The Russia Investigations and other Trump-related cases

[N.E. Brigand]

On March 21, 2017, then-Congressman Devin Nunes, Republican of California and Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, secretly visited the White House, where he was given information about the Trump-Russia investigation.

On March 22, 2017, Nunes publicly announced that he had uncovered important information about the Trump-Russia investigation, and he made a show of going to the White House to present Donald Trump team with the information ... but it was actually the same information he'd been given by the White House the previous day.

The information was meant to support Donald Trump's ludicrous claim about the FBI having wiretapped his campaign.

In November 2020, the Washington Post published a story about Michael Ellis, whom Donald Trump had just named, following his unaknowleged loss to Joe Biden, as the White House's general counsel. The Post noted that Ellis had played a part in arranging Nunes's 2017 escapade, which the Post referred to as a "midnight run." Subsequently the Post appended a correction on the story "noting that Nunes had stated he did not believe the wiretapping claims and that his visit to the White House 'took place during daylight hours.'" But Nunes, not content with having made a fool of himself suing the anonymous parody Twitter accounts named "Devin Nunes's Mom" and "Devin Nunes's Cow," sued the Post over the article, claiming that the story unfairly painted his skullduggery as being nefarious. Which, to be clear, it definitely was.

That lawsuit is still ongoing, more than two years later, and in a hearing today, the judge in the case, Trump-appointee Carl Nichols, so far appears to agree with the Post that Nunes has not been forthcoming in the discovery process.

[N.E. Brigand]

Tell me more about the evidence of financial crimes that Donald Trump may have committed which Italian authorities provided to Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham when they visited that nation as part of their efforts to undermine the Trump-Russia investigation.

[N.E. Brigand]

Tell me more about the evidence of financial crimes that Donald Trump may have committed which Italian authorities provided to Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham when they visited that nation as part of their efforts to undermine the Trump-Russia investigation.

Here's more: in October 2019, media outlets reported that John Durham's examination into the Trump-Russia investigation had let to a "criminal investigation" being opened. That was widely trumpeted by conservative pundits as indicating that someone like James Comey or Andrew McCabe was going to be charged with a crime relating to their investigation of Donald Trump. But really the new criminal investigation concerned allegations that Trump himself may have broken the law!

I'd really like some of the reporters who were duped in this way to burn their sources, who were clearly using them to spread a false narrative.

Also, when the Italians provided Durham and Bill Barr with their evidence, "rather than assign it to another prosecutor, Mr. Barr had Mr. Durham investigate the matter himself -- giving him criminal prosecution powers for the first time -- even though the possible wrongdoing by Mr. Trump did not fall squarely within Mr. Durham's assignment to scrutinize the origins of the Russia inquiry". That's just astonishing. Congressional Republicans spent a huge amount of time trying to falsely demonstrate that Robert Mueller had gone beyond the scope of his permitted inquiry, and now we learn that more than three years ago, Barr secretly expanded Durham's purview.

[N.E. Brigand]

Here's the full New York Times story: "How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia Inquiry Unraveled."

As others are asking: since Special Counsel John Durham opened a criminal investigation into whether Donald Trump committed financial crimes, isn't he required to include a charging declination in his final report? The article says Durham's work "is coming to an end" after running twice as long as Robert Mueller's investigation with almost nothing to show for it, so a report should be forthcoming. (I'm surprised Durham didn't try to keep it going indefinitely, or until Attorney General Merrick Garland had to shut him down, which he could then use to claim that his work was beign covered up.) If he does explain why he chose not to indict Donald Trump, I don't expect it will actually explain much.

The article also reveals that: (1) based on Russian intelligence sources that others considered to be misinformation, Durham sought emails sent by an aide to Democratic donor George Soros and even "used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them" but those emails apparently led nowhere; (2) the sudden departure of Durham's top aide Nora Dannehy in 2020 was the result "of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics" because he wanted to publish an unvetted draft report before the presidential election; (3) another lawyer left Durham's team because he felt that the evidence against Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann was "too flimsy" to support an indictment (Durham charged Sussmann anyway, but Sussmann was acquitted by a jury); (4) then-Attorney General William Barr threatened the National Security Agency in 2019 (after Mueller's report was released but before Mueller's Congressional testimony) in the course of demanding the NSA's cooperation with Durham's probe; and (5) MI6 expressed "indignation" at accusations by Durham's team that they had tried to frame Trump.

One lawyer who represented some witnesses who were interviewed in the course of Durham's investigation rightly says: "This stuff has my head spinning. When did these guys drink the Kool-Aid, and who served it to them?"

[N.E. Brigand]

I should note that I'm pulling tidbits from the trial transcripts [of the Michael Sussmann trial] from this writer, who is already pre-selecting the parts she finds most interesting but perhaps also those most sympathetic to Sussmann's point of view. (Although she was skeptical from the very first of the idea that there was anything untoward about the apparent Trump-Alfa server communications, she has grown to despise Durham's investigation.) But it's worth remembering that there are other people following the trial who see it as wholly damning for Sussmann.

L
O
L.

I just clicked on that "other people" link, the Twitter account of someone who called himself or herself "Durham Is Coming," and it no longer exists.

[N.E. Brigand]

Really?

CNN reports that the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York "developed significant evidence against Trump when they charged his former attorney Michael Cohen in 2018 over a hush money scheme paying two women claiming affairs with Trump, including adult film star Stormy Daniels [but] prosecutors did not consider charging Trump at the time because of longstanding Justice Department guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted." OK. While I disagree with that DOJ policy, it's well known, so not charging Trump prior to January 2021 was a reasonable decision. But what about charging him after leaving office for his part in this scheme which did, after all, result in jail time for Cohen for actions he took at Trump's behest? Well...

With Trump about to leave office in January 2021, however, Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney, held multiple discussions with a small group of prosecutors to discuss its evidence against Trump. They decided to not seek an indictment of Trump for several reasons ... including the political ramifications and the fact that Trump’s other scandals, such as efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the January 6, 2021 insurrection, “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison.”

“We were well aware of the prudential reasons why you wouldn’t charge a president, even after he was out of office,” [said] one person with knowledge of the investigation.

Arrrrrrrgggghhh!

Merrick Garland and other supposedly reasonable people keep telling us that the Dept. of Justice will pursue all cases without regard to politics, and yet here we have a U.S. Attorney's office apparently including political considerations in a charging decision. And "outdated"?! What the hell?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

But what about charging him after leaving office for his part in this scheme which did, after all, result in jail time for Cohen for actions he took at Trump's behest? Well...

While it is true that among the crimes that Cohen pleaded guilty to was campaign finance charges related to the Stormy Daniels scheme, it is not really accurate to say that charge led to jail time. It was mainly the fraud and tax crimes that led to jail time. Had that been the only crime that Cohen was being investigated for it is unlikely that he would have pleaded guilty, and probably unlikely that he would have been charged. As so often happens, the decisions made here are being reduced to simplistic terms that don't really reflect the realities of the situation; I don't have a big problem with the decision not to charge Trump in that matter (though I certainly would not have had a problem with a decision to charge him, either).

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Manhattan Prosecutors Will Begin Presenting Trump Case to Grand Jury

For some reason I am able to read this NY Times article, but in case it is behind a paywall for others, here is the text.

The Manhattan district attorney’s decision represents a dramatic escalation of the inquiry, and sets the case on a path toward criminal charges against the former president.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday will begin presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The grand jury was recently impaneled, and witness testimony will soon begin, a clear signal that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump.

On Monday, one of the witnesses was seen with his lawyer entering the building in Lower Manhattan where the grand jury is sitting. The witness, David Pecker, is the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels.

As prosecutors prepare to reconstruct the events surrounding the payment for grand jurors, they have sought to interview several witnesses, including the tabloid’s former editor, Dylan Howard, and two employees at Mr. Trump’s company, the people said. Mr. Howard and the Trump Organization employees, Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarasoff, have not yet testified before the grand jury.

The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that might shed light on the episode.

A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.

Still, the developments compound Mr. Trump’s mounting legal woes as he faces an array of law enforcement investigations: A district attorney in Georgia could seek to indict him for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, and he faces a special counsel investigation into his removal of sensitive documents from the White House.

Mr. Bragg’s decision to impanel a grand jury focused on the hush money — supercharging the longest-running criminal investigation into Mr. Trump — represents a dramatic escalation of an inquiry that once appeared to have reached a dead end.

Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury about a case focused not just on the hush money but on Mr. Trump’s broader business practices, including whether he fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate to secure favorable loans and other financial benefits. Yet in the early weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case and decided to abandon the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.

One of them, Mark F. Pomerantz, was highly critical of Mr. Bragg’s decision and has written a book that is scheduled to be published next week, “People vs. Donald Trump,” detailing his account of the inquiry. Mr. Bragg’s office recently wrote to Mr. Pomerantz’ publisher, Simon & Schuster, expressing concern that the book might disclose grand jury information or interfere with the investigation.

For his part, Mr. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and chalked up the scrutiny — as he has many times before — to a partisan witch hunt against him. If he were ultimately convicted, Mr. Trump would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg’s office declined to comment. Mr. Pecker’s lawyer, Elkan Abramowitz did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Trump, Ronald P. Fischetti, declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. McConney and Ms. Tarasoff.

The panel hearing evidence about the hush money is likely what’s known as a special grand jury. Like regular grand juries, it is made up of 23 Manhattan residents chosen at random. But its members are sworn in to serve for six months to hear complex cases, rather than the routine 30-day panels that review evidence and vote on whether to bring charges in cases of burglary, assault, robbery, murder and other crimes.

The district attorney’s investigation, which has unfolded in fits and starts over the last four years, began with an examination of the hush money deal before expanding to include Mr. Trump’s property valuations. Last summer, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors, working with the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, returned to the hush money anew, seeking to jump-start the inquiry after the departures of Mr. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, the other senior prosecutor in the investigation.

The district attorney’s office is also continuing to scrutinize the way that the former president valued his assets, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

Over the course of the lengthy inquiry into Mr. Trump and the conduct of his business, the hush money inquiry resurfaced within the district attorney’s office with such regularity in recent years that prosecutors came to refer to it as the “zombie theory” — an idea that just won’t die.

The first visible sign of progress for Mr. Bragg came this month when Mr. Cohen appeared at the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan to meet with prosecutors for the first time in more than a year. Now, he is expected to return for at least one additional interview with the prosecutors in February, one of the people said.

The lawyer who represented Ms. Daniels in the hush money deal, Keith Davidson, is also expected to meet with prosecutors in the coming weeks.

Mr. Trump’s company was instrumental in the deal, court records from Mr. Cohen’s federal case show.

Although Mr. McConney and Ms. Tarasoff were not central players, they helped arrange for the Trump Organization to reimburse Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Ms. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

Allen H. Weisselberg, the company’s former chief financial officer, was also involved in reimbursing Mr. Cohen. And, according to Mr. Cohen, Mr. Weisselberg was involved in a discussion with Mr. Trump about whether to pay Ms. Daniels.

Mr. Weisselberg is currently serving time in the Rikers Island jail complex after pleading guilty to a tax fraud scheme unrelated to the hush money deal, a case that also led to the conviction of the Trump Organization in December. Although he was the star witness for the district attorney’s office in that case — testifying against the company that had employed him for decades — he has never implicated Mr. Trump in any wrongdoing.

Without his cooperation, prosecutors could struggle to link Mr. Trump directly to the misconduct.

In 2018, when Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges stemming from his role in the hush money payments, he pointed the finger at Mr. Trump, saying the payout was done “in coordination with, and at the direction of” the president. Federal prosecutors agreed that Mr. Trump was behind the deal but never charged him or his company with a crime.

Unless Mr. Weisselberg agrees to cooperate, corroborating Mr. Cohen’s account could present a challenge for prosecutors. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will most likely argue that Mr. Cohen, a convicted criminal who pleaded guilty to lying to government officials, has an ax to grind against Mr. Trump.

Still, there is some circumstantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Trump was involved in the deal. Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump spoke by phone twice the day before Mr. Cohen wired the payment to Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, according to court records in the federal case.

For Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors, the core of any possible case is the way in which the Trump Organization reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Ms. Daniels and how the company recorded that payment internally. According to court papers in Mr. Cohen’s federal case, the company falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses.

The district attorney’s office now appears to be focusing on whether erroneously classifying the payments to Mr. Cohen as a legal expense ran afoul of a New York law that prohibits the falsifying of business records.

Violations of that law can be charged as a misdemeanor. To make it a felony, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump falsified the records to help commit or conceal a second crime in what prosecutors would argue was a violation of a New York State election law. That second aspect has largely gone untested, and would therefore make for a risky legal case against the former president.

Mr. Pecker’s testimony could bolster the prosecution’s argument, however. As a longtime ally of Mr. Trump, the publisher agreed during the 2016 campaign to be on the lookout for potentially damaging stories about Mr. Trump.

That October, Ms. Daniels’s agent and lawyer discussed the possibility of selling exclusive rights to her story to The National Enquirer, which would then never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”

But Mr. Pecker, who two months earlier had spent $150,000 to buy and kill a former Playboy model’s story of an affair with Mr. Trump, refused to make a payment to Ms. Daniels as well. He and the tabloid’s editor, Mr. Howard, agreed that Mr. Cohen would have to deal with Ms. Daniels’s team directly.

When Mr. Cohen was slow to pay, Mr. Howard pressed him to get the deal done, lest Ms. Daniels go public with their discussions about suppressing her story. “We have to coordinate something,” Mr. Howard texted Mr. Cohen in late October 2016, “or it could look awfully bad for everyone.”

Two days later, Mr. Cohen transferred the $130,000 to an account held by Ms. Daniels’s attorney.

[N.E. Brigand]

Thanks for that thoughtful reply talking me down from my soapbox, V. This case just gets under my skin for some reason.

- - - - - - - - - -
Meanwhile, Donald Trump today, in a post on his social network that is clearly meant to spur on Congressman Jim Jordan's new so-called "weaponization" subcommittee, says that he's been subject to even more law enforcement scrutiny than "the late great gangster, Alphonse Capone".

And in another post, Trump says both (1) that Vladimir Putin is more trustworthy than U.S. intelligence and law enforcement sources (whom he refers to as "lowlifes" and "misfits") and also (2) that this viewpoint is shown by the duplicity of various invidividual including "McGonigal and other slime."

That would be Charles McGonigal, who was charged with violating sanctions against Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Vladimir Putin.

Seems like circular reasoning to me.

That said, Marcy Wheeler has been making a good argument that McGonigal's Russian connections seem to have developed only after his departure from the FBI: while he was at the FBI, he apparently was working for the Albanians against Russia. (Also McGonigal's move to the New York office seems to have happened after someone there started feeding information about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to the media.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks for that thoughtful reply talking me down from my soapbox, V. This case just gets under my skin for some reason.

While I don't have much faith in Alvin Bragg, the news I posted above suggests that Trump may still be held liable for that conduct.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks for that thoughtful reply talking me down from my soapbox, V. This case just gets under my skin for some reason.

If it makes you feel any better, I had almost the exact same exchange with Seth Abramson on twitter.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile,

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And this

[Inanna]

What would those sanctions amount to, V? In fact, what does it *mean*?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Based on the letter, the AG's office is seeking three things: 1) to have assertions that Trump and his kids improperly denied to be "deemed admitted" (meaning that then these things would not need to be proven at trial); 2) to have certain affirmative defenses dismissed (meaning that the defendants would not be able to claim those defenses in the trial); and 3) to have monetary sanctions issued (which would likely be the amount of attorney's fees necessary to bring the motion. Of the three, the first one is the most important.

[N.E. Brigand]

Posting to his social network today, Donald Trump more or less admits that he directed Michael Cohen to pay off Stormy Daniels, but he says that (1) the statute of limitations has expired (it hasn't) and (2) that he was acting on the advice of counsel. I imagine the latter is an important consideration for prosecutors and that securing an indictment and conviction for Trump will depend on Cohen testifying to the contrary and on jurors believing Cohen.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Actually, he said he was following advice of "council" like it was some governing body.

While I have been skeptical in the past about the credibility of Cohen as a witness, on this point I think it is likely that he will be believable.

[Inanna]

Thanks, V. It’s still over my head. Mumble.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Let me try again, after looking at the allegations closer. When you start a lawsuit of any kind you start by filing a complaint. If that complaint is a "verified" complaint (meaning that the Plaintiff, which in this case is the Attorney General herself on behalf of the state of NY) verifies that the allegations are true and correct to the best of her knowledge, the defendants must respond to each allegation in the Complaint. Here, the Trump responding to many of the allegations with statements that either contradicting things that they have said under oath elsewhere, or claimed that they did not have sufficient knowledge to respond to the allegations, when they clearly did. The Attorney General's office had complained about things before and the judge had "admonished" them but not taken any further, action, but the Trump's did fix the problems. So now the Attorney General is asking for formal sanctions including deeming those allegations admitted.

[Frelga]

Admitted as in assumed to be confessed as true? Or logged/entered somewhere?