

Mike Eckel is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL based in Washington.
https://www.rferl.org/a/top-eu-court-re ... 62112.html

When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese Listen and Learn

Oct. 24, 2018

President Trump has two official iPhones that have limited abilities and a third that is no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world.Tom Brenner/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening — and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.

Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Mr. Trump’s use of his iPhones was detailed by several current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss classified intelligence and sensitive security arrangements. The officials said they were doing so not to undermine Mr. Trump, but out of frustration with what they considered the president’s casual approach to electronic security.

American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials.

The officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said.

Among those on the list are Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group chief executive who has endowed a master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Steve Wynn, the former Las Vegas casino magnate who used to own a lucrative property in Macau.

The Chinese have identified friends of both men and others among the president’s regulars, and are now relying on Chinese businessmen and others with ties to Beijing to feed arguments to the friends of the Trump friends. The strategy is that those people will pass on what they are hearing, and that Beijing’s views will eventually be delivered to the president by trusted voices, the officials said. They added that the Trump friends were most likely unaware of any Chinese effort.


Steve Wynn, who owned a resort in Macau, is among the friends of Mr. Trump the Chinese hope to use to influence the president.Thomas Lee for The New York Times
L. Lin Wood, a lawyer for Mr. Wynn, said his client was retired and had no comment. A spokeswoman for Blackstone, Christine Anderson, declined to comment on Chinese efforts to influence Mr. Schwarzman but said that he “has been happy to serve as an intermediary on certain critical matters between the two countries at the request of both heads of state.”

Russia is not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Mr. Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said.

China’s effort is a 21st-century version of what officials there have been doing for many decades, which is trying to influence American leaders by cultivating an informal network of prominent businesspeople and academics who can be sold on ideas and policy prescriptions and then carry them to the White House. The difference now is that China, through its eavesdropping on Mr. Trump’s calls, has a far clearer idea of who carries the most influence with the president, and what arguments tend to work.

The Chinese and the Russians “would look for any little thing — how easily was he talked out of something, what was the argument that was used,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the agency’s Russia program.

Trump friends like Mr. Schwarzman, who figured prominently in the first meeting between President Xi Jinping of China and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, already hold pro-China and pro-trade views, and thus are ideal targets in the eyes of the Chinese, the officials said. Targeting the friends of Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Wynn can reinforce the views of the two, the officials said. The friends are also most likely to be more accessible.

One official said the Chinese were pushing for the friends to persuade Mr. Trump to sit down with Mr. Xi as often as possible. The Chinese, the official said, correctly perceive that Mr. Trump places tremendous value on personal relationships, and that one-on-one meetings yield breakthroughs far more often than regular contacts between Chinese and American officials.

Whether the friends can stop Mr. Trump from pursuing a trade war with China is another question.

Officials said the president has two official iPhones that have been altered by the National Security Agency to limit their capabilities — and vulnerabilities — and a third personal phone that is no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world. Mr. Trump keeps the personal phone, White House officials said, because unlike his other two phones, he can store his contacts in it.

Apple declined to comment on the president’s iPhones. None of them are completely secure and are vulnerable to hackers who could remotely break into the phones themselves.

Mr. Trump has been pressured into using the secure White House landline more often, but has still refused to give up his iPhones.Doug Mills/The New York Times
But the calls made from the phones are intercepted as they travel through the cell towers, cables and switches that make up national and international cellphone networks. Calls made from any cellphone — iPhone, Android, an old-school Samsung flip phone — are vulnerable.

The issue of secure communications is fraught for Mr. Trump. As a presidential candidate, he regularly attacked his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign for her use of an unsecured email server while she was secretary state, and he basked in chants of “lock her up” at his rallies.

Intercepting calls is a relatively easy skill for governments. American intelligence agencies consider it an essential tool of spycraft, and they routinely try to tap the phones of important foreign leaders. In a diplomatic blowup during the Obama administration, documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, showed that the American government had tapped the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

Foreign governments are well aware of the risk, and so leaders like Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin avoid using cellphones when possible.

President Barack Obama was careful with cellphones, too. He used an iPhone in his second term, but it could not make calls and could receive email only from a special address that was given to a select group of staff members and intimates. It had no camera or microphone and could not be used to download apps at will. Texting was forbidden because there was no way to collect and store the messages, as required by the Presidential Records Act.

“It is a great phone, state of the art, but it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text. The phone doesn’t work, you know, you can’t play your music on it,” Mr. Obama said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in June 2016. “So basically, it’s like — does your 3-year-old have one of those play phones?”

When Mr. Obama needed a cellphone, the officials said, he used one of those of his aides.

Mr. Trump has insisted on more capable devices, although he did agree during the transition to give up his Android phone (the Google operating system is considered more vulnerable than Apple’s). And since becoming president, Mr. Trump has agreed to a slightly cumbersome arrangement of having two official phones: one for Twitter and other apps, and one for calls.

Mr. Trump typically relies on his mobile phones when he does not want a call going through the White House switchboard and logged for senior aides to see, his aides said. Many of those Mr. Trump speaks with most often on one of his cellphones, such as hosts at Fox News, share the president’s political views, or simply enable his sense of grievance about any number of subjects.

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

In an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump quipped about his phones being insecure. When asked what American officials in Turkey had learned about the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, he replied, “I actually said don’t give it to me on the phone. I don’t want it on the phone. As good as these phones are supposed to be.”

But Mr. Trump is also famously indiscreet. In a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office with Russian officials, he shared highly sensitive intelligence passed to the United States by Israel. He also told the Russians that James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was “a real nut job” and that firing him had relieved “great pressure.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s lack of tech savvy has alleviated some other security concerns. He does not use email, so the risk of a phishing attack like those used by Russian intelligence to gain access to Democratic Party emails is close to nil. The same goes for texts, which are disabled on his official phones.

His Twitter phone can connect to the internet only over a Wi-Fi connection, and he rarely, if ever, has access to unsecured wireless networks, officials said. But the security of the device ultimately depends on the user, and protecting the president’s phones has sometimes proved difficult.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s cellphone was left behind in a golf cart at his club in Bedminster, N.J., causing a scramble to locate it, according to two people familiar with what took place.

Mr. Trump is supposed to swap out his two official phones every 30 days for new ones but rarely does, bristling at the inconvenience. White House staff members are supposed to set up the new phones exactly like the old ones, but the new iPhones cannot be restored from backups of his old phones, because doing so would transfer over any malware.

New phone or old, though, the Chinese and the Russians are listening, and learning.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/us/p ... urity.html

Mueller has evidence suggesting Stone associate knew Clinton emails would be leaked

Mueller's team is investigating whether Jerome Corsi knew stolen emails would be leaked and passed information about them to Trump associate Roger Stone.

Oct. 25, 2018 / 3:30 AM CDT
By Ken Dilanian and Anna Schecter

WASHINGTON — Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office has obtained communications suggesting that a right-wing conspiracy theorist might have had advance knowledge that the emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman had been stolen and handed to WikiLeaks, a source familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

Mueller's team has spent months investigating whether the conspiracy theorist, Jerome Corsi, learned before the public did that WikiLeaks had obtained emails hacked by Russian intelligence officers — and whether he passed information about the stolen emails to Donald Trump associate Roger Stone, multiple sources said.

Mueller's investigators have reviewed messages to members of the Trump team in which Stone and Corsi seem to take credit for the release of Democratic emails, said a person with direct knowledge of the emails.

The source and other people familiar with the matter say they have seen no evidence suggesting either man played any role in the hacking or release of the emails. Stone adamantly denies doing anything but passing on information already in the public domain.

Mueller's spokesman, Peter Carr, said the office had no comment. Corsi and his lawyer, David Gray, declined to comment.


Stone appears to be in Mueller's investigative crosshairs, as the special counsel seeks to determine whether the longtime political trickster participated in the secret Russian operation to help Trump win the 2016 election. Mueller has summoned Corsi and nearly a dozen other of Stone's associates to testify before his Washington, D.C. grand jury, people familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

Some of them have described the sessions to reporters, saying they were grilled about their conversations and communications with Stone. While grand juries operate in secret, witnesses have a right to discuss their testimony.

"I was questioned vigorously for hours," said a former Stone associate, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He told NBC News that Mueller's investigators put enormous pressure on him to recall specific details from the 2016 campaign. "They think they're on to something."

In July, Mueller charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with conspiracy to violate U.S. election laws by hacking Democratic emails and releasing them through fake online personas, and later, WikiLeaks. If an American were found to have knowingly aided that effort, he or she could be charged as a member of that conspiracy, legal experts have said.

An author and commentator, Corsi is considered to be the founder of the so-called Birther movement of people who believed Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, a lie that Trump used to help propel his presidential candidacy. In 2017, Corsi became the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for InfoWars, a web site run by Alex Jones, whose inflammatory lies about the 2014 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting have gotten him banned from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Corsi no longer works there.


Image:
Jerome Corsi holds a copy of his book "Where's the Birth Certificate?" during a book signing at Book Expo America in New York on May 25, 2011.Charles Sykes / AP file

Mueller subpoenaed Corsi in September, and he turned over computer, phone and email records, the source said. Mueller's investigators have spent weeks interviewing many of his contacts, asking them what he said about WikiLeaks, the source said.

Questioned by Mueller's prosecutors about why he appeared to know before anyone else that WikiLeaks had Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails, Corsi told them he simply figured it out on his own, the source said. He concluded, after seeing little about Podesta in the initial WikiLeaks dump of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, that the anti-secrecy organization was holding Podesta's communications for an "October surprise," the source said.

The source said he is aware of no evidence obtained by the Mueller team that would contradict that assertion.

Corsi maintained that he did not learn anything about the matter from WikiLeaks, which began dumping Podesta's emails on Oct. 7, 2016, just hours after a tape became public on which Trump boasted about grabbing women's genitalia. However, Corsi expressed in emails a willingness to travel to London and meet with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the source said.

"For the record, I have never had any communication of any kind with Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, or Guccifer 2.0, or any Russian agents of any kind, including those mythical Russian agents who the Democrats believe wanted to throw the election for Trump," Corsi wrote in March 2017 on InfoWars.

Stone denied that Corsi ever told him before it became public that Podesta's emails had been obtained by WikiLeaks, and he denies involvement with Russia, telling NBC News it's a "left-wing conspiracy theory." But he also says he expects to be indicted, and a lawyer close to the case told NBC News he thought that was likely as well.

Stone has a recent history of changing his story about his interactions with Russians.

In June 2016, he said: "I didn't talk to anybody who was identifiably Russian during the two-year run-up to this campaign," he said.

But that was false. In fact, as he acknowledged this year, he met with a Russian in May 2016 — a month before he issued that categorical denial — who offered to sell incriminating information to the Trump campaign. In the wake of that acknowledgement, he was forced to amend his testimony to the House intelligence committee. He said he had forgotten about the proposal and rebuffed it, telling the Washington Post "[Trump] doesn't pay for anything."

Now, Stone is insisting in equally unequivocal terms that he never passed inside information about stolen Democratic emails from the Russians — or their intermediary, WikiLeaks — to the Trump team. He says so despite a series of public statements he made in summer 2016 suggesting he had advance knowledge of WikiLeaks disclosures of the material hacked by Russian intelligence agencies, including a tweet in August that it soon would be John Podesta's "time in the barrel."

Stone's assertion is being put to a fearsome test by Mueller, who has grilled Stone's associates about their dealings and communications with him, sources familiar with the testimony told NBC News.

A key figure in the investigation is comedian Randy Credico, a one-time friend of Stone's whom Stone said served as his back channel to WikiLeaks about hacked Russian emails.


Credico vehemently denies the claim in an interview with NBC News, and a source says he also did to Mueller.

"I don't think there was a go-between," he said. "If Stone got any material, he got it from somebody else."

Credico says Stone has made him his "patsy, his fall guy," and that he's done it before.

Stone has broken with Credico, and now calls him a "liar."

Kristin Davis, also known as the Manhattan Madam for her former role running a high-end prostitution ring in New York City, was also summoned by Mueller to testify. She is still a close friend of Stone's and is backing him.

"I am extremely disgusted at Randy Credico's lies," she told NBC News.

"I overheard him talking about being the back channel. Now he denies this. I strongly feel he lied to the grand jury," Davis wrote in a text.

Some lawyers close to the case believe Mueller would not take so much of the grand jury's time with witness testimony unless he had good reason to believe it would lead to an indictment. But others believe Mueller is using the grand jury to gather facts that he will lay out in a massive report to the Justice Department laying out the fruits of his inquiry.

Stone has said Mueller has scrutinized every aspect of his life, and that he fears being charged with a crime unrelated to Russian election interference.

Image: Roger Stone speaks to the media in Washington
Roger Stone speaks to the media after appearing before the House Intelligence Committee closed-door hearing in Washington on Sept. 26, 2017.Mark Wilson / Getty Images
"It is not inconceivable now that Mr. Mueller and his team may seek to conjure up some extraneous crime pertaining to my business, or maybe not even pertaining to the 2016 election," Stone told Meet the Press in May.

Stone has acknowledged he is the U.S. person named in a previous Mueller indictment as having interacted with an internet persona known as Guccifer 2.0, identified by Mueller as a front for Russian intelligence.

But Stone told NBC News: "I never received anything, including allegedly hacked emails, from Guccifer 2.0 , the Russians, WikiLeaks, [Julian] Assange or anyone else, and never passed anything on to Donald Trump, the Trump campaign or anyone else. There is no witness who can honestly testify otherwise and no evidence to the contrary."

His lawyer, Grant Smith, told NBC News: "We have seen no evidence that would give my client any liability for anything within the scope of the special counsel's mandate. Everything Roger got was in the public domain, and he spread it around."

That likely wasn't the impression of a group of Republicans listening to remarks by Stone on Aug. 8, 2016, when he said, "I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation, but there's no telling what the October surprise may be."

On Aug. 12, Stone said on a podcast that he believed Assange possessed emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's personal server; that same day, Guccifer 2.0, sent a thank-you note to Stone shortly after releasing a set of documents with personal information about Democratic candidates.

Stone says he began messaging with Guccifer 2.0 on Twitter on Aug. 14. The special counsel indictment alleges that Russian hackers used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release documents and to blunt the allegations of Russian responsibility for the intrusion.

On Aug. 21, Stone famously tweeted, "Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta's time in the barrel."

Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails had been hacked in March 2016, but Podesta didn't know about the hack until WikiLeaks began leaking the emails in October.

Stone has innocent explanations for some of those comments.


Stone says he was referring to both John and his brother Tony Podesta, who had foreign lobbying ties.

As for the comment about WikiLeaks and the Clinton Foundation, he has produced an email from a former Fox News reporter, James Rosen, who wrote, "Am told WikiLeaks will be doing a massive dump of HRC emails relating to the CF in September."

Rosen, who is no longer with Fox, declined to comment.

In private Twitter messages with Guccifer obtained by the Atlantic, Stone said he considered himself a "friend" of WikiLeaks.

Credico says Stone told him he had a second back channel to WikiLeaks. Stone says that person was a journalist who he declined to name.

"Roger Stone has spent his entire life spoofing Democrats and the media," said former Trump aide Michael Caputo, a Stone associate. "Mueller will find out that Roger Stone is the P.T. Barnum of U.S. Republican politics."

"I believe Roger Stone is the last gasp of the Mueller investigation."

Ken Dilanian reported from Washington. Anna Schecter reported from New York.

Ken Dilanian is a national security reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. He was most recently lead national security for the Associated Press, and previously worked at the Los Angeles Times and USA Today. You can email him at Ken dot Dilanian at nbcuni.com or follow him on twitter at @KenDilanianNBC.

Anna Schecter is an award-winning producer for NBC News. She has covered stories ranging from the Facebook data breach and Cambridge Analytica to President Donald Trump's former physician while at NBC. She won two Emmy awards, a Peabody, and a George Polk award for her reporting on rape and sexual assault of Peace Corps volunteers during her time at ABC News. Schecter completed her graduate work in Nanjing, China, at the Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies Chinese Studies program. She graduated summa cum laude from Middlebury College in Vermont with a degree in Chinese and French. She joined NBC News in 2011 and is based in New York City.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justic ... ld-n924036

Mueller link seen in mystery grand jury appeal
The special counsel appears to be locked in a dispute with a mystery grand jury witness, but much of the case is sealed.

By JOSH GERSTEIN and DARREN SAMUELSOHN 10/24/2018 11:33 PM EDT

Special counsel Robert Mueller appears to be locked in a dispute with a mystery grand jury witness resisting giving up information sought in the ongoing probe into alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia.

It's unclear exactly what the two sides are fighting over, but the case appears to resemble a separate legal battle involving an associate of Trump ally Roger Stone, Andrew Miller, who is fighting a Mueller subpoena. Miller's lawyers are using the case, slated to be argued at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals early next month, to mount a broad legal assault on Mueller's authority as special counsel.


In the more shadowy case, which involves an unknown person summoned before a grand jury this summer, the D.C. Circuit on Monday set a separate round of arguments for Dec. 14.

The case traveled in recent months from U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, back down to Howell and back up again to the appeals court with most details shrouded in secrecy, another indication that much of Mueller's activity is taking place behind the scenes and is rarely glimpsed by the press or public.

Nothing on the two dockets for the mystery grand jury fight mentions Mueller or his team.

However, a POLITICO reporter who visited the appeals court clerk's office on a day when a key filing in the dispute was due earlier this month observed a man request a copy of the special counsel's latest sealed filing so that the man's law firm could craft its response. The individual who asked for the secret filing declined to identify himself or his client and replied “I’m OK” when offered a reporter’s business card to remain in touch.

Three hours later, a sealed response in the grand-jury dispute was submitted to the D.C. Circuit.

Another detail emerged Wednesday strengthening the secret legal battle's apparent tie to Mueller's probe.

The first appeal appears to have been rejected by a D.C. Circuit panel as premature. The witness's lawyers asked the full bench of the appeals court to review that decision but a notation in court files says only nine of the court's 10 active judges participated. Bowing out was Judge Greg Katsas, the court's only member appointed by President Donald Trump.

Katsas served as a deputy White House counsel before Trump tapped him for the powerful D.C. Circuit last year. At Katsas's confirmation hearing, he acknowledged working on some issues related to the Russia investigation and signaled he would take a broad view of his recusal obligations stemming from that work.

"In cases of doubt, I would probably err on the side of recusal," Katsas told senators last October.

A spokesman for Mueller's office, Peter Carr, declined to comment on the litigation.

Lawyers for Trump said the mystery grand jury subpoena fight moving through the D.C. Circuit had nothing to do with the president. “No idea,” said Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow when shown the docket for the case.

Attorneys for Stone said they didn’t know of anyone challenging a Mueller subpoena beyond Miller. Miller's lawyers agreed with Mueller's prosecutors to make many aspects of that dispute public.

No such agreement appears to have been struck in the other fight, although Mueller's team and the mystery witness did file a joint motion earlier this month asking the appeals court to expedite resolution of the dispute.

Several other lawyers who represent witnesses in the Mueller investigation also said they were unaware of who's crossing legal swords with the special counsel's team in the largely secret case.

A few, bare-bones details about the dispute are available in the public record. While all records about the litigation in the district court are sealed, the D.C. Circuit's docket shows that the case was brought in the District Court on Aug. 16 and Howell ruled on it on Sept. 19. The initial appeal was filed five days later.


"The bottom line is the most likely scenario is someone filed a motion to quash or otherwise resisted a grand jury subpoena, and the judge issued an order denying that and saying the witness needs to testify," said Ted Boutrous, a Gibson Dunn & Crutcher attorney who has handled grand jury-related litigation for journalists and media organizations.

It's unclear whether the case the appeals court has agreed to hear in December involves an assertion of attorney-client privilege or some other privilege, is framed as a broader attack on Mueller's authority, or perhaps advances both sets of arguments.

"It's very hard to tell from this docket," Boutrous said.

The grand jury cases pose a threat to Mueller's investigation because they can serve as vehicles to get questions of his authority and legal legitimacy before appellate judges relatively quickly. Such questions have also been raised by defendants in some of Mueller's criminal cases, but all the human defendants who have set foot in a courtroom have ultimately decided to plead guilty and drop any challenges to the special counsel's authority or tactics.

One Russian company charged in and fighting a Mueller case, Concord Management and Consulting, has attacked the special counsel's authority, but the judge turned down the motion. Concord attempted an immediate appeal, but since dropped it.

Mystery cases moving through the courts involving grand jury matters and independent counsel matters aren’t uncommon. A 1997 conflict-of-interest investigation into AmeriCorps chief Eli Segal’s fundraising activities was conducted under seal from its start. And a final report remains out of public view involving another Clinton-era probe into Labor Secretary Alexis Herman and influence peddling accusations.

“This can get a step or two weirder than it already is,” said an attorney representing a senior Trump staffer in the Russia inquiry. The lawyer recalled a case from a previous investigation where he couldn’t even get to see a judge’s opinion because it was under seal.

“It could be anyone who’s been subpoenaed by the special counsel for anything,” the attorney added.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/ ... end-938572

Rudy Giuliani’s speech with a sanctioned Russian official was ‘total bulls**t,’ said one attendee
"It was a total bullshit talk."
CASEY MICHEL
OCT 24, 2018, 3:06 PM

TRUMP ADVISER RUDY GIULIANI'S SPEECH IN ARMENIA LEFT HEADS SCRATCHING ON TUESDAY. CREDIT: CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY
Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, raised eyebrows when ThinkProgress first reported that he would be speaking alongside a sanctioned Russian official at a panel in Armenia on Tuesday.

The confusion was only amplified by the actual content of Giuliani’s speech — prompting observers to question why the former New York City mayor would be invited to speak about technology in the first place.

Giuliani appeared next to sanctioned Russian official Sergei Glazyev, a man with a history of working closely with some of the U.S.’s most notorious anti-Semites. The pair were on a panel at the Eurasian Week conference, an annual affair dedicated to the future of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus.

The topic of Giuliani’s panel was “Technological breakthrough and EAEU potential,” a subject on which Giuliani would appear to have little expertise. But that lack of knowledge didn’t stop Giuliani — whom Trump previously named as an adviser on cybersecurity affairs — from speaking for roughly 20 minutes on topics ranging from sharing intelligence to electric grids to the safety of driver-less cars.

A screenshot of Giuliani's winding, rambling speech in Armenia.
A SCREENSHOT OF GIULIANI'S WINDING, RAMBLING SPEECH IN ARMENIA.
His lack of expertise on the various topics was immediately apparent to at least one member of the audience.

“Giuliani showed up, and they gave him the podium, and he gave a talk on cybersecurity — but quite frankly it was a total bullshit talk,” one attendee, who requested anonymity, told ThinkProgress.

Despite Giuliani’s claims that he was in Armenia as a private citizen, both conference material and his own introduction identified him as an adviser to Trump. (Needless to say, Giuliani is the most prominent Trump adviser to now speak alongside a sanctioned Russian official in a supposedly private capacity.) And when he was asked whether the U.S. and EAEU could potentially cooperate in the realm of cybersecurity, Giuliani responded, “I don’t see any risks in sharing secrets on cybersecurity.”

The EAEU, of course, includes Russia, which led hacking and social media interference efforts to support Trump’s campaign and sow division across the U.S. Likewise, the EAEU was initially positioned as the Kremlin’s grand geopolitical project following Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 — although that project eventually faltered following Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Despite Giuliani’s nominal role as a cybersecurity adviser to the president, his work on the matter appears negligible, and it’s unclear whether he’s accomplished anything of note while in the position — besides flying to Armenia to stand alongside Glazyev.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, is scheduled to speak alongside a sanctioned Russian official Tuesday in Armenia. CREDIT: JACK TAYLOR / GETTY
Why is Rudy Giuliani scheduled to speak alongside a sanctioned Russian official?
Giuliani’s partners
It’s also worth noting who joined Giuliani at the conference: In addition to Glazyev, Giuliani’s company included individuals like Ara Abrahamyan, a businessman who has previously said that Putin “gives orders and I carry them out,” and others who have vocally defended the Kremlin in the past.

Sanctioned Russian official Sergei Glazyev (center), who has worked in the past with some of America's most notorious anti-Semites, listens to Giuliani's speech. CREDIT: EURASIAN WEEK CONFERENCE
SANCTIONED RUSSIAN OFFICIAL SERGEI GLAZYEV (CENTER), WHO HAS WORKED IN THE PAST WITH SOME OF AMERICA'S MOST NOTORIOUS ANTI-SEMITES, LISTENS TO GIULIANI'S SPEECH. CREDIT: EURASIAN WEEK CONFERENCE
As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Kovensky noted:

Giuliani was invited to the event by Russian-Armenian multimillionaire Ara [Abrahamyan], who heads the Union of Armenians of Russia, according to a local press report. [Abrahamyan], an UNESCO goodwill ambassador, was awarded an order “For merit to the fatherland” by Putin at the Kremlin last year.

[Abrahamyan] sits on the advisory board of TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, a consulting firm the New York Times described as “providing image consulting to Russian oligarchs and clients with deep Kremlin ties.”

Another listed speaker, Russian official Georgy Kalamanov, recently offered a full-throated defense of the Kremlin against accusations that Moscow was responsible for the poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal in the U.K. (For good measure, one of the few Americans at the conference, Daniel Witt, has his own history of helping whitewash post-Soviet dictatorships.)

All told, Giuliani’s speech was an effective capstone to a series of questionable decisions that Trump’s personal lawyer has recently made, including his bizarre condemnation of Romania for cracking down on corruption too effectively.

It’s unclear if Giuliani was paid to attend the event in Armenia. However, Giuliani has picked up numerous clients as part of his work at Giuliani Security & Safety, his personal consulting firm — clients he’s been only too happy to help, regardless of his position as Trump’s adviser and personal lawyer. Neither Giuliani’s firm nor conference organizers responded to ThinkProgress’s questions.

For at least one person who attended Giuliani’s speech, the talk was a waste of time.

“Maybe he just assumed people in the audience don’t speak fluent English, so he could get away with it,” the conference attendee told ThinkProgress. “Eventually it got to the point where I started to reevaluate my life and think, ‘What the fuck am I doing here, sitting here listening to Rudy Giuliani talk about something he clearly knows nothing about when I have real work to get back to?'”
https://thinkprogress.org/rudy-giuliani ... 1a9cdff8e/

MARIA BUTINA’S LEGAL TEAM EMBRACES DISINFORMATION (WITH HELP FROM RUSSIA)

October 25, 2018/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Informants, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
One key prong of Republican propaganda attempting to discredit the Mueller investigation has been to claim Trump associates were targeted by informants. Perhaps the most brazen example was when Roger Stone claimed a Russian whose offer of dirt he entertained (but claims to have refused to pay for) was an FBI informant. But George Papapdopoulos has spawned an entire subindustry of such claims.

It appears that Maria Butina’s attorneys have adopted that approach. In a letter to her attorneys the prosecutors posted to the docket the other day, they insist (as DOJ has had to insist to Republicans in Congress) that they are not sitting on evidence of approaches by informants.

During our previous discussions, you have advanced certain hypothetical scenarios involving your client, including a supposed “dangle” operation or the acquisition of exculpatory information from “Cis,” which we take to mean confidential government informants. It appeared at the time of our discussions, that you based these ideas not on firsthand knowledge of any events, but rather on speculation based on claims made in some unidentified media articles. Inexplicably, however, in your October 18, 2018 email, you–for the first time–firmly assert that “[w]e know this information exists [and] have called it out by name…” [emphasis added]. The government was surprised by this newly adamant assertion, and we invite you to provide us any additional information you may have concerning the provenance or existence of the information you request.

Notwithstanding its speculative nature, the government took your original request seriously and made specific inquiries about the hypothetical scenarios you advanced. Regarding the scenarios described in your October 18, 2018 email, based on our reviews to date, we are not aware of any information that would trigger any disclosure obligations regarding either a “dangle,” successful or otherwise, or information obtained from any confidential informant. We are aware of no surveillance targeting your client that occurred prior to in or around [redacted] We will obviously continue to review the government’s holdings for such information, as well as any additional surveillance records of your client and we will continue to discuss with you any other materials that you consider potentially exculpatory. If that ongoing review yields information that should be disclosed to you, we will certainly do so.

Don’t get me wrong. DOJ has a history of playing games with discovery, or of interpreting discovery narrowly so as to hide other prongs of an investigation. So the allegation from Butina’s lawyers, by itself, is not outrageous.

Except it seems to be a part of the Devin Nunes/Mark Meadows/Jim Jordan propaganda effort in Congress, driven by a bunch of half-wits who leak information that they don’t understand.

Indeed, this incident raises real questions for me on whether the House effort has now taken not only to defending Donald Trump, but also Maria Butina, an alleged foreign spy whose own writings indicate Putin knew of her operation.

Meanwhile, DOJ’s letter to Butina’s team reveals that they have not picked up a hard drive of discovery DOJ made available a month ago.

With respect to materials provided to you so far, we have made an FBI CART examiner available to you to help you navigate the electronic evidence, and we made a second hard drive of electronic evidence available to you over a month ago, which you have thus far reclined to retrieve.

The claim that Butina’s team has left evidence sitting for a month comes just days before Russia’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, claimed that DOJ has not handed over discovery to her and used that to claim DOJ is treating her unfairly.

It is baffling that the court considering Maria Butina’s case has not yet handed over the case material to her, although the hearing is scheduled for November 13. Unfortunately, this gives us yet another reason to doubt the impartiality of American justice system.

Again, it is not unheard of for DOJ to play games with discovery. But in this case, particularly in context of obvious propaganda serving Trump and other Republicans’ interest, it seems like Butina’s defenders both in and outside the country have decided on a disinformation strategy rather than a direct defense of her case.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/10/25/m ... om-russia/

Text Messages Show Roger Stone Was Working to Get a Pardon for Julian Assange

Robert Mueller’s investigators have examined Stone’s efforts to neutralize possible criminal charges against the WikiLeaks founder.

Dan Friedman

October 25, 2018 10:27 AM


In early January, Roger Stone, the longtime Republican operative and adviser to Donald Trump, sent a text message to an associate stating that he was actively seeking a presidential pardon for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange—and felt optimistic about his chances. “I am working with others to get JA a blanket pardon,” Stone wrote, in a January 6 exchange of text messages obtained by Mother Jones. “It’s very real and very possible. Don’t fuck it up.” Thirty-five minutes later, Stone added, “Something very big about to go down.”

The recipient of the messages was Randy Credico, a New York-based comedian and left-leaning political activist whom Stone has identified as his back channel to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign—a claim Credico strongly denies. During the election, Stone, a political provocateur who got his start working for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, made statements that suggested he had knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to publish emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other Democrats, and his interactions with WikiLeaks have become an intense focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian election interference. As Mueller’s team zeroes in on Stone, they have examined his push for an Assange pardon—which could be seen as an attempt to interfere with the Russia probe—and have questioned at least one of Stone’s associates about the effort.

“An effort by Stone to try to help Assange secure a pardon could be considered evidence of a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” says former prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig.
Assange has not been publicly charged with a crime in the United States, though the Justice Department has investigated WikiLeaks over its publication of classified material and role in releasing emails pilfered from Democratic targets by hackers working for Russian intelligence. Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions described arresting Assange, who for the last six years has taken refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy to evade criminal charges in Sweden stemming from a rape allegation, as a “priority.” Justice Department prosecutors have considered charges against Assange since 2010, when WikiLeaks released more than a quarter million diplomatic cables.

Credico says Stone repeatedly discussed his effort to win a pardon for Assange. At one point, he notes, Stone claimed he was working with Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News personality and former New Jersey Superior Court judge, on a plan in which Napolitano would float the idea on his show or directly to Trump. Napolitano said in a statement that he “categorically denies” working with Stone to secure a pardon for Assange.

Stone confirmed the pardon effort but declined to answer specific questions. “I most definitely advocated a pardon for Assange,” he said in an email. He also said he had “most certainly urged my friend Andrew Napolitano” to support an Assange pardon.

It is not clear how far Stone’s effort went, and Credico says he wondered if Stone was being truthful. Stone, he notes, also claimed to have helped convince Trump to pardon former Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, in August 2017. A supporter of WikiLeaks and its enigmatic leader, Credico says Stone’s text messages concerning an Assange pardon were part of a barrage of communications the Republican operative sent him earlier this year in a bid to convince him not to dispute Stone’s description of Credico as his WikiLeaks go-between. “He was trying to get me not to talk,” Credico contends.

Stone’s pardon efforts have drawn scrutiny from Mueller. Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide who once worked closely with Stone, told Mother Jones that prosecutors asked him during a February interview if Stone “ever discussed pardons and Assange.” Nunberg said he had not heard Stone discuss such an effort, and prosecutors did not raise the subject during his subsequent testimony before a grand jury. Credico declined to say if the topic came up when he testified before a grand jury convened by Mueller last month.

Former federal prosecutors say Mueller’s interest in Stone’s bid to help Assange may be part of an effort to untangle the relationship between the men and could factor in a potential effort to expose a criminal conspiracy involving the hacked emails released by WikiLeaks. “If Stone worked with WikiLeaks on the release DNC emails, an effort by Stone to try to help Assange secure a pardon could be considered evidence of a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” says Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior counsel to Kenneth Starr on the Whitewater investigation.

In August, Stone raised the notion of pardoning Assange in an interview with the Washington Examiner, suggesting that prosecuting him was akin to targeting a journalist. “Even the Obama Justice Department concluded Assange did nothing the New York Times and Washington Post have not done, which is obtain classified information through whistleblowers, verifying its authenticity and publishing it,” Stone said.

Stone has also publicly urged Trump to pardon others ensnared in the Russia probe, including his former business partner, Paul Manafort, who was found guilty of bank and tax fraud in August and pleaded guilty last month to money laundering, illegal lobbying, and other crimes, and Michael Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition. Both Manafort and Flynn are cooperating with the Mueller investigation. When earlier this year Trump pardoned far-right pundit Dinesh D’Souza, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in 2014, Stone described it as a sign that Trump allies mired in the Russia scandal could expect similar treatment.

“It has to be a signal to Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort and even Robert S. Mueller III: Indict people for crimes that don’t pertain to Russian collusion and this is what could happen,” Stone told the Washington Post.

The White House referred questions about Stone’s push for pardons for Assange and others to Trump’s outside counsel. One of Trump’s attorneys, Jay Sekulow, declined to comment, saying, “We don’t discuss our ongoing conversations with the Office of Special Counsel.”

Stone’s push was just one of several efforts by Assange allies to help him win a pardon or leniency. Last year, Adam Waldman, a lawyer who also worked as a lobbyist for Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate reportedly close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, approached the Justice Department on Assange’s behalf. Waldman sought a deal with US prosecutors where Assange would get safe passage to the United States to discuss his plans to release a stolen archive of documents that WikiLeaks obtained detailing CIA hacking operations. Assange seemed to hope to use the CIA material as a bargaining chip to win a pledge of legal immunity. That effort fizzled: The Justice Department refused to negotiate and WikiLeaks dumped the CIA documents in March.

Subsequently, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who is known for his pro-Russia views, advocated on Assange’s behalf. In August 2017, he met for three hours with Assange in London. Afterward, Rohrabacher pitched White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on a plan where Trump would pardon the WikiLeaks founder in exchange for Assange releasing information that would supposedly contradict the US intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee. Kelly reportedly declined to pass the idea on to Trump.

Barry Pollack, a lawyer who represents Assange in the United States, said in an email that he is not “involved in any efforts to obtain a pardon on [Assange’s] behalf.” But Pollack said, “A pardon for Mr. Assange is warranted. He has been in legal limbo for far too long, merely for publishing truthful information.”

Mueller’s examination of the pardon push forms part of the special counsel’s broader probe of Stone’s relationship and contacts with WikiLeaks—an investigation that appears to be heating up. The Washington Post recently reported that Credico told Mueller’s grand jury that Stone claimed in September 2016 that a different source was supplying him with inside information concerning WikiLeaks. (Stone told the Post he was referring only to secondhand information passed to him from a journalist.) CNN reported on Monday that Mueller has been looking into whether right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi acted as an intermediary between Stone and Assange.

The special counsel’s scrutiny has many people, including Stone, speculating that the self-described dirty trickster may be indicted after the midterm elections. As Stone recently emailed supporters while drumming up donations to his legal defense fund, “Robert Mueller is coming for me.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... n-assange/

Trump Official Did Undisclosed Work With Scandal-Plagued GOP Fundraiser
BEVERLY HILLS, CA - JUNE 24: Fred Sands and Elliot Broidy attend Dedication And Celebration Dinner For The Fred Sands Institute Of Real Estate At Graziadio School, Pepperdine University at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel on June 24, 2015 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for Pepperdine University)Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images North America
By Justin Elliot ProPublica
October 25, 2018 2:08 pm
Meetings arranged for Elliott Broidy, a major Trump fundraiser and former Republican National Committee official, should have triggered foreign agent registration, experts say.

A current State Department official helped a top fundraiser for Donald Trump arrange meetings with U.S. senators and Angolan officials in early 2017, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. Neither the official nor the fundraiser registered as a foreign agent.


Aryeh Lightstone helped plan the January 2017 meetings with U.S. senators, high-ranking Angolan government officials and the Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy, the emails show. Several months later, Lightstone was appointed by the Trump administration to a top position in the U.S. Embassy in Israel. The involvement of a now-sitting Trump administration official in Broidy’s work has not previously been reported.

Broidy has since been embroiled in scandal, stepping down from his Republican National Committee deputy finance chair post after the revelation that he agreed to pay $1.6 million in a settlement with a Playboy model he reportedly impregnated. (Broidy has said it was just to help her financially, and he stopped paying her after the arrangement became public.)

The Washington Post reported in August that the Justice Department is investigating whether Broidy “sought to sell his influence with the Trump administration by offering to deliver U.S. government actions for foreign officials.” Several news outlets have also reported that Broidy worked for or sought to do business with a Malaysian financier and the United Arab Emirates. (Learn more about Broidy in this “Trump, Inc.” podcast episode.)

Some legal experts argue that Lightstone and Broidy should have registered with the government for the Angolan meetings, though representatives for both dispute that. Work for foreign governments must be publicly reported under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires people conducting business with foreign countries for political purposes to disclose and periodically report details of that work.

“Arranging meetings between a foreign government and U.S. government officials to discuss the foreign policy of the U.S. vis-à-vis a foreign government or to discuss the relationship between the U.S. and the foreign county would in my view count as political activities requiring registration,” said Joshua Rosenstein, a FARA specialist at the law firm Sandler Reiff.


For years, the foreign agents law was sparsely enforced. Recently, the Justice Department has pursued high-profile prosecutions based on the law, most notably of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who was paid millions to represent a Ukrainian political party.

Broidy’s attorney said in a statement he “has never done any work, in relation to Angola or otherwise, that would require registration under FARA.” He declined to comment on the Post report of a Justice Department investigation, calling it a “rumor.”

In a statement, Lightstone said he “never worked for or received any compensation from Elliott Broidy, Threat Deterrence, or Circinus,” referring to Broidy’s companies. The statement added that Lightstone “has never engaged in activity that would require him to register under FARA.” The State Department declined to comment.

In January 2017, Angola paid Broidy’s company $6 million for intelligence services, according to the emails and Broidy’s lawyer. The Angolan defense and intelligence minister were in Washington and were “looking forward to fostering a closer relationship with the United States and the Trump Administration,” Broidy’s assistant said in a Jan. 15, 2017, email to an aide for Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

The emails show that Lightstone helped plan the meetings with Cotton and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.; the Angolan officials; and Broidy. In one email to Broidy under the subject line “Contacts & next steps,” Lightstone lists several senators and advice for how to approach them.


“Cotton – ideal lunch in Senate dining room,” Lightstone wrote. “My gut is if we can lock in these Senators we have a good showing – plus the group you have on the house side [sic].” He added, “Please advise if I am looking to do anything else?”

In his statement, Broidy’s attorney described the meetings as “simply handshake opportunities and purely introductory in nature” and added that “no substantive matters of any kind were discussed. There certainly were no policy-related discussions.”

In July 2017, several months after Lightstone helped arrange the meetings for the Angolans, he was appointed to the Israel Embassy post. He is now considered one of the most influential people in the embassy as a top aide to Ambassador David Friedman. Lightstone’s connection to Broidy has not been previously reported.

Lightstone and Broidy have long been friends and fixtures in pro-Israel advocacy circles. They co-hosted fundraisers focused on pro-Israel advocacy in the 2016 election cycle for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. Lightstone also owns a stake in Broidy’s company, Threat Deterrence Capital LLC, as ProPublica previously reported.

Angola, which is a major oil producer, has military and economic interests with the U.S. government. In May 2017 Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis signed a memorandum of understanding with the Angolan defense minister to “enhance the security cooperation” between the U.S. and Angola. That was the same official, João Lourenço, for whom Lightstone helped arranged meetings with U.S. senators. Lourenço is now president of the country.


Broidy’s attorney, Chris Clark of Latham & Watkins, described the emails about Broidy’s dealings with the Angolans as “stolen and likely doctored.” He declined to give specific examples of any emails that had been altered. Broidy this year sued Qatar and several people accusing them of hacking his emails to retaliate against him for working for one of Qatar’s regional rivals, the United Arab Emirates. Qatar has denied the allegations.

The embassy of Angola and the offices of Cotton and Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/arye ... ott-broidy

BREAKING: A civil RICO suit has been brought against The Trump Organization, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump in United States District Court for their participation in a pyramid scheme

F5AAED7F-AC66-40E6-B013-F15079A97845.jpeg

Trump and His Children Accused of Investment Scams in Lawsuit
By Erik Larson and Shahien Nasiripour
October 29, 2018, 11:47 AM CDT


President Donald Trump and his three eldest children were named in a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the family of targeting working-class Americans with investment scams. The suit was filed Monday in federal court in New York by four individuals who say they represent thousands of other victims.

Key Allegations:

"The Trumps conned each of these victims into giving up hundreds of thousands of dollars -- losses that many experienced as devastating and life-altering," suit says.
Trump, along with his children Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka, have for years sought to systematically defraud "economically marginalized people" looking to invest in their educations or start small businesses, according to the complaint.
The suit focuses on the Trump family’s involvement in a multi-level marketing company called ACN, which offers business opportunities to participants.
From 2005 to 2015, Trump endorsed ACN in exchange for millions of dollars in "secret payments," the suit claims. Trump allegedly said in promotions that participants have a "great opportunity" without "any of the risks most entrepreneurs have to take."
The lawsuit is here: Doe v. The Trump Corp., 18-cv-9936, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ment-scams

The stories of the alleged victims of this fraud are absolutely heartbreaking





This is the pyramid scheme Trump said he didn't get paid to endorse. (He was actually paid millions.)



Trump featured the pyramid scheme, which he was paid to endorse, on The Celebrity Apprentice, without disclosing his financial ties to the company

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum