Trump Campaign To Papadopoulos:Contact Russians; Brits Raid Cambridge Analytica Offices

While Der Trumpenführer, and House Republicans continue to claim the Russiagate investigation  is a "witch hunt," two new developments could well show that claim to be a lie.   First, it now seems that George Papadopoulos - who has copped a guilty plea and is working with Robert Mueller - was told by Trump campaign officials to make contact with the Russians and secured campaign approval before he sought to explore what Russia could do for the campaign.  So much for Trump's claim that Papadopoulos was a glorified coffee boy.  Potentially even more devastating is word the British officials have raided the London offices of Cambridge Analytica and are seizing the company's data base and servers - items that might provide a clear and indisputable link between Russian intelligence officials and the Trump campaign.  Trump in typical form has tried to distract the media - or at least the GOP's Christofascist base - by announcing a new ban on transgender members of the U.S. military.   First this from the Washington Post on Papadopoulos' direction from the Trump campaign:

When a Russian news agency reached out to George Papadopoulos to request an interview shortly before the 2016 election, the young adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump made sure to seek approval from campaign headquarters.

“You should do it,” deputy communications director Bryan Lanza urged Papadopoulos in a September 2016 email,  . . .

The exchange was a sign that Papadopoulos — who pushed the Trump operation to meet with Russian officials — had the campaign’s blessing for some of his foreign outreach.

Since Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts during the campaign and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump officials have sought to paint the 30-year-old energy consultant as a low-level volunteer whose outreach to Russia was not authorized by the campaign — and in some cases was actively discouraged.

Emails described to The Washington Post, which are among thousands of documents turned over to investigators examining Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, show Papadopoulos had more extensive contact with key Trump campaign and presidential transition officials than has been publicly acknowledged.

Among those who communicated with Papadopoulos were senior campaign figures such as strategist Stephen K. Bannon and adviser Michael Flynn, who corresponded with him about his efforts to broker ties between Trump and top foreign officials, the emails show.

Thomas Breen, an attorney for Papadopoulos, declined to comment. A White House spokesman also declined to comment.

In a tweet after Papadopoulos pleaded guilty, Trump wrote that “few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.” Another Trump campaign staffer dismissed Papadopoulos as a mere “coffee boy” during the campaign.
 At the end of March, Papadopoulos attended a meeting of Trump’s newly named national security advisory group at the candidate’s not-yet-opened hotel in Washington. After introducing himself, the young adviser announced he could organize a meeting between Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and Trump, according to court documents.

That Trump and his circle of sycophants have lied about Papadopoulos'  roll should surprise no one not living under a rock or only watching Fox News.

Adding to the fun is the fact that British authorities, as noted above, raided the London offices of Cambridge Analytica which may have been the go between for Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign.  One can only imagine what goodies that company's data base and computer servers may yield.   Here are highlights from Politico:

U.K. authorities raided Cambridge Analytica’s offices overnight amid an investigation into whether the political consulting firm illegally acquired Facebook data to target voters.

Around 18 investigators were seen entering the company’s London headquarters after obtaining a warrant to search its database and servers Friday night, the Guardian reported. The search lasted seven hours, according to the BBC.

“This is just one part of a larger investigation into the use of personal data and analytics for political purposes,” the Information Commissioner’s Office said late Friday after receiving the warrant. “As you will expect, we will now need to collect, assess and consider the evidence before coming to any conclusions.”

The search is the latest development in a ballooning scandal enveloping both the firm and Facebook. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic are scrutinizing the companies amid accusations that Cambridge Analytica may have used 50 million Facebook users’ data without proper consent to help U.S. President Donald Trump’s election.

Perhaps the Brits will expose what the Congressional Republicans have been working so hard to keep hidden.  

Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier

Republicans have gone to great lengths to attack and slander Christopher Steele, the former MI-6 agent for British Intelligence, who prepared a rough dossier that would indicate that Republicans at all levels have supported and continue to support a possible - in my view, most likely - traitor to the United States very susceptible to blackmail by Putin's Russia.  Devin Nunes and his fictional memorandum is perhaps the most egregious example of Republican efforts to resort to any means to protect the foul leader of their party, but Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley have shown their debasement as well through their referral of  Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible criminal investigation.  Grassley's motives are less clear, but Graham is viewed by many as having his own secrets that make him susceptible to blackmail by Trump or others - it's not without reason that I refer to Graham as the Palmetto Queen.  A very long must read piece in the New Yorker looks at Steele and his history and credentials and underscores that Steele is reputable and long considered totally reliable by U.S. intelligence agencies and strongly suggests to me, Trump's Republican defenders and sycophants are not motivated by what is in the best interests of America.  With the Stormy Daniels scandal growing, there is ever more reason to believe that the more salacious portions of Steele's dossier might well be true.  As Senator Diane Feinstein has noted, nothing in the dossier todate has been refuted as false.  Here are article excerpts (there is much more that deserves a full read):  

A friend in Washington, D.C., was calling with bad news: two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, had just referred Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible criminal investigation. They were accusing Steele—the author of a secret dossier that helped trigger the current federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia—of having lied to the very F.B.I. officers he’d alerted about his findings. The details of the criminal referral were classified, so Steele could not know the nature of the allegations, let alone rebut them, but they had something to do with his having misled the Bureau about contacts that he’d had with the press. For nearly thirty years, Steele had worked as a close ally of the United States, and he couldn’t imagine why anyone would believe that he had been deceptive. But lying to an F.B.I. officer is a felony, an offense that can be punished by up to five years in prison. The dossier painted a damning picture of collusion between Trump and Russia, suggesting that his campaign had “accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It also alleged that Russian officials had been “cultivating” Trump as an asset for five years, and had obtained leverage over him, in part by recording videos of him while he engaged in compromising sexual acts, including consorting with Moscow prostitutes who, at his request, urinated on a bed. Steele had spent more than twenty years in M.I.6, most of it focussing on Russia. For three years, in the nineties, he spied in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Between 2006 and 2009, he ran the service’s Russia desk, at its headquarters, in London. He was fluent in Russian, and widely considered to be an expert on the country. He’d also advised on nation-building in Iraq. As a British citizen, however, he was not especially knowledgeable about American politics. Peter Fritsch, a co-founder at Fusion who has worked closely with Steele, said of him, “He’s a career public-service officer, and in England civil servants haven’t been drawn into politics in quite the same way they have here. He’s a little naïve about the public square.” A longtime friend of Steele’s pointed out to me that Steele was in a singularly unenviable predicament. The dossier had infuriated both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump by divulging allegedly corrupt dealings between them. “You’ve got oligarchs running both superpowers,” the friend said. “And, incredibly, they both hate this same guy.” . . . . Legal experts soon assured Steele that the criminal referral was merely a political stunt. Nevertheless, it marked a tense new phase in the investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. It was not the first time that a congressional investigation had been used as a tool for destroying someone’s reputation. Whenever a scandal hit Washington, opponents used subpoenas, classified evidence, and theatrical public hearings to spread innuendo, confusion, and lies. Senators Grassley and Graham declined to be interviewed for this article . . .
 Democratic members of the committee, who had not been consulted by Republicans about the criminal referral against Steele, were enraged. The California senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking minority member on the committee, declared that the Republicans’ goals were “undermining the F.B.I. and Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation” and “deflecting attention” from it. Feinstein said that the criminal referral provided no evidence that Steele had lied, and, she added, “not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted.”

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, is a former prosecutor who also serves on the Judiciary Committee. “To impeach Steele’s dossier is to impeach Mueller’s investigation,” he told me. “It’s to recast the focus back on Hillary.” The Republicans’ aim, he believed, was to “create a false narrative saying this is all a political witch hunt.”

Steele’s lawyers have advised him not to speak publicly about the controversy, and, because he is a former intelligence officer, much of his life must remain secret. His accusers know this, and, as Senator Whitehouse explained, “they are using selective declassification as a tactic—they use declassified information to tell their side, and then the rebuttal is classified.” Both the criminal referral and Nunes’s report used secret evidence to malign Steele while providing no means for his defenders to respond without breaching national-security secrets. But interviews with Steele’s friends, colleagues, and business associates tell a very different story about how a British citizen became enmeshed in one of America’s most consequential political battles. Steele worked out of the British Embassy for M.I.6, under diplomatic cover. His years in Moscow, 1990 to 1993, were among the most dramatic in Russian history, a period that included the collapse of the Communist Party; nationalist uprisings in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power in Russia, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the K.G.B.—now called the F.S.B.—reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge. Vladimir Putin, a K.G.B. operative returning from East Germany, reinvented himself in the shadowy world of St. Petersburg politics. Steele’s already dim view of the Kremlin darkened in November, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B. officer and a Putin critic who had been recruited by M.I.6, suffered an agonizing death in a London hospital, after drinking a cup of tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Moscow had evidently sanctioned a brazen murder in his own country. Steele was put in charge of M.I.6’s investigation. Authorities initially planned to indict one suspect in the murder, but Steele’s investigative work persuaded them to indict a second suspect as well. Nine years later, the U.K.’s official inquiry report was finally released, and it confirmed Steele’s view: the murder was an operation by the F.S.B., and it was “probably approved” by Vladimir Putin. The British Secret Intelligence Service is highly regarded by the United States, particularly for its ability to harvest information from face-to-face sources, rather than from signals intelligence, such as electronic surveillance, as the U.S. often does. British and American intelligence services work closely together, and, while Steele was at M.I.6, British intelligence was often included in the U.S. President’s daily-briefing reports. In 2008, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, visited the U.K., and Steele briefed him on Russian developments. The following year, President Obama visited the U.K., and was briefed on a report that Steele had written about Russia. Steve Hall, a former chief of the C.I.A.’s Central Eurasia Division, which includes Russia, the former Soviet states, and the Balkans, told me, “M.I.6 is second only perhaps to the U.S. in its ability to collect intelligence from Russia.” He added, “We’ve always coördinated closely with them because they did such a great job. Steele has not been to Russia, or visited any former Soviet states, since 2009. Unlike some of his former M.I.6 colleagues, he has not been declared persona non grata by Putin’s regime, but, in 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an F.S.B. agent describing him as “an enemy of Mother Russia.” Steele concluded that it would be difficult for him to work in the country unnoticed. The firm guards the identities of its sources, but it’s clear that many Russian contacts can be interviewed elsewhere, and London is the center of the post-Soviet Russian diaspora.

Orbis often performs anti-corruption investigations for clients attempting internal reviews, and helps hedge funds and other financial companies perform due diligence or obtain strategic information. One Orbis client who agreed to talk to me, a Western businessman with interests in Russia and Ukraine, described Steele to me as “very efficient, very professional, and very credible.” He said that his company had successfully cross-checked Steele’s research with other people, adding, “I don’t know anyone who’s been critical of his work. His reports are very good. It’s an absolute no-brainer that he’s just a political target. They’re trying to shoot the messenger.”

Two of his earliest cases at Orbis involved investigating international crime rings whose leaders, coincidentally, were based in New York’s Trump Tower.

Steele’s first client after leaving M.I.6 was England’s Football Association, which hoped to host the World Cup in 2018, but suspected dirty dealings by the governing body, fifa. England lost out in its bid to Russia, and Steele determined that the Kremlin had rigged the process with bribes. According to Ken Bensinger’s “Red Card,” an upcoming book about the scandal, “one of Steele’s best sources” informed him that the Deputy Prime Minister, Igor Sechin—now the C.E.O. of the Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft—is suspected of having travelled to Qatar “to swap World Cup votes.”

In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he’d met who headed the Bureau’s division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and kickbacks. One of them was Chuck Blazer, a top fifa official who had embezzled a fortune from the organization and became an informant for the F.B.I. Blazer had an eighteen-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in Trump Tower, a few floors down from Trump’s residence. Several years ago, the F.B.I. hired Steele to help crack an international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for financial crimes. . . . . “It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower,” Steele told friends. [O]n several occasions Orbis had warned authorities about major security threats. Three years ago, a trusted Middle Eastern source told Orbis that a group of isis militants were using the flow of refugees from Syria to infiltrate Europe. Orbis shared the information with associates who relayed the intelligence to German security officials. Several months later, when a concert hall in Paris, the Bataclan, was attacked by terrorists, Burrows and Steele felt remorse at not having notified French authorities as well. When Steele took his suspicions about Trump to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016, it was in keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a politically driven aberration. [In April, 2016, Steele] finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. The report discusses the Kremlin’s entanglement with the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen. (Le Pen and Berlusconi deny having had such ties.) It also suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy” the E.U., . . . . Mark Medish, a former director of Russian affairs at the National Security Council, told me that “if Steele had not shared his findings, he might have been accused of dereliction or a coverup.” He added, “It takes courage to deliver bad news, particularly when the stakes are so high.” And Senator Whitehouse described Steele’s actions as akin to warning the F.B.I. about a “physical detonation of some sort,” noting, “If it had gone off, and he or the F.B.I. had ignored it, heads would roll.”

Regardless of what others might think, it’s clear that Steele believed that his dossier was filled with important intelligence. Otherwise, he would never have subjected it, his firm, and his reputation to the harsh scrutiny of the F.B.I. “I’m impressed that he was willing to share it with the F.B.I.,” Sipher said. “That gives him real credibility to me, the notion that he’d give it to the best intelligence professionals in the world.”

A number of former intelligence officers, however, believe that the [Trump Tower] meeting, which happened soon after Papadopoulos’s encounter with the Australian diplomat, enhances the dossier’s credibility. John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the C.I.A. from 2000 until 2004, told me, “I haven’t formed a final thought, but clearly parts of it are starting to resonate with what we know to be true about the Russians’ willingness to deliver information harmful to Hillary Clinton.”

Read the rest of the piece which lays out an timeline on Trump/Russia interfacing.  My conclusion?  We have a likely traitor in the White House.  Anyone who believes otherwise either has their head in the sand or is becoming complicit in harming the nation. 

Russiagate: Will the Crime Be Worse Than the Cover-Up?

With the Russiagate investigation much of the media attention has focused on the obstruction of justice issues that swirl around the firing of former FBI director James Comey.  Perhaps the inclination is natural given the fact that the original crime in Watergate was a "third rate burglary" and it was the cover up that took down Richard Nixon.  In Russiagate, the obstruction of justice efforts by Trump/his campaign  and his Republican accomplices - think Devin Nunes - are concening, but the actual underlying crime or crimes far out weigh the crime that Richard Nixon foolishly tried to cover up after the fact.  A somewhat lengthy piece in The Daily Beast looks at what is known to date and puts together a telling time line for the possible - in my view, very likely - crimes that took place during 2016.  Here are article highlights:

Recall the Watergate cliché that the cover-up is worse than the crime. That may have been true then. While it was never established that President Nixon knew in advance about the break-in at the Watergate complex, he was forced to resign after proof emerged that he used the CIA to obstruct the FBI investigation.

In the Russia scandal, special counsel Robert Mueller has credible proof of obstruction of justice—i.e., the cover-up. But in a highly politicized climate, where “memos” and insults are weapons of distraction, that won’t likely be enough. 

The fragmentary and often disconnected nature of those reports obscures the reasonable supposition that Mueller is well on his way to detailing conspiracy, wire fraud, illegal foreign campaign contributions, or all three. During Watergate, the special prosecutor had most of the evidence that doomed Nixon at least nine months before his August 9, 1974 resignation. Mueller, too, likely has the goods already, even without “smoking gun” tapes.

One tip-off was in Michael Flynn’s December 1 “allocution”—his signed submission to the court as part of his guilty plea to making false statements to the FBI on January 24, 2017. It received almost no media attention but suggested the nature of the criminal conspiracy that would likely be at the heart of Mueller’s prosecution.

Flynn didn’t just vaguely admit he lied. The law doesn’t allow that. He admitted in writing that his lie “had a material impact” on the FBI’s probe “into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the [Trump] Campaign and Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election.”

The conspiracy case--the heart of Mueller’s efforts-- almost certainly boils down to an old-fashioned quid pro quo. Flynn’s “quid”—the substance of his recorded conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak— was lifting the sanctions that President Obama imposed on Russia in late 2016 and the earlier sanctions related to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. The “quo” was collusion (“conspiracy” in legal terms) with Russians to harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which Flynn effectively admitted was “material” to his lies after the election. Anyone associated with this deal is in deep legal trouble.

The conspiracy started with Russians violating the federal computer crime statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by hacking into the computers at the Democratic National Committee and stealing emails that were then distributed publicly by Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks—both linked to Russians— in ways that hurt Clinton. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Russia also tried to penetrate the voting systems of 21 states.

These actions would also violate the federal criminal statute that bars foreign nationals from offering anything of value in a presidential campaign. Every party to such illegal acts is criminally liable.

There are also potential violations of the federal wire fraud statute. The evidence of a scheme to defraud? We know that Russia’s “active measures” included creating thousands of fictitious Twitter and Facebook accounts to generate fake news targeted to suppress the Clinton vote. Campaign officials are criminally liable if Mueller and his team prove an overlap between the illegal Russian fake news posts and the Trump campaign’s routine micro-targeted negative messages--a painstaking but manageable set of data comparisons.

In addition, the special counsel is examining whether a Russian politician with connections to organized crime, Alexander Torshin, routed an illegal campaign contribution to Trump through the NRA, which is relatively easy to trace.

Conspiracy is a much broader crime than is generally understood. The guidelines for judges who instruct juries say that the prosecution need only prove that there was “a mutual understanding, either spoken or unspoken, [Emphasis added] between two or more people to cooperate with each other to accomplish an unlawful act.”

It doesn’t matter whether the “mutual understanding” was before, during or after the crime was committed. “It is not necessary that a defendant be fully informed of all the details of the conspiracy, or all of its participants,” the model jury instructions continue. “You need not find that the alleged members of the conspiracy met together and entered into any express or formal agreement.”

Under the so-called “doctrine of willful blindness,” reinforced by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in a majority opinion in 2011, juries are instructed to “consider whether the defendant deliberately closed his eyes to what would otherwise be obvious to him.”

Don Jr.’s excitement over receiving Russian dirt on Clinton, Jared Kushner’s interactions with Cambridge Analytica and thus with Wikileaks, and Trump’s knowledge of these or other ties to Russians and his use of that knowledge in the campaign, all suggest such “awareness.”

Two other legal concepts are relevant. Much of the obstruction case—from Trump interfering with the FBI probe to re-writing his son’s statement aboard Air Force One after revelations about Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russians--revolves around the president’s concern that he had something to hide, also known as “consciousness of guilt.” He also might be charged as “an accessory after the fact,” which requires only that the defendant “receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension.”  

Now consider just a bit of what has emerged about “mutual understanding,” “willful blindness,” “awareness,” “assists” and “consciousness of guilt” in the Trump-Russia case, which is in turn a fraction of what Mueller knows. As in any criminal case, the timeline is critical:

April 26, 2016: George Papadopoulos, whom Trump named as one of his “top five” foreign policy advisers, learns that the Russians had possession of the DNC emails. He passes word of this to others in the campaign. Because of a “mutual understanding,” no one calls the FBI.

Mid-May: Papadopoulos tells an Australian diplomat in London that the Russians have compromising emails on Clinton. The diplomat properly informs his superiors, who--unlike Trump campaign officials--recognizes his legal responsibilities under American law to notify U.S. authorities.  

June 9: At a meeting at Trump Tower previewed for the campaign as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Donald Trump Jr. listens as well-connected Russians offer damaging information about Clinton. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort both say they left early, suggesting “awareness” of, or “willful blindness” to, crimes that were underway. Again, no one contacts the FBI.

Mid-June: Kushner—assuming control of the campaign’s digital operations— hires Cambridge Analytica, which coordinates with Wikileaks, suggesting a possible “mutual understanding” of what Wikileaks will do.

July 14: At the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign deletes a plank in the party platform that condemns Russia for invading Ukraine, and rejects a proposal for increased sanctions, bolstering the case for the quid pro quo that is the crux of the case.

July 22: On the eve of the Democratic Convention, Wikileaks releases damaging Democratic emails received from the Russians, implicating Wikileaks in the criminal conspiracy.

July 27: In a speech, Trump says, "By the way, if they [Russians] hacked, they probably have her 33,000 emails. I hope they do.” Trump later said he was joking but it reinforces his “awareness” of an unlawful act.

August 21: Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Trump, shows knowledge of the conspiracy by tweeting, "Trust me, it will soon be Podesta's time in the barrel. 

October 7: Within hours of the release of the Access Hollywood tape, which dealt a serious blow to the Trump campaign, Wikileaks releases the first in a series of 60,000 emails belonging to Podesta. Wikileaks effectively acts as an arm of the Trump campaign in a “mutual understanding” to deflect attention away from the sex scandal.

December 29: Deputy National Security Adviser-designate K.T. McFarland emails a colleague about the aftermath of outgoing President Obama’s implementation of sanctions: “If there is a tit-for-tat escalation, Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia, which has just thrown USA election to him.”

Even without knowing any of what Mueller has learned from the many witnesses he has secretly brought before the grand jury, this timeline—and the jury instructions that would accompany it at trial— already offer a strong roadmap for prosecutors. The conspiracy charges that arise from it will likely send some of Trump’s friends and relatives to jail. And they won’t look so good for the president, either, if presented next year at his impeachment trial in the Senate.

Fusion GPS Hearing Transcript Contains Bombshells

Senator Diane Feinstein stating why she released the Fusion GPS transcript "to set the record straight."

Republicans have been increasing the volume of their attacks on the FBI, Robert Mueller's Russiagate investigation, and the dossier prepared by MI-6 agent Christopher Steele and, as modern day Republicans are wont to do, lying about the facts and twisting statements to the point where they are no longer recognizable.  Indeed, Senators Grassley and Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen, even have tried to seek to have Steele criminally prosecuted on a fairy tale theory.  Fed up with all of it and frustrated by Republican refusal to release the transcript of the the (10) hour Senate Intelligence Committee testimony of the principals of Fusion GPS, the original employer of Steele - and the bombshells contained therein - Senator Diane Feinstein released the entire 312 page transcript on her office website.  The full transcript can be found here.  As both Politico and the Washington Post are reporting, the transcript undermines many of the Republican's talking points and perhaps most explosively suggest that someone in the Trump campaign may have been the first to talk to the FBI and trigger the beginning of its investigation - even before a drunken George Papadopoulos ran his mouth to Australian intelligence officials who likewise contacted the FBI. First, these highlights from the Washington Post:

The head of the research firm behind a dossier of allegations against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump told congressional investigators that someone inside Trump’s network had also provided the FBI with information during the 2016 campaign, according to a newly released transcript, a claim quickly disputed by people close to the investigation into Russian interference in the election.

Glenn R. Simpson, a founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, spoke to investigators with the Senate Judiciary Committee for 10 hours in August. As the partisan fight over Russian interference in the 2016 election has intensified, Simpson has urged that his testimony be released, and a copy of the transcript was made public Tuesday.

It was released by the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California.
 Feinstein said she released the transcript to set the record straight. “The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice,’’ she said.

Steele first reached out to the FBI with his concerns in early July 2016, according to people familiar with the matter. When they re-interviewed him in early October, agents made it clear, according to Simpson’s testimony released Tuesday, that they believed some of what Steele had told them.

“My understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization,” Simpson said. . . . . adding that his understanding was the source was someone who had volunteered information to the FBI or, in his words, “someone like us who decided to pick up the phone and report something.”

Again, Republicans would have their sheep like supporters believe that the Steele dossier was what launched the FBI investigation of Trump in 2016.  This transcript shows that that story line is a lie.  The Politico piece goes further.  Here are some excerpts:

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, whose firm commissioned a controversial dossier alleging secret ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, told congressional investigators in August that the FBI found the dossier credible because an unnamed "human source" associated with Trump had offered the bureau corroborating information.

In a 312-page transcript of Simpson's August 2017 interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Simpson's attorney also said it was dangerous to discuss the dossier's sources because its public release last year had already led to murder.

"Somebody's already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work," said the lawyer, Joshua Levy. . . . . It's unclear to whom Levy was referring. He didn't respond immediately to a request for comment. But Britain's Telegraph newspaper reported last year about a former KGB chief who was mysteriously killed around the same time amid questions about his relationship to dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British spy contracted by Fusion.

Simpson also said Steele initiated communication with the FBI in July 2016 with "someone that he said he knew."At the time, Simpson said, Steele was told that his information tracked with what they had heard from a source from the "Trump organization.” It was unclear whether he might have been referring to Trump’s business or his presidential campaign. Simpson said he wouldn't share the identity of that source for "security" reasons.

Expect the Republican lies to continue.  As for Grassley and Graham, one has to wonder how they have decided to prostitute themselves to Trump and/or indirectly Vladimir Putin.  As previously indicated, some believe that either Trump or the Russians have "kompromat" on Graham. 

The Republicans’ Fake Russiagate Investigations

If one listens to Fox News regularly - caution, a lobotomy may be a prerequisite - one is familiar with the Republican rants against the dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, a former top British MI-6 agent, the firm that secured its preparation, and the FBI and intelligence agencies  that gave credence to it.  This despite the fact that we now know that (i) a number of points in the Steele dossier have been corroborated, and (ii) it was the loose lips of a drunk Trump campaign operative/foreign policy adviser (George Papadopoulos) while boasting to a top Australian official in London. But the problem is indeed much worse and, in my view, much more sinister as congressional Republicans seem to be doing all in their power to (a) ignore information that might lead to findings against Der Trumpenführer, and (ii) keep the information that they have learned from the American public.  An op-ed in the New York Times by Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the founders of the research firm Fusion GPS, which commissioned the Steele dossier, who testified before Republican controlled congressional committees seeks to expose the Republican effort to protect the Trump/Pence regime and dupe and deceive the American public.  Here are column highlights:

A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.  Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.

Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.

Seemingly the congressional Republicans are allies to Vladimir Putin, not American citizens.

Is Papadopoulous Merely the First Domino to Fall?

As noted in the previous post, Der Trumpenführer is fully engaged in a lying campaign to distance himself from his campaign's foreign policy adviser who sought to collude with Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election cycle.  As Talking Points Memo ("TPM") notes, the Washington Post and others have begun filling in the names of those who were linked via emails to George Papadopoulous' efforts to collude with Russia.  Indeed, TPM has a version of the Papadopoulous guilty plea documents with the redacted names filled in.  Here are article excerpts:

Former Trump adviser George Papadopolous’ newly-released plea agreement is littered with the redacted names of other campaign officials he allegedly informed about his efforts to hook them up with Russian nationals, making prosecutors’ claims rather hard to follow.

TPM’s design team has gone through the document and plugged in the missing names of those senior campaign staffers, as identified by the Washington Post, to make it easier to parse.

Per the Post’s reporting, the “high-ranking campaign official” was former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski; “another high-ranking campaign official” was campaign chairman Paul Manafort; “another campaign official” was chairman Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates. The “campaign supervisor” was campaign co-chair and policy adviser Sam Clovis, as his attorney confirmed to the newspaper. And one “senior policy advisor” referenced in the document has yet to be identified.

So where may all of this lead?  Another TPM piece looks at this question.  Here are excerpts:

It shows a Trump foreign policy advisor in active communication with what appear to be Russian government officials or spies trying to get dirt on Hillary Clinton, arrange meetings with Russian government officials (even Vladimir Putin, rather ludicrously) and solicit Russian support. That an active foreign policy advisor was taking these actions while in active communication with the campaign about those actions is quite damning. An unnamed campaign official sent back word that a meeting with Trump himself was not happening.

Papadopoulos was arrested in July and has apparently been cooperating since. I see no purely legal reason why the news of his arrest in July and guilty plea in early October had to be revealed today, other than keeping the news from Manafort. One other potential reason is that one of the ‘campaign officials’ referenced in the Papadopoulos plea appears to be Manafort. It sends two clear messages. First, we’re not at all done with collusion and we’re making progress. Second, we arrested Papadopoulos in July and he pled out in October and no one knew. So don’t think you have any idea what we have.

[I]n revealing the Manafort news early, giving time for the White House to respond as you’d expect (nothing to do with us or Russia or the campaign) and then following up by revealing this Papadopoulos indictment certainly has the feel of sucker punching the White House.

If Trump were as smart as he claims, he would keep his mouth shut and keep his tiny fingers off of Twitter.  Neither will likely happen and by running his mouth, Trump is setting the stage for perjury charges when he ultimately gets hauled in before Mueller's team and is confronted with inconsistent statements and/or documents.   If Bill Clinton came close to impeachment for lying about an affair with an intern, does Trump really think his lying about efforts to collude with a hostile foreign government won't be taken more seriously even by many in today's morally bankrupt GOP?  My one hope is that as the evidence is gathered by Mueller's team they find proof that Mike Pence is involved as well.   Falsely pious and sanctimonious "Christians" like Pence in my experience are often the biggest liars of all. Both he and Trump need to go.. 

Trump's Dishonest Efforts to Distance Himself from Papadopoulos

Papadopoulous is center left with Trump, et al

In the wake of the guilty plea taken by former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, Donald Trump has resorted to his usual tactic when the truth becomes inconvenient: he lies.  Thus, in Trump world Papadopoulos has become a nobody and has been labeled as a liar since what he seemingly has to say cuts against the biggest Trump lie, namely that no collusion or efforts to collude with Russia ever occurred. A piece in the Washington Post looks at some of Papadopoulos' activities and who knew about them, especially efforts to collude with Russia so as to harm Hillary Clinton's chances of being elected.  Already, as Politico is reporting, Sam Clovis, a former co-chair and policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, knew that another campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, was talking to Russians, according to documents released Monday as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and campaign and administration officials. Clovis is reported to be cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee and one can imagine that he will be talking to Robert Mueller and his staff.  Others besides Clovis were "in the loop" on Papadopoulous' efforts to collude.  Here are highlights from the Post piece:

President Trump on Tuesday belittled former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty this week to lying to federal agents investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, tweeting that “few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.”

But interviews and documents show that Papadopoulos was in regular contact with the Trump campaign’s most senior officials and held himself out as a Trump surrogate as he traveled the world to meet with foreign officials and reporters.

Papadopoulos sat at the elbow of one of Trump’s top campaign advisers, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, during a dinner for campaign advisers weeks before the Republican National Convention, according to an individual who attended the meeting.

While some top campaign aides appeared to rebuff Papadopoulos’s persistent offers to broker a meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, there is no sign they told him directly to cease his activities or sought to end his affiliation with the campaign.

Emails included in court documents released Monday show that Papadopoulos repeatedly told Trump campaign officials about his contacts with people he believed were representing the Russian government.

At 29, Papadopoulos had scant experience that qualified him to advise a presidential candidate. He had entered the Trump campaign after a six-week stint working for the campaign of Trump’s rival for the Republican nomination, neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

By March 2016, Trump’s campaign, like Carson’s before it, was eagerly searching for foreign policy expertise. As Trump rose in the polls and won Republican primaries, the former reality TV host was under pressure to announce a group of advisers with whom he was consulting on foreign policy issues.

The scrutiny intensified early that month after 70 conservative national security experts signed an open letter opposing Trump’s candidacy. 

To come up with names, the campaign turned to Sam Clovis, a former Iowa radio host who served as national campaign co-chairman, an attorney for Clovis confirmed Tuesday in a statement.

On March 21, Trump included Papadopoulos among five men he announced were advising him on matters of national security in a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board. “An energy and oil consultant. Excellent guy,” Trump said.

Though Papadopoulos’s exaggerated résumé issues quickly became public, he remained a part of the Trump advisory panel and soon began urging campaign aides to let him set up a meeting between Trump and Russian officials.

Court documents show he raised the idea at a March 31 meeting of the group attended by both Trump and Sessions, who had endorsed Trump’s campaign, telling the group that “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President [Vladimir] Putin.”

Papadopoulos continued to be invited to campaign events. In late June or early July, he attended a dinner at the Capitol Hill Club along with several other national security advisers for the Trump campaign.  Another person who was at the meeting said Sessions also attended; Papadopoulos was seated to Sessions’s left.  A spokeswoman for Sessions declined to comment.

The Bombshell in Robert Mueller’s Indictments

I suspect that many were NOT surprised that Robert Mueller secured indictments against Paul Manafort given (i) the FBI raid on Manafort's home earlier this year, and (ii) Manafort's personification of sleaze and someone for sale to the highest bidder.  The only surprise is that nothing in the indictments against Manafort and his cohort Rick Gates appeared directly to Trump campaign efforts to collude with Russia.   That cannot be said about the facts behind the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, who had lied to the FBI about his efforts to meet with Russian operatives for the purpose of collusion. Der Trumpenführer, who if he were smart would keep his mouth shut and fingers away from Twitter, has trumpeted that none of the indictments involved collusion, but such is NOT the case with Papadopoulos' guilty plea.  A column in the Washington Post authored by a professor who teaches white-collar criminal law looks at this reality.  Here are highlights:

[S]pecial counsel Robert S. Mueller III unsealed an indictmenton Monday of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his longtime business partner Rick Gates, who also worked for the campaign. But the stealth bombshell of the day may end up being Mueller’s other announcement, that George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, has already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about attempts to broker meetings between Russian officials and the campaign. It appears Papadopoulos is cooperating with investigators. 

These are the first charges brought by Mueller . . . . They represent a major step forward for his probe — and a potentially ominous sign for others who may be in Mueller’s sights.

As the White House already is pointing out, the charges against Manafort and Gates don’t directly relate to the Trump campaign. . . . The bulk of the allegations concern activities that occurred before either man was working for the then-Republican candidate. The word “Trump” doesn’t appear in the indictment.

But this is not particularly surprising. It’s not unusual for prosecutors to build a case against a potential key cooperator involving charges not directly linked to the ultimate matter under investigation. Even unrelated charges give the prosecutor leverage to persuade the defendant to plead guilty, cooperate in the broader investigation, and provide evidence against the “bigger fish” to earn more lenient treatment in his or her own case. And pursuing Manafort makes perfect sense. With his extensive ties to Russia and his key role as chairman of the Trump campaign, Manafort potentially is a linchpin in Mueller’s investigation.

If Manafort were cooperating there typically would not be a grand jury indictment. There would simply be a statement of charges filed by the prosecutor, along with a plea and cooperation agreement.

This is what happened with Papadopoulos, who was not indicted but pleaded guilty under seal pursuant to an agreement with prosecutors. Unlike the charges against Manafort, the charges against Papadopoulos do relate directly to his contacts with Russian officials while working for the campaign. Papadopoulos may already be providing information that goes directly to the heart of Mueller’s investigation.

If those facing potential charges refuse to cooperate, Mueller is not going to dither around for months or simply move on. He will not hesitate to throw the heat where appropriate. By unveiling both of these cases on the same day, prosecutors are making it clear that it’s smarter to be like Papadopoulos: Cut a deal early and cooperate.

For Manafort himself, the indictment dramatically escalates the pressure to cooperate. Previously his own jeopardy may have seemed more theoretical. Now he has been booked on a federal indictment charging him with multiple felonies carrying a maximum potential penalty of 80 years in prison. Of course, he would never actually receive a sentence that severe — but numbers like that tend to focus the mind.

We don’t know yet what other charges (if any) will be coming out of Mueller’s office. But Monday’s news in no way suggests the investigation is drawing to a close. . . .  Future indictments and pleas, if any, likely will come on a rolling basis, as the prosecutors build cases against lower-level players, possibly persuade them to cooperate, and move up the ladder to higher-level targets.

Mueller’s investigation continues to proceed aggressively, methodically and relatively rapidly. These charges likely are simply the first salvo. Their echoes will reverberate loudly through the corridors of Washington in the days ahead.

 My sincere hope is that as things continue to roll out, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence, and of course Trump, become involved in the collusion efforts and ultimate all are forced out of office.  More on the charges against George Papadopoulos can be found here.