The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[N.E. Brigand]

Late last week Business Insider reported that the Trump Organization had removed Allen Weisselberg from his role as a director of Trump's Scottish golf course, and then the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reported today that Weisselberg had been replaced by Trump's sons as the director of more than 40 Trump Org. subsidiaries. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow tonight said that there appears to be no law in either Scotland or the U.S. requiring an indicted CFO to be removed, but she said that it's possible the Trump Org. has agreements with banks or other lenders that require this step. Others had speculated on the possibility of this happening before Weisselberg was indicted.

I can understand a bank requiring that a company with which it does business not have someone who has been charged with multiple financial crimes as its CFO.

But in this case, the company itself has been charged with multiple financial crimes. Shouldn't the bank's policy also require that the company step down from its role?

[N.E. Brigand]

Putting this here because it has to do with media sourcing:

Ben Smith, who covers the media for The New York Times, reports that, based on his conversation with 16 different journalists working for various outlets, Fox News host Tucker Carlson is a regular source for (1) embarrasing stories about Donald Trump and (2) behind-the-scenes stories about Fox News.

Smith writes that it's an "open secret" that Carlson plays both sides, and that his readiness to act as a source leads other journalists to go easy on Carlson himself.

Edited to add this wise observation (source):

That Tucker Carlson is a "secret" source for reporters is not a surprise and isn’t really news. The real story, which isn’t explicitly mentioned, is that the country’s most powerful reporters cozy up to a famed white supremacist and launder stories on his behalf.

As I said, the mainstream media skews to the right.

It probably seems like I'm belaboring this point unnecessarily, but I emphasize it because despite (or because of) his tendency to push racist talking points, Tucker Carlson is one of America's most popular broadcast figures, and as the Times piece notes, he's very influential even in the mainstream that he claims to despise -- even though (as David Frum notes here) Carlson is so well known as a fabulist that his employer, Fox News, successfully argued in court that he couldn't defame someone, not even when falsely accusing that person of a crime, because his statements "would not have been taken by reasonable listeners as factual pronouncements but simply as instances in which [people like Carlson] expressed their views over the air in the crude and hyperbolic manner that has, over the years, become their verbal stock in trade" (that quote is Fox's argument, which again, won in court).

This new Washington Post story reveals that Carlson's habit of telling false stories extends even to descriptions of his biography:

How Tucker Carlson Became the Voice of White Grievance

Carlson has written that what he describes as his anti-P.C. feelings go back all the way to his experiences in elementary school:

Carlson said he just wanted liberals to "stop blubbering and teach us to read. . . . . Mrs. Raymond [his first grade teacher] never did teach us; my father had to hire a tutor to get me through phonics."

So the reporter looked up Mrs. Raymond, now aged 77, who was flabbergasted that the boy she had remembered as "very polite and sweet" has grown up to tell lies about her. It's true that Carlson did need help with phonics, but she was the person hired to tutor him at home.

And that's just one of the anecdotes that the reporter debunked.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That's really disturbing!

[River]

Um, guys...do you think this is legit or that the Guardian's been had? I have no evidence that they've been had, BTW. I just can't believe such a thing actually happened.

Images of the leaked documents are in the linked article. Text below.

Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House

Exclusive: Documents suggest Russia launched secret multi-agency effort to interfere in US democracy

Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House

Exclusive: Documents suggest Russia launched secret multi-agency effort to interfere in US democracy

Support independent Guardian journalism

Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh
Thu 15 Jul 2021 06.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 15 Jul 2021 12.45 EDT

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.

The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.

By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.

Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.

The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.

The Kremlin responded dismissively. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the idea that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction” when contacted by the Guardian on Thursday morning.

Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House

Exclusive: Documents suggest Russia launched secret multi-agency effort to interfere in US democracy

Luke Harding, Julian Borger and Dan Sabbagh
Thu 15 Jul 2021 06.00 EDT

Last modified on Thu 15 Jul 2021 12.45 EDT

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.

The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.

By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.

Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.

The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.
Vladimir Putin holds a meeting with permanent members of the security council on 22 January 2016 at the Kremlin
Vladimir Putin holds a meeting with permanent members of the security council on 22 January 2016 at the Kremlin. Photograph: Alexei Nikolsky/Russian presidential press service/TASS

The Kremlin responded dismissively. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the idea that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction” when contacted by the Guardian on Thursday morning.
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The report – “No 32-04 \ vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.

“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.

This would help bring about Russia’s favoured “theoretical political scenario”. A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts.

The Kremlin summit

There is no doubt that the meeting in January 2016 took place – and that it was convened inside the Kremlin.

An official photo of the occasion shows Putin at the head of the table, seated beneath a Russian Federation flag and a two-headed golden eagle. Russia’s then prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, attended, together with the veteran foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

Also present were Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister in charge of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; Mikhail Fradkov, the then chief of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service; and Alexander Bortnikov, the boss of the FSB spy agency.Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB’s former director, attended too as security council secretary.

According to a press release, the discussion covered the economy and Moldova.

The document seen by the Guardian suggests the security council’s real, covert purpose was to discuss the confidential proposals drawn up by the president’s analytical service in response to US sanctions against Moscow.

The author appears to be Vladimir Symonenko, the senior official in charge of the Kremlin’s expert department – which provides Putin with analytical material and reports, some of them based on foreign intelligence.
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The papers indicate that on 14 January 2016 Symonenko circulated a three-page executive summary of his team’s conclusions and recommendations.

In a signed order two days later, Putin instructed the then chief of his foreign policy directorate, Alexander Manzhosin, to convene a closed briefing of the national security council.

Its purpose was to further study the document, the order says. Manzhosin was given a deadline of five days to make arrangements.

What was said inside the second-floor Kremlin senate building room is unknown. But the president and his intelligence officials appear to have signed off on a multi-agency plan to interfere in US democracy, framed in terms of justified self-defence.

Various measures are cited that the Kremlin might adopt in response to what it sees as hostile acts from Washington. The paper lays out several American weaknesses. These include a “deepening political gulf between left and right”, the US’s “media-information” space, and an anti-establishment mood under President Barack Obama.

The paper does not name Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 rival. It does suggest employing media resources to undermine leading US political figures.

There are paragraphs on how Russia might insert “media viruses” into American public life, which could become self-sustaining and self-replicating. These would alter mass consciousness, especially in certain groups, it says.

After the meeting, according to a separate leaked document, Putin issued a decree setting up a new and secret interdepartmental commission. Its urgent task was to realise the goals set out in the “special part” of document No 32-04 \ vd.

Members of the new working body were stated to include Shoigu, Fradkov and Bortnikov. Shoigu was named commission chair. The decree – ukaz in Russian – said the group should take practical steps against the US as soon as possible. These were justified on national security grounds and in accordance with a 2010 federal law, 390-FZ, which allows the council to formulate state policy on security matters.

According to the document, each spy agency was given a role. The defence minister was instructed to coordinate the work of subdivisions and services. Shoigu was also responsible for collecting and systematising necessary information and for “preparing measures to act on the information environment of the object” – a command, it seems, to hack sensitive American cyber-targets identified by the SVR.

The SVR was told to gather additional information to support the commission’s activities. The FSB was assigned counter-intelligence. Putin approved the apparent document, dated 22 January 2016, which his chancellery stamped.

The measures were effective immediately on Putin’s signature, the decree says. The spy chiefs were given just over a week to come back with concrete ideas, to be submitted by 1 February.

Written in bureaucratic language, the papers appear to offer an unprecedented glimpse into the usually hidden world of Russian government decision-making.

Putin has repeatedly denied accusations of interfering in western democracy. The documents seem to contradict this claim. They suggest the president, his spy officers and senior ministers were all intimately involved in one of the most important and audacious espionage operations of the 21st century: a plot to help put the “mentally unstable” Trump in the White House.
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The papers appear to set out a route map for what actually happened in 2016.

A matter of weeks after the security council meeting, GRU hackers raided the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and subsequently released thousands of private emails in an attempt to hurt Clinton’s election campaign.

The report seen by the Guardian features details redolent of Russian intelligence work, diplomatic sources say. The thumbnail sketch of Trump’s personality is characteristic of Kremlin spy agency analysis, which places great emphasis on building up a profile of individuals using both real and cod psychology.

Moscow would gain most from a Republican victory, the paper states. This could lead to a “social explosion” that would in turn weaken the US president, it says. There were international benefits from a Trump win, it stresses. Putin would be able in clandestine fashion to dominate any US-Russia bilateral talks, to deconstruct the White House’s negotiating position, and to pursue bold foreign policy initiatives on Russia’s behalf, it says.

Other parts of the multi-page report deal with non-Trump themes. It says sanctions imposed by the US after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea have contributed to domestic tensions. The Kremlin should seek alternative ways of attracting liquidity into the Russian economy, it concludes.

The document recommends the reorientation of trade and hydrocarbon exports towards China. Moscow’s focus should be to influence the US and its satellite countries, it says, so they drop sanctions altogether or soften them.

‘Spell-binding’ documents

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s spy agencies and author of The Red Web, said the leaked material “reflects reality”. “It’s consistent with the procedures of the security services and the security council,” he said. “Decisions are always made like that, with advisers providing information to the president and a chain of command.”

He added: “The Kremlin micromanages most of these operations. Putin has made it clear to his spies since at least 2015 that nothing can be done independently from him. There is no room for independent action.” Putin decided to release stolen DNC emails following a security council meeting in April 2016, Soldatov said, citing his own sources.

Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador in Moscow and an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, described the documents as “spell-binding”. “They reflect the sort of discussion and recommendations you would expect. There is a complete misunderstanding of the US and China. They are written for a person [Putin] who can’t believe he got anything wrong.”

Wood added: “There is no sense Russia might have made a mistake by invading Ukraine. The report is fully in line with the sort of thing I would expect in 2016, and even more so now. There is a good deal of paranoia. They believe the US is responsible for everything. This view is deeply dug into the soul of Russia’s leaders.”

Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

[N.E. Brigand]

Um, guys...do you think this is legit or that the Guardian's been had? I have no evidence that they've been had, BTW. I just can't believe such a thing actually happened.

In the past, some other journalists have questioned the reliability of the lead reporter on this piece, Luke Harding. That doesn't mean they're right about him or that these documents are fake. As described, the documents accord with my general views on Russia's role in the 2016 elections (if anything, I think the situation was worse than portrayed there). But I am suspicious about the idea of these plans actually being written down and signed by Putin. I see that one linguist has already found apparent errors in the text suggesting that it wasn't originally written in Russian. And Marcy Wheeler, who has consistently been *very* critical of the Steele dossier (which she believes is riddled with Russian disinformation), but who also has found much of the evidence for Trump-Russian collusion quite credible, argues that if anything, the date of this supposed meeting is too late, or as she says: "It seems like the story you'd tell if you wanted to shift the timeline for some reason. 'Hey! Let's make pretend it happened at that Moldova meeting!'"

If she's right, then my guess is that there's some other genuine evidence about Trump/Russia that's likely to become public soon, and Russia decided to fake this document in order to discredit that evidence.

[N.E. Brigand]

Lots of good questions from experts here.

And to enlarge on my point from the previous post: what's described in these documents is what Mueller's report already says: Putin decided to help Trump win.

What's not in these documents is the much more important question that Mueller couldn't answer: to what extent did Trump know what Putin was doing and enable it?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

What N.E.B. said.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Inspector General for the Commerce Department has informed Congress that, having investigated former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross at Congress's request, the Inspector General has found evidence that Ross lied to Congress about why the Commerce Dept. tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

But the Inspector General also tells Congress that after referring the case to the Department of Justice, DOJ has declined to prosecute Ross. (We don't know why. DOJ usually doesn't explain decisions not to prosecute, and that's reasonable. Just ask Hillary Clinton!)

I find this decision particularly frustrating because the Commerce Dept. used phony arguments by Ross and others to defend the inclusion of the citizenship question in a case that went to the Supreme Court. By that time, a fair bit of evidence had already emerged that the real reason Commerce wanted to include the citizenship question was to discourage Hispanic Americans from responding. The Supreme Court found that Commerce's explanations were pretextual and blocked them from using the question. (But bizarrely, the Court said that if Commerce came back with a better explanation, they'd reconsider. That makes no sense. Once you've lied to the court, nothing you say to the court later should be trusted. If the court says the real reason you want to do X is A, even though you claimed the reason was B, then it shouldn't matter if you later say that you're doing it because of C. We all know that your real reason is A. You shouldn't get to un-ring that bell.)

https://www.govexec.com/management/2021 ... us/183843/

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I obviously do not know this for sure, but I suspect that the reasons that they have decided not to prosecute are political, not because they have determined that a crime did not occur. Which is unfortunate.

[N.E. Brigand]

To be fair, I know that it can be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone lied and wasn't merely mistaken. But it often seems that the rich and powerful are given more deference when it comes to the uncertainty of their state of mind.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Inspector General for the Commerce Department has informed Congress that, having investigated former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross at Congress's request, the Inspector General has found evidence that Ross lied to Congress about why the Commerce Dept. tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

But the Inspector General also tells Congress that after referring the case to the Department of Justice, DOJ has declined to prosecute Ross. (We don't know why. DOJ usually doesn't explain decisions not to prosecute, and that's reasonable. Just ask Hillary Clinton!)

I find this decision particularly frustrating because the Commerce Dept. used phony arguments by Ross and others to defend the inclusion of the citizenship question in a case that went to the Supreme Court. By that time, a fair bit of evidence had already emerged that the real reason Commerce wanted to include the citizenship question was to discourage Hispanic Americans from responding. The Supreme Court found that Commerce's explanations were pretextual and blocked them from using the question. (But bizarrely, the Court said that if Commerce came back with a better explanation, they'd reconsider. That makes no sense. Once you've lied to the court, nothing you say to the court later should be trusted. If the court says the real reason you want to do X is A, even though you claimed the reason was B, then it shouldn't matter if you later say that you're doing it because of C. We all know that your real reason is A. You shouldn't get to un-ring that bell.)

https://www.govexec.com/management/2021 ... us/183843/

Rachel Maddow tonight, citing an AP story (that I can't find online) said it was the Department of Justice during the Trump administration, not the during the Biden administration, that declined to prosecute Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and that this happened more than 18 months ago, before Congress was informed last week.

Searching around, I find that the news about Ross appeared at least three days ago, but the story wasn't widely covered until today -- and while the headline there is that the Dept. of Justice "will not" prosecute Ross, the text of the artile merely echoes the letter to Congress in saying that DOJ "declined" to do so, but neither the article nor the letter says when that happened, and the article says that DOJ declined to comment. Or at least that's apparently how the story originally appeared, but there's a correction at the end to say that DOJ and Commerce both clarified that the decision happened during the Trump administration.

As as Maddow noted tonight, that makes five different Trump cabinet secretaries whose departments' inspectors general referred them to the DOJ for potential prosecution, only to have DOJ decide not to pursue that course of action.

What are the rules about the DOJ taking another look at those decisions now?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't know. I would imagine that there is no reason why they could not revisit a decision like that* so long as it is within the statute of limitations (which it may not be), but, politics.

* It certainly isn't like the Cosby situation where there was supposedly some kind of implied or express agreement that the wrong-doer allegedly relied on in some way.

[elengil]

What I don't understand is - yes, they apparently were supposed to not use his own testimony against him, but could they not have simply fallen back on the testimony of the women rather than throwing out the thing entirely?? Like, revisit the case and say even without his own there was ample evidence, etc etc?

[River]

I don't know. I would imagine that there is no reason why they could not revisit a decision like that* so long as it is within the statute of limitations (which it may not be), but, politics.

They may also have bigger priorities?

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't know. I would imagine that there is no reason why they could not revisit a decision like that* so long as it is within the statute of limitations (which it may not be), but, politics.

They may also have bigger priorities?

That may be true, in so far as the Trump administration committed (or enabled) so many crimes that the Dept. of Justice simply can't keep up.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't think that there will be ANY prosecutions of ANY Trump administration officials by the Biden/Garland Justice Department.

[N.E. Brigand]

There were so many times that I heard from Donald Trump's supporters about how noble it was for him to have donated his presidential salary. That came to a total of $1.2 million he gave to the federal government. It sounds like a lot, but according to new reporting from Forbes, that amounts to less than 1% of the $2.4 billion his company earned while he was president. (It would have been $2.6 billion if not for the pandemic.) And remember, prior to Trump's administration, it was customary for decades for presidents to put their assets in a blind trust, in order to make it harder to bribe the nation's chief executive. Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm and other holdings into a blind trust, and he lost so much money (without knowing it) that after his presidency he had to sell the farm in order to recoup his loss.

And one reason I note it in this thread about "cases" is that one source of Trump's income over the past four years is money spent at this hotels and resorts that clearly violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

- - - - - - - - - -
Just so as to not start a new post, and not knowing where else to put this:

This is a pretty small scandal, and not criminal, but Donald Trump announced his campaign in June 2015 in Trump Tower, famously arriving by escalator. There were reports soon after, in The Hollywood Reporter and other outlets, that a sizeable portion of the crowd gathered to see him were paid actors. But these reports were vehemently denied by the Trump campaign, and by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in particular, who said that the campaign didn't pay anyone to attend, and I think it's fair to say that this news didn't get much attention in most stories about the announcement.

Yesterday, Lewandowski admitted that was a lie: he says the campaign did pay hundreds of people $50 each for a couple hours of pretending to be Trump supporters.

Other Republican campaigns at the time argued that Trump didn't have much support and was being helped by a credulous media. Imagine if all the news reports about Trump's announcement said that he was unable to draw a crowd and had to pay people to attend.

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't think that there will be ANY prosecutions of ANY Trump administration officials by the Biden/Garland Justice Department.

This may prove to be correct. But the manager of Trump's inaugural committee, Tom Barrack, today was indicted for being an unregistered foreign agent.

Edited to add: Barrack allegedly was acting as an agent of the United Arab Emirates. The indictment apparently doesn't mention this, but per the New York Times, Barrack's firm was paid $1.5 billion by that nation from 2016 to 2019. I wonder if that investment paid off.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

True. And I think that there is at least a 50% chance that Giuliani will be indicted on the same charge. But of course neither was ever a member of the administration.

I think that there is at least some chance that Ivanka Trump will get indicted, but not by the Justice Department and not for her role as a member of the administration, but rather for either her role in the Trump Organization and/or her role with the inaugural committee.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I moved the posts about the 1/6 Select Committee to the thread about the 2020 election results because that is where the topic of the 1/6 insurrection has been discussed.